this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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America continues trying to fool it's own people into thinking their 2-party system is a good idea.
It’s not that it’s a good idea. It isn’t. It’s a terrible idea.
It’s that without ranked choice voting, the spoiler effect means a third party vote is shooting yourself (and everyone else) in the foot.
That's the thing people never seem to understand. The 2 established parties benefit immensely from having a 2 party system - they have every incentive to prevent a third party from ever being a viable choice, and they make sure that it never is. Insofar as we're still trying to fix the system using the system, we're going to have to play by the rules of that system, which is determined by the 2 established parties. Long past are the days where politicians had an incentive to do what we want, they just do what's best for themselves now.
Our predominant voting system guarantees a 2 party system. And said 2 parties are needed to change it. They just have to not do anything to keep it. No discouraging of 3rd parties is needed.
In fact parties in narrow elections will promote the 3rd party option to their opposition voters to try and spoil it to win.
I think the point was that to change the system away from a 2-party-system, the people who got into power via this system would have to agree to change to a different system which would likely lead to them not being in power.
Politicians are directly disincentivized from changing to a better system. The only direction they are incentivized to change the system to would be a 1-party-system with them in power.
That's why a change to a better, more fair, more liberal electoral system only ever happens when a country is re-founded, e.g. after a lost war or after a revolution.
Btw: If you ignore the 10 amendments to the US constitution that were ratified in the first year (which were basically zero-day patches) and the two amendments that don't have an effect (prohibition and cancellation of the prohibition) you end up with 15 amendments.
France had 15 full constitutional rewrites over about the same time period.
That's true. I more meant that a politician's duty is to work in the best interests of their voters, which I believe is why a lot of people seem to be confused as to why politicians aren't implementing ranked choice voting or something similarly beneficial, because they don't understand that politicians haven't been working in the best interests of their voters for a long time.
Cant you vote in more parties on the legislative elections?
Most Anericam voters, regardless of what position they're voting for, tend to choose one of the two major parties, or no one at all. The exceptions happen when someone not in those parties makes duch a name for themselves that they can convince voters to deviate from that "comfortable" norm.
It's also possible for people elected as a member of one of the parties to also support changing the very system that elected them for the better. It just takes a politician with more integrity than loyalty to a party.
When the party has tools to retaliate (censure, primarying the politician in their next election, removal of committees/assignments, etc.) it makes it even harder for those politicians to stick around long enough to sufficiently fill the political body they serve in to make change.
I don't know the details of how your electoral system works. But if it's possible to vote 3rd party for the legislative houses, you have a clear path you can exploit to make something change. (Independently of how people vote today.)
Nearly all of our elections are first-pqst-the-post. Also so much of the public discourse around political parties reinforces the two-party system, such that people tend to be very against or at least wary of third parties. It's certainly possible for 3rd party candidates to make it to the federal/national legislature ("state" to us is one of the 50 primary divisions of the country, rather than the country itself as is used so many other places). But since so few do, there is not really enough political will at one time to overturn the homeostasis that the self-interest of the two major parties' power almost inherently enforces.
Could it happen? Sure. The pathway exists. But the liklihood in having enough people in the legislature at once willing to do it is quite low. There would have to be a huge change in how the populace views our system, and while there have been opportunities in the past for that to build (we are in one now), they have always fizzled out in the past.
God I wish we had ranked choice voting across the country.
Imagine a case where multiple candidates on the Dem or Con side team up against the worse candidate, promoting cooperation AND competition instead of just competition.
Right? I was so excited to sign my state’s ranked choice ballot proposal petition at the No King’s rally last month. I think it is ones of the most important issues, because it impacts all the others.
Sorry, best we can do is 18 choices of Pop Tart flavors.
Always an excuse for avoiding progress from Democrats
When politicians quit working for the people and the vote machines are privately owned time to fucking riot
So do you have a solution to the problem in mind, or do you just want to throw bricks at things until they magically change somehow?
Not things. People.
Although I guess politicians are just things.
I mean, they're getting shot and and killed, and our situation is only getting worse. Doesn't really seem to be doing the job.
Cause people keep aiming at nobodies instead of the ones with power. I wish we lived in the world where Trump's shooter had Kirk's shooter's aim.
Mmm, yes, there's totally not a glut of ever-willing shitbags more than willing to fill in (and use their predecessors death to their advantage) and do the same or worse.
How can you be so critical of the lack of success from the Democrats when your party hasn't achieved ANY of its goals? They're not perfect but they're more successful than you.
In 2016, Dem candidate Larry Lessig (of the EFF) made election reform his entire platform, on the basis that it's one of the main things destroying out country. He was laughed out of the race. He never expected to win, but to be laughed out ... He was a Cassandra candidate; the soothsayer everyone takes as a fool.
And he was entirely right.
Voting systems are extremely hard to change.
Nope, they're saying political reality is we don't get a mythical multi-party system until electoral policies change.
Except politicians; they're allowed to not know about it and not even address it.
The problem isn't the two party system. The "perfectly democratic" EU countries are electing fascists en-masse, and when they're not, the socialdemocrats that replace them apply similar policy. There is no EU country free from austerity policy, rising military budgets, undermining of worker rights, rising of retirement age, support to the genocidal Israeli entity and complete inaction in terms of affordability of housing, energy and food. The problem is capitalism, not "first past the post" or other technicalities of electoral systems. They all produce the same outcomes, so the root of the problem is deeper.
The power of my cordon sanitaire compels you!
Oversimplification, but: In Romania, with proportional representation, if AUR (pro-Russia) gets 49%, the remaining 51% can form an alliance to shut them out of government, no matter how many parties.
In the UK, Reform can get a majority of seats with just over 30% of the vote. In fact, Labour did just that in 2024.
Didn't the pro-Russian candidate in Romania get removed from elections? Not the most openly democratic example in my opinion.
This can happen with leftist parties too, and as a matter of fact we see it happening in France, with the most voted party being "cordon sanitaire"d. Again, there is no functional democracy if the policy applied over 15 different countries, regardless of party elected, is indistinguishable.
And yet, no one party has all the power. A party is always forced to make a coalition to form a government, and we've seen how the right wing is woefully incompetent at doing that.
And why does that matter? If we see uniform policy results in the EU-wide, regardless of coalition in power, where's the democracy?
I wonder why.
Because we are US vassal states without democracy or political independence. I don't see how you honestly believe that Spanish or Portuguese people, on the opposite corner of the continent, would democratically want to go further into defunding hospitals to buy more bombs while Europe happily collaborates in genocide in Palestine.