Comment by lopmotr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lopmotr | Hacker News Reader

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For some reason, Americans keep complaining about the same problems with their government over and over again - particularly lobbying, and yet every election they nearly universally reject all their concerns in favor of tribalism and vote for the same two parties that are responsible for everything they don't want, or nobody at all, which has the same effect.

Wouldn't it be fun if whenever somebody criticizes their government, they also state who they voted for to force them to open their eyes to the fact that it's their own fault.

People rationalize it by saying that voting for a 3rd party is "wasting" their vote, but in that sense, voting for anybody is wasting their vote because it never comes down to one individual's vote deciding things. Really they just have two driving forces - allegiance to whatever tribe they randomly found themselves feeling like a part of (and mysteriously agree with all the inconsistent aims of), and wanting to be on the winning team. Healthcare be damned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

Without a switch to range voting, approval voting, or one of the condorcet variants, the party system will remain broken into two corrupt halves.

Condorcet won't work.

http://scorevoting.net/NESD

> People rationalize it by saying that voting for a 3rd party is "wasting" their vote

It's actually worse than what people say. First past the post voting systems have a lot of problems, one of which is called the spoiler effect. By not voting for the major party you prefer you are actually voting against said major party.

Take this simple example: Major party A has 51% of the votes, while major party B hast 49%. Party A wins the election. Next election party C makes a big campaign at party A voters and convinces 3% to vote for them. Now we have A 48%, B 49% and C 3%. Party B wins the election. And if we look at the paper trails it probably doesn't surprise who funded party C's campaign.

Assigning this well studied behaviour of rational voters to simple tribalism is trivialising the core issue in the US: Elected officials are not representing the people. The way to fix this issue is to fix their voting system.

“People rationalize it by saying that voting for a 3rd party is "wasting" their vote,”

I guess I am stubborn but I will never vote for one of the two big parties. However it would be great if smaller parties got some kind of representation in Congress. It seems ridiculous that in the 90s Ross Perot got 20% of the vote but that resulted in zero representation.

There's an ideal world we want (that might never happen) and there's the real world. We live in the latter. Voting for the 3rd party is effectively voting one of the big 2.

Also, I find it curious that while our community has generally settled on "incremental improvement" approach, we expect different from our governments and want the "big bang" changes. Then we are surprised when things get worse.

“We live in the latter. Voting for the 3rd party is effectively voting one of the big 2.”

It’s not. It sends a signal that there is a desire for something else.

A signal to whom? Is that signal strong enough to persist in memory until the next election cycle?

What’s the alternative? Choose between two corrupt parties?

I don't know, I'm just questioning the quality and magnitude of the signal sent by voting for a third party.

The public memory is so short and so malleable, people forget things week over week let alone the entirety of an election cycle.

The issue with third party voting is a classic case of the problem of coordinated collective action.

Would-be voters don't participate out of perceived futility or participate in the dual party system for similar reasons.

I don't know how to solve it but there does seem to be growing agitation in the electorate with the current system as it stands, with the Electoral College under public scrutiny and with media support. To me that is a signal that times are changing.

> People rationalize it by saying that voting for a 3rd party is "wasting" their vote

In reality, voting for someone who didn't win the election is a "wasted" vote. But people will say that a particular candidate has no chance of winning the election, so voting for them is "wasting" your vote. Unfortunately, because most people follow this line of reasoning, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

I'm just saying we need to figure out how to change the lobbying process to not allow these big players (e.g. conglomerates) to influence the political process so much. However, I do agree with you that our country has descended into tribalism not seen before, which undoubtedly helps the folks who want to undermine our democratic process.

The people who are are paying attention are not the problem.

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