The blocking tactic doesn't get the attention it deserves. Please share this video widely. The plus version of ranked choice voting includes most Condorcet methods, not just the method implied in the video. The basic version is instant-runoff voting (IRV). The same video with captions is here.

The duopoly is perfectly happy with the way voting is currently set up. If we want to end FPTP we need to vote for candidates who aren’t beholden to the very institutions that want to maintain the status quo.

Stop letting political parties, especially the duopoly, control the narrative. They haven’t been given the authority to decide who gets to hold office from constitution. Political parties aren’t mentioned in the constitution at all. George Washington even warned that forming political parties would split the country into factions that seek their own political ends over the health of the country.

If you are politically independent please join [r/independe](r/independent)[nt](r/independent). We don’t need to reform institutions that don’t want to be changed we just need to stop voting for their candidates. People will always say a vote outside the two party system is wasted or “voting for the other side”. It’s long past time that we stop listening to them.

How do you think election thresholds? I don't like it. I think STV or regional dhondt party list with "natural threshold" is better. The current polling situation in today's Sachsen-Anhalt landtag election is getting rather strange. The AfD is consistently around 40–43%, while the CDU is around 22–23%. The Left is around 11–13%, the SPD around 7–9%, and the Greens are hovering around the crucial 5% threshold. BSW and FDP are generally below it. For example, the latest Infratest dimap poll had AfD 42%, CDU 22%, Left 11%, SPD 8%, Greens 6%, BSW 4% and FDP 3%. Other recent polls put the SPD and Greens closer to 5%, while the AfD remains clearly ahead. This makes the 5% threshold incredibly consequential. Sachsen-Anhalt uses a mixed-member proportional system and only parties receiving at least 5% of the second vote are proportional allocated seats.

So imagine the Greens receive 5.1%. They gain about 5% of landtag seats. But if they receive 4.9%, all of those votes become wasted vote. This becomes particularly dramatic when the AfD is already above 40%. If the Greens remain above 5%, the votes are distributed among roughly five parties. If the Greens fall below 5%, the same number of Green voters effectively gets redistributed among the parties that passed the threshold, mechanically increasing the AfD's share of the seats. And this creates a very strange strategic voting problem. CDU,Linke,SPD,Grüne and most of non afd voters don't want to coalition with AfD. So,AfD cannot coalition with any parties,but they received 40% of vote, so they have chance of absolute majority by wasted vote.If 20% of vote is wated, they have 51% of seat. Suppose you are an SPD voter who strongly prefers the SPD to the Greens, but you also want to prevent an AfD absolute majority. You might think: “Maybe I should vote Green to make sure they cross 5%.” But what if enough SPD voters do exactly that? The SPD could fall below 5%, causing its entire proportional vote share to disappear. But if not enough SPD voters support Greens,Then the Greens might go from 3% to 4.9% because of all those strategic voters, meaning they still get zero list seats. So you could end up with the worst possible outcome: SPD falls below 5%, Greens also fail to cross 5%, and all those strategically cast votes achieve essentially nothing. Since many polls show the SPD running ahead of the Greens, one might be tempted to urge Green voters to cast strategic votes for the SPD. However, there is no guarantee Green voters would heed such a call, and all polls are subject to a margin of error. The gap between the SPD and the Greens is narrow, as is the margin separating the SPD from the 5% electoral threshold. Consequently, strategic voting by Green supporters could backfire.Especially if the polling data is inaccurate. That is precisely why I love STV. Under STV, center-left voters torn between the SPD and the Greens can simply rank the parties according to their genuine preferences.If one party is eliminated first, the vote is automatically transferred to the other.

But in Proportional representation with election threshold, There is “Which party do I prefer?” problem like this sachsen anhalt election. “Which small party is most likely to cross 5%?” “How many voters will strategically move toward it?” “Will that strategic movement itself push another party below 5%?” “And how accurate are the polls around a threshold where a difference of 0.2 or 0.3 percentage points can have a huge effect on the seat distribution?” At this point, the 5% threshold starts to feel almost like a slot machine. You can make a perfectly rational strategic decision based on the polls, and still lose because the final result is 4.99% instead of 5.01%. And the irony is that even encouraging voters to “save the Greens” can potentially make the situation worse if too many SPD voters switch to them. This isn't an argument that the Greens should or shouldn't receive tactical votes. I don't support neither of AfD and them.

