For those of you serious about the need for third parties: what would you be willing to change to get them?

Question

In order to make third parties viable on the national level, we would need to change a few things.  Apart from the campaign finance issues, a fairly fundamental change would need to happen in our electoral methods.  In the US for Congress, we use what is called first past the post voting in single member districts, where politicians cut up the country into congressional districts and whoever gets the most votes in those districts win.  This voting method tends to a two party system (this idea is known as Duverger's law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law ).  In order to make it rational for people to vote for a candidate who cannot make it to close to 50%, we have to put into place some sort of proportional representation (preferably single transferable vote  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote ) where people would vote in multiple member districts and get to rank who they would like to represent them.

That would be something of a radical change, although it is used in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and some cities in the US.

Would you be willing to change the way we vote so that we could get politicians that better represent us?

[What is proposed here would only need an act of congress to repeal a federal statute mandating single member districts and action on any states' part to change the way they elect their representatives. It is in no way a US Constitutional issue.]

healthyguy63 · Accepted Answer

I would be willing to change to proportional representation (PR), and I think a majority of people would be willing to make this change if they believed it would create better representation for everyone and more influence for alternative parties. In addition to implementing PR, there are many ways to give voters the incentive to vote for alternative parties and overcome the difficulty of Duverger's law. PR may not be solely adequate to wrest the electorate from two-party domination because the presidency, governorships, senate seats and states with only 1 or 2 representatives cannot benefit from it. 

Election reform at the very least should allow a single voter to cast a ballot for more than one candidate from a list of many. This simple change is likely very beneficial for so many reasons, one of which is that it may substantially reduce the Democrat/Republican duopoly. Some voting systems that allow voters to cast a ballot for multiple candidates are better than others. Single transferable vote (STV) and instant run-off voting (IRV) and other types of ranking methods should probably be avoided because they have so many fundamental problems. Approval voting or range voting are likely much better. 

Please see the following sites for a discussion of advantages and disadvantages of proportional representation, and the advantages of using range voting.

http://rangevoting.org/PropRep.html

http://rangevoting.org

It is good that you pointed out that PR is presently consistent with the U.S. constitution. Many people assume it is not, and I made this assumption for a long time until recently.

strpenta · Answer

I can't remember what it's called but the idea where each person who gets whatever percrent of the votes gets an equal amt of representatives.

Anonymous · Answer

I would just like two parties. A liberal one and a conservative one. Right now we only have one, and it's usless. There's supposedly two, but really it's just one, half of them are dressed as elephants and the other half are dressed as jackasses.

fungal_gourmet · Answer

drastic times call for drastic measures, congress would never let something like this happen, as they would be ensuring their not being re-elected

cj · Answer

obama is black because he used to eat too much chocolate when he was little

For those of you serious about the need for third parties: what would you be willing to change to get them?

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