States are expressly empowered to choose how they run elections, although the current FPTP (at least for the House) is actually a law of Congress.

That being said, the major issue with relying on states to do this, is that the first states to do this will probably lose out. In a parallel universe with orange and green parties, if, say, the orange state decides to move to proportional electoral college but the green state does not, then the green party will benefit because they get both split votes from the yellow state and the total votes for the green state.

I think something like the interstate voting compact is an extremely deft strategy for approaching a more proportional voting approach for the executive office - for congressional seats there might be a similar approach possible but I'm not certain - such an approach might need to be activated only when a much higher proportion of states sign on - I agree that the leaders would lose if they approached this individually and, honestly, I think we need a really big change to get into a good place - we might get a bit better incrementally.

I'd really like to see the US have regional and balancing seats in congress - the former tied to districts and the latter allocated to maximize the correctness of the representation - so maybe the Purple wins all the races in Maine but Green had 40% of the vote in both races - Green would gain a non-regionally tied house seat[1] while purple gets both of the regional seats.

1. Potentially seats depending on how national elections go

The thing about the Interstate Voting Compact is that it's still winner-takes-all, so as long as a majority of states are on board it's fine.

The problem with doing it with proportional voting is that you need every single state on board; any state still doing winner-takes-all has much greater power.

Yea - but it should still be possible to structure such a compact in a way where you wouldn't create loser states - let's say you target 80% buy-in of states (by representative numbers) before activating and you're talking about the house (the same rule goes for the senate but the activation might fire at a different time) - The only scenario that would really flub the system is if the 20% of house seats not covered by the compact went all to one party (say the purple party) in close races while the green party and yellow party split the vote otherwise - in that case maybe the purple party won 11% of the popular vote and thus is over-represented by the 20% of control they have. Still the other states could balance the math to split the remaining 80% appropriately.

Additionally, as long as that proportion is significantly high enough (say above the 66% mark) the two parties that were partially disenfranchised would still be left sharing a strong majority in the house between them and, if something similar happened with the senate, they could coalition up and force through a congressional amendment that would bring the remaining portion of the country in line for the next election.

The Interstate Voting Compact couldn't be precisely similarly applied to congressional elections, it'd need more momentum behind it, but there is a way for the math to work out.

All that said, IANAL and I have no idea if the legal shenanigans used to make the IVC binding could also be utilized for a similar movement around the house and senate.

FPTP doesn’t enforce two parties. Canada uses FPTP and has 5 major parties (Conservatives, Liberals, NDP, Bloc Québécois and Greens) that end up with seats. One of the first two ends up in power for the most part but minority governments often lead to de facto coalitions, the way the NDP is currently propping up the Liberal minority while the conservatives form the official opposition.

I would love to see IRV in both places though as it would be nice to see something other than a Liberal or Conservative PM. Near miss with the NDP a few years back.

When it matters, FPTP inevitably eventually whittles away all but two parties.

Canada once had at least 18 active parties, and is now down to five, even with a system that encourages more coalition-building than its neighbor to the south. Eventually it will become two.

Just a note - in Canada there is a party generally called the Liberal party and another called the Conservative party - I've been careful in the text below to differential Liberal from liberal and Conservative from conservative - it can get a bit confusing (especially when the Liberals aren't liberal) but that's just Canada being confusing.

As a Canadian - Canada is slipping into a two party system. There are, weirdly, regional variations of parties - that tends to lead toward the appearance of wider representation. I'm in BC and our conservative party is the Liberals while our liberal party is the NDP - with the greens eeking out a few seats on the sunshine coast and occasionally vancouver island in most elections - it's basically a two horse race provincially between the Liberals and the NDP. Since the Conservatives have essentially no chance of winning all their voters jumped on the Liberal bandwagon and made that party conservative (as evidenced by the pro-life Liberal candidate who recently described contraception as a form of eugenics).

