Runoff voting or something similar would work too. Tons of people don't vote for their preferred 3rd party because they realistically want to help their slightly-aligned major party defeat their not-aligned other major party.

That reminds me a lot of South Park episode 8 of season 8.

> You'd need proportional representation or something like the French system or you wind up with very skewed results

Is the French system a good example of a multi-party system? It currently seems to be struggling with handling three parties and it doesn't guarantee proportional representation. The presidential election is a winner-takes-all system and in the election for the Assemblée Nationale each constituency is a winner-takes-all.

> Is the French system a good example of a multi-party system?

I would say yes in the sense a new party can (and did) emerge and rise to power when there is demand. Even before that you had some healthy rise and fall of political parties and political alternance beyond just two main contenders.

> It currently seems to be struggling with handling three parties

There are like 6 parties with more than 10% of seats, the current government is a coalition of five parties (from two main "families") and no shutdowns or hung parliament.

> Doesn't guarantee proportional representation

That however is true, and by design. This is a property the french voting system share with eg: ranked choice and other systems that aim at resolving the compromise as part of the election rather than afterwards.

I don't mean to say that the french voting system is perfect (I quite like ranked choice), simply that it is a functioning one with interesting properties.

Thanks. I had no idea there where that many parties in the parliament. At the last election I got the impression that it was just Le Pen's party, Macron's party, and a left-wing coalition. But I guess that was simplifying media coverage.

Technically all of the main three blocs were coalitions, the bigger picture matching your description.

The left-wing coalition was about 9~10 parties, Macron's coalition was around 6~7 right leaning/centrist parties, and Le Pen's block joined by one or two smaller far right/conservative parties.

not necessarily, I just wanted to give an example of the kind of measures that would be required to handle multiple parties that people might already know.

The House of Representatives in the US gets voted in the exact same way that Parliament in the UK gets voted. Yet there isn't a single third party seat in the House. The problem is something non-electoral, like the third parties are not trying hard enough, or they are being blocked somehow, if they don't have even one seat in the House.

Not the exact same way — far from it. Look up ranked choice voting. It makes third (and beyond) parties actually viable.

I was talking about the US House and UK Parliament, neither of which use ranked choice voting.

I don't think third parties even really try to organize and do the boring work of proving themselves in local/state office.

They are just spoilers; you don't see the Libertarians or Greens saying "you know what, forget the presidency, obviously we aren't going to win--let's field candidates for like mayor, city council, DA, state legislature, etc. in really swingy/purple districts and show people what we can do"

Yep, the pure delusional thinking required to seriously run for the presidency when they don't have a single elected federal position anywhere. It's beyond absurd.

Yep, but it actually breaks the UK system to have more than two parties so the existence of two parties there isn't actually a very good alternative. There's a lot of seats in the most recent election where the Conservative party lost only because the even further right wing Reform party took so many votes.

If I were to guess why third parties don't make much of a dint it'll be because successful movements gradually get incorporated into one party or the other via the primary system. Once a party has drained away the core appeal the third party or outside movement will flounder.

And get this, fewer people voted for Starmer in 2024 than voted for Jeremy Corbyn in either 2017 or 2019.

> one party has 410/650 of the seats in government with a third of the popular vote

WTF? I didn't know UK had such a weird voting system

Bill Clinton got elected as president with 43% of the vote. The US system with more than two parties would have the exact same issues.

Here's an election in the SDP split largely from Labour; the result was ultimately the Conservatives gaining 10% more seats when their vote share went down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_United_Kingdom_general_el...

Both of the last two elections were heavily impacted by Nigel Farage's parties in different ways; gaining very few seats but acting massively to the detriment of Labour in 2019 and even more to the Conservatives in 2024