You are one of the people dangblingus was mentioning about the erosion of the Education System. Here, let me help out.

Suppose you’re voting in an election for who is going to be responsible for the Christmas Decorations this year. The rule is the person with the most votes wins. There are three candidates. One person thinks that Christmas is a commercialised holiday that sucks money out of you. He’s saying that the community should NOT put Christmas decorations up, and instead, put that money into the pockets of the homeowners. Let’s call him Mr. Bah Humbug. The other person LOVES Christmas, and wants to put up decorations. We’ll call him Jolly Saint Nick, but your big problem with him is that he isn’t that inclusive. You love Christmas decorations, but you think that he should put up decorations for other Winter holidays as well. And thus, you don’t want to vote for him. So you put yourself up as the alternative to Jolly Saint Nick. Let’s call you Progressive Jim. And you’re going to cause the entire community to get NOTHING. How? I’m getting to that.

The community is narrowly divided on the question of decorations. There are 200 people on your block. 99 of them want to keep the money in their pocket, while 101 want decorations in the community. The 99 are all unified. There’s not much room to debate specifics in that position. All 99 want to keep their $$$ in their pocket. So there’s no vote splitting there. But you have ALREADY split the vote in the 101 side. What happens if you and two other people vote for you? Well, 99 people are voting for keeping money in their pockets. 101 people wanting SOME sort of decoration, minus your three votes, equals 98. The final breakdown is 99 Bah Humbug, 98 Jolly Saint Nick, 3 Progressive Jim. Congrats! You just ensured that NONE of the 101 people who wanted Christmas Decorations get what they want. You let the Perfect (having inclusive holiday decorations) be the enemy of the Good (having any sort of holiday decorations), and now you get the worst outcome of all, nothing at all.

In this system, you have to come to a consensus you can deal with. All the people who want decorations are just going to have to come together and negotiate on the type of decorations, and the thing is that in a democracy, you don’t always get what you want. You have to settle with ‘good enough’ if you want to get anything done. Another analogy used here is voting is like taking the bus, not falling in love. If you insist that you must get EVERYTHING you want, in First Past the Post, you regularly get NONE of what you want, especially if you’re the ‘fall in love’ party like Progressives are, and you’re up against a “Fall in Line” party like the Republicans/Conservatives.

There are fixes. Maybe you make your voting a Ranked Choice system, so people can specify “my vote for a progressive holiday season not tied to Christmas is not a vote for no decorations at all. If I don’t get what I want, I’ll settle for uninclusive decorations, grudgingly.” But that’s not the system we have. And until we do, Nic Cage is right. All you’re doing here is ensuring we get the worst outcome.