I am reminded of Justice Scalia's testimony regarding "gridlock"
Combine FPTP with the electoral college system and you get arguably absurd presidential outcomes like we saw in 2016, where the winning candidate can receive less votes than the runner up and still win. Huge majorities on minority shares are often found in FPTP systems, because anyone who didn’t vote for the winning candidate might as well have not voted. It can also create the opposite outcomes, minority seat shares in the legislature on majority vote shares.
It’s just a plain bad voting system if you believe the legislature should at least vaguely reflect the wishes of voters.
Of course, the underlying problem with those situations is that minorities are ignored via the tyranny of the majority. So if you think the presidential outcome was absurd because Hillary received the majority of votes you're arguing that in just this particular election ignoring the minority, and going solely by majority vote, would have been a good thing. You can't pick and choose like that.
Combining FPTP with the electoral college did what it was supposed to, it compensated for the tyranny of the majority.
How is this tautology helpful at all? Why would we want this definition of what the most desirable candidate is?
In the UK for example, it's pretty common to win your seat with just 40% or less of the vote. The desires of 60% or more of the electorate in that constituency is simply ignored - a majority can vote for someone else entirely, hardly a reflection of the electorate's desire.
> I think you're overstating it when you say that it leads to situations where anyone who didn't vote for the winning candidate might as well have not voted.
I'm really not. The outcome remains the EXACT SAME if everyone who voted for a losing candidate stays at home. This isn't really my opinion - it's a widely known limitation of FPTP electoral systems.
That is, if you know that policy A is preferred over B by 95% of the citizens of the USA (an incredible supermajority), that gives you no information about whether A or B will be implemented by the government. Has no predictive value. But if I provide the additional information that B is preferred over A by a majority of US elites, then now you can predict whether A or B will be implemented: B will be implemented, most likely.
That situation is the current state of affairs in the US, and it shouldn't be. The system is broken.
Or, more accurately; what is the true purpose to the state and how well does it fulfill that purpose?
If you assume that the purpose to the state is to carefully and thoughtfully use the resources and powers granted to it by the public to serve the public then, yes, the system is utterly broken. It's so completely and fundamentally broken that it is not salvageable.
However if the purpose of the state is use the political power granted to it to advance the interests of people who are politically connected to the state... then it works very very very well.
In fact what people call 'corruption' is fundamental to how politics is able to function in the first place!
Get rid of the 'corruption' and get 'money out of politics' then you eliminate the purpose, reason, and forces that caused the state to come into existence.
Any time you attempt to exercise political power to enact any sort of change to the country you must give the powerful people of your country a reason to go along with you. Whether your goal is to eliminate poverty, save the environment, or make your brother a billionaire... you must first convince the key individuals go along with your program.
And powerful and wealthy don't work for free.
And how this works in a country like the USA is by having the state gain significant control over markets so they can use regulation and policy to benefit people who play along and punish those companies that resist.
Money and power go hand in hand. You can't have big government without big corporations. You can't have big corporations without big governments.
These groups are not opposing forces, the state does not balance out the 'greed' or 'excesses' of market capitalism. Instead it is the nature of the state to feed into these negative effects and exploit them. Big business and Big government are complementary.
So, yes, if the purpose of the state is to exploit the wealth of the country for the purposes of the politically elite within and without the state... then it works extremely well.
Not broken one bit.
>>the purpose to the state is to carefully and thoughtfully use the resources and powers granted to it by the public to serve the public
not an accurate representation? Services are at an all-time high, while today is the best year to have been born vs. any in history.