8 ms·

While this is great, my analysis of the problem, as a European, is that you can't remove water from a sinking ship with a teaspoon: the main problem with the US

by vages 6y ago

While this is great, my analysis of the problem, as a European, is that you can't remove water from a sinking ship with a teaspoon: the main problem with the US political "spectrum" is that it contains only two colors. In Norway, we have 9 parties in our parliament. No parties are perceived as the exact opposite of the other. Friends and family often vote for different parties, and loyalty changes over time. And this is how it is across almost the entire continent, with the UK as the major exception (with their voting process favoring a two-party system). If Americans could somehow get a taste of this freedom of choice, I'm certain many of them would demand the same things at home. I'm amazed that there's often 10s of kinds of peanut butter in an American super market, but only two political parties. Could it be done with tech? I'm not sure, but I would like to see someone give it a go.

timthorn 6y ago
The UK has a two party system in terms of who will form the government, but there's a plurality of smaller parties acting as strong lobby groups - some even getting reasonable levels of parliamentary representation. Case in point - without the threat of UKIP taking votes from the Conservatives, it is unlikely that the EU referendum would have been held.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  I still think FPTP is the UK's biggest political problem. The UK is crying out for a new left party to take over from the Labour party which is dysfunctional at this point. But it can't happen because the electoral system means that it would have to happen all at once which is unrealistic.
  - caoilte 6y ago
    For context, imagine if a trove of whatsapp chat messages from inside the Clinton presidential campaign in 2016 revealed they most of the paid employees hated her so much that they were sabotaging her campaign and diverting money to down ballot races. This is effectively what happened in the UK in 2017.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    It's quite remarkable how many voting systems we have in the UK; STV, D'Hondt, AMS and so on. The parliament with all the real power, and the constitutional ability to erase the others at will, is of course entrenched in FPTP to preserve conservativism.
  - jskdvsksnb 6y ago
    The situation is similar in Canada - a significant number of people would support the NDP, but they're viewed as a spoiler. In my parent's riding, for instance, 55% of people voted for the two left-wing candidates, so the seat went to the right-winger who got the remaining 45%. A concerted effort to consolidate votes behind the Liberals gave us Justin Trudeau, a do-nothing neoliberal whose hobbies include brownface and giving indigenous people's land to oil companies.
- sudofail 6y ago
  Australia is similar as well. I'm not sure having more parties fundamentally fixes the issues. From my experience, parties just form coalitions that wind up taking similar stances to the US two-party system. I will say though that the US two-party system seems to promote a deadlock / winner-take-all scenario that doesn't seem as common in other countries. So I do think having something like ranked choice voting will help. It's just not the full solution.
- eertami 6y ago
  >it is unlikely that the EU referendum would have been held. If the UK had actual proportional representation, it is also unlikely the EU referendum would have been held. The referendum was entirely a fault of the conservative government at the time, a gambit made not to appease potential UKIP voters but instead to satisfy in-fighting within the conservative party. >some even getting reasonable levels of parliamentary representation. Your definition of 'reasonable' differs from mine. Reasonable implies that the representation is fair/proportional to the amount of votes received. In 2010, the results were as follows: Conservatives: 36% of votes, 47% of seats. Labour: 29% of votes, 39.7% of seats. Liberal Democrats: 23% of votes, 8.8% of seats. A 'reasonable' level of representation for the 2010 election would've drastically reshaped British politics and the country would be much less divided than it is now. I feel strongly about this, since the UK used to be my home, but I couldn't bring myself to continue living there as a contributor to such a broken system.
- chriswarbo 6y ago
  The UK's big parties are themselves a collection of factions held together by the inevitability of a two-party system. The ERG and Momentum are the most obvious, each pushing an agenda that, regardless of how much one agrees with it, has been incredibly divisive over the years: hard brexit and 'corbynism' (to avoid connotations of the 'S' word). These have been big gambles by the major parties, the details and direction of which have mostly been dictated by marketing and in-fighting. Despite having multiple general elections with these as the main issues, the public has only been presented with coarse yes/no choices and false dichotomies. In a multi-party system (e.g. proportional like STV) I'm pretty sure we'd see ERG as a separate party to Cameron-esque Tories, and Momentum as a separate party to the NewLabour/Starmer side of Labour. I'm not sure who would get the keep the old Labour/Tory names, though.
richardwhiuk 6y ago
The cause of two political parties in the US is a result of the electoral system. It's not possible to fix this using tech.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  > It's not possible to fix this using tech. I think that's kind of the point.
