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Analysis | The problem for third parties? America is not a political free market.
(www.washingtonpost.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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politics
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We need an alternate voting system, not a takeover of a major political party. At least ranked choice voting or maybe STAR voting.
I'm not going to totally disagree with you here, which is why I neither upvoted nor downvoted your comment. I think your chance for RCV or STAR increases if you take over a major party, because frankly, you're going to need to counter the old, dead weight that will fight tooth and nail to tear down your RCV framework. As much as I like Governor Polis in Colorado, he's still working with the people fighting to shut down RCV by making it so we have to jump through various hoops before RCV can be implemented State Wide.
We also have to be careful at the Federal level. RCV can work nicely for House and Senate, but we have a Constitutional Problem at POTUS that will take serious coordination at the State and Federal level to patch out. I'd hate for our current House to pick our POTUS because Harris got 269 votes, Stein got 25, and Trump got the rest. That's mandated by the constitution to go to the House, where Trump will be selected. We gotta fix that before we try to push RCV.
Maybe it's just because I've got a project manager's mind and see all the dependencies that I'm not calling immediately for RCV, though I am a fan of RCV, for sure, and will be voting for it in November.
This is totally wrong. RCV is already in place in a few places, and on the ballot in multiple states in November.
You don't have to have anyone from the existing parties on board to enact RCV. You can gather signatures, put an initiative on the ballot, vote, and presto. I don't even really agree that "both sides" are trying to fight tooth and nail to prevent RCV (it is mostly one side in particular that's doing that), but in any case it's besides the point.
Check fairvote.org, see if it's on the ballot for you, if so vote. If not then try to sign up with a group working to make it happen in your state.
The idea that most voters are disheartened with "both sides" and that's what's wrong with politics right now is actually pretty much backwards from the statistics -- people are getting involved more and more in every recent election, which kind of makes sense since "one side" is so actively and obviously dangerous right now -- but again, that's even kind of besides the point. The point is, keeping FPTP and pushing for a third party is going to produce exactly the opposite of whatever the third party you're pushing is advocating, because what you're going to do is split the vote with whichever their ideological neighbor is. Reform of the voting system is the only approach that makes sense, and it's currently happening at actually a pretty surprising pace.