This comment seems to be well received based on the points. I think about this often and it drives me nuts that the two party system is the best we have. It's like we're trying to optimize an operating system at every level EXCEPT THE KERNEL. Suggesting that you don't buy into the two party system is met with skepticism, as if you're a closet supporter of one party. Or worse, that by not supporting a party you're implicitly siding with "the other side" (You know, because we're on different teams). "You're either with us or against us!!'.
Can someone just make a p2p party already? Any billionaire in SV could bankroll this project with their weekend funny money. I'd be willing to donate development hours. I'm just wondering if people would be willing to venture out of their comfort zone and "throw away their vote" for something that isn't mainstream.
Without runoff elections its always going to veer towards a two party system. It would work if we did two votes: vote first for who you want, then second vote for the best choice from top two.
Which leads to the next question. Why are we voting for a human at all? If members of an organization want a resolution passed anyone should be able to propose it - and if the magic threshold is met - then whala - the resolution is law.
I want to be able to vote everyday. I want to be able to pick who I want to represent my vote - and change it at will. I want to be able to pick Bill Gates to represent me on technology issues, and Sal Khan to represent me on education.
Government is just an organization, and an organization is a network. We should be using computer science terms to describe how we want this network to operate in terms of resolution, latency, redundancy, centralization/decentralization, upgrade protocls, failovers, and so on.
What I'm trying to say is.. Let's purge the politicians and put the people in charge.
> If members of an organization want a resolution passed anyone should be able to propose it - and if the magic threshold is met - then whala - the resolution is law.
...You just described the legislative branch. Direct democracy has its own problems; even if you scale for proportions of people, the people leading their everyday lives do not have the time to inform themselves en masse of particulars about issues, and thus would be readily swayed by false information. (As can already be seen with voting on ballot measures, which are a headache enough just being statewide)
Direct democracy tends to lead to tyrannies of the majority. I'd much prefer a multi-party system with some form of instant-runoff voting or mixed member proportional voting.
I agree the replacement for current democracy is more technology based with provable transparency. Bitcoin's decentralized ledger breathes a lot of life into this concept.
Its actually more surprising regions haven't figured out they can create their own voting blocs and gain outsized influence. This happens in Canada with the Bloc Quebecois basically being Quebec's political party in Canada.
They trade votes on other things for concessions with Quebec. Scotland has done similar things.
There's a brilliant, modern solution to this problem, and if the failed US democracy that I was born into can be fixed, I think this will be one of the cornerstones:
There is an oligopoly in politics called Democrats and Republicans, and they've created, by law, many barriers to entry for any competing parties, let alone casting aside either party.
Disruption in this vast market is difficult. Millenials and Xers will have to team up and work cooperatively. The baby boomers have gotten Democrats and Republicans to pander to them, there is no possible way those parties go away if baby boomers have any say about it.
As to why there are two parties, it's central to how the government is configured. No runoffs, range or preference voting, means that you get punished when voting for fringe candidates, because there's a very good chance the ideological opposite will win as a result of choosing a 3rd party candidate. Majoritarian democracies like the U.K. parliamentary system tend to have only two big parties, where consensual democracies like Switzerland and Germany have many parties represented in their legislatures. The U.S. is a hybrid, but the voting mechanism results in pretty much a two party system.
The history of it is very interesting; essentially it was formed after the League of Women Voters, who used to run the debates, stopped running them because the system had become too corrupt: "the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter."
At a federal level, the constitution itself does this structurally by requiring an absolute majority in the electoral college for a president to win; and that makes a president from an emergent third party very difficult. That party would have to already be competitive in a majority of states, but that's also difficult if that party can't ever promote someone to the presidency and use the national bully pulpit to the party's advantage. And whenever a 3rd party person appears in Congress, the existing two parties require them to caucus with either Democrats or Republicans, in order to get committee assignments and you know, do anything other than vote on stuff. You're not a legislator if you aren't on any committees.
