America continues trying to fool it's own people into thinking their 2-party system is a good idea.
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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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.
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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?
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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.
is a good idea
Nope, they're saying political reality is we don't get a mythical multi-party system until electoral policies change.
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The deer in my state can vote for as many 3rd parties as they want, the districts are all so gerrymandered by the pigeons that it does not matter.
Stoat will never win unless the animal kingdom gets ranked choice voting!
(ty, cgp grey, for making the best videos on this)
So called "don't vote for 3rd party candidates, they never win" voters when their shitty centrist candidate doesn't win the primary and runs as a 3rd party:
I'd like to take a moment to point out that the third-party candidate did not, in fact, win.
Third party candidates never win.
The lesson here isn't "we're stuck on rails with no real choices because both dems and republicans make me feel icky" the actual lesson here is that if the party that most closely connects with your ideology doesn't satisfy you, remake it, sweep out the dusty old corpses and artifacts from a century ago and bring in new leadership and new mandates.
THAT is the lesson that this election should be teaching every leftist and progressive out there. That and the power of actually unifying as a fucking community and not creating weird, isolated ideological factions purity testing each other.
We should take a huge lesson from Mamdani's handling of his repeated grilling on why he won't condemn this word or that phrase - STOP GETTING DISTRACTED.
The lesson was to vote in the primaries.
I think it's also worth noting that the independent candidate (Cuomo) was not the 3rd party candidate - since Mamdani and Cuomo were the 2 viable candidates, Sliwa's votes moved to the nearest viable candidate.
Lots of people seem to think that 3rd parties are defined by lack of party nomination
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I miss being young, my friends and I hanging out on the weekends, carefree, getting high, voting third party.
I had a friend who tried using 'voting republican' as a euphemism for doing coke. It kind of worked. When we were at the bar, and he'd say '"Let's go to the bathroom and vote republican," everyone assumed we were having gay sex, not illegal drugs!
I've always found it weird that not voting for the two major parties is considered "third party". It's sort of an explicit acceptance of having a two party state
I mean, you have to accept reality even as you work to change it.
Because the US has a constitutionally enshrined two-party system.
The constitution doesn't mention the two-party system by name, but it defines an election system that can do nothing but create a two-party system.
That's because it's first-to-the-post: The winner takes it all, the loser gets nothing.
Take for example a situation where there are three parties. One is far left, one is center left, one is right. If 25% vote for far left, 35% vote for center left and 40% vote for right, it's clear that the majority would favour a left candidate, but the right one will win.
This means, splitting the vote is a lost vote for your compromise candidate (e.g. a far left voter would prefer a center left one over a right one), so people vote for one of the major parties, which doesn't allow third parties to ever emerge. Most people would just not risk voting for another candidate who has less chance to win.
A run-off system would drop out the least favoured candidates, giving people a choice to vote for a compromise candidate. This would allow people to be more risk-friendly with their first vote, which could allow a third-party candidate to actually make it into the run-off round.
A coalition-based system allows multiple parties to be in government at once. That would allow e.g. the far left and the left parties to form a coalition, which allows for finer compromises.
Take for example a situation where there are three parties. One is far left, one is center left, one is right. If 25% vote for far left, 35% vote for center left and 40% vote for right, it's clear that the majority would favour a left candidate, but the right one will win.
Yeah, we have the exact same problem in Canada with our FPTP system :(. Canada is basically a two party state as well at the federal level. We do have additional parties like the Green Party and the NDP though and I wouldn't want to refer to them as third parties. I guess where it works a bit better in Canada is that our smaller parties can create coalitions and/or have supply and confidence agreements that let them negotiate things in return for supporting the ruling party's goals
FPTP is just an ancient, outdated system that really sucks. Unmitigated FPTP is mostly employed by countries that have been "alive" for too long without a major crisis that caused a new constitution to be passed. (And not only some measly amendments, but full re-writes).
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don't blame me, I voted for Kang!
If there are no dangerous predators, then there is no problem voting third party
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strange to see this on lemmy
I guess im like a reckless deer
Funny, and promoting the wrong idea. "Tactical voting" is the bane of democracy. If you're against "third parties" you are, fundamentally, against choice and thus democracy.
And if you're adamant you are not, in fact, against democracy, then you must be trying your best to destroy the two-patwo-party system that corrupts democracy in the USA, right? And what better way to do that than to make third party options viable?
The issue is that voting for third parties doesn't make third parties viable in first-past-the-post systems. I, for example, would love if my country had a diverse parliament, but I continue to vote for the saner major party in my constituency because if votes are split between them and the party I'd really like to be in power, then neither of them will be.
Tactical voting is the symptom of two party systems, not the cause.
You don't make third parties viable by voting for them, though. You do so by pushing for electoral reform and systems like score voting, proportional representation, or MP
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