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The only way for 3rd parties to become a reality is for voting to become much more easier, convenient and fairer. With laws that make it hard to vote, you lose
by pm90 5y ago
The only way for 3rd parties to become a reality is for voting to become much more easier, convenient and fairer. With laws that make it hard to vote, you lose more and more of the public from the political discourse. Fairer systems like Ranked Choice Voting make it even more easy for people to express their preferences without the fear of losing to the least favored party.
Without reforms 3rd parties have 0 chance. They are simply used as convenient political tools by either one of the major parties and should be recognized as such.
- steelstraw 5y agoYou're probably right. To really break the duopoly we need Ranked Choice and open primaries.
- Apocryphon 5y agoBesides systemic electoral issues stacked against 3rd parties like Duverger's Law thanks to first past the post, there's also a ton of local electoral "mechanical" bureaucratic issues against them like lack of access to federal funding, impossibly strict requirements to get onto ballots, petty regulations like that.
- pm90 5y agoYes, exactly this. I don’t know why Americans seem it’s ok that local elections are controlled so tightly by party machinery of either party…if we’re really a democracy, parties should be involved ONLY in fielding candidates, providing them support and a platform, and a nonpartisan body should be in charge of election administration (ideally this would be uniform across each county). It’s like if Fraternities/Sororities were given control of college admission process.