Re:Brian Eno's Theory of Democracy
by notahacker on Sunday May 04, 2025 @11:57AM
(#43887464)
Beyond that, a quirk of the American system in many states is registering your party affiliation at the time you register votes so that you can participate in primaries. When you've got >45% of registered voters identifying as being a supporter of one of the major two parties closely enough to add it to their name on the electoral roll, it's not exactly an encouraging environment to break that status quo
Other majoritarian democratic systems often also converge into two party (or two and a bit party, or two parties per region systems) but few seem to normalise voting for the same party every time in quite the same way.
Re:Brian Eno's Theory of Democracy
by ronnieboy493 on Sunday May 04, 2025 @01:59PM
(#43888271)
To further add to that, many states do closed primaries. If a voter isn't registered with one of the two ordained parties, they realistically cannot participate in primaries at all.
If there would six parties to choose from, for example, I think it would be hard to argue that closed primaries are harmful. But since we have a duopoly, they exclude a significant portion of the voting population from participating until late in the process.
Re:Brian Eno's Theory of Democracy
by dragonwriter on Sunday May 04, 2025 @07:48PM
(#43890623)
> If there would six parties to choose from, for example, I think it would be hard to argue that closed primaries are harmful.
Six is a not-uncommon number of parties qualified for ballot access in a US state, though some have fewer and some have more.
https://ballotpedia.org/List_of_political_parties_in_the_Uni...
there is roughly 0.000087% of US population who can name more than two
Re:Brian Eno's Theory of Democracy
by dragonwriter on Sunday May 04, 2025 @07:44PM
(#43890596)
The debates are a distraction, the issue is the electoral system (and, at that, mainly the electoral system used for state and federal legislative elections), not the system of admitting candidates to Presidential debates.
Previous to 1988 the League of Women Voters[0] handled presidential debates. A fully independent outside organization.
Since then, the Commission on Presidential Debates[1] set rules for admittance to president debates. The CPD was founded jointly by Republicans and Democrats and is controlled solely by both parties.
At best, there _appears_ to be a large, gaping conflict of interest when it comes to admitting candidates to presidential debates. In 1992 Ross Perot was invited to the debates as a third option. In 1996 Clinton and Dole successfully argued for Perot to be excluded from the debates as he had no "realistic chance to win" [2]. Perot aside, what happened was downright anti-democratic and further enforced the two party system.
---
[0] https://www.lwv.org
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Presidential_Deb...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/09/18/p...