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by danaris 289 days ago
Third parties are nonviable in most of the US due to our voting system.

In order to make it mathematically possible for a third party to compete, we need to switch to something with more nuance than single vote, first-past-the-post winner-take-all elections. Ranked Choice Voting has some momentum right now, and AFAICT is no worse than any of the other options (they all fail in certain edge cases, I believe; it's just a matter of which ones).
2 comments
SOLAR_FIELDS 289 days ago
RCV also has the advantage of being relatively understandable for the layperson unlike some of the more esoteric ones I’ve seen
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jfengel 288 days ago
As I understand it, Ranked Choice Voting is still winner-take-all, and that's the real problem. There's still only one winner, and that person is rarely anybody's first choice.

People might appreciate having had the chance to express their first choice, but when they're forced to settle for their second, third... hundredth choice, I'm not sure they'll be any happier.

There are ways to do away with the single-winner system, such as party lists. They, too, have drawbacks, but they'd at least be different drawbacks.

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danaris 288 days ago
Changing the voting method is much easier than changing to proportional representation, or any other means of avoiding a single winner. The former is something that's under control of the states. I...think the latter would require an amendment to the Constitution for Congress, and changing the nature of the Presidency definitely would.

Even just allowing people to provide more than one vote means that people can support third-party candidates without that vote effectively robbing their preferred major-party candidate of a vote. (eg, if you're broadly left-wing, and like the Green Party, you can rank their candidate first, then the Democratic candidate second—and then if the Green Party candidate doesn't win, your vote counts for the Democrat) That's a big, big change.

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JumpCrisscross 288 days ago
> I...think the latter would require an amendment to the Constitution for Congress

I don’t think it does [1].

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section4

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