It'd be nice to go beyond and have some sort of ranked voting while we're at it. Essentially being forced to pick between two parties or risk having your vote being wasted sucks.
I don't know how the american system works, but voting for small parties should not considered a wasted vote. It helps the party even if they don't get elected
It's worse than wasted. It's effectively a half-vote for the major candidate you like the least.
If a party receives 5% of the popular vote, they start to receive funding from the FEC. That hasn't happened in a while for a third party.
Unpopular opinion: ranked choice voting will do little to solve the USA's democracy issues.
For starters, there are plenty of countries that do use FPTP and still have plenty of third parties in their parliaments (Canada, UK, Taiwan, Australia off the top of my head). So FPTP does not inherently preclude third parties - rather, the USA simply doesn't have any culture of multilateralism. I'd say this is mostly a byproduct of various cultural phenomena - the wealth gap, corporate media ownership, private campaign financing, win-or-lose mindset, etc.
But the greater issue is that RCV doesn't really ensure proportionality. As long as you have a single winner from each district, there will be distortions between the proportion of parties for whom people vote and the ultimate parliamentary body. For example, even if you implemented RCV across the entire USA today, I'm pretty sure most legislative bodies would still be entirely dominated by a single party because of gerrymandering and single-member districts.
So if you want to fix the USA's core issue, what you really need is a more proportional system - either have fewer, larger districts with multiple representatives from each one, or adopt something like MMP which is what Germany has (where you also cast a party vote to declare your preference for which party you most want represented in parliament and distribute proportionally along this tally across all voters). Not only does this make the final representation more fair, but it also does a much better job of making all votes matter, instead of only the lucky few in swing states or the rare competitive Congressional race.
But RCV on its own won't do much. It is still a small improvement, and if you have the opportunity to adopt it, I say go for it. But at best, I think it would take decades, or maybe even generations, before it starts to improve things.
Also, while I know this doesn't pertain quite so much to Presidential elections as the electoral college is used for, the USA is also fairly unique in that it has a directly elected head of government with much more power than other countries that also have a directly elected head of state. This is also a part of the problem - the executive branch is supposed to be the weakest of the 3 Federal branches - but it's a discussion for another time.
BREAKING: group of people whose only chance of getting elected is relying on the Electoral College not thrilled about the idea of abandoning the Electoral College
Part of this piece has an excellent insight into the dichotomy of the Republican Party. Of those highly engaged with politics, only 27% want to ditch the electoral college! These people understand the party is unpopular and the tactics used to hold power are a necessary way to get their policies.
The rest of the group feels otherwise, probably NOT because they don’t care if their candidate gets elected, but rather that they don’t understand how crucial it is to their party (along with gerrymandering). And their first gut instinct is that popular vote is justified/rational/logical whatever.
Now for a little thought experiment: What would happen if this became an actual campaign issue? I’d put my money on those 27% being able to convince the rest of the party how important it is, flipping their view. Maybe I’m wrong, but since many R voters tent to put self interests above all else, it logically follows that they’re just not understanding how critical the electoral college is. If their talking heads went on air/TV each day and stopped talking about how immigrants are stealing jobs or poor people are taking their hard earned money, and instead focused on the importance of the electoral college, they’d flip. Not because they think it’s right or justified. Because they think it’s best for themselves and their party. And it’s the current rallying cry.
Now apply this across an entire party, with those highly engaged telling the others how to vote, what to think about policy, and what the outcomes will be. Bring together uneducated people already susceptible to misinformation, and pair them with intelligent and extremely vocal/active groups who can sell snake oil like the best of them. Take that minority vote and put some real numbers behind it… likely not enough to get a majority, but enough to win a sophisticated electoral college or gerrymandered district.
they probably wouldn’t even try and hide it: they’d literally just come out and say the electoral college helps keep the democrats out and they’d vote for it
Americans, lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
Republicans would never win a nationwide election again. They'd actually have to come up with policies people want. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
I've had family that votes Republican say this, they will literally defend the minority vote winning. They see democracy as "mob rule." Well, if a bunch of rich assholes getting to decide who's president, and a system where the people with the least votes win, how is that not mob rule?
If the president was chosen by popular vote, I think you could make a reasonable case that the last Republican president would have been George H.W. Bush in 1988. George W. Bush did win the popular vote against John Kerry in 2004, but he lost it to Al Gore in 2000 so it's debatable whether or not he would have beaten an incumbent Gore in 2004 I think.
And now you see why the Republicans are so against it. They can’t win in a straight vote.
My vote would finally matter. My state already knows who it's supporting with or without me.
And the votes of the flyover states become an after thought.
Tue votes of the flyover states would matter exactly as much as the votes of any other arbitrary subsection of the country with the same number of people. That's the point.
