Sure would be nice if we could move on from FPTP so alternative parties weren’t inherently destructive to the party they more closely align with. Not holding my breath though
Same problem in the UK. A party can finish a close second in hundreds of constituencies, totalling millions of votes, but have nothing to show for it.
Proportional representation is the way.
The US has literally 0 third party representation at the federal level and 10 state senators all libertarian. Even Bernie isn’t technically a third party he just is no party. So to be clear, having no party is far far better in the US than representing a third party even in a local election.
I think you are conflating two things. We can have a viable third party with ranked choice voting. We don’t necessarily need PR.
Personally I think PR will fragment the parliament and destabilise the government.
Also if you look at 2024, PR would’ve given many seats to Reform…
I found this video on the mathematics of democracy fascinating. It’s not some accident that third parties hurt the party they’re more aligned with: it’s inevitable under first-past-the-post. Really, the only reason to start a third party is to influence one of the other parties, and even then it’s a dangerous game because your spoiler effect may create backlash, drawing people away from the ideas you want to promote. The older I get, the more I see that you can’t win the game without playing it.
This is why I’ve been thinking we should focus on changing the voting system within primaries rather than in the general to start with. The general election is going to require massive amounts of effort and political will to change, but primaries could be changed more easily since it’s mainly up to the party itself (still could require some legal changes to update voting machines, etc)
Its literally politics 101. This is why we need ranked choice & proportional voting.
Just make sure not to take it too far if you do proportional voting. We have a system in the Netherlands that works like that but the result is that we now also have about 30 parties running for government, most of them being fairly pointless. Don’t get me wrong, it’s better than the US shenanigans but you can also go too far.
That doesn’t sound like a bad thing.
It doesn’t sound particularly good, either.
It’s the same in Australia. Every now and then you get a random crackpot senator.
I’m not trying to be mean when I say this, but to me your comment sounds a little bit like “I know you guys are starving but if you ever solve that issue make sure you don’t go too far in the other direction. I sometimes buy food that I don’t end up using, which is fairly pointless.”
I wish the biggest grievance I had with my country’s politics was that some of the parties are redundant. I think I’d be willing to give up a limb or two for that actually.
Understandable, it’s all a matter of perspective. There’s no ideal way of democracy and any way has it’s pros and cons. I’d say that overall my gripe is a somewhat minor one but it does lead to big issues sometimes, especially during election times because the biggest party gets first dibs on creating the government. More fragmentation on your side of the political spectrum (left vs. right) can therefore lead to splintering of the votes and losing out on being the biggest.
This is more or less what happened last time. The leftist parties tried to prevent it by joining forces shortly before the election but the amount of leftist parties we have still meant that votes were somewhat splintered; that is (among other factors) how we ended up with another right-wing government after people clearly seemed to be done with over 10 years of right-wing Rutte politics.
Coming from Germany, I wish! We have a 5% cutoff for representation, which means there’s realistically 4-5 parties that get into parliament, and all of them suck. We got the liberal Greens that sold their morals long ago, the social democrats whose greatest strength is blocking, delaying and betraying leftist causes, the christian democrats that have been copying Trump rhetoric for years, and finally the outright fascists. I’d love to be able to vote for some fringe leftist party knowing I’ll not waste my vote
I’d love to be able to vote for some fringe leftist party knowing I’ll not waste my vote
But in a way it will. Many of these fringe parties never have a chance to make it into the government and will forever be in the opposition, meaning their impact isn’t very big. The PVV started off like this as well and their leader, Geert Wilders, has only ever wanted to be the person shouting at stuff from the opposition side of the fence. Even now, when he has the biggest party, they had to come up with some wicked solution where he’s not the PM and not in the government itself. Instead, it’s a neutral PM with some ministers and everyone else is in the opposition and constantly criticising their own “government”. It’s ridiculous and so far they haven’t gotten much done.
In my opinion, a cutoff of 5% is a bit high but I also think that parties should have more than 1 seat to even make it into the chamber, otherwise it’ll turn into a mess real quick.
I honestly don’t mind many splintered parties in parliament. There’s always gonna be assholes whose only aim is to sabotage and fling shit, but they’re just going to join a bigger party under our system. Our (recently fired) finance Minister was like this, constantly publicly criticizing the government that he was a part of, and which he was actively blocking from getting shit done.
