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by ameetgaitonde 1724 days ago
Edit: I was wrong, he's doing exactly what I thought he wasn't. See Hannibalhorn's comment below for more details.

I'm glad he supports Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV), but I think he's going about this the wrong way.

Right now, he's creating a new third-party within an electoral system that effectively defaults to two existing and dominant parties. Those two parties currently control every federal and state legislature and/or election committee that has the power to alter how elections are run.

Working against them, in a system that is extremely hostile to third-parties, makes it very hard to effect change because you are almost always guaranteed to be a loser, and be viewed as an opponent.

If his interests are truly about implementing RCV nationwide, a better course of action would be to endorse and campaign for the Democratic and Republican candidates that are willing to commit to implementing RCV.

In any state where you can get a filibuster-proof majority of those candidates elected, you would have a much better chance of changing the electoral system.

Simply put, lobbying for RCV would be more effective than introducing a third-party within our current electoral system.

2 comments

That is actually what he's doing [1]:

    We will support candidates for office who align with our core principles so that we can reform the system and make it more responsive to the American people. This means that we will support Republicans, Democrats, and Independents - as well as candidates identifying themselves as Forward Party members.
1. https://www.forwardparty.com/whyforward
Sounds like he is actually starting a PAC as opposed to a new political party.
From the FAQ -

Is the Forward Party a political party?

The Forward Party is a PAC that plans to grow its support and then petition the FEC for recognition as a political party when we fulfill the requirements, which include operating in several states, supporting candidates, getting volunteers signed up around the country, and other party activities.

It could easily be both.

One method for avoiding the problem of splitting the vote is to only run candidates in ridings which are otherwise effectively "single candidate", places where the incumbents are expected to get >66% of the vote without you running.

This also lets you focus your resources more, and lets you pander more to a specific kind of voter (the voters you need to win the otherwise-not-competitive ridings you are running in).

Sorry, I didn't read carefully. Thanks for correcting me.
Mixed member proportionate voting works well for NZ, in terms of allowing multiple political parties to gain significant representation… [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_re...]
MMP is way better than FPP, however the NZ version with list MPs is undesirable in my opinion, because the party gets to choose candidates who get zero votes and then get into parliament. To remove someone you have to vote out the party.

To explain: in NZ MMP, the party creates a list of candidates, and if the party is voted for, people from the list become members of parliament. NZ also has 60 out of 120 seats allocated by voting in an electorate, but even someone that doesn’t win their electorate can still become an MP if they are sufficiently high on the party list. https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/what-is-new-zealands-sy...

It has changed politics here, for sure. For the better

It has not made politics sensible