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Comment by rcxdude | Hacker News Reader

You should reevaluate what a vote means. In a country of millions of people, a vote is in absolutely no way a means for you to voice exactly what you want, or even for most people for you to voice an option you would actually like. In FPTP, a vote is for the most preferable option of the top two parties. Anything else is depriving yourself of your say. Other voting systems aren't actually that much different, they just make the information more available (you don't need to guess how others are going to vote beforehand, which can matter even though it's usually fairly predictable) and give people a bit more of a warm fuzzy feeling because they can give a vote for their most preferred option, even if still the outcome is which of top two options is more preferred.

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> Anything else is depriving yourself of your say.

As much as plurality voting sucks, that's not true unless you assume there is only one election ever.

In reality the game-theory is iterative: What happens this time influences players next time. If X is concerned about losing to Y, they have an incentive to court voters that previously went for Z.

That tends not to work very well. In most countries, the third-party options are usually more extreme, and courting their voters may get them, but at the expense of even more votes in the center. In FPTP, third parties and their votes (as well as voters staying home), tend to disadvantage their own goals much more than advance them.

I may very well just be out of touch today, but I find both major parties in the US to be extreme. The policies they say they support and the rhetoric used to demonize the other party are both much to extreme for me.

At the end of the day the average person is just trying to live a decent life where they and their loved ones can be happy. We all have different ideas of what that takes, but we don't need to liken those we disagree with to Nazis out to destroy democracy.

In Canada, I've voted for the fifth place party in the past. I simply wanted them to get enough popular vote to qualify for official party status. Felt like I helped make a difference to get another voice in the fray.

This isn't strictly true. Parties definitely care about motivating their base and arguably the stay-at-home vote has pushed the US away from visible centrism in Presidential candidates.

I would suggest that this kind of thing is contributing to the problem as opposed to solving it, even as someone who is not particularly near the center.

A drop in voter participation creates an opportunity for an alternative party to fill the void. That market opportunity simply wouldn't exist if always accept that we have to eat whatever crap the two major parties decide to serve us.

How low do you think participation would have to be for another party to step in?

I really don't know, it would depend on a lot if factors. More important to me though is that I think it's st least a possibility in that scenario, as long as a vast majority of voters believe they only have two options we won't have a third party step in.

If the two main parties were to drift well away from the opinion of the voters, and the voters all picked the closer option of the two, then one party would become dominant, the other irrelevant, and then there would be an option for an alternative party to fill the void closer to the voters. Note that this would be the case in any other voting system as well: whatever your preferred party is only gets to power at the expense of one of the others. The main reason this doesn't happen often is that the politics of those parties tends to shift to try to win those votes.

(IMO, the sad fact of most democracies nowadays is that the government does in fact tend to reasonably well represent the average of what the voters want, in terms of method if not results. Given the state of them, I think it reflects poorly on the voters, but there's not really any better way to align government and populace)

> In FPTP, a vote is for the most preferable option of the top two parties.

I wholeheartedly disagree with this take. I owe nothing to the two parties and I don't agree that they get to control everything to the point that I can only pick between two bad options they offer me.

Allowing parties to take this power leaves the door wide open for both parties to end up providing options that want to go in directions fundamentally bad for the country and I have to vote for one of them. To be clear I'm not saying that is the case today, but your view on voting makes that possible.

If one doesn't vote when they feel strongly that both party candidates are harmful, voter participation goes down and it opens the door for a new party to step up and have a legitimate chance. Said another way, refusing to vote when I absolutely disagree with both candidates creates a market for an alternative that wouldn't exist if I gave in and accepted choosing between two bad options.

> I wholeheartedly disagree with this take. I owe nothing to the two parties and I don't agree that they get to control everything to the point that I can only pick between two bad options they offer me.

I don't think he's saying it's desirable, but is an outcome of the FPTP system. If you don't want to pick between only two bad options, then you'll need to eliminate the spoiler effect by switching to something like STV.

I'd be happy for us to switch to an STV model, I'd also be happy with a majority rules vote without the electoral college.

Neither option is helpful this time around though. That said, I'd vote for congressional representatives that I believe actually will push for such a change if that option was available to me.

Wait, how does lack of voter participation open any new party doors? There’s third party candidates on the ballot, which sometimes get a little traction, and then there’s write-ins, which don’t get traction. Not voting avoids both of those possibilities. Ranked-choice voting would enable other parties in a real way. I don’t see how not voting opens any doors. A third party has no legitimate chance in this election or for the foreseeable future unless voting breaks down completely. Neither party is going to let that happen if they can help it. The last third-party candidate to make it to 2nd place was more than 100 years ago (Teddy Roosevelt, 1912).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_third-party_and_indepe...

Third party candidates have effectively no chance as long as a majority of the country falls into the view that voting for anyone other than a Democrat or Republican is a wasted vote. For the third parties, gaining support and more importantly funding is extremely difficult when we all fall into the D/R categories.