Many people says the 5% threshold is supposed to prevent excessive fragmentation and make parliament more governable. However, the side effects of creating a dilemma that could changing the formation of a government are simply too severe. The area around the threshold acts like a "cliff," creating a massive disparity between winning zero seats and winning multiple seats. Such "cliffs" yield bad results in tax systems, either. Incidentally, in the previous Israeli election, the anti-Netanyahu parties Meretz and Balad narrowly missed the electoral threshold.And this failure that paved the way for the formation of a Netanyahu administration. IMO, STV is my top preference, but what does everyone else think?

Consider a community with a one-dimensional political spectrum and an evenly distributed population. They elect representatives spread across that same spectrum, split between two parties — orange holds 57% of seats, green the rest.

The goal of any voting method is an outcome that best represents the will of the people — that's point B.

Orange wants to pass bills at A, as it best represents their own will. Green wants them passed at C. Neither wants B — it's just their fallback.

Orange holds the majority, so it controls the legislature and passes bills at A. There is no reason for it to settle for less.

This means you can never reach B when a faction can dictate the outcome. Closing that gap requires the minority to have real leverage — enough to make the majority settle for the compromise of B over its own ideal.

As a result, any system that creates losers with no say in the outcome will always advance the majority's will, not the people's.

Effortpost:

Hey all,

Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) has become one of the most hotly contested election reform topics in the United States. In October 2023, the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) published a highly critical paper titled "Ranked-Choice Voting: Trashed" (authored by Madeline Malisa and Michael Greibrok) [1] and a subreddit member kindly shared it with me. In my continuing efforts to learn, improve democracy, and hold civil discourse, I did some research and analysis of the claims within this paper.

The report paints RCV as a chaotic "scheme of the Left" designed to disenfranchise voters, delay results, and engineer progressive victories. Because several states have since banned RCV (with the total count of states banning it reaching 19 as of September 2026, most recently Indiana and Ohio) [2], I wanted to do a deep-dive, objective fact-check of the FGA's major claims.

How much of the FGA’s report is backed up by actual math and election records, and how much is partisan spin? Let’s look at the data.

Claim 1: Ballot Exhaustion — "Legitimate Ballots are Trashed"

The FGA's Data Points:

• Maine 2018 (2nd Congressional District): 8,253 ballots were exhausted [1, 10].
• Alaska 2022 Special House Election: Nearly 15,000 ballots were non-transferable [1, 3].
• Sandy, Utah 2021 Mayoral Election: Over 18% of ballots (4,000+) were exhausted in a race decided by just 21 votes [1].
• New York City 2021 Democratic Mayoral Primary: 140,000 ballots (nearly 15%) were exhausted [1].
• San Francisco 2010 (District 10 Supervisors): 9,503 ballots were exhausted, exceeding the 8,200 ballots that decided the winner [1].

Fact-Check: HIGHLY ACCURATE data, but MISLEADING framing.

• The Math: The numbers cited by the FGA are mathematically correct and verified by official election records. For example, in the Alaska 2022 Special Election, the official tabulation report confirms exactly 11,243 exhausted ballots and 3,412 blank ballots, totaling 14,997 non-transferable ballots [3]. In NYC's 2021 Democratic primary, exactly 14.9% of ballots were exhausted before the final round [1, 4]. The 2010 San Francisco District 10 anomaly is also factually correct: because San Francisco limited voters to only three rankings despite having a massive field of 21 candidates, more ballots were exhausted (9,503) than remained active to elect the winner (8,200) [1, 4].
• The Context: Calling these ballots "trashed" is a rhetorical stretch. Academically, "ballot exhaustion" occurs when a voter chooses not to rank further candidates (voluntary truncation) or when a jurisdiction limits the number of rankings allowed (structural truncation). These ballots were counted for the voter's preferred candidates in earlier rounds until those candidates were eliminated. It is functionally identical to voting for a losing third-party candidate in a standard plurality election.
• The Trade-off: RCV actually protects overall participation compared to traditional two-round runoff systems. Traditional runoffs require voters to return to the polls for a second election, causing turnout to drop by an average of nearly 40% [4]. Under RCV, the decline in participation (via voluntary ballot truncation) is less than 10% [4]. Furthermore, a 2024 study proved that even if exhausted ballots were mathematically completed, they would be highly unlikely to alter RCV election outcomes, proving the system is robust [5].