At a state level, election laws do things like guaranteeing the two parties a position on various ballots: city, county, state, federal. But then put in all kinds of onerous requirements for other parties just to get on the ballot. While Democrats and Republicans are using resources for other things, upstart parties have to spend money and volunteers just to get signatures in order to get on ballots and appear in debates. Primaries are tax payer funded, free publicity for established parties. Numerous laws exist for small things like elections commissions only having either Democrats or Republicans seated - i.e. if you're a third party, you can't even run for a state or county elections commission, it's prohibited. These sorts of things are very state by state or even by county.
But as I indicated in my original post, it's how U.S. elections favor the lesser of two evils strategy, else you get punished when voting for who you really want. Minor parties seldom get pluralities, and they suck away votes from an ideologically similar major party candidate which can cause them to lose, and then its the ideological opponent who wins as a result. Duverger's Law is what it's called.
For your first paragraph I agree, the Constitution does reinforce a 2-party system, but obviously the Republicans and Democrats didn't create the Constitution.
For your second paragraph, do you have examples of the "onerous requirements"? Because looking at the ballotpedia list[1] I don't see anything in there that is too onerous.
And again for your final paragraph, I agree that the system supports the lesser-of-two-evils way of thinking, but that isn't something instituted by Democrats or Republicans. It's built into the system at it's most fundamental level, the Constitution.
It should not drive you nuts that the two-party system is the best we have. The two-party system is the natural mathematical consequence of our electoral system, "divide the land into districts and each district holds a first-past-the-post vote." Fixed-point theorems are sufficiently robust and human intellectual attitudes sufficiently squishy that we will always be coerced into this. Abstract mathematics literally caused the US civil war, and it will keep amping up the anger and mistrust and divisiveness over and over, again and again, because the fixed point of our electoral system is two parties who both say "you're either with Us or Them, you have to choose."
[I have seen a recent push of progressive voices against gerrymandering, including both political sides (e.g. Schwarzenegger on the right and John Oliver on the left)... It is important to understand that the elimination of gerrymandering would help make the parties a little more volatile and would thereby help things get done, but it is very much a "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" measure, the polarization and 50/50 split would stay there even if you used mathematical methods to do redistricting.]
We have a fine proportional system that we use to allocate our Representatives to the States, and it is worth remembering explicitly that the House was created to solve one big problem: we have a bicameral legislature because the Founding Fathers were split between people who said "every person should have an equal say in terms of what laws are passed" (House) and "every state should have an equal say in terms of what laws are passed" (Senate). People from low-population states did not want city-folk running over them, and that is what the Senate guarantees.
What we need is to use this same proportional system to allocate our House Representatives to the various national Parties. The founding fathers did not want to think in terms of political parties because they were all big intelligentsia egos who figured that you'd want to really know who you were voting for. What they didn't consider is that in a fork-o-philic model, someone can basically just make their own party about their personality and they'll get one or more seats if they're influential enough. (A great example is Trump's analogue in the Netherlands, a man named Geert Wilders, who basically just made a party that was about him and his own isolationist nationalism and it has been remarkably successful as the Netherlands has similar pressures to those that got Trump elected.)
No more gerrymandering, no more 50/50 partisan split: for the House, everyone gets an equal vote for a party, and the parties get proportional representation in the House via their Webster allocation of delegates. While the party composition starts off Republican vs. Democrat, in short order the Freedom Caucus and Green Party and Libertarians and so on will have their own representation there, too. The 50/50 split in the Senate will probably still infect the House, and your parties in the House will consistently be "left-ish" and "right-ish", but the openly nonpartisan House politics will also feed back into the Senate and kill some major road-blocks.
Can someone just make a p2p party already? Any billionaire in SV could bankroll this project with their weekend funny money. I'd be willing to donate development hours. I'm just wondering if people would be willing to venture out of their comfort zone and "throw away their vote" for something that isn't mainstream.