mehrdadn 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
dnpp123 6y ago
> I'm amazed that there's often 10s of kinds of peanut butter in an American super market, but only two political parties Like I can't taste the difference between the 10s of kinds of peanut butter, I'm not sure the half dozen different political parties in my home country (France) offer a real variety of choice.
- paulgb 6y ago
  I see it less about the expressive ability of having multiple parties to express your political positions, and more about the fact that competition is good. In other countries, when a major party is embroiled in scandal, they usually lose power for a few years and sometimes another party emerges from their ashes. You don't have that happen in the US, and it's overdue.
  - dnpp123 6y ago
    Sure, fake choice is still a choice.
keiferski 6y ago
Just thinking out loud here: I generally agree with this take, but lately I’ve actually been considering the opposite: that the two-party system is the only thing truly holding the country together as a union. The two party system has two consequences: one, making the federal government more amenable to bottom-up change; and two, by making fringe movements morph themselves to fit into the federal structure, rather than simply exit and secede. As an example, imagine that there were a “West Coast” party which had control over California, Oregon and Washington. In a multiparty system, what incentivizes them from not just declaring independence? At least by forcing them into Democrats or Republicans, they become unified with the rest of their party country-wide.
- WindyCityBrew 6y ago
  I think you run a much bigger risk of a "West Coast" party in the FPTP system (looking at SNP in the UK). In a proportional system, California and the west coast is not pure blue or liberal or some new "independence party". Without even looking at numbers I'm sure California alone has as many or more conservative leaning voters than Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas combined, we just never see it thanks to our antiquated setup.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  I'm sure Brexit is going to be a cautionary tale for decades to come on the risks of exiting a well-established union in favor of sticking out on your own. And there's no unity in the party, either. A California democrat could have more in common with a Missouri republican than his same-party counterpart. The democratic platform this year includes a number of promises that the presidential candidate does not agree with. The republicans did not publish a platform this year. It's essentially a directional signal more than any concrete unifying measure, a party-for-all-people-except-the-ones-we're-against. If the democrats and the republicans are supposedly holding the union together, they're doing an absolutely awful job at it.
  - lki876 6y ago
    > I'm sure Brexit is going to be a cautionary tale for decades to come on the risks of exiting a well-established union in favor of sticking out on your own. not being part of the Union != not cooperating (although currently the EU is attempting to block all cooperation outside the bounds of the Union in an effort to keep the UK practically a member, but without voting rights)
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
I disagree. Sure there are two parties but there is quite a spectrum of ideas throughout. I actually believe that a larger issue is both sides being unable to have a conversation. I get my news and someone else gets their news and when we try to talk we find that we don't even have the same facts to start from. Imagine not being able to talk to half of your country? Your neighbors?
- fnord123 6y ago
  The issue of both sides being unable to have a conversation is a symptom of having only two parties.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > I get my news and someone else gets their news and when we try to talk we find that we don't even have the same facts to start from In America, people voluntarily subscribe to the propaganda channel because it makes them angry. shrug
  - lki876 6y ago
    I keep trying to shut low quality news out, but it's pushed practically everywhere. Front page of reddit, tech sites... people even stuff my mail box.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
    I think it's a human thing. It bypasses your logical mind by making you angry and it happens fast. Without you even realizing.
- steego 6y ago
  It’s not just that you don’t have the same facts, you actually speak different languages. People share a lot of similar ideas but I find I have to switch out words depending on whether I’m talking to someone with left leaning or right leaning tendencies. What makes it worse is they’ve spent decades listening to propaganda that turns words from the opposing languages into trigger words and trigger phrases. As soon as they hear those trigger words, they begin to parrot talking points that have been drilled into them. It’s pathetic.
y7 6y ago
> Could it be done with tech? Uh, as shown in numerous democratic countries like Norway and other European countries, you don't need tech for this. You just need something that isn't first-past-the-post.
- yunruse 6y ago