Decreased voter participation would signal a growing lack of faith or trust in the two major parties. That can open doors for fund raising for third parties, because they now can point to a percent of the population that historically did vote and stopped. Similarly, it would open doors for gaining support and votes because they can make the same argument to voters - 20% (or whatever the decrease is) of voters gave up on both parties. Join our party if you lost faith in the others, and in a 3 way race that puts us very much in the hunt for fundamentally shaking up the system we have today.

> Third party candidates have effectively no chance as long as a majority of the country falls into the view that voting for anyone other than a Democrat or Republican is a wasted vote.

This isn't just an opinion certain voters have, it's the truth. A vote for anyone other than one of the two parties with the best odds of winning is a "wasted vote" in the sense that when the third party candidate voted for doesn't win (and they almost certainly wont) that vote can't go to support anyone else. Our voting system makes that true.

The only way a third party could ever win in under our current system would be if they managed to get a massive majority of the voters to vote for them, and a massive majority of the voters knew that the third part was going to be getting a massive majority of the votes before anyone voted.

It's extremely unlikely that a third party could gain that much support. Especially because elections in the US tend to be pretty close. The best any president has ever managed was something like 60% of the popular vote.

FPTP systematically prevents third-party candidates from becoming viable. Literally, unless FPTP changes, voting for anyone other than D or R is factually a wasted vote.

The way our system is structured what would actually happen is any sufficiently electable third party would just "take over" one of the two major parties, at the primary stage.

Trump basically did just that and Bernie Sanders came close.

Most countries with presidential systems and FPTP have third party runs to such an extent that it's impossible to decide who the first, second, third... party is. It's more than such and such a famous politician runs for the presidency and sets up a party if they can find one to support their bid.

The US does not have successful third party runs because of the uncertainty and difficulty of getting onto the ballot, the possibility of getting onto enough ballots that you will harm your allies but not enough ballots to win, and the fact that the electoral college means you can't rely on running up the vote in your home regions in order to get yourself into the running on a national level. It's not FPTP that prevents third party presidential runs in the US, but state electoral administration, state primaries, and the electoral college.

In any case, the effect is the same. It doesn't matter why the US only has two major candidates at this presidential election and the last presidential election and the next presidential election. It just matters that the US only has two major candidates at this presidential election and the last presidential election and the next presidential election. Abstention is nothing more than half a vote against the candidate closest to you. It's not a motivator for an extra candidate to run next time.

In this reading, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact will probably have a bigger consequence than Ranked Choice Voting, because it will allow candidates to run up the vote in home regions, which will create new paths to the White House. Ranked Choice Voting just allows voters of the least favored candidate to make a protest and then come home. If you had had Bernie, Biden and Trump running at the last election with RCV, then Biden would have won if Bernie voters had preferenced him, and Trump would have won if they didn't. There's no actual alternative in which Bernie wins. So why would you stand if you're guaranteed to lose? It costs money and burns bridges. The extra candidates want a lower hurdle to winning (for instance, 38% in a field of four), not a higher hurdle (like 50%+1 in a field of four).

The consequences are different at the level of an individual district, because a member of Congress is a very different role than a national president.

> So why would you stand if you're guaranteed to lose?

From a country with Preferential Voting: you run to make preferencing deals that benefit the people that vote for your particular ideals.

It's on the record that X% of the popuation support the stance you take.

Further, it goes all the way to the houses and breaks the party stranglehold; Australia has 10 Independents, more than Canda, the US, and the UK combined.

Politics shoud be about more than "a little king" as POTUS, it should be about the house reflecting the proportional views of the population and weight being given to views represented and the deals that aligned views can make together.

The US FPTP system was doomed (from an iterative dynamic system perspective) to devolve into a two party non representative end game despite the express opposition of many Founders to Party Politics. It's what happens when a poort voting system is scaled up over centuries.

> I owe nothing to the two parties

You are free to do that but then dont complain if your rights are taken away.

The 1st Amendment doesn't say anything about proving I voted before I complain.

If you want it to, you are free try to change the Constitution.

I can do more than complain when rights are taken away. That was the entire point of the second amendment, the populace needed to be able to defend itself from tyrants.

I hope to never see that day come to pass and will do whatever I can to avoid it, but we aren't left with only complaining if fundamental rights truly are being taken away.

in FPTP, if you aren't voting tactically, you are in fact not doing whatever you can to avoid it.

There's nothing to disagree with, here. FPTP has proven equilibrium states, and proven effective voting strategies.

The status quo of where the top parties go is a consequence of the voter's attitudes, because of the vote they don't actually have the power to just force an unpopular option. The reason they are presenting policies you don't like is because they think (probably accurately) that they will win them more votes than they lose. If a top party were to not do this, they would quickly lose relevance, ceding dominance to the other party and then setting the stage for another party to gain power. A third option doesn't actually reasonably exist, in any voting system, unless the electorate and parties reach this state, it's just FPTP needs tactical voting to reach accurate representation (even in systems which result in many parties in government, you will have coalitions which form compromises and you get voters who did not get much at all of what they voted for).

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