In terms of cause & effect, the USA's 2-party system is the effect caused by the voting system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
The game theory of voters not wanting to "waste their vote" on a marginal candidate -- and -- candidates naturally forming alliances and consolidating into fewer parties to have the best chance of attracting votes means.... the inevitable 2-party situation emerging organically.
For a 3rd party to participate they must be polling over 15%. Dems and GOP allowed on stage often only poll at 4%.
https://www.debates.org/about-cpd/overview/
15% polling with the political machine of our News apparatus and the 2 parties is almost impossible unless it's a celebrity running.
Also, it would be great if we could make voting easy enough for people to do it every election. Focusing on just the presidency means that we have fewer candidates representing the will of the People in the off years.
With typical work weeks in mind, midweek makes more sense to avoid conflicting with weekends.
(and here's why we don't have unanimous agreement—it's always the little details that hang people up)
What we need is the ability for people to get their ballot easily, return it when they want.
Where I live, I get my ballot for every election in the mail, I fill out at home. I then walk it down to a secure ballot drop box a few blocks away. Everyone should have this experience.
PS: the disadvantage of fixing vote-by-mail is that voting is run by 50 states, with wildly different standards in each (and some run by politicians that are opposed to the entire concept.) Whereas a Federal election-day holiday is at least just one vote by Congress.
I agree on the holiday. It’s fine if they want to do it, I’m not against it. I just think it’s not the thing we need to be demanding.
I think you're still correct but other factors can be powerful too. For example, people struggle to understand how ranked preferences work, so they are still irrationally afraid of 'wasting their vote' if they preference for a minor party that has no chance of winning. I suspect mandatory voting also encourages people that dont really care about politics (or understand ranked voting) to vote based on propaganda, reinforcing the major two parties.
Australia's top 3 parties achieved ~65% of the vote. That leaves about 1/3rd to minor parties and independents. Surely that's a great deal better than having just 2 parties with any real power.
Importantly whilst 90% of the seats may be in 4 distinct parties, that form two opposing sides, The Coalition suffered the loss of seats to independents recently. Labor voters in these electorates were able to vote 1 for the ALP and then send there preference to an independent in order to tactically vote against the liberals ruling party. This effect can be seen by the reduced labor vote in these electorates.
In your example, the voter has voted for their preferred (Labor) candidate over the independent. If the Labor candidate gets knocked out then their second preference says "if I can't have Labor then I would prefer an Independent over Liberal". That's the beauty of preferential voting, you generally don't have to vote tactically. You just vote for what you really want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Tactical...
While true, that 10% allocation of parliamentary seats to independents/small parties allows for a great deal of negotiation on policy. The smaller parties, particularly if the hold a sufficient level of balance-of-power, can see some/many of their own policies reflected in the eventual policies which pass through parliament.
[Edit: clarification]
The primaries are your problem - those are crazy. Why does the government run voting for the representatives of private political parties?
The two major parties created this situation through state and local legislation. It's absolutely bizarre that two private organizations who are responsible to no one but themselves have inextricably and exclusively bound themselves to the operation of US government. They avoided any constitutional questions by legislating locally instead of federally.
I don't see how that's meant to be superior to a single-party communist system. Is adding a "primary" step so much more democratic than just putting all of the primary candidates into a single election?
Do Americans realise how insane this sounds?
Seems contrary to secret voting? If someone in the government wanted to round up many supporters of party X they have a database.
> this is done is to facilitate closed primary voting
Why is the government facilitating how political parties pick who represents them? Isn’t that a private matter?
How do you think this works in other countries? Parties have their own, private, lists, not shared with other parties or the government, so that you can support a party in private.
Just because you register one way doesn't mean you always vote on party lines. There might not be as much concern with being rounded up with an armed population.
"Why is the government facilitating how political parties pick who represents them? Isn’t that a private matter?"
I'd imagine because you needed voting locations prior to the technology today. It was convenient to use the same infrastructure as for the regular vote.
"How do you think this works in other countries? Parties have their own, private, lists, not shared with other parties or the government, so that you can support a party in private."
How do the choose the party representatives? Or does that fall to the aristocrats of the party?
Entirely up to them - postal voting in practice. The government keeps out of it.
If the 27 seats from New York would be distributed via proportional voting, then a party with just a few percent of votes can get some political power.
Australia just had Federal elections, and the count is still in progress, but there is a chance we will end up with a "hung parliament" with neither (ex) major party having a majority. 16 seats of 151 appear to have gone to minor parties or independents. Forming government should be an easy negotiation, to the extent that the new Prime Minister has already been declared, as the new government will need support from only 1 or 2 independents. In this instance a hung parliament would be an excellent outcome in that the government would be stable due to the small number of independents needed to form government, and debate would have to occur in the parliament and not behind closed doors in a party room.
