Jophiel wrote:
Why do you need a "negotiated process"? The winner of a plurality or majority of the popular vote wins. Given that many elections conclude without the winner gaining 50%+ of the popular vote, this is no big deal. The EC only gives a "majority" via an artificial means by largely shutting out any third parties with its winner-takes-all allocations (be it on a state or district level).
It's not artificial though. It requires the formation of two large parties, each of which has the capability of obtaining a majority of the EC votes to win the election. It's that majority requirement and the WTA condition that force two large parties. Take that away, and you wont have just two large parties anymore.
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That said, even with a popular vote we would still gravitate towards a two party system for the same reasons why we do today: the more fractured party would lose to the less fractured party. Despite your confusion, the EC has nothing to do with that. We would need a parliamentary-style process to really influence it.
I disagree. If you eliminate the requirement for any sort of majority (whether EC majority or popular vote majority), you will see both parties fracture into smaller, more focused, parties over time. Because you've created a circumstance where, for example, the social agenda Democrats can win control without having to appeal to the blue collar worker Democrats. Or the small government Republicans can win without having to appeal to the religious right Republicans. And vice versa in all cases, and frankly almost certainly a number of other factions and ideological "sides" that would crop up that we're not even considering right now.
I think it's monumentally foolish to think you can so dramatically change the victory conditions for the election and not see an equally dramatic change in how the parties themselves form and operate.
What you would almost certainly see under the sort of systems you're proposing is the rise of a number of smaller parties, each with a narrower focus then the two existing major parties we have now. This would result in one of them holding the White House, but without anything close to a majority support in terms of their party platform. We'd also see a similar change in Congress, where no single party would hold a majority of seats. Which in turn would result in alliances of parties after the fact (and outside the direct influence of voters) which would form voting blocks to pass legislation (perhaps often changing shape from one issue to the next). This is what I mean by "negotiated". You're actually taking even more power out of the hands of the voters in this sort of scenario.
That's certainly "different". But I don't think it's necessarily "better". And yes, it'll result in a greater percentage of our policy and legislative decisions being made behind closed doors as negotiations between multiple different political parties and factions and fewer being made as a result of platform positions that had to be clearly stated prior to the election and on which the voters got to make their voting decisions. I'm just not seeing how this actually increases voter enfranchisement. Not even on paper.
Timelordwho wrote:
Single Transferable Vote (STV) or Ranked Choice Voting for single member elections (ie, only one position available, so no granularity like in the house/senate/parliament), has largely solved this problem, as if your preferred candidate is nonviable, your votes are shifted to your next choice option. This has benefit of allowing people to vote for other candidates than major parties without acting as "spoilers" allowing more more electorally accurate policy shifts.
You're declarations aside, I did read your earlier statements about this, and did respond to them. The problem with ranked voting is it even more increases the odds that whichever candidate actually wins the resulting election does so by being at best the 2nd or 3rd or even 4th choice of a large percentage of the population. How on earth is that better? It certainly does not improve the issue of voter enfranchisement at all. It makes it worse. Sure, on paper your vote mattered, but only in that you got someone you didn't really like elected because you listed him low on your rank (but he was in the list, so you technically voted for him, right?). That's totally absurd.
And you're still failing to see the biggest problem with this. You're still operating under the assumption that political parties under such a system will be similar to how they are in the US now. But that's not the case. You'll have 8 or 10 different major parties, each of which is running exclusively on a relatively narrow set of issues that matter most to them (and their voters). Under our current system, the two major parties have to make an effort to adjust their platform in order to appeal to enough voters in enough geographical regions to win a majority of the EC votes. They have to appeal to a large swath of people. In a ranked system, they simply don't. Period. Someone is going to win, no matter how narrow their platform is. Worse, it'll likely be the party with the narrowest platform, and not the broadest. Why you ask? Let me explain.
It's generally much easier to get voters to vote *against* a candidate than *for* them. So out of a field of say 10 candidates, you might rank the first one or even two based on the narrow set of issues that candidate holds that you care about a lot (and are likely a member of his/her party as well). But the rest are likely going to be ranked based on how much you disagree with them (so number three would be the one you dislike the least out of the rest, etc, etc). This is because most people think in terms of what they want most first, then settle on "well, at least he's not going to do <something I don't like>". So, in a field of say 10 candidates, those who run on a wide platform of positions on a number of issues don't really increase the odds that their platform will perfectly match the desires of voters much, but will dramatically increase the odds that their platform will contain something that a set of voters will seriously dislike, resulting in them being far down the list on most people's rank (and thus less likely to win).
As a result, the candidate who runs purely on a single or small number of issues and nothing at all other than that will actually have the best chance of winning in a ranked system. Which means that the voters will actually have the least likelihood of having a clue what that person will actually do once in office. Which again, leads us to a system that is massively worse than the minor disenfranchisement of our existing system. Sure, your "vote mattered", but in an election where nearly every single candidate is actively working to minimize the number of things he's stuck to in terms of campaign promises so as to maximize his chance of winning. Which leads, once again, to the wheeling and dealing and negotiating after the election is over to determine how our government actually rules.
Which IMO, is not in any way an improvement. Heck. The run off system is better (but takes more time and costs more money). And it's still less "good" IMO than the two party system used in the US. Again, it really depends on what you want your representation to look like, and how you want political parties to align with that representation. I happen to think that a system that forces the parties to each have to appeal to and comply with the wishes of approximately half of the voting population to be far superior to one where the party in power may win with a platform representing only a small percentage of the population in nearly every case, and more or less just being the least bad choice for the rest of the population.
Want to know how to achieve 100% voter enfranchisement? Have just one candidate on the ballot, right? But does that mean that the one candidate that everyone voted for actually represents what the voters want? Not at all. So concocting a system where everyone ranks candidates, so that whomever wins is at least to some degree the "choice" of the people, is equally contrived. You're solving a problem on paper that doesn't really solve the problem in the real world. I don't think that's a good idea.
I'll also point out that ranked systems work much better in systems in which a prime minister is elected rather than a president. Because, again, you're going for a "least bad" solution from the get go, and the parties form factions which then form a government and choose the PM. In a system like the US, where the president is elected completely separate from the legislature, such systems simply do not work because there's no assurance that the person with power in the executive branch of government is even remotely a consensus person (even parliament systems requires a consensus of the legislature, acting as representatives of the people in this case, and once again, requires an actual majority of said body).
Investing executive power in someone using any sort of non-majority based system is just a really really really (add a lot more "really" here) bad idea.
Edited, Dec 22nd 2016 4:03pm by gbaji