> If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties.

If multimember districts are used with RCV yes. If not it tends to maintain a duopoly. Australia’s Senate uses RCV like voting with multimember districts and has more diversity than its House which uses single member districts.

That said there is some benefit to using RCV even with single member districts as in theory it tends to moderate the candidates a bit as they want to appeal to more people. That said I think it’s a serious missed opportunity to press RCV without multimember districts.

While multimember districts would be a huge improvement, I wonder if we also should start having the conversation if geography based representation is the right approach for the internet age.

I for one, have more in common with a minority identity widely dispersed across the country but connected through the internet than I do my next door neighbors. My niche identity never gets proportionately represented in government because I'm overwhelmed by local majorities.

No. Government and politics are primarily local because most problems are local.

For instance, I have zero clue about life in NYC. Letting me directly influence decisions in NYC is wholly unfair. I have no skin in the game! How good or bad their transportation is doesn’t affect me. Whether their local tax rate is high or low doesn’t affect me. But it most definitely does affect them.

Likewise, nobody in NYC is affected by the repeat wildfires we’ve had recently on the west coast. Letting them directly say, “Nah, it’s no big deal” is also unfair.

I definitely empathize, though. Lots of my beliefs aren’t represented where I live, either.

The Congress does not decide the New York local tax rate or how west coast cities handle their forest. You can have a local government and Congressional elections that are not tied to your specific location. As far as I know now the only position that both someone in California and someone in New York would vote for is POTUS.

Congress does, however decide how western states manage much of their land - a majority in some states.

Ironically, a lot of people who decide how to develop NYC subway sit in Albany, NY.

> a lot of people who decide how to develop NYC subway sit in Albany, NY

Albany bailed us out, so it retains oversight. But the vast majority of the MTA’s decisions are made by people with boots on the ground.

There is always a trade-off between the representation of regions, demographic groups, and opinions. Single-member districts are the right solution when regional representation is the most important concern and the representation of various opinions is the least important one. Sufficiently large multimember districts are the opposite.

When it comes to regional representation, the right district size depends on population and mobility. If you live in a rural area, a single-member district probably covers you local area reasonably well. In major cities, the boundaries of electoral districts are often arbitrary and meaningless. If you live in one district, work in another, and use shops and other services in a third, which of the three is most important to you? And what happens if you move to another place within the city?

I think that RCV is at best a hack, a compromise for people who don't want to get too far from FPP.

IMHO if you are electing individual people (a mayor, a US president, a city council, a US Senator) then STV is more equitable (it is pretty close to RCV if you are electing a single person). But if you are electing parties (like the US House) then MMP is a fairer solution

> But if you are electing parties (like the US House)

I'm not sure why you are phrasing it this way. Voters don't pick a party for their House representative, they pick a candidate. Each House district election is independent of all the others.

Yes but if each house district is FPP 3rd parties generally don't get a look in, people who vote for them get no representation at all, and can produce governments where the party with the most seats got fewer votes than the others.

MMP provides local representation, and proportional representation (at the expense of having larger local seats, or more representatives).

Voters pick a candidate knowing that the candidate will have to play within a two party legislature.

Third party legislators are shunned. Their bills get no traction, and they get no committee assignments. If they are seriously divergent, the House could easily have them removed.

Further evidence for this exists in the demise of ticket splitting: if you vote R at the top of the ticket, you're very likely to vote R the rest of the way down the ticket, regardless of who the downballot R's are. It wasn't always this way, but has been for some time.

Some States even have a single box you can check to vote entirely for that party’s candidates, “straight ticket voting”.

Texas removed it a few years back and it’s removal was challenged (and lost) by Democrats: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/30/texas-2020-election-...

Ranked ballots in single member districts are really a hack on electoral reform movements. It creates the appearance of improving the system while only solving one of many problems.

The hack worked in Canada and GB, where it was used to divide, confuse and ultimately scuttle the electoral reform process.

I'm Australian so I might be biased, but I don't like MMP. It seems to be optimising for democratic outcome (well at least a parliament that looks like the distribution of first party votes) while ignoring all other factors. Many countries that use it seem to have weak governments that can't get much done. There is parties that won't work together because one is secessionists (Catalans), right wing (national rally in France, AfD in Germany), different ethnic group (Arabs in Israel, Flemish vs French speakers in Belgium). Some parties seem to get more popular if they refuse to compromise. This can end up in endless elections (e.g. Israel), inability to form government for years (e.g. Belgium) or parties that aren't acceptable for mainstream parties to form coalitions with becoming the only opposition (e.g. National Rally). Even well run countries like the Netherlands and Sweden can seem to take forever to form a government. RCV mostly allows one party to form a majority government and get things done. There is clear accountability. While at the same time there is still the incentive to appeal to a broad base. And over time new parties can break into the system if they are appealing enough.

You seem to be assuming that doing something is usually better than doing nothing. I believe the opposite is true in politics. It's difficult to make things better with political decisions, but it's much easier to break things or make them worse. If you can't convince a clear majority that something is a good idea, doing nothing is probably a better choice.

Presidents, prime ministers, and governors are always enemies of liberal democracy (the republic for those more familiar with American terminology). Nobody should be given that kind of power, but unless we can figure out how to run a country without such leaders, we have to tolerate them as a necessary evil.