The general view is that this change in voting patterns will be long term, as the majors' votes have been declining for years and it has just reached the tipping point. 10 independents elected is a record.
In my opinion the Australian electoral system gets several things right:
* Compulsory voting. You have to turn up to the booth and receive a ballot paper, but it's then up to you what you do with it. Most people use it to vote but some use it to draw a pretty picture or tell the counters what they really think of the government. The real power of compulsory voting is that it virtually eliminates disenfranchisement as those who are not marked as receiving their ballot are handed a small ($20) fine. This creates a paper trail and a disenfranchised voter can refuse to pay the fine, turn up to court and as part of their argument against the fine tell the judge how they were disenfranchised.
* An independent commission (aec.gov.au) that sets voting boundaries and runs the election on a national basis.
* Preferential/RCV voting makes it more likely (than FPTP) that the result reflects the will of the majority and is harder to game. Whilst RCV might not be perfect, it's better than FPTP.
Things it gets wrong:
1) Lack of disclosure of political funding sources
2) This has lead to corruption, whereby the major parties put the interests of themselves and donors above the country, with rampant pork barrelling and looking after "mates".
#2 is a big reason why the major parties are losing votes, and the new government comes with the promise of an anti-corruption commission "with teeth", and a bunch of independents who plan on holding the government to this promise. Amazingly in this instance the system seems to have self-corrected.
With any luck, #2 being fixed will reduce the opportunities to put the interests of parties and donors above the country and lead to #1 also being fixed in the not too distant future.
I'd say there's a 1% chance of having a prime minister from outside the ALP and the Coalition in the next 50 years.
As an aside, this discussion about the Australian system is relevant to the original question of how to depolarise the US. Australia looked to be following the US into polarisation stasis, but this week the preferential voting system has allowed a number independents to fill the void left by the major parties as they have gone off course. Time will tell, but the signs are that either the parties will have to adopt less polarised positions or drift off either end of the spectrum into oblivion.
Is this an argument that first-past-the-post reduces the dominance of major parties? It's a weird argument that the dominance of the winners is reduced because their margins were small. The smaller the margins, the larger the portion of the governed who ultimately have no say about the direction of government e.g. the US, where margins (and differences) between the winning and losing parties are tiny.
The main benefit of the preferential system is that it allows people to safely take the risk of voting for a third candidate. I see it as question of incentives more than raw maths. (Everything I'm saying is from the perspective of the lived experience of being under a RCV system, not the raw maths.)
By way of information the upper house does use proportional representation with typically 6 candidates chosen from each state, each state being a single electorate. Smaller parties do regularly win a number of spots in the upper house.
Edit: downsides: stuff gets moving slower (until they reach compromise...) and the electorate is less motivated (let them find a way among themselves...)
This is untrue. It is not only a crime in Australia not to properly fill out your ballot paper, but part of properly filling out your ballot means fully ranking your choices. Encouraging others to not fill out their ballot paper or rank all choices is a crime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Langer
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa12/005/1996/en/
I don't completely understand why everyone who thinks the Australian system is good gets this wrong. Ranked-choice voting in Australia compels Australians to choose a preference between the two major parties, creating support for them on paper that doesn't actually exist.
edit: it might even be criminal for you, if you were/are an Australian, to have posted here that it is legal not to completely and properly complete your ballot paper.
It's not a crime to vote informally. It is a crime to try and induce others to vote informally. The reasoning is that such advocacy is a form of disenfranchisement, as it opens the door to deception, causing others to lose the effectiveness of their vote. Langer was free to put whatever he wanted on his own ballot paper, but not free to tell others to vote informally.
The real controversy with the Langer case was that his recommended way of voting (using repeated numbers) was actually a valid way of voting at the time. The law was later changed to make such votes informal.
There is no physical way for anyone to know what you put on your ballot paper in an Australian election. You fill it out, fold it and put it in the box with thousands of others. The restrictions are that you must take the ballot paper and it must not leave the room.
Edit:
A quick search gives a result from the parliamentary library. To quote: "Of course, voters may deliberately choose to cast an informal vote."
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...
They have a different election system than the US.
Scotland has more recently shown shows that a single main representative of a losing minority in an independence referendum can win nearly everything against the multiple major parties on the other side. (Wales shows if your nationalist support is more lukewarm and unevenly distributed you get more unpredictable multiparty politics)
Northern Ireland is contested only by local parties with a longstanding religious/national identity division leading to two major parties for each side plus, and ultra tactical voting based on trying to figure out which of your factions' parties to unite behind this time to avoid the embarrassment of the local minority faction getting their candidate elected (and the non-sectarian fifth party being squeezed out).
None of the areas are particularly delighted with the results they are getting.