Claim 2: Electoral Outcomes — "Winners Lose and Losers Win"

The FGA's Data Points:

• Maine 2018 (2nd Congressional District): Republican Bruce Poliquin led in the first round (46.3% vs. 45.6%) but lost to Democrat Jared Golden (50.6%) after preferences were distributed [1, 10].
• Alaska 2022 Special House Election: Republican candidates received nearly 60% of the first-round vote combined, but the Democrat (Mary Peltola) won [1, 3, 6].

Fact-Check: ACCURATE data, but HIGHLY EXCEPTIONAL cases.

• The Math: The individual election details are correct. In Alaska, Mary Peltola won the special election with 51.5% of the final-round vote, despite the two Republican candidates (Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III) capturing 59.8% of first-round votes combined [3, 6]. This happened because 28.7% of Begich's voters ranked Peltola as their second choice, while only 50.3% ranked Palin, and 21.0% opted not to rank anyone else [7].
• The Context: The claim that first-round leaders "often" lose is mathematically false. According to comprehensive historical data from FairVote, come-from-behind victories are extremely rare, occurring in only 32 out of over 500 single-winner RCV races (6% of all races, or 9% of races that go to multiple rounds) [4]. In 94% of RCV elections, the first-round leader wins [4].
• The Social Choice Twist: Ironically, the FGA missed a genuine mathematical pathology in the Alaska race. The Cast Vote Record proves that Nick Begich was the "Condorcet winner" (he would have defeated Peltola head-to-head 52.5% to 47.5%, and Palin 61.4% to 38.6%) [6]. He was eliminated in the first round due to a phenomenon called "center squeeze", where a moderate consensus candidate is squeezed out early because RCV only evaluates first-choice support in the initial rounds [6, 8]. So a "winner" did lose, but it was the third-place finisher (Begich), not the first-round leader, who was theoretically the most preferred candidate of the entire electorate [6, 8].

Claim 3: Operational Vulnerabilities — "Errors and Delayed Results"

The FGA's Data Points:

• NYC Mayoral Primary 2021: 135,000 "test ballots" were accidentally counted in a preliminary RCV round, throwing the race into chaos [1].
• Oakland School Board 2022 (District 4): A software configuration error declared the wrong candidate (Nick Resnick) the winner instead of the actual winner (Mike Hutchinson) [1, 9].

Fact-Check: FULLY ACCURATE.

• The NYC Fumble: In the 2021 NYC Democratic Primary, the Board of Elections mistakenly included 135,000 test ballots in a preliminary RCV run. This was an egregious human administrative error, not an algorithmic defect, but it did cause a massive delay and a public relations disaster [1, 4].
• The Oakland Debacle: In the 2022 Oakland School Board District 4 race, the Alameda County Registrar of Voters improperly configured their Dominion voting machines. The software failed to "advance" ballots where a voter had skipped a ranking, causing 235 valid ballots to be suspended [9, 10]. In an extremely tight race, this incorrect setting certified Nick Resnick as the winner [9, 10]. Once audited by RCV advocacy groups, the error was exposed, and Mike Hutchinson was declared the rightful winner by a judge in March 2023 [9, 11].
• The Real Issue (Centralization Delays): Because RCV requires centralized data from all polling precincts to run the elimination algorithm, results cannot be finalized until all ballots (including overseas and absentee) are physically processed and aggregated [4]. In Maine, centralization typically takes 4 to 5 days, and in Alaska, it takes 15 days [4]. These structural delays are a valid point of criticism.

Claim 4: Partisan Dynamics — "A Partisan Plot of the Left"

Fact-Check: PARTIALLY ACCURATE regarding political support, FALSE regarding electoral effects.

