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Comment by robbrown451 | Hacker News Reader

He makes plenty of good points, but completely fails to make mention of how plurality voting (also known as "first past the post") results in two dominant parties, rather than electing people who represent the preference of the median voter. This is known as Duverger's Law, and I would argue it is about 90% responsible for everything he speaks of.

Voting systems that don't do this exist. Approval voting is one of the better ones (unfortunately, Ranked Choice voting doesn't do much at all to alleviate this). Approval voting has been enacted in Fargo, ND and is being considered for St. Louis, MO.

The charts he included show that there actually is a reasonable middle ground and lots of voters are there. The problem is that candidates that are in the middle can't get elected. Imagine how different things would be if our election system tended to elect the first choice of the median voter.

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I'm a fan of single transferable voting, but the claim that FPTP is responsible for America's politics does not seem well borne out by the evidence. As the Wikipedia article on Duverger's Law notes: "In practice, most countries with plurality voting have more than two parties." The USA is very much an outlier here. Even if there remained only two _dominant_ parties, a significant third party like the NDP in Canada, or the Liberal Democrats in the UK, would reshape congressional politics very significantly.

Without FPTP I think you would get more parties, and as you say these parties will influence the politics or introduce actual dialogue between parties in composing governments. Essentially all countries that I know of with a more proportional representation system have more parties and a less polarised political system.

I think the reason why US has two parties is that most States apply FPTP at a district level, but then also have a winner-takes-all at State level based on the districts result. So one district selects one party, and then the State gives all its N votes to the majority party among districts, selecting N people of the same party. UK only has FPTP at constituency (district) level. So one constituency selects one person (one MP belonging to one party).

In UK when voting you have to chose among the top two parties in your own constituency in order to have a chance to get the MP you want rather than throwing your vote away. Votes distribution at national level doesn't really count from the voter point of view.

In US when voting you have to chose among the top two parties in your own State because if your district picks a third party and no other district does, your whole district vote is thrown away. Votes distribution at State level really counts from the voter point of view.

It isn't thrown away, though. If your district picks a third party, you send a third party representative to Congress. You'll have different choices in district-specific and state-wide races but you could also have a third party senate candidate and no realistic third party house candidates (for example Maine in 2018, though they had ranked choice voting). I don't see how having multiple levels of elections changes things beyond larger populations making it harder to coordinate outside the parties.

I stand corrected. Thank you for pointing out my misunderstanding of US elections.

So what is the main difference? size of districts (constituencies) by a factor of ~10? Gerrymandering?

I think the purpose of democracy should primarily be to avoid civil conflict and only secondarily be to represent the median voter. First past the post voting ensures a two-party system which means that people will make compromises while voting and not outsource that responsibility to politicians. The latter might cause voters to not own the consequences of trading favors (which is necessary for coalition building) and potentially lead to civil conflict.

Do you have examples where this system has caused civil conflict elsewhere?

I think representing the median voter is the best way to avoid conflict.

Imagine you have a shared workspace and people vote on the temperature to set the thermostat. Do you think he best way to avoid conflict is to have a system that encourages people to cluster into warm nature and cool nature people, one or the other get their way? Or is it best to simply settle on the median, which tends to be right in the middle and no one is miserable.

Thank you for introducing me to Duverger's Law! I had been looking for that concept for a long time but never knew how what it was called or how to search for it.

There are some interesting voting systems out there, including quadratic voting, that used market based mechanisms. Maybe something more useful would be something like a prediction market where people can pay to express a preference for a particular policy decision. Everyone would receive an amount of credits depending on the amount of property they own (not necessarily land, but some abstract notion of property).

It seems to me that would favor those with more property at the expense of those with less which would be unjust. Am I misunderstanding?

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