Every time a person says they voted to oppose their least favorite party, we should all remember that first-past-the-post voting is the main reason we have a hyper-polarized two party system.

Your friend might have found another party than the Trump party to support tighter immigration and better healthcare policy. Instead, we have millions of people who will vote to destroy democracy rather than vote for someone who supports abortion or permitting trans people to exist.

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pstuart 2 days ago | parent [-]

I absolutely agree that the current system is bad (and we were warned by George Washington himself).

Rank based voting is touted as being a better approach but there's some reasonable criticism of it (too lazy to find and share a link).

Add to the list of things that need to change is campaign financing -- it's literally legalized bribery.

All of this change is possible, the problem is that those in power will do everything in their power to preserve their control.

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mrkeen 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I grew up with a ranked voting system. It has effectively been a two party system regardless. I don't think people know how it works and just treat it like first past the post.

Proportionate representation seems like it's probably better. I think everyone should skip the intermediate steps and jump straight to approval voting.

	▲	unethical_ban 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		If I really geek out on voting systems, the one I prefer the most is the River method, which is a ranked ballot but fixes some of the issues of Instant Runoff and allows equal ranking of multiple candidates. Any ranked system has some issues yes. I forget which criteria it fails but they are all better than FPTP. My issue with unranked approval voting is that IMO very few people have equal preference of lots of candidates. I think that it forces people to express themselves in a way that doesn't reflect their true preference, and that's a bad thing. Yes, I think multimember districts with proportional representation makes the most sense. For anyone interested, here is a site to visualize the River (and other) methods. https://votingmethods.net/cond/

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unethical_ban a day ago | parent | prev [-]

One quick note: there is a single political party that calls for banning alternatives to FPTP: Republicans. While party insiders at the DNC might not like the idea of diluted power, they haven't tried to ban voting reform. Nor have they vocally opposed campaign finance reform like Republicans.