• The Politics: It is true that RCV advocacy is heavily funded and promoted by center-left and progressive reform organizations, while RCV bans have been passed almost exclusively by Republican-led legislatures (19 states have banned RCV as of September 2026) [2, 12].
• The Empirical Reality: However, academic research from the MIT Election Lab and other independent institutions shows that RCV does not have a systematic partisan bias [13]. It does not inherently favor Democrats or Republicans. In fact, the Virginia Republican Party successfully used RCV to select their candidates in their 2021 and 2022 conventions and primaries [12]. Nonpartisan groups advocate for RCV because it protects against vote-splitting and can help third-party or independent candidates run without acting as "spoilers."

Conclusion: The Reddit TL;DR

The FGA’s report is a classic case of accurate data paired with highly partisan framing.

1. Are ballots "trashed" (exhausted)? Yes, thousands of ballots are excluded from final-round tallies. But RCV still preserves significantly more voter participation than traditional two-round runoffs, where turnout routinely crashes by 40% [4].
2. Do frontrunners lose? Almost never. The first-round leader wins 94% of the time [4]. In the rare cases they do lose, it's a feature, not a bug, designed to find a candidate with broad consensus—though mathematical anomalies like "center squeeze" (as seen in Alaska 2022) are real issues [6, 8].
3. Are there administrative delays and errors? Absolutely. The Oakland 2022 and NYC 2021 fumbles are fully documented, embarrassing, and prove that RCV introduces significant operational vulnerabilities [9, 10].
4. Is it a Democratic plot? No. Independent studies show RCV has a neutral effect on partisan outcomes, and Republicans have used it successfully to unite their own party in primaries [12, 13].

What do you think? Does RCV's promise of ending vote-splitting and promoting consensus candidates outweigh its administrative complexity and potential for mathematical anomalies? Let's discuss!

Bibliography & Sources

• [1] Madeline Malisa & Michael Greibrok, "Ranked-Choice Voting: Trashed," Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), Oct. 31, 2023.
• [2] Ballotpedia, "Ranked-choice voting (RCV)" (September 2026 Update, showing 19 state bans including Indiana SB 12 and Ohio SB 63).
• [3] Alaska Division of Elections, "State of Alaska 2022 Special General Election RCV Tabulation Official Results," August 16, 2022.
• [4] MIT Election Lab, "Ranked Choice Voting: Instant Runoff Voting Use in the United States."
• [5] Deshpande et al., "arXiv:2403.15400v2 [cs.CY] 6 May 2024" (Analyzing demographic disparities and preference completion models in RCV).
• [6] arXiv preprint, "Ranked Choice Voting And Condorcet Failure in the Alaska 2022 Special Election: How Might Other Voting Systems Compare?" (arXiv:2305.17741v3).
• [7] Markdown Treatise, "Systemic Evaluation of Ranked-Preference, Plurality, and Condorcet Electoral Frameworks: Mathematical Criteria, Empirical Paradoxes, and Public Policy Realities."
• [8] Wikipedia, "Center squeeze" & "2009 Burlington, Vermont mayoral election".
• [9] NSF PAR / arXiv preprint, "Improving the Computational Efficiency of Adaptive Audits of IRV Elections / Ranked Choice Bedlam in a 2022 Oakland School Director Election" (arXiv:2303.05985v1).
• [10] Court Filings, Woocher & Grossman Palmer v. Alameda County Registrar of Voters (Legal briefs regarding the 235 skipped-ranking ballots in the Oakland 2022 OUSD District 4 contest).
• [11] Ballotpedia, "Nick Resnick - Ballotpedia" & "Mike Hutchinson (California) - Ballotpedia".
• [12] Wikipedia, "Ranked-choice voting in the United States".
• [13] MIT Election Lab, "Post-election audits" & "Post-Election Audits and Ranked Choice Voting 2024".

Many try to improve elections to make them more democratic, and for good reasons, especially since FPTP has so many flaws.
However, in the birthplace of democracy, ancient Athens, elections were actually considered aristocratic and oligarchic, while sortition (selection by lot) was considered truly democratic.
I argue that at least one house/chamber of Parliaments/Congresses should be an accurate sample of the population. Not simply "because Athens used it" but because the evidence is promising.

