I did not think what you had could be called FPTP though? Other countries have more then 2 parties and FPTP but between the collage and borked rules in the US basically make them impossible.
So First Past the Post and the electoral college aren’t mutually exclusive.
The electoral college is voting logistics, a relic of a time when sending paper ballots in a sealed box from Vermont or Georgia to Washington was a months long horseback ride through dangerous territories. It was a clever solution to solve the logistics of running a democracy on the technology they had at the time.
First Past the Post is a simple voting system where each persong gets one vote with one name on it. Whichever candidate gets the most votes wins. The problem with it is it tends toward 2 parties through the spoiler effect. If there are 2 parties that run similar enough platforms, that splits the voting base, because either party will satisfy those issue needs, but the opposition to those issues would be one big voting bloc. Thus the 2 losing parties will siphon off voters from the other losing party until eventually one party remains.
It’s why the Dems in this country range from vaguely progressive corporate neoliberals (think Biden or Pelosi) or to highly progressive further left wing* people (think Bernie or AOC. And Republicans range from conservative corporate neolibs (think Romney or McCain) to reactionaries and outright fascists (think Boebert and Marjorie Green).
*compared to the rest of our representatives in America
Well yes, but way back many years ago in school the two systems where treated as not the same type. My country has FPTP but we don’t consider the US to use it (at least years ago in school). This could be because of how like many countries with FPTP ours does have more then 2 parties win seats in every election where in the US it is though legal means almost impossible (I know they exist but I don’t think any have won a seat). This also could have been some weird pride thing as well, as learning world political systems in public education always seemed to have a bit of the propaganda to it.
In any case it is interesting and neat to learn you guys use FPTP also.
The Electoral College is just to elect our President. It has no other purpose than that.
As an American, you vote for four people who represent you directly in the government: your Representative in our House of Representatives, two Senators in our Senate, and the President. The Senators are a relatively recent addition as for a long time, Senators were appointed rather than directly elected, and some people are talking about going back to that system. But for now, that’s 4 people you vote for.
Representatives are voted for by their voters in their individual districts. This is like a MP. In some districts, such as those in Maine, we use Ranked Choice Voting. In others, we have a sort of runoff election if nobody wins a majority. However, in most, we vote FPTP, and the guy with the largest share of the votes wins.
Senators are state-wide votes. We’ll only vote for one at a time, and over 6 years, we’ll have one election for one seat, another election for the other seat, and a ‘bye-year’ where we don’t vote for Senators at all. Like the House, this is rarely RCV or Runoff, but is frequently FPTP.
POTUS votes are run nation-wide, but they really are state-wide in all states except Maine and Nebraska, where they are hybrid Congressional District-wide and State-Wide. This is where the Electoral College comes in, and trying to RCV this could well challenge constitutional crises because if no one candidate gets more than half of the EVs, the race is thrown to the House, which is an anti-democratic thing.
I say fuck representative government. We as people, all of us, are flawed. And no matter who we elect, they will at some point, use the power or voice we’ve entrusted them with to their own ends and for their own means. We need Digital Direct Democracy. It’s time to end the notion that society needs elected representation to act as wranglers and moderate our opinion. The technology is here and honestly I think it’s a system that the founders would have been behind.
Technology could largely streamline that and condense things in plain language for people to understand. Research councils and individual polling could help to dictate ballot composition. I’ve seen it proposed that you could enact whats known as liquid voting, where by you could entrust a like minded friend you consider more knowledgeable to vote for you. Outside of that, so much of that individual policy is performative and redundant. We can change how the system works incrementally and work toward greater levels of involvement and knowledge will become more common the more people have a taste for it. We can incentivize participation by linking it to civil duty and a lessening of your personal taxes.
there’s at least 5-7 states where you could pass it as a constitutional referendum. The only hang up is that we are baked in as representative governments on a state level due to agreements made to the federal government constitutionally when we joined the union. You’d have to find a way to make a representative system function like a delegate system, but not under the eyes of the law. It seems like a real moonshot, but where I’m at all it would take is the courts to approve the language and around 50,000 signatures to get it on the ballot. 50%+ of the vote and it’s enacted.
Yeah, I meant that we need to get rid of FPTP.
And I agree, nuke the fucking electoral college.
I did not think what you had could be called FPTP though? Other countries have more then 2 parties and FPTP but between the collage and borked rules in the US basically make them impossible.
What the US has is FPTP. We need ranked choice or something else that permits 3rd parties to be viable.
