How is this not a bug? A straightforward patch would be the introduction of FPTP and moving the executive role from the office of the head-of-state to a body controlled by congress.
Adopting RCV seems to me like one of the best ways we can improve the health of the US’s democracy going forward.
Any voters Massachusetts can vote this November to have RCV statewide, just like Maine, from local elections up to the US House and Senate elections. I’ve volunteered with the group [1] helping Massachusetts join Maine in leading the way.
1. they are beholden to that region,
2. You get an all-or-nothing approach to elections.
With respect to 1: the main problem is that such a system will put the interests of the country second to the interests of the district.
But even if you think that is an acceptable trade off, there's 2: all-or-nothing. RCV is one way to partially mitigate this, by letting voters specify more choices.
Of course, ideally you'd want proportional representation. A simple solution is to abolish districts and have one multi-seat election. All votes count, the N candidates with the most votes are elected.
(Of course, if you prefer to maintain districts, you can achieve the same by increasing the number of electable seats per district.)
The US uses FPTP for most elections, that's actually central to the problem.
If you mean “a system approximating proportional repreaentation”, that's a valid fix, but problematic, both in terms of choosing the right one and the fact that doing so itself has ideological as well as functional impacts on outcomes, which means that the status quo faction which would ideologically be disadvantaged will be hard to sway no matter what the functional argument is. So you'd need unchallenged control by the opposing faction, which would have to be willing to surrender that control to a multiparty system which might be favorable ideologically, but not organizationally. And even that only is talking about the House. It's outright Constitutionally prohibited, even by Constitutional amendment, for the Senate.
Not quite true. It can be changed with consent of the state, so it would require 100% of the states to ratify it.
Something like MMP is probably a better system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...). Baby steps though.
No, it doesn't. FPTP is a synonym for single-member plurality, which enables wins with less than 50% of the popular vote when there are more than two candidates.
You may mean majority-runoff (which the US already uses for a fair number of elections) or instant runoff, instead of FPTP, both of which require a kind of majority, but are otherwise very close to FPTP in their incentives and effects.
In the Netherlands, elections for the lower house (150 seats) are nationwide. The 150 candidates/parties with the highest number of votes get a seat.
The party system makes it a bit more complex, but in the end, there's roughly proportional representation: a party with 10% of the popular vote occupies roughly 10% of the seats.
No superwinning like in the UK (where 30% of the vote can get you more than 30% of the seats), no cut-off except you need at least 1/150th of the votes to get a seat.
Also, the founding fathers famously made it difficult for Congress to change anything, so dysfunction was definitely a feature.
Voters consider the paralysis a feature when it is presenting a hostile legislative majority or executive from realizing their agenda, and a bug when it is preventing a friendly one.
Yes, that's what they said: paralysis is always a feature, because the legislative majority is always hostile to the people.