[AnthonyMouse]

> Voting feels like you've done something. Cast a vote between the lady rammed through without even a primary, or the other oh so fabulous option. Go home and pat yourself on the back, you did something, you tried, and hey it is democracy so you deserve what you get. Now you can relax and mission accomplished.

It's worse than that. It's possible to have a democracy where some of the options are better, e.g. switch to score voting so there can be arbitrarily many parties and candidates instead of major party insiders filtering out every decent candidate before you get to the election.

But the party insiders want that control, so they set up a narrative where every problem is caused by the other team, instead of the problem being caused by there only being two teams.

[chrchr]

Had the Democratic Party's nomination won the election the worst outcomes of the second Trump presidency would have been prevented. You can blame the campaign and the primary voters and the party or whatever, but ultimately the general election voters could have chosen a normal politician who would have at least been a competent, law-abiding administrator and instead voters chose this. The two party system and the lack of ranked-choice voting are no excuse.

[AnthonyMouse]

The Democratic Party nominated a poor candidate who proceeded to lose the election. Because there are only two viable parties, that means the other party wins, even when the other party nominated Donald Trump.

If you use a cardinal voting system (note: not ranked-choice voting), there are more than two viable candidates, and then putting Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on the ballet only causes them both to lose because they're both undesirable candidates and less undesirable candidates would score higher with the voters than either of them. And then you don't get Donald Trump. (Or Kamala Harris.)

[chrchr]

I don't know what third candidate you think could have beaten both Trump and Harris in a three way race. "Someone else" is always a popular choice until the someone else turns out to be RFK Jr. or Vivek Ramaswamy or Kanye West. And that's beside the point. Voters had a choice between Harris, who would have been a capable defender of the health research funding that the article discusses, and Trump. They chose Trump. That was a bad choice and it was clearly a bad choice at the time. If the general election is between Pinochet and Marco Rubio you can bet I'll vote for Marco Rubio.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I don't know what third candidate you think could have beaten both Trump and Harris in a three way race. "Someone else" is always a popular choice until the someone else turns out to be RFK Jr. or Vivek Ramaswamy or Kanye West.

Under the existing system, a three way race between Trump, Harris and Marco Rubio causes Harris to win because Trump and Rubio split the Republican vote. So the Republicans, in order to prevent this, only run one candidate. When that candidate is Trump and the Democrats choose Harris, oops.

Score voting is the thing they use in the Olympics. Voters rate every candidate on a scale of 1 to 10, highest average wins. Now if you add Rubio to the ballot, it only affects Trump's chances to the extent that Rubio could score higher than Trump. So there are no more primaries, every party just runs all their candidates in the general election.

Meanwhile Rubio will score higher than Trump among Democrats and not much if at all lower among Republicans, so Rubio defeats Trump. And if you put some Democrat the likes of Jared Polis on a general election ballot, he plausibly scores higher than Harris. If you had to flip a coin between Jared Polis and Marco Rubio, how is that not better than it being Harris and Trump?

[hn_acker]

> If you had to flip a coin between Jared Polis and Marco Rubio, how is that not better than it being Harris and Trump?

Without detracting from your explanation about score voting, I would hope that Jared Polis will recalibrate his judgement about other people's medical opinions prior to running for president [1]:

> He has supported Donald Trump's decision to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the secretary of Health and Human Services.[114]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Polis#Vaccines

[exe34]

> The Democratic Party nominated a poor candidate who proceeded to lose the election. Because there are only two viable parties, that means the other party wins, even when the other party nominated Donald Trump.

You had a choice between Trump again and not Trump. You can't keep blaming others for your choices.

[ClayShentrup]

score voting is the key.

https://asitoughttobemagazine.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/