As well as eradicating the electoral college.
It was news to me, we where always taught the US had the electoral collage system.
So First Past the Post and the electoral college aren’t mutually exclusive.
The electoral college is voting logistics, a relic of a time when sending paper ballots in a sealed box from Vermont or Georgia to Washington was a months long horseback ride through dangerous territories. It was a clever solution to solve the logistics of running a democracy on the technology they had at the time.
First Past the Post is a simple voting system where each persong gets one vote with one name on it. Whichever candidate gets the most votes wins. The problem with it is it tends toward 2 parties through the spoiler effect. If there are 2 parties that run similar enough platforms, that splits the voting base, because either party will satisfy those issue needs, but the opposition to those issues would be one big voting bloc. Thus the 2 losing parties will siphon off voters from the other losing party until eventually one party remains.
It’s why the Dems in this country range from vaguely progressive corporate neoliberals (think Biden or Pelosi) or to highly progressive further left wing* people (think Bernie or AOC. And Republicans range from conservative corporate neolibs (think Romney or McCain) to reactionaries and outright fascists (think Boebert and Marjorie Green).
*compared to the rest of our representatives in America
Well yes, but way back many years ago in school the two systems where treated as not the same type. My country has FPTP but we don’t consider the US to use it (at least years ago in school). This could be because of how like many countries with FPTP ours does have more then 2 parties win seats in every election where in the US it is though legal means almost impossible (I know they exist but I don’t think any have won a seat). This also could have been some weird pride thing as well, as learning world political systems in public education always seemed to have a bit of the propaganda to it.
In any case it is interesting and neat to learn you guys use FPTP also.
The Electoral College is just to elect our President. It has no other purpose than that.
As an American, you vote for four people who represent you directly in the government: your Representative in our House of Representatives, two Senators in our Senate, and the President. The Senators are a relatively recent addition as for a long time, Senators were appointed rather than directly elected, and some people are talking about going back to that system. But for now, that’s 4 people you vote for.
Representatives are voted for by their voters in their individual districts. This is like a MP. In some districts, such as those in Maine, we use Ranked Choice Voting. In others, we have a sort of runoff election if nobody wins a majority. However, in most, we vote FPTP, and the guy with the largest share of the votes wins.
Senators are state-wide votes. We’ll only vote for one at a time, and over 6 years, we’ll have one election for one seat, another election for the other seat, and a ‘bye-year’ where we don’t vote for Senators at all. Like the House, this is rarely RCV or Runoff, but is frequently FPTP.
POTUS votes are run nation-wide, but they really are state-wide in all states except Maine and Nebraska, where they are hybrid Congressional District-wide and State-Wide. This is where the Electoral College comes in, and trying to RCV this could well challenge constitutional crises because if no one candidate gets more than half of the EVs, the race is thrown to the House, which is an anti-democratic thing.
We also have that.
I say fuck representative government. We as people, all of us, are flawed. And no matter who we elect, they will at some point, use the power or voice we’ve entrusted them with to their own ends and for their own means. We need Digital Direct Democracy. It’s time to end the notion that society needs elected representation to act as wranglers and moderate our opinion. The technology is here and honestly I think it’s a system that the founders would have been behind.
The reason we got fucked over is a LACK of representation. We started a fucking revolution because we were so heavily taxed by a foreign power.
Maybe you want to move into a different direction where all are somehow involved in lawakong, but that’d be a huge clusterfuck.
Imagine 330,000,000+ individual policies…
Technology could largely streamline that and condense things in plain language for people to understand. Research councils and individual polling could help to dictate ballot composition. I’ve seen it proposed that you could enact whats known as liquid voting, where by you could entrust a like minded friend you consider more knowledgeable to vote for you. Outside of that, so much of that individual policy is performative and redundant. We can change how the system works incrementally and work toward greater levels of involvement and knowledge will become more common the more people have a taste for it. We can incentivize participation by linking it to civil duty and a lessening of your personal taxes.
Sure, I mean that would be great but looking at where the US is right this min maybe the focus should be just a touch lower.
there’s at least 5-7 states where you could pass it as a constitutional referendum. The only hang up is that we are baked in as representative governments on a state level due to agreements made to the federal government constitutionally when we joined the union. You’d have to find a way to make a representative system function like a delegate system, but not under the eyes of the law. It seems like a real moonshot, but where I’m at all it would take is the courts to approve the language and around 50,000 signatures to get it on the ballot. 50%+ of the vote and it’s enacted.