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Comment by Jedd | Hacker News Reader

"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."

   -- John Adams, 2nd President of the United States

Here in Australia there's a weird combination of moves towards this hugely damaging two-party approach to politics (moves orchestrated I suspect by pop media), and a very real trend away from that. At the last federal election, f.e., we had >25% of people not voting for either of the two major parties - that ratio has been growing steadily, and is hugely reassuring.

What's not reassuring is that most people still think in terms of A or B, exhibiting a poverty of expectations, or perhaps just seeking a simple answer to the complexity of administration.

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This is why it's important to change our (American) voting system -- plurality inevitably trends toward a two-party system.

Preferably we would move to STAR voting (score then automatic runoff). More info at https://www.starvoting.us and you can try it at https://star.vote

(No affiliation, just convinced it's the best method we could adopt)

Why do a runoff, if you can just take everyone's preferences into account on the first vote? IRV and related systems have serious problems, most of which arise because they ignore some of people's preferences. Any system that needs a runoff is in some ways ignoring information it could have used the first time around.

STAR just has one runoff, between the top two candidates; the original scores are used to narrow down to those two, and then the runoff just compares everyone's preferences between them (single vote for one or the other, or neither if you scored them the same).

It's a protection against some scenarios where more people prefer the second-highest-scoring candidate, which I believe can result from strategic voting by a minority block.

More importantly, score voting is the best family of voting systems that currently exists (both STAR and vanilla score voting blow plurality and any form of ranked choice out of the water); STAR has only been around for a few years and has some real momentum in Oregon, whereas score has been around for roughly two decades[0] and has not made any headway that I know of.

[0]: https://www.rangevoting.org/AboutUs.html

And he saw this coming without needing any game theory..

I'd say that Blaise Pascal founded game theory, with his famous God / no God vs believer / non-believer matrix, at least a century before the American Revolution.

I suspect such a style of thinking was not alien to intellectuals of the time, even if not as a formal theory.

i dream of a house of independents.

It should be said that John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Patriot Act of their day except far worse, which were used to imprison a majority of the opposition newspaper editors using those acts' definition of sedition. Not who I would quote as a defender of democracy.

I'd consider the merits of the idea separately from who said it. An idea should be judged by its merits alone.

It should be judged by its merits and looked at askance according to its author, because that often helps you spot sneaky-sneaky demerits being slipped in by the back door.

John Adams’ greatest contribution to the presidency was that after losing the election to Thomas Jefferson in 1800, he stepped down and power changed without bloodshed.

I’m not so sure that will happen should Trump lose this November.

Just wondering-- why would you worry about that? Got anything factual to cite?

He has a fairly long history of ignoring or denying tradition, social norms, presidential norms, factual information and even law. Lots of references to these sort of behaviors throughout his political career, presidency, and business ethics spanning many years.

It doesn't seem too far fetched to extrapolate those behaviors to future events. Obviously, no one can predict the future with certainty of fact, but such an action certainly wouldn't be out of the norm of his past behaviors.

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