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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

A pity Pirate Party never took off in US, because of the entrenched two party system.

The Australian system works a lot better. There are still the main 2 but there are a huge number of minor parties that actually have a meaningful impact. The minor parties are usually dedicated to single issues. The biggest minor party being The Greens who are about the environment. No one votes for a minor party because they want them to run the government but you vote for them to send a message to the major 2 about what issues you care about and then use your lower preference vote to pick the major party you like more.

This is a shame, but if you're in a big coastal US city take a look for them. They're around, sometimes!

Mostly, they campaign for things like police accountability and run candidates to force focus on certain issues like surveillance and net neutrality. They don't win, in those cases, but it's a good way to keep solidly-Democratic candidates from letting the issues slide. But there are some Pirates holding offices like town council seats, which is inspiring to me.

(And on a practical level, they seem to be way better at recognizing their position and making an impact than much bigger factions like the Libertarian Party. Perhaps ironically, they've got some great organization.)

Is there any way to change this, besides reforming the whole election system?

Nope! Duvergers law says that our election system will never be stable with more than two parties.

Then it surely needs reforming. Current parties simply don't adequately represent the people.

There are many other voting systems that are better than the current first past the post (FPTP) voting system that the US currently uses. None are perfect, but pretty much every single one is better than FPTP.

A ranked-choice voting system would encourage the existence of more parties. Even a run off voting would help with the existence of more parties, while still preserving the simplicity of FPTP (though, getting people to vote is hard enough, forcing them to go vote a second time would probably be even harder).

I agree with FPTP being bad. But keep in mind the big advantage of the system is keeping two parties close to even, leading to more frequent regime changes. This makes it harder to rig the system in your favor, thus providing long term stability. I'm not sure if term limits alone would would be good enough at that.

I'm somewhat skeptical of the thought that FPTP makes it harder to rig the system. I'm probably a bit information diet biased here, but it seems (as an example) that Republicans have had more court rulings against them due to unfair gerrymandering of districts. It seems who holds the power gets to determine the districts, which would help preserve power. If there wasn't a two way swing, it would arguably be harder to gerrymander in one parties favor, as it _should_ be more difficult to hold 51%+ power if more than 2 parties are available.

How cool would it be if we passed gerrymandering restrictions based on the fractal dimension of the district maps :-)

Wouldn't you expect even more frequent regime changes in a system where the vote was split between three or more parties? This is a common criticism of minority government.

No, only if the electoral system is winner take all. Multiparty proportional systems can be very stable,for example, Germany 2000-present

Ranked choice voting, and efforts to eliminate gerrymandering. The 2020 census.

https://old.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_tabl...

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/gerrymandering-illegal-mathema...

https://theintercept.com/2017/11/03/maine-ranked-choice-voti...

> This is a shame, but if you're in a big coastal US city take a look for them. They're around, sometimes!

They have effectively zero presence in New York City, Los Angeles, Houston, or Philadelphia

> But there are some Pirates holding offices like town council seats

Where? How many?

> And on a practical level, they seem to be way better at recognizing their position and making an impact than much bigger factions like the Libertarian Party.

As someone who's pretty tuned in to US politics, including local politics, I can't identify any impact that the Pirate Party has had. In fact, it's almost impossible to tell that they even exist, in 2019.

Maybe the Pirate Party could organise themselves around being factions in the Democratic and Republican parties, trying to ensure those parties elect Pirate-friendly candidates.

Has this been tried?

I don't think any pirate party really had the numbers to make that happen. Usually a faction represents some larger group of people. The only way I see that happening is by unionizing tech. But that would be incredibly hard exactly because it would create a political force.

Both parties have strong top down control over their respective primaries. Both in terms of direct influence and manipulation. For the Democrats you could observe this during Bernie's campaign for president. For republicans you could see it during Ron Paul's. Both had the majority in the primaries in terms of popular support but primary regulations were such that it didn't matter. Local and state factions were just overruled.

Neither one of those candidates had anywhere near majority support. The Democratic party made some changes since 2016 to make it harder for a Bernie-like candidate to be elected, but will still allow for any candidate with a majority of primary votes to be selected over the party's direct influence.

Neither of those candidates had majority support, especially Ron Paul. This is delusional.

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