  One great way to fix this which preserves FPTP (if there's a culture for which replacing it is seen as too much change, or too complex) is FPTP with a run-off vote for the final two candidates, allowing for variety while also keeping the voting system pretty much unchanged, albeit there's now a possible second vote. In the 2017 French presidential elections, we hear so much about Macron and Le Pen, but they only made up about 45% of the vote in the first round.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    That doesn't really change much though, because it still allows geographical distribution of votes (between constituencies) to greatly influence the results. It's better than nothing, but not much.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    You're right to point out that attempts at electoral reform often fail because of issues of "too much change, or too complex" (even if those are narratives that are disingenuously pushed to trigger the illusory truth effect in citizens' minds). Given the failures of campaigns in the UK and Canada to change the voting system, I think that a requirement for proposed systems has to be that the ballot papers (and voter instructions) must be the same as FPTP, and the constituency/district boundaries (and number of representatives) have to stay unaltered too. That may seem like too stringent a set of requirements, but as you say, a top-two run-off system does satisfy them. Unfortunately, such a system can still be attacked on the basis of cost, since having two election days is roughly twice as expensive as having just one. Not only is there the administrative cost to the government, but the time cost for voters themselves. The only remaining solution that I have found is Asset Voting, in which votes are cast and tallied just as in FPTP, but then the candidate with the fewest votes gets to reassign their votes to one of the remaining candidates, with this process repeating until a candidate has a majority. This should remove the problems of spoiler candidates and tactical voting.
JansjoFromIkea 6y ago
If you have more than two without proportional representation it doesn't tend to work out very well. In the UK the main party got 51% of seats with 36% of the vote in 2015. Their share actually went up 5% in the next election two years later but they lost a bunch of seats as the opposition votes weren't split between multiple parties as much. Voting reform _should_ be the long term goal and choice would come from it but the main reason the US is in a rot to the level it is is probably more down to the various areas of control (specifically the Senate, judicial system and the utterly insane amounts of money running through the whole political system).
lki876 6y ago
But given the multitude of parties, they tend to work together in groups (blocks), right? So in the end, there are fewer sides/groups/blocks than parties and people tend to switch between parties within a block, but rarely between blocks.
steenreem 6y ago
I think any single-seat election, regardless of voting system, stabilises when there are only two popular parties from which candidates can get elected. I don't believe voting systems such as instant-runoff or approval voting can avoid this problem. If the US wants more than two colours in their spectrum, they need proportional representation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "stabilises". Perhaps you're saying that once the range of choices has been reduced to just two big parties, it is hard to introduce new parties (that successfully challenge the major parties), even if the new voting system prevented the problem of spoiler candidates. I agree that proportional representation would help shift things, but I don't think it is necessary for the reform to work. For example, it doesn't seem far-fetched that over time, Democrat seats in Congress could be lost to Green or Socialist candidates in some areas, and different factions within the Republican party could also start to win elections under their own banner too. With some clever campaigning (and/or a lot of money) a popular figure like Bernie or Trump could bring supporters to a "New Left" or "New Right" party that eclipsed the current mainstream parties.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
auganov 6y ago
There are perhaps 5 or 6 viable parties where I'm at. Don't like any of them enough to have ever voted. I find many of my positions represented in the American mainstream but not by any (viable) parties domestically. Also a big reason for the fragmentation of parties is simply how rigid they are internally. Most political parties in Europe are governed like private companies. Few have primaries and when they do they tend to be fairly limited. When there's infighting between major players the simplest thing to do is often to just setup a new party. There's not much of a culture of political affiliation or involvement. Just because you might have identified with some party doesn't give you much of a platform to advocate for anything internally. If you don't like it you need to find a new one.
abstractbarista 6y ago
I vote third party in the USA in every election where it is available. I'm definitely rare though. Many of my friends are caught up in picking the 'better of two evils'.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  Does that mean you support the Alliance Party? They are officially proponents of Ranked Choice Voting, which would hopefully prevent the "better of two evils" problem if widely adopted. https://www.theallianceparty.com/positions https://www.theallianceparty.com/positions
whoomp12342 6y ago
Oh, so naieve. Here in America, we have the illusion of choice when it comes to peanut butter and lots of products. They do look different, and maybe taste different but they are different product likes from the same company. And that company owns more than just peanut butter.

