dhork , 4 months ago

People talk about our “two-party system” as if it’s written into our Constitution or something. But there’s nothing in the document enforcing parties, and in fact it’s rather well documented that the Founders weren’t that fond of the idea of parties. Washington actually invited some of his political rivals into cabinet positions in his government, and while I’m sure that ultimately made for better policy is also resulted in some well-documented public infighting. Every President since then has identified with some party.

The main reason we have this system is the math of elections. In all but a handful of states that hold runoffs when no candidate reaches 50%, the winner simply needs a plurality of the vote. So in an election with 5 candidates, someone could easily win with 25% of the vote. But In the next election, 2 opposing candidates realize that if their voters worked together, they could achieve 35% in a four-way election. This leads to consolidation until there are only 2 choices left.

If we want to change our party system, we need to change how we vote. Ranked-choice voting is obvious, if we can get people to understand it. (And someone who strenuously objected to ranked-choice voting could still vote for a single major candidate, ignoring the other choices, and have that vote counted the same way it did before.)