this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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Third parties are mathematically impossible until we ditch first past the post voting:
https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
We need our vote to be a list, not a checkbox.
This is the way. It is possible and unlikely to have a third party win under the right conditions, like with how the Republican Party became a national party after Lincoln was elected as a third party candidate. But ultimately there will always only be two parties with the outdated FPTP voting method. If only George Washington knew about and pushed for a better voting system than FPTP.
I don't think they really existed yet in his era. You've got to remember that Australia, a much younger country, invented the secret ballot. It was known as the "Australian Ballot" for a long time.
Better systems existed but to your point, they were not well known.
Leaders today, with access to Wikipedia if not researchers with Nobel prizes, do NOT have this excuse.
Well yes, obviously. The issue with today is that the incumbency of the system makes it hard to change
In 1294-1621 the election of the Pope used Approval voting. Venice also used it.
The election of the Pope required secret ballot since 1621. And the concept existed since Ancient Greece and was used in elections and courts of Roman Republic.
IMO, it's not the full story to say the Republican party was a third party that year. The previous opposition to the Democrats had a rift and came apart. I think you are underselling what "the right conditions" are. This is more like a new party filling a void.
That year the Democrats themselves (regressives as this was well before Southern Strategy) split into two. Running both a candidate for "states' rights" style slavery and another for "fuck you, slavery everywhere" style slavery.
All it takes is a bunch of celebrities endorsing third parties and it's done. At some point in your lifetime you will probably see a third party winning in the usa and it will simply happen with media and celebrities redirecting everyone vote. It happens all the time in other countries: people get tired of the local rulers and to keep protests and disorder at bay the government through mass media redirects attentions to a new and fresh party that already got bribed and corrupted by the ruling class.
In Australia government funding is distributed to political parties based on the number of first preference votes they get as well so even if your first choice doesn't get in, you still helped them by putting them first.
I like CGP Grey and all, but power dynamics is an important aspect of poltics. An aspect he completely ignores in favour of spreadsheet thinking.
Yeah so proportional representation systems kinda suck. Israel has one and it ended up with a conservative party making concessions to far right crazies to form a coalition. Sure minorities are in the parliament, but they have zero power because the only thing that matters is the backroom negotiations between parties to form a coalition.
The biggest problem with FPTP is the name. Really we should call it a community representation system (which is what it is) and call proportional representation system a "party coalition" system, which is what it actually is. In a party coalition system the negotiations between party leaders to form coalitions is all that matters, everyone else is just there to fill seats which are owned by the parties.
In a community representation system each seat is own by a representative of the community who can vote against their party or leave their party. Parties are incentivized to keep the community leaders happy or they could lose seats.
If you want third parties, it's better to go with a ranked choice system. That gives people more choice over who represents their community, and allow them to have compromise options in case their top choice doesn't get enough votes. You don't actually have to give parties full ownership of the seats (making them redundant) to have more options.
Yeah I've seen all of these videos before. Problem is, these aren't isolated concepts. There are very specific power dynamics within a proportional representation system that aren't the same as the power dynamics in a community representation system. He doesn't go into those details in the rules for rulers videos, only the broad concept of democracy is mentioned. He only goes into a some math on the FPTP video but doesn't discuss the differences power dynamics for those different systems.
Basically in a community representation system (called FPTP by people trying to make it sound arbritrary an unfair) the power flows up from the communities. In a proportional representation system the power flows down from the party leadership.
Considering the "rules for rulers" video it seems CGP Grey thinks all government has to be top down, so he doesn't seem to have even considered the possibility of power flowing upwards from a community. This is what happens in the system he thinks is bad, so I'd say he hasn't adequately considered everything about the subject.
We don't actually elect rulers we elect people to represent our communities. Sure they're usually part of a party but because we elect representatives, not parties, that representative has the option of leaving the party if it serves the interests of the community they represent. Since parties can lose seats between elections they have to listen to the the elected representatives (community leaders) to avoid losing seats. People in a community put pressure on their representative, the reps but pressure on the party leadership, power flows upwards from the people.
Proportional representation only seems better if you think as CGP does and believe we can only be ruled over and we need to find a better way to select rulers. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of representative democracy.
It seems you are mixing the concepts of voting systems and candidate selection. FPP nor FPTP should not sound scary. As a voting systems, FPP works well enough more often than many want to admit. The name just describes it in more detail: First Preference Plurality.
Every voting system is as bottom-up or top-down as the candidate selection process. The voting system itself doesn't really affect whether it is top down or bottom up. Requiring approval/voting from the current rulers would be top-down. Only requiring ten signatures on a community petition is more bottom up.
The voting systems don't care about the candidate selection process. Some require precordination for a "party", but that could also be a party of 1. A party of 1 might not be able to get as much representation as one with more people: but that's also the case for every voting system that selects the same number of candidates.
Voting systems don't even need to be used for representation systems. If a group of friends are voting on where to eat, one problem might be selecting the places to vote on, but that's before the vote. With the vote, FPP might have 70% prefer pizza over Indian food, but the Indian food vote might still win because the pizza voters had another first choice. Having more candidates often leads to minority rule/choice, and that's not very good for food choice nor community representation.
I also generally prefer a Condorcet Method (ranked choice, single winner) over mixed-member-proportional, but either one would be a massive improvement over our current system.
I'll take Approval voting, even.
If you're going to use a genocidal cult as your counter-example to democracy, why not just talk about the nazis?
Switzerland has a good system, just copy it. (Yes, not the same country, size difference and so on and on but its still a thousand times better than the US system)
FPTP is not real democracy for this reason.
Math doesn't decide what people vote, they are free to vote anything they want. Parties don't automatically side with each others because another is most likely to win. This video is rooted in the mindset that politics and elections are a horse race between left and right.
What's preventing third parties from winning it's not math but the propaganda and the power of the red and blue party. The ruling parties didn't become this powerful mathematically. Over decades and centuries the ruling class paved their way and ensured their power with violence and repression.
If third parties aren't mathematically impossible, where are all members of third party during midterms? Local elections? The work it takes to make real lasting change is done down ballot, where are they at those times? Why do they only creep up during presidential races? The above analogy may not be perfect, but it's pretty damned close... but we could also compare third party to all the lazy animals in the story of the little red hen...
In case your not familiar with the children's story...
The government spend billions of dollars to make sure third parties are nowhere to be seen. This post being evidence. You got a fascist party and one involved in a genocide yet you see warnings about not voting for anyone else.
It doesn't take a whole lot of money to run for city council, local officials, sherif, alderman. It takes a bit, but not millions to run for state government positions. Are you saying the federal government is quashing local and state third parties? That is where you make your sweeping electoral reforms for federal elections. Why don't we ever hear about them making moves in those races? Where are they when I go to vote for my city council? My county commissioners? Are you telling me the federal government is coming down and removing them from ballots?
That's a pretty serious accusation, and I'd love to see some sources on that, because I'm with you all the way if that's the case.
But when you've got someone who was wined and dined by an impotent dictator, and a half dozen of his cronies and yes men coming in and trying to split the vote for the best chance of preventing a take over by the impotent dictator's choice clown... and then suddenly you've got people toting her banner when she's been largely silent the past 3.5 years... it kind of makes you wonder, or it should... assuming you've got more than 3 braincells reenacting the DVD screen saver.
Because mass media are own by government and rich people. If you try to compete with them they take you down
I see a few bits of information about it happening at the presidential election level, but I'm not finding anything at the state and local level. Can you provide some sources on that?
Who's we?
The working class I guess? Certainly no one with power.
Americans. "We" already have preferential voting.