You’d think midterms would be a great time to get your name out there and run high profile candidates to win House districts led by charlatans…
ranked choice voting (or similar)
If we could have both of these, it would be American democracy—only better!
I like Approval Voting for single-winner elections and Sequential Proportional Approval Voting. Approval is way easier than RCV in every sense (RCV is complex enough to disenfranchise minorities) and it gets more accurate results because it doesn’t have spoilers (RCV actually does, they’re just different than what you’re used to).
Approval is great for third parties because their full support in the final results, which RCV doesn’t always do. Those results are important because they influence voters in the next election, helping little parties build up legitimacy even when they lose.
It’s currently in use in Fargo and St. Louis, and of course they’re very happy with it.
Yeah, as long as we can get rid of lesser-of-two-evils voting, things would get a lot better.
Right; ranked choice seems to have a lot of momentum behind it. There are a lot of other possibilities with pros and cons. I don’t think it’s worth bickering too much about what makes the best one. I do know first past the post needs to go. If ranked choice is being pushed, I’ll go with it.
Just gonna throw STAR voting into the rink for the hell of it. Any of these systems is better than FPTP and I would endorse any of them in a local push for better voting.
I used to mention AV a lot, but STAR is my preference now. Of course, any improvement to the voting system makes it easier to further improve the voting system (which is why improvements are against the interest of either of the main two parties - they will not help)
Let’s say one voter gives all candidates 5 stars each, except 1 who gets no stars; and another voter gives no candidate any stars, except 1 who gets 3 stars?
I want to expand the House to proper proportionality and staff it by sortition.
I still think an elected chamber is important. Might be better to create a third chamber filled by sortition. Legislation needs to pass 2 out of 3 chambers of Congress to get to the president. Call it the “House of Jurors” or something. It would consist of 5,000 members divided proportionally to by state or territorial population and selected by sortition among registered voters for a term of two months or until they quit (people can quit immediately if they don’t want to serve). There is no formal debate, but members can talk to each other. No legislation can be introduced. Their only job is to show up and vote. The meeting place is a football stadium, once a week. Scantily-clad cheerleaders will be present for halftime and there will be free beer, Coca-Cola, and Costco hot dogs. Participants get $20,000 for their trouble. Accommodation provided free of charge at a hilariously large Motel 6.
All of this would probably still cost less to the taxpayers than Congressional salaries and expenses. And besides, what are corporate interests going to do, bribe five thousand people? Lol
If I recall correctly, that’s how the president of the government in The Songs of Distant Earth was chosen.
IIRC something happens if one manages to get 5% of the vote, which would enable them to more seriously compete the following election. So, the pitch is they aren’t trying to win this time but for the election after - if they can get 5% this time. Didn’t get 5%. Next election rolls around: rinse and repeat.
It’s a pipe dream. In 2016 we had two of the most disliked candidates running in the big two, and an uncharacteristically decent looking candidate running for the LP. That was prime time for the LP to get that coveted 5% and start making wheels turn. They got 3% and remain on square one. We will not EVER see better conditions for a 3rd party success than Trump v Hillary v Johnson. Not with fptp.
If 3rds want to ever actually get their shit together, they need to work together for reform like ranked choice. Their differences in policy don’t mean squat until then, so wake me up when that shit starts to happen. (it won’t happen)
Ross Perot was the last time a 3rd party actually made some noise. He took 18.9% of the popular vote, founded the reform party, then withered on the vine.
In following elections, the Reform party would go on to nominate Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader as Presidential candidates. It also ran Jesse Ventura for governor, and even Trump had a brief turn in there.
Not so much withering on the vine as being completely incoherent.
(If you don’t know about Pat Buchanan, since he’s been out of the limelight for a while, he was basically all the worst impulses of racist GOP voters back in the 90s. Exactly the kind of people Trump uses as his base now.)
Localist parties can probably win as well. I think there are some observations that can be made from UK elections, which also use first-past-the-post.
- Local political parties can win. The Scottish National Party did well in Scotland for several years (until their poll numbers collapsed after their former leader quit and got arrested)
- It makes more sense for small parties to pour all their resources into contesting a small number of seats than to contest and lose a large number of seats. The UK Green Party spent a lot of effort to get their leader elected to Parliament in the Brighton Pavillion constituency.
- Local representation matters. When your party controls several seats on a local council or devolved assembly, they have more chances to gain visibility or even govern. US parties should spend a lot more effort on state legislative races than the presidential one.
