We need serious political reform before that is likely to change. A country of 300+ million people with only 2 parties, and a choice between 2 weak old men. It is deeply depressing.
I fear the reform. Mostly because most reform won’t really change what people expect and we’ll just have a big upheaval to be back in the same place.
Let’s say we get rid of First past the post. But still the people with the most money will still win the presidency. Libertarians constantly talk about "Well if ranked voting had a "… What happens when people vote only for their favorite and don’t throw a vote to the libertarians? I imagine it’ll still be mostly two parties.
I love looking at Britain’s parliament. I love hearing about the “Pirate party” got a seat or what not. But yet when you hear talk of them, it always seems like the Labour or Tories are the only ones who have real power. I know the theory, and how the smaller groups get SOME say, especially when one group isn’t holding 50 percent of the house, but it’s still MOSTLY the voice of two parties… so what’s the major difference?
I mean we’ll progressives, and liberals, and they’ll form a coalition and get power… and it’ll be different than the modern democratic party because… umm?
(There are probably reforms that may make a major change, but I do feel like we’ll see the same system evolve quite often)
Heads up friend, the UK also has FPTP. We’ve effectively got a two party system because we have the same way of voting as you do. Even where a third party actually has a seat (like the SNP in Scotland), it just becomes a two party race between them and whichever of the two big ones the third party didn’t locally displace
Northern Ireland is basically the exception, as it has separate parties and its very specific history
Maybe I’m not understanding it, I thought the UK had an election for parliament, and parliament was divided by the percentage of votes each one got. You don’t for a specific representative, but rather a party. So if 49 percent of people voted for party A, 39 percent voted for party B, and 10 percent voted for party C, even if they aren’t all in the same area, 10 percent of parliament would be party C (and thus party A and Party B has to cater to party C’s desires).
Maybe it was the EU, but I thought the UK also worked like that, and at the very least in that situation party C has more power, but also both Party A and Party B could enact things for the public good as long as party C could be persuaded.
It’s possible you heard about the Scottish or Welsh parliaments within the UK (like a state government in the US, although with somewhat more power I believe), which partially work like that. Or you’ve just gotten us mixed up with one of our European neighbours that does do it. Sweden and the Netherlands use a system like you described.
The UK’s House of Commons, which I’ll refer to as Westminster going forward, is our equivalent to the American House of Representatives. We’ve also got the House of Lords, which is our equivalent to the Senate, but it’s unelected (largely chosen by each outgoing prime minister) and far, far less powerful than the US Senate. It can’t make Westminster pass or not pass something. Anyway, Westminster is elected by first-past-the-post. 650 constituencies, each one is considered totally separately from the other, highest number of votes for a candidate in that constituency gets the seat. Whichever party has the most seats gets to try to form a government first, either with its own majority, in coalition with a minor party if it doesn’t have one (happened recently with the Conservatives and the Northern Irish party the DUP), or just as a minority government if the opposition is unable to form a larger coalition.
Situations like you describe where A and B try to win the allegiance of C do happen, particularly when the Liberal Democrats were still a significant force as they typically sit somewhere between our A and B on a lot of matters. For whatever reason, smaller parties have persisted in some specific areas despite having no chance whatsoever of winning nationwide. The Northern Isles of Scotland are committed Liberal Democrat voters, for example, even though they’ve not been anywhere near winning nationally for a century. The C is now a pro-Scottish-independence party that is absolutely never going to agree on much with A, and which B is going to be hesitant to work with despite a number of similar policies because B doesn’t want Scotland to leave either, so A and B are looking at the really small parties to work with when they need to.
The Scottish and Welsh parliaments use a mixed system. Two thirds of the seats are appointed with FPTP, but everyone makes two votes. Your first vote is for your constituency just like in Westminster or the US HoR, but you also have a second vote for your region, a collection of about eight constituencies which also gets multiple seats. The regional seats are weighted so that parties that parties that are proportionately overrepresented get less of them, so the regions loosely counteract the imbalances of the first round. In Scotland, for example, the SNP typically wins a lot of seats in both Scottish and British elections. In the British ones this results in the SNP having a huge majority of Scotland’s seats (upwards of 90% some years) while only getting a little around 50% of Scotland’s votes. In Scottish parliament elections, they other parties that lost to the SNP in the first round get boosted in the regional round and it comes a lot closer to being proportional, resulting in an SNP-Greens coalition government.
Again, Northern Ireland is entirely its own thing, and this comment is already getting very long
Another reason to fear reform, the wrong reform might win and set us back further.
