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While this is great, my analysis of the problem, as a European, is that you can't remove water from a sinking ship with a teaspoon: the main problem with the US political "spectrum" is that it contains only two colors.

In Norway, we have 9 parties in our parliament. No parties are perceived as the exact opposite of the other. Friends and family often vote for different parties, and loyalty changes over time. And this is how it is across almost the entire continent, with the UK as the major exception (with their voting process favoring a two-party system).

If Americans could somehow get a taste of this freedom of choice, I'm certain many of them would demand the same things at home. I'm amazed that there's often 10s of kinds of peanut butter in an American super market, but only two political parties. Could it be done with tech? I'm not sure, but I would like to see someone give it a go.

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> Could it be done with tech?

Uh, as shown in numerous democratic countries like Norway and other European countries, you don't need tech for this. You just need something that isn't first-past-the-post.

One great way to fix this which preserves FPTP (if there's a culture for which replacing it is seen as too much change, or too complex) is FPTP with a run-off vote for the final two candidates, allowing for variety while also keeping the voting system pretty much unchanged, albeit there's now a possible second vote. In the 2017 French presidential elections, we hear so much about Macron and Le Pen, but they only made up about 45% of the vote in the first round.

That doesn't really change much though, because it still allows geographical distribution of votes (between constituencies) to greatly influence the results. It's better than nothing, but not much.

You're right to point out that attempts at electoral reform often fail because of issues of "too much change, or too complex" (even if those are narratives that are disingenuously pushed to trigger the illusory truth effect in citizens' minds).

Given the failures of campaigns in the UK and Canada to change the voting system, I think that a requirement for proposed systems has to be that the ballot papers (and voter instructions) must be the same as FPTP, and the constituency/district boundaries (and number of representatives) have to stay unaltered too.

That may seem like too stringent a set of requirements, but as you say, a top-two run-off system does satisfy them. Unfortunately, such a system can still be attacked on the basis of cost, since having two election days is roughly twice as expensive as having just one. Not only is there the administrative cost to the government, but the time cost for voters themselves.

The only remaining solution that I have found is Asset Voting, in which votes are cast and tallied just as in FPTP, but then the candidate with the fewest votes gets to reassign their votes to one of the remaining candidates, with this process repeating until a candidate has a majority. This should remove the problems of spoiler candidates and tactical voting.

This is a political problem and not a technical one. The UK already uses STV, D'Hondt, and AMS in various elections. There is no campaign to change those to FPTP. The reason we can't change the Westminster voting system is exactly the reason we want it: because it would disrupt the existing party alignment and power structure. Same reason we still have an entirely unelected legislative house.

The same, presumably, applies in America. Parties are willing to sabotage elections altogether there rather than risk making them fairer.

> There is no campaign to change those to FPTP.

That depends what you mean by "campaign"[0] (or "is", I suppose[1]).

We saw in the 2019 election that individual MPs[2] and even the parties themselves[3] were willing to create electoral alliances for a single issue goal. It is not inconceivable then that an alliance could be formed (perhaps in the aftermath of a hung parliament, or in the run up to a close election) where MPs agreed to introduce a voting system which made the minimum possible change to the existing procedure while also making all future "standing down candidates" alliances unnecessary.

[0] https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/the-conservatives-just-p...

[1] https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/latest-news-and-research...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50398820

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/07/lib-dems-gr...

We already have that in the US. We just call it "primaries" and "general election". It's not quite a completely open first round, but it's not uncommon for an outsider to come in and win the support of a party without any prior experience with it. I don't think it makes Americans happy.

The separate primaries make it a wildly different game. True run-off (common primary) is used in some states, such as California. In the case where one party wins both run-off slots, the system naturally selects the moderate. Great!

However, in a two-party "run-off", the sides are pressured to polarize and rile up their voters. It's a very different game!

It's different, but I don't think it's as different as you say. It's still a two stage process, and the primaries are generally open to anybody.

The pressure to rile up voters exists either way. You saw this in the UK recently, where there are plenty of parties, and the election was incredibly awful. The winner of the election was, as usual, the one that had eliminated the second, third, and fourth parties that split the vote.

I'm not saying there aren't differences, but I think it might help Americans to think of it as if it were more similar. They cast one vote, and if their candidate lost, they get to vote for their second favorite. It's not identical to a runoff election, but there are enough similarities to make me believe that a change to true runoff elections would not alter how people perceive the result.

