Major problems with the US system have been known for a long time. It's been regarded as basically obsolete for over a century now, by the kind of people who study this stuff.
"We basically run a coalition government, without the efficiency of a parliamentary system" - Paul Ryan.
To be more specific, our majority-based government locks us into a two-party system where one party just has to be slightly less bad than the other to win a majority. But our two parties are really just a rough assembly of smaller coalitions that are usually at odds with each other.
The presidential democracies that function usually have some sort of "hybrid" model where the legislature has some sort of oversight on the executive office. But they are still much more prone to deadlock or power struggles.
Germany had 7 major political parties in the run up to 1933. In fact if you look at the history of dictatorships that took over democracies, having 2 to 3 stable institutionalized parties is actually protective. The other thing that appears to be protective is a history of peaceful transitions of power, which the US has the longest or second longest.
Under immense pressure from an impressive list of disasters during the 1920s, it reverted back to authoritarianism in 1933.
I don't think this teaches us much about the US
Nearly every democracy to dictatorship is preceded by disasters.
What is the money doing that the voter can't overcome?
Nonetheless, an individual citizen still has to support some political cause (even if you are completely politically disinterested, there are multiple factions claiming that your inaction is tantamount to support for their opponents). Whatever information about the world you think is true, or whatever political cause you think is in your interests, someone else can point to a monied interest who supports similar things. There's no way to use the absence of big money as a heuristic for what political causes are good or bad for you to support.
There's a set of similar questions one could ask about exactly how you implement a ban on "voting yourself other people's stuff", in an adversarial political system where everyone has a different idea of what that means and is motivated to use whatever constitutional framework exists to ensure that their idea gets structurally advantaged.
Voting yourself other people's stuff would be that the safety net is bare minimum to keep people who are going through unexpected issues alive. But no one gets to live in the social safety net. No one who is receiving these kinds of benefits from the government should expect name brand anything, or to even be able to choose what food to eat, or to travel, or even pick who you socialize with. If you want to eat steak, you have to be a net producer. If you want name brand clothing, be a net producer. If you want to go to the beach, be a net producer.
Everyone who should pay some amount of tax, and anytime there is an increase in government spending, that amount that they are taxed should go up. If there is a decrease in government spending, it can go down. But everyone pays something. People need to have skin in the game. The US's current situation where nearly half the country are not net tax payers is not sustainable. Anything that can't go on forever, won't. So the country should ease into better situation, where the country is a nation of producers and not a nation of consumers, instead of hitting a brick wall where suddenly your ration of beans just stop.
Yes, we should implement this as it’s never been tried before! Oh, wait…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test#Voting
Perhaps instead of reading’, writing, and ‘rithmetic, maybe we should test one’s knowledge of history, eh?
Having a failure of parental upbringing and education system causing someone to be incarcerated seems cruel. Should a child who ran away from home & school to avoid family abuse be incarcerated? There are so many current systems of society (education, police, disability, etc) that have failures at the margin that adding incarceration seems over the top.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
[2] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o1byqi/...
FPTP, particularly with partisan primaries, has the misfeature that you need to rally the base in order to win the crowded primary field. This leaves only extremist candidates heading toward the general election. In a country like the U.S. where voting is not compulsory, this turns off the moderate electorate, who are forced to choose between two extreme candidates that both seem batshit crazy, and encourages them to stay home.
https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
approval voting is insanely good at this.
*best is funny to define
Smells like BS.
But it was absolutely seen as "a good first effort" that could be improved upon in the 1890s.
Evidence of that is the new Australian Federation used the UK Westminster system and the system straight of Washington as inspiration to create what was considered "better" .. a Washminster system of government.
The current degeneration of a system founded by people opposed to Party Politics into a Hotelling's law quagmire of two parties, neither particularly broadly representative of general population, should be sound evidence that something went wrong along the way.
That's the emergant behaviour of discrete iterations of the US electoral system as was and as is for you.
Still, absolutely thumbs up for effort and intent those bold founders.
Shame it didn't scale well and got captured by corporations.
Transparency, limiting campaign funding, taking away corporate lobbyinging, universal suffrage (including everyone), indpendant commissions for electrol boundaries (stop parties directly dicking about with boundaries), ranked voting, more room for independant blocs, no "presidental" elections, cicada like co-prime terms for justices / other heads of non-p[olicy arms, ... many ways to improve the current system to increase broadly democratic representation.
The original point by the green account stands though, "problems with the US system have been known for a long time" .. perceived or otherwise, as evidenced by many others looking at the US system and picking and choosing what they use.