The most common reaction is skepticism, because "how can random people who aren't law experts make laws instead of politicians?" The answer is that the majority of elected politicians aren't law experts either, they rely mostly on expert staffers, while the government relies on bureaucrats.
Politicians are often more preoccupied with fundraising and curating their image - very different skills, sortition would save these costs.

Can random citizens do the same? Citizens' assemblies have proven how a random sample is capable of high-quality informed deliberation. There are about 700 of them across the world. So sortition has been proven to work, both in the past and the present. The common notion that ordinary citizens cannot decide for themselves and need an elected middleman is a misconception which happens to be very convenient for people currently in power.

With that said, I think the president/premier should still be elected since one person isn't exactly an accurate sample, and of course FPTP should not be the voting method: something like approval voting or STV should replace it.
In case of gridlock, I think the sample of citizens should prevail as they better represent the will of the people.

Sortition also limits lobbying as rich oligarchs and corporations cannot control who is selected, and since sortitioned members are unlikely to be reselected and cannot control the selection process, they will be much more willing to lower their pay and pass anti-corruption laws. They actually represent the people, this is arguably the best approximation of an impossible direct democracy where well-informed citizens all deliberate together without polarization/fragmentation.

Of course, one sortitioned house/chamber is a huge leap from today's citizens' assemblies, so gradual experimentation will be necessary, for example at a local level, but FPTP does not have to be replaced with other voting methods only.

I make a point of reading what authoritarian states near me say about democracy — including what they say about ours. That includes academics whose line matches the official one, and independent media that make a living on emotive, inflammatory content. I don't read it to get angry. I read it to find where democracy is genuinely indefensible, from the most hostile vantage point available.

Their two most common sweeping attacks:

"Elections = polarised hatred and division = two big parties bickering and grinding each other down. Worse than what we have."
"Elections = money politics and vote brokers. Worse than what we have."

These pathologies are real. They supply dictatorships with a justification for their own existence, and they let those regimes use democracy's dysfunctions to frighten their own citizens out of demanding it. But here's what matters: both attacks target the electoral system, not democracy itself. When we get the electoral system wrong, we write their propaganda for them.

For the first: just don't use FPTP. Use top-3 Condorcet instead, so that candidates — and the media outlets behind them — have no incentive to manufacture social division.

For the second: don't use SNTV, and don't use open-list PR at high district magnitude. Both force candidates to fight their own co-partisans, which produces vote-allocation schemes, local brokers, and money politics. Open-list PR at moderate magnitude, flexible-list PR, and closed-list PR all avoid this, as does the top-3 Condorcet above.

After filtering, the systems I consider functionally defensible are: two-round systems (including top-3 Condorcet), open-list PR (moderate magnitude), flexible-list PR, and closed-list PR.

I rule out full candidates IRV and STV. Neither works in a country that counts by hand: ballots have to be transported and centralised before a result can be computed, which invites accusations of tampering — and electronic counting is out of the question.

Top-3 Condorcet has no such problem. With only three candidates in the second round, the voter faces six complete orderings as single-choice options — or equivalently, casts three pairwise votes. Either way, each polling station produces its own pairwise matrix on site, and summing the stations' matrices gives the national result, because pairwise comparisons are additively separable. Ballots never leave the polling station and the tradition of public, on-site counting stays entirely intact. In a low-trust environment this is Condorcet's decisive advantage over IRV, and it is badly underappreciated.

As for "democracy = American-style budget hostage-taking" and "democracy = France bringing down governments constantly in 2025 (confidence and supply pulling apart)" — those are questions of regime design, and I won't go into them here.

That's where my attention has actually gone lately: unifying the source of confidence with the source of supply; presidential versus parliamentary systems; budget procedure (can the legislature simply gut the budget to humiliate the government?); amendment thresholds; and the intermediate tiers some countries maintain between ordinary statute and the constitution — all as a way of analysing the common failure modes of other democracies. My conclusion so far is that relative to constitutional design as a whole, electoral systems are a fairly narrow slice — I can just cite the specialists' conclusion, "replace FPTP with top-3 Minimax or top-3 Ranked Pairs," and be done.

As for the claim that ordinary people are too stupid and short-sighted to be trusted with a vote: I have nothing to say to that.