by vages 6y ago

timthorn 6y ago

The UK has a two party system in terms of who will form the government, but there's a plurality of smaller parties acting as strong lobby groups - some even getting reasonable levels of parliamentary representation. Case in point - without the threat of UKIP taking votes from the Conservatives, it is unlikely that the EU referendum would have been held.

nicoburns 6y ago
I still think FPTP is the UK's biggest political problem. The UK is crying out for a new left party to take over from the Labour party which is dysfunctional at this point. But it can't happen because the electoral system means that it would have to happen all at once which is unrealistic.
- caoilte 6y ago
  For context, imagine if a trove of whatsapp chat messages from inside the Clinton presidential campaign in 2016 revealed they most of the paid employees hated her so much that they were sabotaging her campaign and diverting money to down ballot races. This is effectively what happened in the UK in 2017.
- pjc50 6y ago
  It's quite remarkable how many voting systems we have in the UK; STV, D'Hondt, AMS and so on. The parliament with all the real power, and the constitutional ability to erase the others at will, is of course entrenched in FPTP to preserve conservativism.
- jskdvsksnb 6y ago
  The situation is similar in Canada - a significant number of people would support the NDP, but they're viewed as a spoiler. In my parent's riding, for instance, 55% of people voted for the two left-wing candidates, so the seat went to the right-winger who got the remaining 45%. A concerted effort to consolidate votes behind the Liberals gave us Justin Trudeau, a do-nothing neoliberal whose hobbies include brownface and giving indigenous people's land to oil companies.
sudofail 6y ago
Australia is similar as well. I'm not sure having more parties fundamentally fixes the issues. From my experience, parties just form coalitions that wind up taking similar stances to the US two-party system. I will say though that the US two-party system seems to promote a deadlock / winner-take-all scenario that doesn't seem as common in other countries. So I do think having something like ranked choice voting will help. It's just not the full solution.
eertami 6y ago
>it is unlikely that the EU referendum would have been held. If the UK had actual proportional representation, it is also unlikely the EU referendum would have been held. The referendum was entirely a fault of the conservative government at the time, a gambit made not to appease potential UKIP voters but instead to satisfy in-fighting within the conservative party. >some even getting reasonable levels of parliamentary representation. Your definition of 'reasonable' differs from mine. Reasonable implies that the representation is fair/proportional to the amount of votes received. In 2010, the results were as follows: Conservatives: 36% of votes, 47% of seats. Labour: 29% of votes, 39.7% of seats. Liberal Democrats: 23% of votes, 8.8% of seats. A 'reasonable' level of representation for the 2010 election would've drastically reshaped British politics and the country would be much less divided than it is now. I feel strongly about this, since the UK used to be my home, but I couldn't bring myself to continue living there as a contributor to such a broken system.
chriswarbo 6y ago
The UK's big parties are themselves a collection of factions held together by the inevitability of a two-party system. The ERG and Momentum are the most obvious, each pushing an agenda that, regardless of how much one agrees with it, has been incredibly divisive over the years: hard brexit and 'corbynism' (to avoid connotations of the 'S' word). These have been big gambles by the major parties, the details and direction of which have mostly been dictated by marketing and in-fighting. Despite having multiple general elections with these as the main issues, the public has only been presented with coarse yes/no choices and false dichotomies. In a multi-party system (e.g. proportional like STV) I'm pretty sure we'd see ERG as a separate party to Cameron-esque Tories, and Momentum as a separate party to the NewLabour/Starmer side of Labour. I'm not sure who would get the keep the old Labour/Tory names, though.

richardwhiuk 6y ago

The cause of two political parties in the US is a result of the electoral system. It's not possible to fix this using tech.

nicoburns 6y ago
> It's not possible to fix this using tech. I think that's kind of the point.

