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Comment by galectin | Hacker News Reader

They told me that if I voted for Mitt Romney that lobbyists would be put in charge of the internet.

There was nothing false about that. It was your mistake for assuming that voting for Obama wouldn't also result in lobbyists being put in charge.

As long as we have only 2 parties, they will have no incentive to do anything different from one another. It's like expecting your local cable monopoly to be a better ISP because they have to compete with your local telephone monopoly for Internet subscribers.

I completely agree. Even though there are many political parties[1] in the US, there are only two that have the funds and mindshare to win presidential elections.

I like that independents like Bernie Sanders[2] and Angus King[3] manage to get into the senate, it provides a little bit of hope for change.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_th...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_King

Don't Sanders & King almost always vote with the democrats? I would like to see real independents that vote sometimes with one party sometimes with the other and sometimes against both. That would be a true independent.

As for Sanders, given the two-party system, I would expect a senator left of the Democrats to mostly vote with the Democrats just as I would expect a senator to the right of the Republicans to mostly vote with the Republicans. We need more political parties on the left, right, and center, but I don't think limited options makes him a false independent. As for King, he's only got a few months of a voting record, but it makes sense to caucus with the majority given the choice.

Left right and center are mostly party constructs. Political ideology is infinitely more complicated than that, but the idea of left, right, and center make it easier to lump your beliefs nicely with those of others, which is necessary for a party system. In reality a politician can be in favor of regulating the oil industry and against regulating the communications industry; there is not hypocrisy there.

The two major parties are propped up by the mathematics of voting, and funds. I believe mindshare is a symptom of those two things.

http://www.rangevoting.org

Interesting site, but the process is more complex than I think it needs to be. Try instant-runoff voting[1], Australia already switched to it: http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/the-alternative-vote-explained.h...

Of course, this assumes that people know how to vote for the parties best for them. Which comes down to quality education and good news sources. You’d have to ban paid political ads, SuperPACs, lobbyists.

Then there’s the matter of voting fraud. Voting computers shouldn’t be used at all, all voting should be done on paper and the ballot design should be standardized. Voter registration should be done away with. On election day, all public transport should be free and workers should get at least one hour paid leave to go out and vote.

(None of these things are going to happen anytime soon, but I think they would help.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

Not for single-winner elections. STV (IRV) isn't so bad for multi-winner elections, but for single-winner elections it fails monotonicity. (It's difficult to design a multi-winner election system that's truly bad.) You think Florida in 2000 was bad? If there's a significant election skewed by IRV's problems, the population will want to burn the people who chose it at the stake.

http://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html

http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Assess...

http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~unger/articles/irv.html

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/articles/irv.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system_criterion#Compli...

IRV is a hack to incorporate run-off voting into the first-round voting system, and run-off voting is lacking.

In a political system as dysfunctional as the U.S., allowing voters to express true voting preferences is more important than having a voting system that will lead to only marginally better outcomes. Once true voting preferences are known, the political parties will have to adjust to accommodate that. As long as the voting system encourages some people to hide their true voting preferences, those preferences cannot push the two dominant political parties to change their platforms.

Democracies tend to gravitate towards a binary choice, regardless of the actual number of parties. This happens all the time in Europe.

Don't mistake the fact that we have social policies different from those in the US for diversity, it is very much a cross-party consensus.

I never suggested that we should imitate Europe, did I? That would lead to even worse economic problems than we already have.

I just think that we need to introduce more competition so that the parties are forced to compete on concrete goals and actions, rather than lofty ideals that are more suited to a sports match (which is what American politics often feels like).

No, I was reacting to this:

> As long as we have only 2 parties, they will have no incentive to do anything different from one another.

In Europe, there are many more parties, but that doesn't make politics less of a two-team sports match.

My point was that you've identified the wrong culprit in the two-party system.

It doesn't matter who you vote for; lobbyists already control the Internet.

> It doesn't matter who you vote for; lobbyists already control the Government.

FTFY

If voting actually changed anything, they'd make it illegal.

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