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The Strange Decline of the Pax Americana
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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politics
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Political parties are not mentioned in the constitution.
That document does need an amendment however.
The issue comes from First Past the Post voting.
There's math that shows that over a series of elections, FPtP naturally forces the creation of a two party system.
Every ordinal voting system falls prey to this issue to a greater or lesser extent, but there are cardinal voting systems that are completely immune.
My current favorite is STAR, it's dead simple. You rate each candidate on a scale of zero to five stars. Zero being the worst, five being the best.
To count the votes, you just add up the star count for each candidate. You don't need to average the count, but I'm sure that news media would.
The spectate is you take the two candidates with the highest star count and put them into an automatic runoff. You look at each ballot cast, and if either of the two candidates is preferred on that ballot (higher star rating) then the ballot goes to them. If there is no preference between the two, the vote is counted as No Preference and reported in the final tally.
Doesn't matter that parties aren't mentioned. Political parties are inevitable predictable outcome of the ruleset.
Also actually one of the biggest fixes USA could have is getting rid of single winner elections districts. Well President has to be single winner (though again why the heck electors should be single winner or even better why have electors in first place). However there is no reason to have single winner legislative body elections, since there is large number of members anyway. Only reason it is that way is, because Congress decided to make law about it.
Since one key truth is: there is only so much one can do with the ruleset to make things fairer while having just single winner. All the other votes get wasted by default, except the winner. The only amount of power one can win is 100% or 0%.
To have better proportionality one has to use multiple winners (or mixed member proportional, which is still multiple winners just indirectly via the party quotients). Since it allows dividing political power in more granular amounts than 0% and 100%. Like say 33%, 25% or 20%.
After that one can start talking, we'll how should we allocate the winner of each for example 25% share of power in the district.
This would also increase political activity, since previously apathetic voters would know "my candidate doesn't have to carry the whole district, we are just aiming to get 1 of the 5 seats. That is much more achievable. Yeah the big two probably grab say 2 each, but hey with good luck there is realistic change we get that 1/5".
Where as there was snowballs chance smaller player could take a single winner district as whole.