Just thinking out loud here:

I generally agree with this take, but lately I’ve actually been considering the opposite: that the two-party system is the only thing truly holding the country together as a union. The two party system has two consequences: one, making the federal government more amenable to bottom-up change; and two, by making fringe movements morph themselves to fit into the federal structure, rather than simply exit and secede.

As an example, imagine that there were a “West Coast” party which had control over California, Oregon and Washington. In a multiparty system, what incentivizes them from not just declaring independence? At least by forcing them into Democrats or Republicans, they become unified with the rest of their party country-wide.

I think you run a much bigger risk of a "West Coast" party in the FPTP system (looking at SNP in the UK).

In a proportional system, California and the west coast is not pure blue or liberal or some new "independence party". Without even looking at numbers I'm sure California alone has as many or more conservative leaning voters than Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas combined, we just never see it thanks to our antiquated setup.

I'm sure Brexit is going to be a cautionary tale for decades to come on the risks of exiting a well-established union in favor of sticking out on your own.

And there's no unity in the party, either. A California democrat could have more in common with a Missouri republican than his same-party counterpart. The democratic platform this year includes a number of promises that the presidential candidate does not agree with. The republicans did not publish a platform this year. It's essentially a directional signal more than any concrete unifying measure, a party-for-all-people-except-the-ones-we're-against.

If the democrats and the republicans are supposedly holding the union together, they're doing an absolutely awful job at it.

> I'm sure Brexit is going to be a cautionary tale for decades to come on the risks of exiting a well-established union in favor of sticking out on your own.

not being part of the Union != not cooperating

(although currently the EU is attempting to block all cooperation outside the bounds of the Union in an effort to keep the UK practically a member, but without voting rights)

> lately I’ve actually been considering the opposite: that the two-party system is the only thing truly holding the country together as a union. The two party system has two consequences: one, making the federal government more amenable to bottom-up change; and two, by making fringe movements morph themselves to fit into the federal structure, rather than simply exit and secede.

I don't understand what evidence has led you to these conclusions.

Can you clarify what you don’t understand?

It seems clear to me that both Trump and Sanders (outsiders / fringe movements) have had an immense impact on their respective parties, far more than they would have with a separate political party.

To use another example: the two party system ensures that everyone is in the same room and has to use one of two microphones to speak. Since there are limitations, everyone has to compromise: the establishment and the newcomers.

A multiparty system lets everyone have a microphone (which drowns out all the voices) or lets you simply go to a different room. Both don’t require much compromise and I don’t see either as effective for maintaining the union.

I am big Sanders fan, but I don't see his impact being very strong on the democratic party. But regardless, even if he had an impact, this doesn't tell you anything about your assertion.

I suspect Sanders would have higher impact in a multi-party system, because apparently there is a group of maybe 30% of Americans who would be his fans and could vote for a progressive party under his leadership.

What I would really like to see is a comparison of the political systems, across different countries perhaps. To take an issue and compare how it was pushed through the different systems. I can't help it but today, EU seems more progressive (in the sense of trying to make life of citizens better) than the U.S. (and UK).

> maybe 30% of Americans who would be his fans and could vote for a progressive party under his leadership.

That’s where I disagree. I don’t think the percentage is anywhere near that high. Instead, I’d say that by latching onto the Democratic Party apparatus, his ideas have become far more popular and relevant in the party (and subsequently the country) than if he was running the Green/Libertarian party equivalent.

Again, based on what evidence? If you ask about specific Sanders' policies, routinely more than half of Americans agree with them (like universal healthcare, green new deal, economic support in dealing with COVID,...). So I think this new platform could have large support - except people are worried that nobody would vote for it. (But the problems with American voting system go far beyond that - voter suppression, gerrymandering, delegates, bribery of the supreme court; the whole system can only be considered democratic under a very antiquated definition.)

In the 2nd sentence, you're assuming exactly the conditions of the two party system. In Europe, new parties (like Greens or Pirates) were successfully able to bring new issues to the traditional political divide.

Isn't the country already heavily divided into "blue states" and "red states"? Especially ones where the entrenched party can gerrymander their way to permanence?

But I'm not sure why you think having more parties would make them more regionally split, they could (and arguably "should") be more interest and policy based, but still nationwide.

