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People voting for whoever they want is a realistic scenario in democratic elections.
Do you understand what the spoiler effect is? It's sometimes called "splitting the vote".
It's why having, for example, two left leaning candidates and one right leaning candidate results in a win for the right-leaning candidate. With plurality voting the candidate with the most votes wins, without regard for whether that candidate has majority (more than 50%) of the vote.
Let's imagine that we have a population of 100 people and the demographic breakdown is that 60 of them are left leaning and 40 are right leaning. In a two party vote, the left leaning candidate wins. Now imagine a three party election with a liberal, a progressive, and a conservative. If more than 20 left-leaning people vote for the progressive candidate, the conservative wins. Since the voters know this, they have strong incentives to vote for the left leaning candidate they think is most likely to get the most votes, not the one they most align with.
It is technically possible for everyone on the left to all switch parties at the same time, but realistically impossible, especially considering that many people do prefer liberals over progressives.
The only way we get more than two parties is by abandoning plurality voting, and if you're voting for a third party in a plurality voting system, you're helping the candidate you least align with.
The world isn't divided in left and right, you are still assuming that voting for a third party is voting for blue.
My examples assume those things, but you're free to switch them around as you like; it doesn't change the underlying principle.
The key element of the spoiler effect is that a majority isn't required. If you have 100 candidates and 100 voters, someone can win with only 2 out of 100 votes.
I am guessing that you very strongly do not want this to be true, but unfortunately that doesn't make it so.
The good news, assuming you're an American, is that the states dictate how voting works. Some states, like Maine, have moved away from plurality voting for some elections. In those states there is no harm in voting third party, as long as your vote finalizes on the major party you most align with. If your state still uses plurality voting, now you know exactly what to push for to get more representative voting in your state.
33% people vote blue, 33% people vote red , 34% people vote third party. Third party wins.
Yes, but that's magical thinking. The spoiler effect affects voting behavior. You aren't going to get 33% of voters to do that. Even if that did miraculously happen, the "blue" voter is faced with the spoiler effect in the subsequent elections; the point is that voters generally understand that splitting the vote is counter-productive.
This is not up for debate, it's a well defined phenomenon.
If you want more than two parties, push to move from plurality voting.
joe explained it very well to you. You should stop being obtuse and listen to joe
You are assuming that American elections are more democratic than they really are.
How are they not democratic?
Every couple of months a brand new movie comes out and millions of people go to watch it because they hear about it on ads. It takes less than a month to make something popular among the public.
That's not a metric on how to measure how democratic a government is.......?
Democracy is measured by how much access the average citizen has to influence how the nation is run. Compared to a direct democracy, the average American is pretty separated from the levers of powers. We are a democratic Republic, meaning that we do not directly vote for every law, but instead vote on representatives to vote on those laws.
How these representatives are elected, how much power they have, and how they can operate in regards to their constituent's will are all ways that we are moved further away from the democratic process.