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Actually what you need is proportional representation. First past the post almost guarantees that people will vote for whoever they think will "stick it" to the

Actually what you need is proportional representation. First past the post almost guarantees that people will vote for whoever they think will "stick it" to the party they don't like; i.e. a two party system is inevitable.

baddox 13y ago
You can't really have proportional representation for the role of President, unless you want to split up the roles (head of state, commander in chief, chief executive, etc.).
- rjsw 13y ago
  You can have multiple voting rounds, France does this.
  - baddox 13y ago
    But that's just another election system with different attributes of subjective value. Any choice of election system is just a compromise between many desirable criteria, some of which are mutually exclusive. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system#Compliance_of_selected_systems_.28table.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system#Compliance_of_sel....
  - mkr-hn 13y ago
    Perhaps a primary election where the parties select between a gaggle of variously qualified candidates with a nationwide vote? Sounds like a great idea. The hard part would be getting voters to participate in it since it would be about as interesting as lower level (state/county/city) elections, which have abysmal turnout.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > You can't really have proportional representation for the role of President American voters don't elect the President, anyway, they elect Presidential electors; if you had more proportional (compared to FPTP single member districts) representation for the Congress [1], and PR within each states slate of electors for the Electoral College (for the EC, party-list proportional could work rather than candidate-centered), and then change the rules for the EC so that the whole EC meets physically and has a set time to elect a President and VP by majority otherwise those elections fall to the House and Senate, you'd neatly solve the problem of duopoly. [1] Without abandoning candidate-centered elections and equal representation in the Senate, my preferred method of doing this for the Congress would be to add senators so that each state had 3 instead of 2, elect a slate of 3 Senators from each State every 6 years using Single Transferrable Vote, and also elect the House by STV every 2 years, dividing states up into House districts as follows: If a state has 1-5 seats in the House, it has one district; If a state 6 or more seats in the House, it is divided as evenly as possible in to districts of not less than 3 and not more than 5 members.

baddox 13y ago

You can't really have proportional representation for the role of President, unless you want to split up the roles (head of state, commander in chief, chief executive, etc.).

rjsw 13y ago
You can have multiple voting rounds, France does this.
- baddox 13y ago
  But that's just another election system with different attributes of subjective value. Any choice of election system is just a compromise between many desirable criteria, some of which are mutually exclusive. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system#Compliance_of_selected_systems_.28table.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system#Compliance_of_sel....
- mkr-hn 13y ago
  Perhaps a primary election where the parties select between a gaggle of variously qualified candidates with a nationwide vote? Sounds like a great idea. The hard part would be getting voters to participate in it since it would be about as interesting as lower level (state/county/city) elections, which have abysmal turnout.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> You can't really have proportional representation for the role of President American voters don't elect the President, anyway, they elect Presidential electors; if you had more proportional (compared to FPTP single member districts) representation for the Congress [1], and PR within each states slate of electors for the Electoral College (for the EC, party-list proportional could work rather than candidate-centered), and then change the rules for the EC so that the whole EC meets physically and has a set time to elect a President and VP by majority otherwise those elections fall to the House and Senate, you'd neatly solve the problem of duopoly. [1] Without abandoning candidate-centered elections and equal representation in the Senate, my preferred method of doing this for the Congress would be to add senators so that each state had 3 instead of 2, elect a slate of 3 Senators from each State every 6 years using Single Transferrable Vote, and also elect the House by STV every 2 years, dividing states up into House districts as follows: If a state has 1-5 seats in the House, it has one district; If a state 6 or more seats in the House, it is divided as evenly as possible in to districts of not less than 3 and not more than 5 members.