I actually think it would be better if there were no rigid factions either. But then again, my opinion of representative democracy isn’t too great anyways
My eyes glazed over reading this. Its like hearing people with 6 houses complain about property taxes.
This interesting video details some of the problems with various vote counting systems, including ranked choice. Turns out that formulating the perfect democratic process is something people have been trying and failing at for centuries.
That’s a veritasium clickbait video.
While it’s true that no voting system is completely perfect that’s a little bit like saying that no one’s body is completely perfect, so trying to be healthy is pointless. The efficacy of voting systems can in fact be quantified and compared based on baysian regret, and some are better than others.
That’s for single winner elections. Almost any proportional system is going to be better than any single winner system, with the added benefit of eliminating gerrymandering. Presumably the best proportional system available is proportional score voting, but I don’t know if there’s been rigorous mathematical analysis of that yet.
The title is a little clickbaity though that is frankly the state of YT as a whole these days. Given the rich information in the video and the high effort put into the explanations, let’s allow it.
so trying to be healthy is pointless
No one said anything about pointlessness.
Strictly speaking, the video does a quality job of showing how true democracy is a unfinished science and far less intuitive than most people suppose when they haven’t thought about it much. However it repeatedly makes the same point you do, that some systems are better than others.
Literally Bernie Sanders for the 8 years
Hell sold out in the send but after what DNC did to him in 2016 it ain’t like him not selling out would change anything.
He is too old to break off into opposition.
Democratic regime whores shilling progressive could do it but they won’t because they are regime whores first…
Anyway, vote for third party is a protest vote anyway. Until a critical mass is hit, we won’t get a viable candidate. It would take a generation off people voting 3p too lol
Two party sysmem is the owner regime
He understands that even to be “independent” in this kind of election system you have to caucus/primary with one of the two parties.
He is an old geezer can he take some risk jfc
Bernie Sanders has stood up to the system and taken risks for 50+ years. Have some well deserved respect, please.
Bernie at a Civil Rights protest in 1963
My man… that’s 1963. When was last time any politician deliveries something of value to the working wage slaves?
Seeing as how it would take at least a billion dollars to even get such a party off the ground, you can be assured that the mainstream media would treat it with respect.
I think that the only reason the Greens and the Libertarians managed to get national status was that the GOP wanted to have someone to drain off D support.
Libertarians don’t “drain off D support” They drain off Republican support.
Libertarians give people who would vote for Repiblicans someone to vote for when the Republicans go too far with abortion and other fascist stuff so they don’r vote Dem instead.
So less peeling off Dem supporters and instead keeping from trading votes to Dems.
My personal theory is that the GOP will do a hostile takeover of the Libertarians if the ever become too unpopular.
Also, they don’t drain off support, because the Libertarians almost always vote R when it counts. You notice that Green Party Jill was active this cycle and you didn’t hear about the Libertarians once.
You didn’t hear about the Libertarians because they basically did get taken over by MAGA. They’re know as the Misus Caucus and they’re brutal, doing damage control on the Libertarian Party as a whole. They shut the primary elected candidate out and gave him little to no resources or even publicity.
Libertarians do drain off support. Libertarians are likely one of the reasons Trump lost so many swing states, because they pretty much had a great candidate and huge turnout. Nearly two million votes compared to Green Party’s Howie Hawkins, who I met, and voted for in 2020. Howie received 404,000 votes.
I voted Harris this year, and volunteered for the WFP.
Jill Stein is deceitful pos and she’s the reason I left the Green Party.
I like the Libertarian classic novel “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.”
On the other hand, I can spned three hours pointing out all the ways the author had to massage reality to make his society work.
The only way to do it is run a populist campaign in one of the parties lying the whole way through then switching to an independent party that actually cares about the people and have enough numbers to get a coalition in both houses of congress. Doing all this all together without talking to each other or giving yourself away.
They would have to have their own sorts of media
There can’t be, mathematically. First past the post voting turns third parties into a hole in one funnel that feeds into the other funnel.
Perhaps since the election has just ended, it is now time to start shedding the dems and restructure a new party? By 2028 if elections are still legal maybe we’ll fair better
IfWheneverWhat does light them up mean?