See, the leading candidate for election reform is currently Ranked Choice. RCV can lead to worse election outcomes than First Past the Post, and has lead to worse results in several US based elections already.
It’s a deeply flawed system that, on the surface, looks like an upgrade. And when people experience the flaws first hand, it makes them not want to try actual better systems.
Want a super simple system that easily outperforms RCV and FPtP? Try Approval, It’s been tried in a few US elections to good result.
If you want to be able to rank your candidate choices against each other and have it matter, try STAR, a voting system designed to be easily used and easily understood. Designed to take advantage of basic human psychology to get the best result.
The choice for the star rating to be 0-5 was very specific. Humans tend to group ratings at the edges and the middle in ranking systems. For instance, a rating system of 0-100 would see lots of 0, 1, 50, 99, 100. And that would be about all the points of the scale used. You might have one person out of a hundred who will use more, but mostly it’s going to be ratings at either end of the scale, and then smack dab in the middle. So the best rating system is actually the scale of 0-5.
Anyway. STAR takes that rating, then adds them all up for each candidate, the top two move on to the second round, where each ballot is examined to see who placed higher on that ballot. You count those ballots as their vote total. You also count the ballots where they were scored evenly and release that info as a “no preference” so that the winner knows what sort of mandate they actually have.
If you want to change things up, you could also do the average in the first round. It slightly changes how the votes are counted, with ratings of 0 actively hurting a candidate, but in testing it doesn’t seem to actually change the result.
Anyway, this whole tangent was about how RCV is bad, and saps political will from being able to implement actually good systems, which makes RCV even worse.
Oh, a final thought, with Approval and STAR, you can also ditch the primary elections. They can both handle more candidates natively, and perform better the more you have. RCV actually performs worse the more candidates you have, which has led to several of its failures.
Talking about different reforms, the tv show QI was talking about the best system for election… and they suggested choose someone at random from the populace. It would make bribery to get elected impossible, it’d eliminate the contentious elections, and a random selected person is likely more moral and a better leader than someone already in power now…
Not going to say it’s the best system, but I wouldn’t mind seeing it attempted once or twice, I do honestly believe it couldn’t be worse than the current systems.
Agree.
We need serious political reform before that is likely to change. A country of 300+ million people with only 2 parties, and a choice between 2 weak old men. It is deeply depressing.
I fear the reform. Mostly because most reform won’t really change what people expect and we’ll just have a big upheaval to be back in the same place.
Let’s say we get rid of First past the post. But still the people with the most money will still win the presidency. Libertarians constantly talk about "Well if ranked voting had a "… What happens when people vote only for their favorite and don’t throw a vote to the libertarians? I imagine it’ll still be mostly two parties.
I love looking at Britain’s parliament. I love hearing about the “Pirate party” got a seat or what not. But yet when you hear talk of them, it always seems like the Labour or Tories are the only ones who have real power. I know the theory, and how the smaller groups get SOME say, especially when one group isn’t holding 50 percent of the house, but it’s still MOSTLY the voice of two parties… so what’s the major difference?
I mean we’ll progressives, and liberals, and they’ll form a coalition and get power… and it’ll be different than the modern democratic party because… umm?
(There are probably reforms that may make a major change, but I do feel like we’ll see the same system evolve quite often)
Heads up friend, the UK also has FPTP. We’ve effectively got a two party system because we have the same way of voting as you do. Even where a third party actually has a seat (like the SNP in Scotland), it just becomes a two party race between them and whichever of the two big ones the third party didn’t locally displace
Northern Ireland is basically the exception, as it has separate parties and its very specific history
Maybe I’m not understanding it, I thought the UK had an election for parliament, and parliament was divided by the percentage of votes each one got. You don’t for a specific representative, but rather a party. So if 49 percent of people voted for party A, 39 percent voted for party B, and 10 percent voted for party C, even if they aren’t all in the same area, 10 percent of parliament would be party C (and thus party A and Party B has to cater to party C’s desires).
Maybe it was the EU, but I thought the UK also worked like that, and at the very least in that situation party C has more power, but also both Party A and Party B could enact things for the public good as long as party C could be persuaded.
It’s possible you heard about the Scottish or Welsh parliaments within the UK (like a state government in the US, although with somewhat more power I believe), which partially work like that. Or you’ve just gotten us mixed up with one of our European neighbours that does do it. Sweden and the Netherlands use a system like you described.
