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I would argue it’s coming from the system. The national two party first-past-the-post system naturally leads to hyper-partisanship and constantly escalating sta

I would argue it’s coming from the system. The national two party first-past-the-post system naturally leads to hyper-partisanship and constantly escalating stakes, meanwhile fewer and fewer Americans truly feel represented by the choices they have on offer - and very large numbers of people have their vote effectively ignored because their voting precinct is gerrymandered to ensure stable one-party rule. Because the system is broken, people are angry and want to tear down the system and replace it with something else. Unfortunately, history says that authoritarianism is a popular response to broken systems, and that it doesn’t end well. If we don’t want to go down that path we need to quit blaming individuals and get very serious about fixing the system: we need proportional representative multi-party democracy, like almost every other western democracy. For citations and a deep discussion on this, see: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44244963-breaking-the-two-party-doom-loop https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44244963-breaking-the...

christophilus 6y ago
I’m with you. I have voted for an Nth party every presidential election since I was 18. Every single time I was told that I was throwing my vote away or voting for one of the major party villains. Every single time, I was told that this was the most important election of my lifetime, and just this once, I needed to bite the bullet and vote for a major party. Not doing it. That entire narrative needs to change.
- u801e 6y ago
  > Every single time I was told that I was throwing my vote away or voting for one of the major party villains. The refrain essentially is that you must vote for the candidate we say is most likely to win and if you don't, then you're helping the next runner up. I believe that if we no longer reported polling results and had election results reported at the same time, then the problem I describe above would be significantly reduced. The fact that primaries are not held at the same time leads the results of earlier primaries influencing the results of later ones. The fact that election results from the eastern part of the country are reported while the western part is still voting influences the results.
  - leetrout 6y ago
    We need ranked choice voting nationwide.
  - smichel17 6y ago
    Reduced? Probably. Meaningfully? I don't think so. It's baked in to the system: if your equivalent (nth party voter) on the other side of the political spectrum switches their vote to the mainstream party and you don't, then the mainstream party you're more aligned with is disadvantaged. There's nothing subjective here; it's just how the system works. We desperately need a voting system that allows you to express your preferences honestly, and ideally across all candidates, without hurting the outcome. By far, score voting systems are the best at that. Of those, I recommend STAR voting (Score Then Automatic Runoff), because it has some actual momentum[1] (it also has some theoretical advantages, but both it and vanilla score voting, and even Ranked Choice with a Borda count, are such a massive improvement over the status quo that it doesn't matter which we pick). [1]: https://www.starvoting.us/ https://www.starvoting.us/ -- no affiliation, just convinced by the research (edit: which you can mostly find linked from https://www.equal.vote/ https://www.equal.vote/)
    - nrclark 6y ago
      Agreed that we need voting reform in the US, badly. It's also unlikely to ever happen, because the only ones with the power to do it are the ones that would be displaced.
    - burlesona 6y ago
      Thanks for sharing STAR, I hadn’t seen it before. How does that interact with proportional representation?
      - smichel17 6y ago
        https://www.starvoting.us/pr https://www.starvoting.us/pr
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    So just set aside freedom of the press? You've stated a goal of suppressing polling; what's the legal mechanism you use to do it?
whimsicalism 6y ago
I think it's funny to see people dismiss those who want to "tear down the system and replace it" as something untenable and hard to achieve, then go on to propose proportional representation. How do you see any sort of path forward for proportional representation being adopted as an amendment to the constitution? I see no path towards 2/3 majority voting for that.
- burlesona 6y ago
  Actually it doesn’t strictly need a constitutional amendment for the president to be elected differently, as every state is allowed to decide how it appoints its electors. Maine and Nebraska come closer to proportional now simply by allocating their electors individually. Any state could choose to go one step farther and allocate its electors by proportional representation. However, there is only one president, so for this to really matter it needs to happen in Congress, which would require an amendment. The rationale that it could happen is simply that it has happened before: women’s suffrage, the direct election of senators, and the conversion from multi-member districts to single member districts, are all examples of major reform in the US process that were all “impossible” until they happened.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    > it doesn’t strictly need a constitutional amendment for the president to be elected differently Yeah, I assumed we were talking about the Senate - which would require huge, fundamental changes in order to be made proportional. With the exception of suffrage, I would argue that that is a bigger change than any of the others you mentioned. It would require precisely the people most hurt by the change (small states) to vote for substantially decreasing their voter power. I'm not claiming it's impossible, but I think it is silly to dismiss calls for more radical action in favor of a constitutional amendment with no path to get there.