mehrdadn 6y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

dnpp123 6y ago

> I'm amazed that there's often 10s of kinds of peanut butter in an American super market, but only two political parties Like I can't taste the difference between the 10s of kinds of peanut butter, I'm not sure the half dozen different political parties in my home country (France) offer a real variety of choice.

paulgb 6y ago
I see it less about the expressive ability of having multiple parties to express your political positions, and more about the fact that competition is good. In other countries, when a major party is embroiled in scandal, they usually lose power for a few years and sometimes another party emerges from their ashes. You don't have that happen in the US, and it's overdue.
- dnpp123 6y ago
  Sure, fake choice is still a choice.

keiferski 6y ago

Just thinking out loud here: I generally agree with this take, but lately I’ve actually been considering the opposite: that the two-party system is the only thing truly holding the country together as a union. The two party system has two consequences: one, making the federal government more amenable to bottom-up change; and two, by making fringe movements morph themselves to fit into the federal structure, rather than simply exit and secede. As an example, imagine that there were a “West Coast” party which had control over California, Oregon and Washington. In a multiparty system, what incentivizes them from not just declaring independence? At least by forcing them into Democrats or Republicans, they become unified with the rest of their party country-wide.

WindyCityBrew 6y ago
I think you run a much bigger risk of a "West Coast" party in the FPTP system (looking at SNP in the UK). In a proportional system, California and the west coast is not pure blue or liberal or some new "independence party". Without even looking at numbers I'm sure California alone has as many or more conservative leaning voters than Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas combined, we just never see it thanks to our antiquated setup.
freeone3000 6y ago
I'm sure Brexit is going to be a cautionary tale for decades to come on the risks of exiting a well-established union in favor of sticking out on your own. And there's no unity in the party, either. A California democrat could have more in common with a Missouri republican than his same-party counterpart. The democratic platform this year includes a number of promises that the presidential candidate does not agree with. The republicans did not publish a platform this year. It's essentially a directional signal more than any concrete unifying measure, a party-for-all-people-except-the-ones-we're-against. If the democrats and the republicans are supposedly holding the union together, they're doing an absolutely awful job at it.
- lki876 6y ago
  > I'm sure Brexit is going to be a cautionary tale for decades to come on the risks of exiting a well-established union in favor of sticking out on your own. not being part of the Union != not cooperating (although currently the EU is attempting to block all cooperation outside the bounds of the Union in an effort to keep the UK practically a member, but without voting rights)

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

I disagree. Sure there are two parties but there is quite a spectrum of ideas throughout. I actually believe that a larger issue is both sides being unable to have a conversation. I get my news and someone else gets their news and when we try to talk we find that we don't even have the same facts to start from. Imagine not being able to talk to half of your country? Your neighbors?

fnord123 6y ago
The issue of both sides being unable to have a conversation is a symptom of having only two parties.
pjc50 6y ago
> I get my news and someone else gets their news and when we try to talk we find that we don't even have the same facts to start from In America, people voluntarily subscribe to the propaganda channel because it makes them angry. shrug
- lki876 6y ago
  I keep trying to shut low quality news out, but it's pushed practically everywhere. Front page of reddit, tech sites... people even stuff my mail box.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
  I think it's a human thing. It bypasses your logical mind by making you angry and it happens fast. Without you even realizing.
steego 6y ago
It’s not just that you don’t have the same facts, you actually speak different languages. People share a lot of similar ideas but I find I have to switch out words depending on whether I’m talking to someone with left leaning or right leaning tendencies. What makes it worse is they’ve spent decades listening to propaganda that turns words from the opposing languages into trigger words and trigger phrases. As soon as they hear those trigger words, they begin to parrot talking points that have been drilled into them. It’s pathetic.

y7 6y ago

> Could it be done with tech? Uh, as shown in numerous democratic countries like Norway and other European countries, you don't need tech for this. You just need something that isn't first-past-the-post.