Exactly!
Why would you want people to decide their countrys future when empty landmass could do it?
I hate this argument. There are still a lot of votes in the flyover states. The electoral college doesn't disadvantage flyover states anymore than not having an electoral college disadvantages those living outside of the major cities in a state wide election.
Republicans still win the Ohio governor's election despite 5 major metropolitan areas in the state.
Also there are Republican votes in New York and California that get discarded currently.
This isn't a game, this is just making the thing fair.
They are already advantaged in both the house and the senate. Why do they need advantages in literally all elections to feel they are treated fairly?
Two things I'd love to see. Eliminating the electoral college and then getting rid of superdelegates. Two fundamentally anti-democratic concepts.
Well superdelegates aren't exactly something the government can legislate away because they're just an internal thing of the DNC.
National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
Introduced in 2006, as of August 2023 it has been adopted by sixteen states and the District of Columbia. These jurisdictions have 205 electoral votes, which is 38% of the Electoral College and 76% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force.
The electoral college was created at a time when faster-than-horse communication didn't exist. It made sense then, but has not grown with the times.
They will never allow that because it'll kill the entire republican party lol
Won't be good for Democrats either. System is rigged for two parties and two parties only.
The whole thing is absurd and overly represents rural areas and Republicans. We already have a huge problem with the "2 senators per state" thing and the House representing Republicans far too much in relation to their numbers.
Instead of tilting at the windmill that is removing the EC how about we do something much easier and simpler and simply expand the House of Representatives? Not only would this add votes to the EC and make the Presidential Elections more representative it would also, you know, make the HoR more Representative! For extra fun it would also diminish the returns of gerrymandering since there would be so many more districts.
All we need is a change to the Re-Apportionment Act of 1929. There is no good reason that the size of the HoR is fixed at 435. None.
For extra fun it would also diminish the returns of gerrymandering since there would be so many more districts.
you should lead with this
In 1929, each representative represented about 283k Americans. Now each representative represent about 762k Americans. That's almost a 300% increase. This means each American's voice is only about 1/3rd as powerful as it was in 1929. To have as much political power as they did in 1929, we'd need about 1200 Representatives.
Unfortunately the elected representatives don't care what the majority of citizens want.
Hell, a good chunk of the citizens vote for people that don't support their lives or values. It's fucked top to bottom.
The "founding fathers" would be against the electoral college today too. The electoral college was an idea to try to get the people to directly vote for the president.
The electoral college was necessary because it would have been logistically impossible for people living in 18th and 19th century America to be able to participate in a single-day one person one vote election, given their level of technology at the time.
We live in the 21st century. We have instantaneous means of communication via the internet making designating an elector to travel to Washington unnecessary, a greatly expanded infrastructure via roads and mass transit for people to travel to polling places in a reasonable amount of time in a day, computers that can tally the ballots many hundreds of times faster than a human being can, and vastly expanded capacity for handling the logistics of running a nationwide election including a complex bureaucracy dedicated to oversight and enforcement of voting laws and regulations.
The electoral college is an archaic system whose only purpose has been completely supplanted by modern technology. Any notion of rogue electors defending the republic from authoritarians and populists is not only historically false, but given the fact that they failed to prevent exactly that situation from happening once already, laughably ineffective.
I propose the National Popular Vote Interstate compact. Cgp grey has an amazing video on it. It's a "petition" of sorts that basically says that states that sign it will have its elective representatives vote with the majority vote of their said state.
Here's the video if anyone wants to watch it: https://youtu.be/tUX-frlNBJY
I feel like while the electoral college is an issue, it's the gerrymandering that is ultimately the biggest issue.
And in fact probably also contributes to the electoral college issue.
The senate is pretty bad too.
In theory we could expand the number of house seats so that more populous states get more reps and everyone has a more equal number of voters per congressperson. I think that would not only help make the house more fair but would also make the electoral college more fair (since the # of electors increases with the number of house members). Not as good as the popular vote, but it’s an improvement that doesn’t require a conditional amendment.
there is absolutely no valid argument to do anything that isn't simply tallying all the votes. because of course that's how it should work
I would modify the electoral college rather than get rid of it. Make it so that states are obligated to assign their electoral votes to candidates in proportion to the number of votes received. For example, Maryland might go 60% blue and 40% red, so they would give 6 of their 10 votes to blue and 4 to red.
This would de-emphasize the importance of swing states, not completely disenfranchise rural voters, and would return a result that more closely mirrored the popular vote. It might also pave the way for a 3rd party to be relevant if the stars aligned elsewhere.
First we need a federal initiative/ referendum system. Because the existing politicians will never vote to limit their own power.
Something something, “Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.”
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