> Both ruling parties oppose anything that opens the system to additional parties.

Virtually all RC election schemes in the US, and also nonpartisan primaries (which are a close cousin) are championed by democrats. That's just not true.

Edit to expand: it's a partisan issue because structurally the democratic party is already a loose collection of interests. They've always structured their internal workings around this kind of dealmaking and coalition-building. Shifting to an environment where those groups (Blue Dogs, DSA, The Squad, the Congressional Black Caucus, etc...) become first class parties doesn't really change the way democrats have always governed.

The Democratic party fought extremely hard to keep the Green party off the ballot in many states this year. They sued and literally harassed petition signers into recanting their signatures. Both parties in the United States disenfranchise voters.

https://www.gp.org/dem_voter_suppression

Trying to keep third parties off the ballot while still operating under a first past the post system is very different from opposing a switch to something other than first past the post.

Under systems like ranked-choice, IRV, etc., having the Green party or Libertarian party on the ballot would be much less likely to harm the near-term prospects for candidates from the two major parties: most of the voters that minor parties would gain are people who currently pick a major-party candidate that has a real chance of winning. Those voters would mostly continue to select a major-party candidate as a second choice.

Can you blame them after what happened in Florida in 2000?

It was very mean of the greens to vote for their preferred candidate.

On the other hand, it can be argued that 400 green votes to Al Gore would've unmade the Bush presidency and all the misery that followed.

On the other hand, one way or another the entire Democratic operation with all of its spending couldn’t secure those additional votes (closer to 600) in Florida and they didn’t bother challenging voter suppression efforts, basically rolling their eyes at those sounding the alarm. It’s also possible that the early call of Florida swung the election too close by encouraging last minute voters to stay home in the panhandle, and it really was a stronger Bush victory. Also, if they could have prevented so much vote spoiling through the confusing ballots and malfunctioning “machines” or marking devices, which was in the Democrats court as the vote supervisors in the counties they control; Gore would have won. But, sure, it’s a good look for the Democratic party to suppress democracy.

I've worked with a 3rd party in New York. At least in that state what you said is false and I've heard but not verified stories in other states.

To get a candidate on a statewide ballot you have to get signatures from a percentage of registered voters. I don't remember the numbers off hand but it's in the tens of thousands. This alone is both cost and time prohibitive. There are also a bunch of other hoops you have to jump through.

As a German, this whole registered voter thing still puzzles me. It's almost as if un-registeres people are second class citizens. No ballot access, and even that access can be cut off with voter role purges. It took me a while to really wrap my head around the fact that bot every resident is automatically registered. Without party affiliation off course. Just implementing that would go a long way to fix things. Add more polling places, get rid of gerrymandering and make voting day a public holiday and the US would almost be there. Except for that electoral college thing.

Germany is based on the experience of the Nazi's raise to power, one thing Germany got right after WW2 was the German constitution. Stuff like the 5% hurdle to get seats in parliament for example. The US on the other hand still seem to struggle with a system put in place after the civil war to suppress the black vote and satisfy the former confederate states. But I might be wrong.

I think the crux of the issue is that the elections are held by each state, and each state can't enumerate its own eligible voters due to the lack of a 100% comprehensive ID system. Think of European Parliament elections, but in this case there is no concept of "home country". However, I certainly do agree it's not ideal.

Doesn't Germany also follow a voter registration system ? With proof of identity ?

You are legally obliged to have a ID card or passport. You also have a officially registered primary residency. Being a German citizen makes you eligible for all German and European elections.

No need to present your ID to vote, your invitation is enough. Your ID will do if you forgot that invitation.

So in a sense, we have. A mandatory, government run. You cannot be purged, we don't sign ballots (our elections have to be 100% anonymous), we don't need our ID to vote. And any party affiliation is not part of that system. makes stuff a lot easier, and individual parties cannot toy around with it.

For clarity: no one signs a ballot in the US. States with remote voting options generally have a ballot envelope which must be signed and sealed. That is: you have to authenticate that the ballot was cast by the right person, but the vote itself can only be tallied anonymously.

This is sort of a dumb idea, really. But it's not as broken as you imagine.

Thanks for the clarification, that puts things right.

Both your and the other counterexample are talking about something other than nonpartisan ballotting, though. I mean, yes, if you have a third party candidate in isolation then whoever that third party is going to "steal" more votes from is going to oppose it.

So democrats would oppose a Green or other progressive candidate in (most races in) New York, sure. That's just self-interest. But for the same reason they'd clearly welcome a libertarian entrant. That's not responsive to the discussion.

The claim upthread was that "both" parties oppose ranked choice voting. And that's simply not true.

This was for the LP. The rules apply the same to all other parties.

A single party's goal may be to avoid direct competition but they work together with each other to prevent all other parties. This is one of the things that's easy for them to have bipartisan agreements on.

This is the great difficulty of writing a constitution. If there's a game in which it might happen that the system produces an undesirable result, you have to have anticipated it beforehand. Otherwise, eventually the game gets locked up and whoever is in control uses the constitution to cement control.

IMO legislatures should have proportional representation. Sure there are drawbacks but they're not as bad as locking out minority opinions.

I think the Senate should be entirely determined by proportional representation. Leaving everything else the same, it would make a massive difference in how much people feel the government represents them. The drawback is that we would have at least three Q Anon Senators, but I'm pretty sure we're going to get that anyway.

For the US, it's kinda interesting. It seems that when the original constitution was written, people kinda thought of the states as different countries. Robert E Lee seemed to think he had to fight for Virginia, for instance.

Nowadays, that thinking seems wrong. Not sure what yall think over there, but I've always thought of Michael Jackson an American artist, rather than a person from Indiana. I just don't see that Americans see the states as a federation of countries, but I guess people there might.

Something like the UN might have similar votes per country, on the rationale that countries are equal regardless of relative size.

Mass media and industrialization have definitely caused some convergence, but in the context of an America where it took more than a day for some intra-state trips this made sense. There's still definitely a lot of regional pride and some differences, most notably in Texas, which is rather unique in its mythology because it existed as a country for a short period and fought an independence war.

The US when it formed was probably more aligned with what the EU is today. That original setup was very impractical so they reformed into the current US with the Constitution in 1789.

For all practical purposes they were, or damn close to it. Modern conceptions of the nation-state are post-Napoleon, so when the Articles of Confederation and later the Constitution were put together, Union meant Union, however post-Civil War, that came to matter much much less.

There was an episode during the ratification debates where Rhode Island was almost left out of the United States. 12 other States had already ratified the new US Constitution but Rhode Island held out for more concessions until eventually it was decided that Rhode Island could ratify or leave the Union. Considering they were surrounded by much larger States who had prior grievances with Rhode Island, Rhode Island made the right call. Otherwise they’d likely be part of New York or Massachusetts right now.

But only in America (still due to FPTP, btw) is the ratfucking so bad that the biggest supporters of libertarians is the democrats and the biggest supporters of the greens are republicans. RC voting (or proportional representation) doesn't have this issue, since theres not a good reason to fund whichever party is more extreme than your opponent.

Ballot access is 99.9% meaningless without an alternative voting method (like Ranked Choice).

Single vote first-past-the-post guarantees a 2-party system.