yunruse 6y ago
One great way to fix this which preserves FPTP (if there's a culture for which replacing it is seen as too much change, or too complex) is FPTP with a run-off vote for the final two candidates, allowing for variety while also keeping the voting system pretty much unchanged, albeit there's now a possible second vote. In the 2017 French presidential elections, we hear so much about Macron and Le Pen, but they only made up about 45% of the vote in the first round.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  That doesn't really change much though, because it still allows geographical distribution of votes (between constituencies) to greatly influence the results. It's better than nothing, but not much.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  You're right to point out that attempts at electoral reform often fail because of issues of "too much change, or too complex" (even if those are narratives that are disingenuously pushed to trigger the illusory truth effect in citizens' minds). Given the failures of campaigns in the UK and Canada to change the voting system, I think that a requirement for proposed systems has to be that the ballot papers (and voter instructions) must be the same as FPTP, and the constituency/district boundaries (and number of representatives) have to stay unaltered too. That may seem like too stringent a set of requirements, but as you say, a top-two run-off system does satisfy them. Unfortunately, such a system can still be attacked on the basis of cost, since having two election days is roughly twice as expensive as having just one. Not only is there the administrative cost to the government, but the time cost for voters themselves. The only remaining solution that I have found is Asset Voting, in which votes are cast and tallied just as in FPTP, but then the candidate with the fewest votes gets to reassign their votes to one of the remaining candidates, with this process repeating until a candidate has a majority. This should remove the problems of spoiler candidates and tactical voting.

JansjoFromIkea 6y ago

If you have more than two without proportional representation it doesn't tend to work out very well. In the UK the main party got 51% of seats with 36% of the vote in 2015. Their share actually went up 5% in the next election two years later but they lost a bunch of seats as the opposition votes weren't split between multiple parties as much. Voting reform _should_ be the long term goal and choice would come from it but the main reason the US is in a rot to the level it is is probably more down to the various areas of control (specifically the Senate, judicial system and the utterly insane amounts of money running through the whole political system).

lki876 6y ago

But given the multitude of parties, they tend to work together in groups (blocks), right? So in the end, there are fewer sides/groups/blocks than parties and people tend to switch between parties within a block, but rarely between blocks.

steenreem 6y ago

I think any single-seat election, regardless of voting system, stabilises when there are only two popular parties from which candidates can get elected. I don't believe voting systems such as instant-runoff or approval voting can avoid this problem. If the US wants more than two colours in their spectrum, they need proportional representation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation

dane-pgp 6y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "stabilises". Perhaps you're saying that once the range of choices has been reduced to just two big parties, it is hard to introduce new parties (that successfully challenge the major parties), even if the new voting system prevented the problem of spoiler candidates. I agree that proportional representation would help shift things, but I don't think it is necessary for the reform to work. For example, it doesn't seem far-fetched that over time, Democrat seats in Congress could be lost to Green or Socialist candidates in some areas, and different factions within the Republican party could also start to win elections under their own banner too. With some clever campaigning (and/or a lot of money) a popular figure like Bernie or Trump could bring supporters to a "New Left" or "New Right" party that eclipsed the current mainstream parties.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

auganov 6y ago

There are perhaps 5 or 6 viable parties where I'm at. Don't like any of them enough to have ever voted. I find many of my positions represented in the American mainstream but not by any (viable) parties domestically. Also a big reason for the fragmentation of parties is simply how rigid they are internally. Most political parties in Europe are governed like private companies. Few have primaries and when they do they tend to be fairly limited. When there's infighting between major players the simplest thing to do is often to just setup a new party. There's not much of a culture of political affiliation or involvement. Just because you might have identified with some party doesn't give you much of a platform to advocate for anything internally. If you don't like it you need to find a new one.

abstractbarista 6y ago

I vote third party in the USA in every election where it is available. I'm definitely rare though. Many of my friends are caught up in picking the 'better of two evils'.

dane-pgp 6y ago
Does that mean you support the Alliance Party? They are officially proponents of Ranked Choice Voting, which would hopefully prevent the "better of two evils" problem if widely adopted. https://www.theallianceparty.com/positions https://www.theallianceparty.com/positions

whoomp12342 6y ago

Oh, so naieve. Here in America, we have the illusion of choice when it comes to peanut butter and lots of products. They do look different, and maybe taste different but they are different product likes from the same company. And that company owns more than just peanut butter.