this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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If we could somehow ensure that our actual desires were reflected by our votes without simultaneously risking our vote being wasted by splitting support between similar candidates, we could have actual representative democracy. But we all have a duty to prevent the worst to the best of our ability, even at the sacrifice of our support of what we think would be best, but unlikely.
Vote for ranked choice voting however you can. This paradox is intentional design, not an unforeseen consequence. We need to rework the voting system before things have any chance to get better without violent revolution.
It’s actually been mathematically proven that ranked-choice voting does not eliminate the so-called spoiler effect. It’s called Arrow’s Impossibity Theorem.
As people who live in a country with FPTP voting, we’re all intimately familiar with the drawbacks of FPTP voting. But all voting systems have their drawbacks.
(I’ve actually been a volunteer election worker in a country with ranked ballots and proportional representation, and the experience actually soured me on ranked ballots and proportional representation.)
Countries like Canada and the UK manage to have four or five parties with FPTP voting.
Stop waiting for the perfect voting system, because there is no perfect system.
And they both are dominated by 2 parties. Hardly a defense of FPTP.
There may be no perfect system, but there are certainly systems that utterly fail to capture the will of the people, and FPTP (especially the US's implementation of it) is one such system. People aren't going to magically all change their centuries long behavior of voting for 1 of two parties. This is a systematic problem, and the solution is election reform.
Justin Trudeau's current government is a minority government being propped up by a minor party (the NDP). That minor party were able to get the government to pass a Pharmacare bill in exchange for their support.
With just 24 seats in parliament, the NDP were able to deliver on an election promise to their voters. I'd say that's pretty good.
"Being propped up by" doesn't change the fact that Trudeau is a member of one of the two main (and dominant) parties within Canada.
The liberal and conservative parties make up the overwhelming majority of the seats:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_parties_in_Canada
And the last time they had a 3rd party PM was in 1993, three decades ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_Canada
And the party that appointed that PM died in 2003. The Bloc Québécois, the NDP, and the Green party have never once gotten a PM. You can't point to a system that does that as a success.
You're also comparing house of commons seats to PM seats, which is a bad comparison because of the scale and difference in location of said elections. A FPTP election in a locality will inherently have easier competition than a national level FPTP election. Often times seats like that go unopposed, or functionally unopposed, or X political party has no chance, which gives a 3rd party a chance. That same effect never happens with a PM sized seat, which is why you never get 3rd party PMs/presidents.
We need election reform. Even Canada's elections show how terrible FPTP voting is.
There's no such thing as a "PM seat". The Prime Minister occupies a seat in the House of Commons like any other, for which he must win the election in his local riding. Justin Trudeau is the member for Papineau, a neighbourhood in north Montreal.
The Governor General (representative of the King) then invites one member of parliament to form government as Prime Minister, for which the other members of the parliament must give a vote of confidence. By convention, that person is the leader of the party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons.
The Prime Minister of Canada is not directly elected in Canada. There is no nation-wide FPTP election for PM.
This is unrelevant semantics. You know exactly what I mean when I say the "PM seat".
This, I will admit is a misunderstanding on my part. However you do see how this is worse, right?
Like, not only do 3rd parties not have a chance in Canadian politics to install a PM, but also the general public has less of a say on this than they otherwise could. That is worse. Canada is a terrible example of FPTP working well/being sufficient for 3rd parties.
No, I have no clue.
In theory, a major party and a minor party can form a coalition, and the leader of the minor party becomes Deputy PM.
I don't think it's ever happened at the federal level in Canada, though.
You're just side-stepping the core issue at this point by focusing solely on the PM seat thing. Address the rest of what I said.
I disagree. I too have been involved in elections in my country (Australia) and preferential voting system is pretty popular. As candidates get eliminated your vote keeps moving to your next choice. What could possibly be fairer?
Approval or STAR voting, since they are more heavily utilized by all citizens instead of just white people, they are purely additive unlike ranked, which allows for easy auditing and making sharing the results possible in real time.
They're also far easier to explain, which makes voting more inclusive, and the results more straightforward to follow.
RCV is definitely better than what we have now, but if we're gonna have election reform we should go for the best possible system, not a half measure like RCV.
Don't know those systems so you could be right?
Definitely take a look, it's actually pretty interesting.
https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting/
https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/
And yet minor parties fair pretty poorly in Australian elections, and always have. Minor parties currently have 6 seats in Australia's House of Representatives (up from 3 in the previous parliament).
In Canada, third-parties (Greens, Bloc Quebecois, and NDP) have 56 seats between them.
In the UK, there are 11 third-parties represented in the House of Commons, with 84 seats between them.
I don't necessarily think that the best system is the one that favours minor (or major) parties. The reason for the success, or otherwise, of minor parties involved a hundred variables.
The best electoral system makes the best value of a person's personal vote. That might be minor or major party candidate or even an independent.
Part of the problem with Australia's voting method is that the Australian people don't understand how it works. They rely on following "how to vote" cards handed out by the parties at voting booths. Most voters don't realize they don't have follow one of those cards.
If your a small party and don't have enough volunteers to hand out how-to-vote cards at every single voting booth, you'll miss out on votes. This massively disadvantages small parties in Australia.
And even amongst people who do number the boxes themselves, most of them think "I like minor party X best, so I'll put them #2. I'll put a major party #1 because I don't want the other guy to win, and I want my vote to count". Which completely undermines the purpose of ranked ballots.
So I think there's something to be said for a simple voting system that the voters understand.
Also, it sounds like you're only talking about the voting method used for the House of Reps. The STV method of voting used in the Australian Senate is much more complicated and is a complete omnishambles if you ask me.
I hear what you are saying, and I agree with some of it, but not several key points. I have supported a couple of different parties and regularly hand out how to vote cards at different elections and have done so for decades. The idea that voters slavishly follow party advice couldn't be more wrong. One in two voters snub the cards outright, many rudely so. Contrary to popular opinion, on the day, the vast majority of voters know which box they are going to pick.
Secondly, your point about minor parties struggling in Australian elections. Well, so what? There is no constitutional imperative to either favour or disfavour small parties. Or large ones, for that matter. That you think that this is important is neither here nor there constitutionally. Myself, I think that it would be better if it were so, but no system should put its weight behind it. When the constitution was put into force in 1901, parties were not enshrined, candidates were.