Is it really a two party system though? There are two major parties, but afaik anyone can start a party. This means two parties dominate, but that's actually the same in most countries in Europe. There are many parties but for most of the 1900s you'd get two large parties and a large number of very small ones. In more recent times some of the smaller parties have grown large enough that parties group together in order to secure a majority. But this means that although there are many parties, there are still only two sides (practically) to chose from.

>Is it really a two party system though?

>But this means that although there are many parties, there are still only two sides (practically) to chose from.

I believe you've answered your own question.

> I believe you've answered your own question.

two party system != there are two parties

the system != the current situation

I think this is a good argument. Any large nation has come together due to some sort of central leadership and not due to everyone getting things their way.

>what incentivizes them from not just declaring independence?

The federal government invading and re-establishing control, which they would be able to do with incredible ease.

I don't think it's that simple for a whole host of reasons.

The cause of two political parties in the US is a result of the electoral system. It's not possible to fix this using tech.

> It's not possible to fix this using tech.

I think that's kind of the point.

I disagree. Sure there are two parties but there is quite a spectrum of ideas throughout.

I actually believe that a larger issue is both sides being unable to have a conversation. I get my news and someone else gets their news and when we try to talk we find that we don't even have the same facts to start from. Imagine not being able to talk to half of your country? Your neighbors?

The issue of both sides being unable to have a conversation is a symptom of having only two parties.

> I get my news and someone else gets their news and when we try to talk we find that we don't even have the same facts to start from

In America, people voluntarily subscribe to the propaganda channel because it makes them angry. shrug

I keep trying to shut low quality news out, but it's pushed practically everywhere. Front page of reddit, tech sites... people even stuff my mail box.

I think it's a human thing. It bypasses your logical mind by making you angry and it happens fast. Without you even realizing.

It’s not just that you don’t have the same facts, you actually speak different languages.

People share a lot of similar ideas but I find I have to switch out words depending on whether I’m talking to someone with left leaning or right leaning tendencies.

What makes it worse is they’ve spent decades listening to propaganda that turns words from the opposing languages into trigger words and trigger phrases. As soon as they hear those trigger words, they begin to parrot talking points that have been drilled into them.

It’s pathetic.

> I'm amazed that there's often 10s of kinds of peanut butter in an American super market, but only two political parties

Like I can't taste the difference between the 10s of kinds of peanut butter, I'm not sure the half dozen different political parties in my home country (France) offer a real variety of choice.

I see it less about the expressive ability of having multiple parties to express your political positions, and more about the fact that competition is good. In other countries, when a major party is embroiled in scandal, they usually lose power for a few years and sometimes another party emerges from their ashes. You don't have that happen in the US, and it's overdue.

Sure, fake choice is still a choice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system

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

If you have more than two without proportional representation it doesn't tend to work out very well. In the UK the main party got 51% of seats with 36% of the vote in 2015. Their share actually went up 5% in the next election two years later but they lost a bunch of seats as the opposition votes weren't split between multiple parties as much.

Voting reform _should_ be the long term goal and choice would come from it but the main reason the US is in a rot to the level it is is probably more down to the various areas of control (specifically the Senate, judicial system and the utterly insane amounts of money running through the whole political system).

I think any single-seat election, regardless of voting system, stabilises when there are only two popular parties from which candidates can get elected. I don't believe voting systems such as instant-runoff or approval voting can avoid this problem.

If the US wants more than two colours in their spectrum, they need proportional representation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation

I'm not sure what you mean by "stabilises". Perhaps you're saying that once the range of choices has been reduced to just two big parties, it is hard to introduce new parties (that successfully challenge the major parties), even if the new voting system prevented the problem of spoiler candidates.

I agree that proportional representation would help shift things, but I don't think it is necessary for the reform to work. For example, it doesn't seem far-fetched that over time, Democrat seats in Congress could be lost to Green or Socialist candidates in some areas, and different factions within the Republican party could also start to win elections under their own banner too.

With some clever campaigning (and/or a lot of money) a popular figure like Bernie or Trump could bring supporters to a "New Left" or "New Right" party that eclipsed the current mainstream parties.

There are perhaps 5 or 6 viable parties where I'm at. Don't like any of them enough to have ever voted.

I find many of my positions represented in the American mainstream but not by any (viable) parties domestically.

