getting rid of First-Past-The-Post alleviates the drive toward a 2-party system. The author mentions this (they have written extensively on it).
Obligatory !fairvote@lemmy.ca
It’s already a 1.5 party system. Our liberal party is just conservatives who aren’t openly racist or bigoted.
They’re so unracist they tripled what the UN defined as modern slaves to prop up Canada’s GDP. Would a racist bring non-white wage slaves into an existing housing shortage just to serve them cheaper Tim Hortons?
It’s not racist if they were doing it to prop up the GDP, it’s just a practical way to suppress wages and get cheap labour. If they openly said it was a way to avoid having our precious whites sully themselves by performing menial tasks, then it would be racist.
Ignoring the lack of basic living standards of those brownies sure isn’t, and I’m an expert in racism.
Basic living standards are very expensive, you see. We would like to do something but we can’t
Pretty much.
We should absolutely get rid of FPTP in favour of proportional representation, however, I don’t know that the current polling situation is actually a result of FPTP. I’m a pretty consistent NDP voter, but I’ve voted Liberal twice - Trudeau once (to bring in proportional rep… lol), and Carney this last time. I know this is unpopular but I didn’t “lend” my vote to Carney to beat the CPC, I genuinely think he’s doing great and will happily vote for Liberals again so long as he’s at the helm.
Proportional Representation is what you need for multi-seat bodies like parliament. It’s absolutely the best method for such bodies, imo. For single seat elections, proportional doesn’t work as their are no proportions for a single seat and generally you don’t want to just vote for party for such roles, but individuals themselves. You’ll need something like Ranked Choice or (my preference) Approval voting for those seats to avoid the two party inevitability.
Ranked Choice is a misuse of ranked ballots. Say an election goes like this:
40% vote A > B > C.
35% vote C > B > A.
25% vote B > C > A.Plurality says A wins, because Plurality sucks. You don’t even need a bare majority. You just need everyone else to split.
RCV says C wins: B has the fewest top votes, so they’re eliminated. The race becomes 40% A > C versus 60% C > A. Better… but still wrong, because 65% of people would prefer B > C.
Condorcet methods like Ranked Pairs get that right. They model every runoff: A vs B is 40-60, A vs C is 40-60, B vs C is 65-35. B wins every 1v1 and is obviously the best candidate according to these voters. The supermajority prefers B.
Oh that’s interesting, I always thought that ranked choice would put B in there but in that example it shows that that wouldn’t happen. I never saw or thought about it that way. Thanks!
Everyone has a vague idea of what ranked ballots should do, even if they’ve never tried to explain how that works. Condorcet is what they expect. RCV is just goofy.
CGP Grey did this excellent video on FPTP a number of years ago. Worth a watch.
It explains why a FPTP electoral system will almost certainly gravitate toward a two party system.
It is a feature, not a bug. The NDP is an anomaly. As is the BQ but that’s more about regionalism.
There’s a good chance the NDP will be back with a vengeance.
Typically it’s not a choice - it’s a result of your ballot system.
Ranked ballots, directly for candidates, can easily prevent this. People need to trust that their vote is not squandered if they throw in behind some longshot, or if they like several similar options.
Juuust don’t do “Ranked Choice” specifically, for single-winner elections. The multi-winner version, Single Transferable Voting, works as intended. RCV gets stupid results and has suspicious backing. You want a Condorcet system like “Ranked Pairs.”
Or… just check as many names as you like, for Approval Voting. That approximates Condorcet results and there’s no good reason it isn’t the default.
I say “typically” because of Sri Lanka, which has ranked ballots, but is apparently too thick to use them. Most voters still pick one guy and cross their fingers. They have the option to vote for every candidate they do not despise, if their first-, second-, and tenth-favorite candidates cannot win. But for some goddamn reason, they act like their system is as broken as America’s.
Some of that blame belongs to Harper, for consolidating conservative parties, and sidelining progressive conservatives who are and have shifted to Liberals. But he has also long had a goal of single party state, like Alberta has essentially been. That is not going well
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Important. Katherine Hayhoe suggests that climate change is the hole in the bottom of the buckets that represent our other major issues. We can pour as much resources in the top but climate change is causing it to run out the bottom.
In my opinion, First Past the Post is the rust that is making the buckets unmanageable in the first place. Highly polarized, flip-floping policy isn’t solving the big problems.