christophilus 6y ago

I’m with you. I have voted for an Nth party every presidential election since I was 18. Every single time I was told that I was throwing my vote away or voting for one of the major party villains. Every single time, I was told that this was the most important election of my lifetime, and just this once, I needed to bite the bullet and vote for a major party. Not doing it. That entire narrative needs to change.

u801e 6y ago
> Every single time I was told that I was throwing my vote away or voting for one of the major party villains. The refrain essentially is that you must vote for the candidate we say is most likely to win and if you don't, then you're helping the next runner up. I believe that if we no longer reported polling results and had election results reported at the same time, then the problem I describe above would be significantly reduced. The fact that primaries are not held at the same time leads the results of earlier primaries influencing the results of later ones. The fact that election results from the eastern part of the country are reported while the western part is still voting influences the results.
- leetrout 6y ago
  We need ranked choice voting nationwide.
- smichel17 6y ago
  Reduced? Probably. Meaningfully? I don't think so. It's baked in to the system: if your equivalent (nth party voter) on the other side of the political spectrum switches their vote to the mainstream party and you don't, then the mainstream party you're more aligned with is disadvantaged. There's nothing subjective here; it's just how the system works. We desperately need a voting system that allows you to express your preferences honestly, and ideally across all candidates, without hurting the outcome. By far, score voting systems are the best at that. Of those, I recommend STAR voting (Score Then Automatic Runoff), because it has some actual momentum[1] (it also has some theoretical advantages, but both it and vanilla score voting, and even Ranked Choice with a Borda count, are such a massive improvement over the status quo that it doesn't matter which we pick). [1]: https://www.starvoting.us/ https://www.starvoting.us/ -- no affiliation, just convinced by the research (edit: which you can mostly find linked from https://www.equal.vote/ https://www.equal.vote/)
  - nrclark 6y ago
    Agreed that we need voting reform in the US, badly. It's also unlikely to ever happen, because the only ones with the power to do it are the ones that would be displaced.
  - burlesona 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing STAR, I hadn’t seen it before. How does that interact with proportional representation?
    - smichel17 6y ago
      https://www.starvoting.us/pr https://www.starvoting.us/pr
- maxerickson 6y ago
  So just set aside freedom of the press? You've stated a goal of suppressing polling; what's the legal mechanism you use to do it?

whimsicalism 6y ago

I think it's funny to see people dismiss those who want to "tear down the system and replace it" as something untenable and hard to achieve, then go on to propose proportional representation. How do you see any sort of path forward for proportional representation being adopted as an amendment to the constitution? I see no path towards 2/3 majority voting for that.

burlesona 6y ago
Actually it doesn’t strictly need a constitutional amendment for the president to be elected differently, as every state is allowed to decide how it appoints its electors. Maine and Nebraska come closer to proportional now simply by allocating their electors individually. Any state could choose to go one step farther and allocate its electors by proportional representation. However, there is only one president, so for this to really matter it needs to happen in Congress, which would require an amendment. The rationale that it could happen is simply that it has happened before: women’s suffrage, the direct election of senators, and the conversion from multi-member districts to single member districts, are all examples of major reform in the US process that were all “impossible” until they happened.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > it doesn’t strictly need a constitutional amendment for the president to be elected differently Yeah, I assumed we were talking about the Senate - which would require huge, fundamental changes in order to be made proportional. With the exception of suffrage, I would argue that that is a bigger change than any of the others you mentioned. It would require precisely the people most hurt by the change (small states) to vote for substantially decreasing their voter power. I'm not claiming it's impossible, but I think it is silly to dismiss calls for more radical action in favor of a constitutional amendment with no path to get there.