Also a big reason for the fragmentation of parties is simply how rigid they are internally. Most political parties in Europe are governed like private companies. Few have primaries and when they do they tend to be fairly limited. When there's infighting between major players the simplest thing to do is often to just setup a new party. There's not much of a culture of political affiliation or involvement. Just because you might have identified with some party doesn't give you much of a platform to advocate for anything internally. If you don't like it you need to find a new one.

Oh, so naieve. Here in America, we have the illusion of choice when it comes to peanut butter and lots of products. They do look different, and maybe taste different but they are different product likes from the same company. And that company owns more than just peanut butter.

But given the multitude of parties, they tend to work together in groups (blocks), right?

So in the end, there are fewer sides/groups/blocks than parties and people tend to switch between parties within a block, but rarely between blocks.

The UK has a two party system in terms of who will form the government, but there's a plurality of smaller parties acting as strong lobby groups - some even getting reasonable levels of parliamentary representation.

Case in point - without the threat of UKIP taking votes from the Conservatives, it is unlikely that the EU referendum would have been held.

I still think FPTP is the UK's biggest political problem. The UK is crying out for a new left party to take over from the Labour party which is dysfunctional at this point. But it can't happen because the electoral system means that it would have to happen all at once which is unrealistic.

For context, imagine if a trove of whatsapp chat messages from inside the Clinton presidential campaign in 2016 revealed they most of the paid employees hated her so much that they were sabotaging her campaign and diverting money to down ballot races. This is effectively what happened in the UK in 2017.

It's quite remarkable how many voting systems we have in the UK; STV, D'Hondt, AMS and so on. The parliament with all the real power, and the constitutional ability to erase the others at will, is of course entrenched in FPTP to preserve conservativism.

The situation is similar in Canada - a significant number of people would support the NDP, but they're viewed as a spoiler. In my parent's riding, for instance, 55% of people voted for the two left-wing candidates, so the seat went to the right-winger who got the remaining 45%.

A concerted effort to consolidate votes behind the Liberals gave us Justin Trudeau, a do-nothing neoliberal whose hobbies include brownface and giving indigenous people's land to oil companies.

Australia is similar as well. I'm not sure having more parties fundamentally fixes the issues. From my experience, parties just form coalitions that wind up taking similar stances to the US two-party system.

I will say though that the US two-party system seems to promote a deadlock / winner-take-all scenario that doesn't seem as common in other countries. So I do think having something like ranked choice voting will help. It's just not the full solution.

>it is unlikely that the EU referendum would have been held.

If the UK had actual proportional representation, it is also unlikely the EU referendum would have been held. The referendum was entirely a fault of the conservative government at the time, a gambit made not to appease potential UKIP voters but instead to satisfy in-fighting within the conservative party.

>some even getting reasonable levels of parliamentary representation.

Your definition of 'reasonable' differs from mine. Reasonable implies that the representation is fair/proportional to the amount of votes received. In 2010, the results were as follows:

Conservatives: 36% of votes, 47% of seats.

Labour: 29% of votes, 39.7% of seats.

Liberal Democrats: 23% of votes, 8.8% of seats.

A 'reasonable' level of representation for the 2010 election would've drastically reshaped British politics and the country would be much less divided than it is now. I feel strongly about this, since the UK used to be my home, but I couldn't bring myself to continue living there as a contributor to such a broken system.

The UK's big parties are themselves a collection of factions held together by the inevitability of a two-party system. The ERG and Momentum are the most obvious, each pushing an agenda that, regardless of how much one agrees with it, has been incredibly divisive over the years: hard brexit and 'corbynism' (to avoid connotations of the 'S' word).

These have been big gambles by the major parties, the details and direction of which have mostly been dictated by marketing and in-fighting. Despite having multiple general elections with these as the main issues, the public has only been presented with coarse yes/no choices and false dichotomies.

In a multi-party system (e.g. proportional like STV) I'm pretty sure we'd see ERG as a separate party to Cameron-esque Tories, and Momentum as a separate party to the NewLabour/Starmer side of Labour. I'm not sure who would get the keep the old Labour/Tory names, though.

I vote third party in the USA in every election where it is available. I'm definitely rare though. Many of my friends are caught up in picking the 'better of two evils'.

Does that mean you support the Alliance Party? They are officially proponents of Ranked Choice Voting, which would hopefully prevent the "better of two evils" problem if widely adopted.

https://www.theallianceparty.com/positions

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