- Vote-splitting is less of a concern when one ideology is already overwhelmingly dominant in a region. That is a good region to try to win. For example, the DC Statehood Green Party is the second-largest political party in Washington, D.C. because the DC Republican Party is tiny and terrible (polls in the single digits). That’s a good place to try to win some seats.
Not to mention, a third party did get 5%+ with Perot and the Reform Party. But I don’t think Reform even exists anymore, and if they do, they’ve done a terrible job of making themselves known.
They’ve been trying their strategy of “get our name out during presidential elections and hit 5%” for a long time now, and it’s clearly a losing strategy.
I mean tbf I’ve seen the libertarians and greens run those races too, it’s just that being a third party under fptp bites those candidates just as hard as their presidential candidates.
Also having such a hopeless position means they’re not actually accountable to their supporters, meaning refusing to actually try to build a movement doesn’t actually hurt them.
Isn’t it weird that people only pay attention to third parties every 4 years? Maybe that’s why we only have two shitty choices.
Volunteer. Get educated. Quit blaming others.
Third parties should be running House candidates and putting ads on airtime for them. You aren’t going to win an election if it’s based on people doing research instead of you doing heavy advertisement.
Third parties should try doing anything noteworthy to get attention. The parties and their candidates don’t deserve anything intrinsically.
There’s plenty else they could be doing… outreach in off-years, for example. Start on campuses building awareness and building the kind of word-of-mouth and grassroots supporters you really need for a campaign. Having your name on the ballot isn’t enough. Having rallies isn’t enough. You can’t ask the people to come to YOU, and the media certainly won’t give you any coverage… you have to reach out to THEM.
Third-party candidates don’t have much money. They typically don’t have corporate donors and dark money funneling in, and individual contributions simply aren’t enough.
That is true… of a traditional campaign. But we live in an era where people can get millions of devoted followers by twerking on a webcam. A savvy third party that uses the internet effectively to build followers and then spreads into the greater population through word of mouth could conceivably work. Heck, it’s not all that different from how Trump managed to build his base.
I’m not sure exactly what such a thing would look like for a third party candidate with some kind of scruples, but it shouldn’t be IMPOSSIBLE.
But then the argument would be “we lost this house seat because of the 3rd party”
Not when the seats are heavily garrymandered, anyway, and only one party is normally running in that district. Gerrymandering can be an opportunity.
Yeah but like this you can vote 3rd party every four years and then do nothing else and then you can go on Lemmy and claim you’re both anti trump and anti genocide and have the moral high ground.
chances are, they probably are, but corporate media is never going to give them any airtime so you never hear about it
In my state if a Democrat doesn’t run for a seat. Chances are a Republican is running uncontested. I leave large parts of the state ballot blank because Republicans run uncontested ON EVERY BALLOT. Even presidential years. And while I rarely vote FOR anyone. I always vote AGAINST Republicans. Well them and Rand loving economic liberals pretending to be libertarians. Which is basically the same thing.
If we had god-damn Approval Voting you could literally just vote for everyone but the evil candidate and that would actually help everyone else and hurt them. “Anybody but Dr. Evil” would be a legit PAC interest group.
Yeah, Libertarians and Republicans are so alike: both want drug legalization, massive military cuts, removal of a lot of tariffs and immigration restrictions, and having 38 year-old gay men running for President—2 peas in a pod.
If that’s so, then why would most of those “Libertarians” vote for Republicans over Democrats who better align with those goals? Every time I’ve ever asked a Libertarian when there wasn’t a Libertarian candidate running who they were going to vote for. Or read about such a situation. It’s always been the republican.
Liberals larping as libertarians say so much contradictory bullshit. Take so many actions against their own stated goals. They say they want those things. Yet they won’t take the very basic goals to achieve them against the actual people responsible for it. Wealthy business owners. They want wealthy business owners to be their rulers. The problem with government isn’t that it exists. It’s that it’s been captured by wealthy business owners. Why do we have so much military around the world? To protect the interest of wealthy business owners. Why do we have so many tariffs in place? To protect the interest of wealthy business owners. Why do we have so many restrictions on immigration in place? To protect the work Supply and low wage Workforce for wealthy business owners. Why do we have so many drugs made illegal. Because it suits the wealthy and powerful.
And yet these so-called Libertarians would do nothing against those people. The man that coined the phrase Libertarian and defined what Libertarianism is showed what needs to be done. And these so called Libertarians rejected Libertarianism and it’s creator.