BQ is an interesting party that mostly exists because QC still kinda wants to be independent, and the greens essentially don't exist. The same is essentially true of the NDP when it comes to the national elections - please just look at these results[1] with the Liberal party at 157, the conservatives at 121 and the next most represented party at 32 (up 22 seats over the last election) - Canadian elections are essentially a two horse race and a lot of Canadians that aren't already in "safe" NDP, BQ or Green districts end up voting strategically for Conservatives or Liberals - whichever they hate less.

Oh also there's the PPC but honestly they're a joke - I still think they should have a few MPs though (technically, five seats) - they did carry 1.62% of the national vote in a country where an MP represents .3% of the country. Here's a graphic demonstrating the full skew of voting in Canada, it's not nearly as minor as you might think[2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Canadian_federal_election

2. https://www.fairvote.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Canada-vo...

I think there's an important further distinction to be made here. The US has voting directly for the head of state, whereas Canada's head of state is of course the Queen, but the PM is selected incidentally to the vote via parliamentary procedure.

The Canadian system has you pick your local representative for your riding (MP) and the party with the most MPs, traditionally™, gets to make their leader the Prime Minister. The popular vote is irrelevant because the popular vote is not how Canadian elections are 'scored.' At all, really. Each race is a race for your specific representative. That it's correlated with the PM-ship is ancillary, since even a plurality of seats doesn't guarantee your party ends up picking the PM. A coalition of two smaller parties can band together and unseat a plurality party for the PM role. A Conservative-NDP coalition (haha) could have installed Scheer as PM after the last selection. A Conservative-Bloc coalition could have done so too. And a Liberal-NDP coalition could have installed Trudeau as a majority leader in the last election.

In the US, they have FPTP voting specifically for their head of state, which is where the rub lies. You have a poll for who should be in charge, but you weight the votes differently depending on which state those voters happen to reside in, and throw some of them away (via FPTP). This is intentional, to ensure that rural states have outsize representation. A good idea? Maybe not, but it's no mistake.

[edit] Re: the BQ, they've started campaigning not on separatism but on social issues, it's cool to see honestly.

The problem is not really the relative vote weighting in the electoral college, but the fact that nearly all states in the EC are winners-takes-all.

If you instead awarded EC votes proportionally, you'd largely wind up aligning with popular vote entirely. It'd also make more states more competitive, since it is much easier to move the margin on one electoral vote rather than say 55.

> The US has voting directly for the head of state

No, it doesn't. The US has indirect elections for the head of state, but the body which directly elects the head of state literally does nothing else.

By "directly" for the head of state, I mean, they vote, directly, for the head of state. Americans are picking on the ballot between "Trump" or "Biden," not "Republican Elector Steve Ruralson" vs "Democrat Elector Bill City-Slicker."

The results are passed on via electors, but most electors are bound by law to vote alongside the popular vote of the state. Even when not bound, they have almost exclusively done so, making this particular fact more of a technicality.

An indirect analogy based on the Canadian system, for instance, would be whichever party in the House has the most seats gets to put their leader in the President role. I would consider that to be "indirectly."

Canadians are never asked "Who should be Prime Minister: Justin Trudeau, Andrew Scheer, Jagmeet Singh, Elizabeth May or Yves-François Blanchet?" Parliamentary procedure dictates that.

> By "directly" for the head of state, I mean, they vote, directly, for the head of state.

They don't, though, they vote for (mostly, there's a few exceptions) statewide slates of electors.

> Americans are picking on the ballot between "Trump" or "Biden," not "Republican Elector Steve Ruralson" vs "Democrat Elector Bill City-Slicker."

But that's because the ballot is a lie.

You are technically correct - but in actuality the electorate is intending to vote for the head of state - so I think in practice this technicality doesn't invalidate the general statement that folks are voting for a head of state.

The distinction you're highlighting is a very important piece when it comes to discussing election reform, but I think it's better to classify it as an inaccuracy in the manner in which the electorate votes for the head of state - rather than as the electorate not voting for a head of state.