It works well here in NZ - I think that part of it is that we've built a political culture around MMP that understands that to be successful at MMP parties need to build coalitions and compromise (very transparent public compromises) - the current government is the first we've had in 3-4 decades where one party could form a government by themselves, and they still formed a coalition of sorts

Just to be clear - most of the countries you give as your examples aren't MMP systems, they are other proportional representation systems, and the problems you have with it are common to proportional representation systems broadly rather than MMP.

It's interesting you gave France as an example, because they have a nice workflow/system to avoid this.

There are presidential elections every 5 years, which are "standard", if no candidate gets over 50% of the votes, there's a second round between the first two candidates from the first round. A month later, there are legislative elections, the concept being that people will send the new president a parliament he can work with if they're OK with him. Macron won with 20 something % in the first round ( second round was against the aforementioned National Rally, so his victory was guaranteed), but his party got 50%+ in the legislative elections because people decided to give him a chance to enact his program, even if he wasn't their first choice. That isn't always the case, and if the far right wins the presidential elections next year i'm certain they won't have a parliamentary majority.

To avoid a popular wave sweeping everything, the legislature id bicameral, the aforementioned legislative elections only for the lower chamber, the National Assembly. The higher chamber, the Senate, which is more limited in powers but can still exert influence over the lower chamber's law making, is indirectly elected by mayors, local/departmental/regional councilors with staggered 6 year terms ( every 3 years half the seats are up for election).

IMHO it's overall a good system that allows for everyone to be represented, enables governments to be stable ( but doesn't force it). The main thing i'd improve is ranked choice voting for single seat elections ( presidential, local).

And besides all that specific to France, i disagree about "classic" MMP. It forces cooperation and compromise, much better than a party forcing through with whatever they want because there's nobody that can opose them.

That’s not correct, Chirac won the parliament in 2002, the first time the presidential election was for 5 years. The former system (7 years president) allowed more diversity and that’s how he got to work with a left prime minister, 10 years after having been himself the prime minister of a left president.

Hm, i remembered my history wrongly, i've now removed that stuff, thanks!

> The former system (7 years president) allowed more diversity

Yeah, but 7 years is a lot and it's a remnant of when France wad supposed to be a monarchy, so i completely understand why they changed it.

I see RCV and STV used interchangeably. And the way I’ve seen RCV described in the US it is just STV with a better name for easier marketing. But I may be missing some subtlety. I also prefer MMP for parliamentary systems but changing the US to use MMP is several orders of magnitude harder than implementing RCV, which can be done state by state. It can even be implanted using multimember districts without changing anything. So it gives the US the best path to a better electoral system I think.

What I like about RCV is that it benefits moderate candidates. You can also argue that moderate candates have more influence at a national level, and if your representatives have more influence they have more bargaining power on behalf of your state.

All in all RCV can be a moderating factor AND it does not require top down changes to the election system.

> That said there is some benefit to using RCV even with single member districts as in theory it tends to moderate the candidates a bit as they want to appeal to more people.

RCV has a bigger impact when used in conjunction with primaries. The is a not unusual situation where more extreme candidates win primaries when the more moderate candidate would have won the election by a larger margin. The more extreme candidate then ends up elected because the district has been jerrymandered to belong to their party.

Yeah. The solution there is to get rid of primaries altogether. And they’re unnecessary with RCV.

Although I think they’re unnecessary already under the current system and the US would be a lot better off without them. You could get rid of them and just leave it up to the parties themselves to decide which candidate they will back for each district via whichever means they prefer internally amongst party members.

> The USA is a two-party state because of the voting system.

There's much more to it than that. The two-party system is codified into many laws. A lot of effort goes into maintaining it; the voting system isn't up to that job.

That's just a circular argument though. It's codified because the voting system has historically only allowed for two parties to flourish.

> The USA is a two-party state because of the voting system. If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties.

There are plenty of other parties, for example: Libertarian, Green, and Constitution.

In practice, these minor parties (could be) funded by the opposite end of the spectrum to weaken the other side (just a hunch).

But that gets at one possibility of why these minor parties never do better than, say Ross Perot (who got no electoral votes, but sunk Bush41 in 1992): scale.

It takes a whale of a party to carry a pond the size of the US.

And really, the remaining two nominal parties seem wings of a deeper, stateful organization putting on a show every couple of years.

If there is interest in altering the equation, I would suggest https://conventionofstates.com/

Plurality voting systems lacking runoff elections lead to two-party states. Maurice Duverger pointed this out in 1964.

The Convention of States is a campaign by the Tea Party movement to form an Article V convention, but they are more likely to present a balanced budget amendment, not electoral reform. Key people involved like Jim DeMint have also advocated for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage—a pretty silly idea if you ask me.

The 16th and 17th Amendments, plus the Federal Reserve Act, all in 1913, along with the capping of the House of Representatives at 435 members in 1910, have driven the growth of the Administrative State. And the debt.

So now there is a quasi-aristocracy running plays and putting on these electoral shows every couple of years.

Calls for substantial reform.

Technical people understand the need for clean architecture and political systems.

Humans are not code, but our political- and tax systems are a Byzantine train wreck. On a good day.

But go ahead and worry about DeMint's opinions, boss.

I agree that our political system is a train wreck, but I don't see why the political positions of the people you're suggesting amend the Constitution wouldn't be relevant.

Ah, so.

I submit that perhaps the communication challenge may be rooted in the modern insistence in making ansolutely everything political.

A Federalist construct would seek to assign appropriate tasking to each level of government, and have DC manage international and inter-State concerns.

Arguably, a single, monolithic state try to manage every personal and local concern leads to gridlock, Q.E.D.