The UK’s House of Commons, which I’ll refer to as Westminster going forward, is our equivalent to the American House of Representatives. We’ve also got the House of Lords, which is our equivalent to the Senate, but it’s unelected (largely chosen by each outgoing prime minister) and far, far less powerful than the US Senate. It can’t make Westminster pass or not pass something. Anyway, Westminster is elected by first-past-the-post. 650 constituencies, each one is considered totally separately from the other, highest number of votes for a candidate in that constituency gets the seat. Whichever party has the most seats gets to try to form a government first, either with its own majority, in coalition with a minor party if it doesn’t have one (happened recently with the Conservatives and the Northern Irish party the DUP), or just as a minority government if the opposition is unable to form a larger coalition.
Situations like you describe where A and B try to win the allegiance of C do happen, particularly when the Liberal Democrats were still a significant force as they typically sit somewhere between our A and B on a lot of matters. For whatever reason, smaller parties have persisted in some specific areas despite having no chance whatsoever of winning nationwide. The Northern Isles of Scotland are committed Liberal Democrat voters, for example, even though they’ve not been anywhere near winning nationally for a century. The C is now a pro-Scottish-independence party that is absolutely never going to agree on much with A, and which B is going to be hesitant to work with despite a number of similar policies because B doesn’t want Scotland to leave either, so A and B are looking at the really small parties to work with when they need to.
The Scottish and Welsh parliaments use a mixed system. Two thirds of the seats are appointed with FPTP, but everyone makes two votes. Your first vote is for your constituency just like in Westminster or the US HoR, but you also have a second vote for your region, a collection of about eight constituencies which also gets multiple seats. The regional seats are weighted so that parties that parties that are proportionately overrepresented get less of them, so the regions loosely counteract the imbalances of the first round. In Scotland, for example, the SNP typically wins a lot of seats in both Scottish and British elections. In the British ones this results in the SNP having a huge majority of Scotland’s seats (upwards of 90% some years) while only getting a little around 50% of Scotland’s votes. In Scottish parliament elections, they other parties that lost to the SNP in the first round get boosted in the regional round and it comes a lot closer to being proportional, resulting in an SNP-Greens coalition government.
Again, Northern Ireland is entirely its own thing, and this comment is already getting very long
Another reason to fear reform, the wrong reform might win and set us back further.
See, the leading candidate for election reform is currently Ranked Choice. RCV can lead to worse election outcomes than First Past the Post, and has lead to worse results in several US based elections already.
It’s a deeply flawed system that, on the surface, looks like an upgrade. And when people experience the flaws first hand, it makes them not want to try actual better systems.
Want a super simple system that easily outperforms RCV and FPtP? Try Approval, It’s been tried in a few US elections to good result.
If you want to be able to rank your candidate choices against each other and have it matter, try STAR, a voting system designed to be easily used and easily understood. Designed to take advantage of basic human psychology to get the best result.
The choice for the star rating to be 0-5 was very specific. Humans tend to group ratings at the edges and the middle in ranking systems. For instance, a rating system of 0-100 would see lots of 0, 1, 50, 99, 100. And that would be about all the points of the scale used. You might have one person out of a hundred who will use more, but mostly it’s going to be ratings at either end of the scale, and then smack dab in the middle. So the best rating system is actually the scale of 0-5.
Anyway. STAR takes that rating, then adds them all up for each candidate, the top two move on to the second round, where each ballot is examined to see who placed higher on that ballot. You count those ballots as their vote total. You also count the ballots where they were scored evenly and release that info as a “no preference” so that the winner knows what sort of mandate they actually have.
If you want to change things up, you could also do the average in the first round. It slightly changes how the votes are counted, with ratings of 0 actively hurting a candidate, but in testing it doesn’t seem to actually change the result.
Anyway, this whole tangent was about how RCV is bad, and saps political will from being able to implement actually good systems, which makes RCV even worse.
Oh, a final thought, with Approval and STAR, you can also ditch the primary elections. They can both handle more candidates natively, and perform better the more you have. RCV actually performs worse the more candidates you have, which has led to several of its failures.
Talking about different reforms, the tv show QI was talking about the best system for election… and they suggested choose someone at random from the populace. It would make bribery to get elected impossible, it’d eliminate the contentious elections, and a random selected person is likely more moral and a better leader than someone already in power now…
Not going to say it’s the best system, but I wouldn’t mind seeing it attempted once or twice, I do honestly believe it couldn’t be worse than the current systems.