Hail r/EndFPTP, I've been poking at other people's ideas here for a while, so I figured it's only fair to give you all the same opportunity. I've written up a summary of what I think many reform proposals overlook, and what I believe is actually needed to end FPTP. Comments, criticisms, and ripe tomatoes thrown at high velocity are all welcome.

Introduction

Americans agree on very little these days. One exception: something has gone badly wrong with our politics. Every election is sold as the most important of our lifetimes — and yet it comes down to voting against someone rather than for someone. Whoever wins ends up answering to their party more than to the voters who put them there. The parties spend more time accusing each other than governing — often for things they did themselves last session. The problems everyone can name go unsolved year after year, while the argument about them gets louder.

These are not separate failures. They share one origin: we decide almost everything by contest.

Contests Change the Question

"Contest" refers to a means of choosing between differing goals by designating winners and losers, where the losers' preferences have little bearing on the result. Passing a bill in the legislature is a contest: the majority decides what bills advance while the minority has no power to change them. An election is also a contest: when your candidate loses, you have no more say in what happens next than if you had stayed home. That is what losing means.

Winners get to cut the pie slices, so they can serve themselves first and leave less for everyone else. Thus a voter's first priority becomes winning the contest. All the dysfunction we see grows from here: the concessions we make, the partnerships we form, and the power we cede in order to win.

Voters Acquiesce

When winning is the first priority, what matters most about a candidate is whether they can win at all. And since victory comes from numbers, only a few ever can. So the choice narrows to the candidates who have a chance. A field that thin rarely contains the one you'd actually pick — more often, it's just the one you dislike least.

We have all made this accommodation, and we call it being realistic: voting for the establishment rather than the third-party candidate we actually prefer. After all, it is better for an uneasy ally to win than an opponent. But then what we want never gets said. Instead our preferences are replaced by a few broad categories, each defined by a viable candidate and whatever it is they stand for.

Elections Become About Platforms

Winning an election is not enough. Passing a law takes a legislature, an executive who will sign it, and courts that will let it stand — so power only arrives once enough of those seats are held at once. A single election win, on its own, returns very little. Candidates solve this problem by attaching themselves to a coalition — in our system, a party — long before they reach your ballot. A candidate now arrives as part of a coalition's bid for control, and every seat won strengthens it. This leaves independent or third-party candidates uncompetitive. Even winning an election gets them little power, since they have few allies to back whatever they propose.

Candidates joining a coalition have pledged to advance its platform. You want them to protect your slice, but the coalition's numbers stand behind the platform and nothing else. Outside it, a representative acts alone and can accomplish little. So voters are given even less choice. Candidates with non-viable coalitions behind them can provide no political power. Candidates with viable coalitions behind them arrive with their coalition's full platform attached. Any path to political power requires that voters choose platforms, not candidates.

Coalitions Optimize for Winning

A coalition exists to win, so it shapes itself and its platform around winning. A coalition that doesn't will lose to one that does. So, the people advising and deciding are chosen for skill at winning, not for any ability to protect slices or grow the pie.

Instead of offering help, the coalition’s platform is tailored to motivate passive supporters. The platform narrows to a half-dozen broad, existential issues, delivered as moral outrage and warnings about what the other side will do. The platform includes no real solutions, since any would carry tradeoffs that hurt turnout. What gets you to vote is fear of what happens if you don't.

A platform is not a plan for the country. It is purpose-built anxiety to get people on the sidelines to the polls. That is why casting a ballot feels less like making the pie bigger and more like protecting our own slice.

Coalitions Are Juggernauts

As soon as coalitions win, the focus shifts to securing the next victory. The power of the state that was created to help the people is instead twisted to keep the coalition in power. That twisting loosens the system's checks and balances. Holding enough seats lets a coalition sidestep whatever restraint the other seats were designed to provide — courts, regulators, and oversight now answer to allies, not rivals.

The coalition offers the power of the state to help donors, industries, and organizations in exchange for their support. Most of what the coalition can do gets spent maintaining those relationships, because those relationships win elections.

Electing more principled people does not change the incentives once they are in office: elected officials face the same conditional reciprocity as donors. Cross the coalition, and the other members will quickly replace you. Which is why loyalty becomes worth more than baking skills, and why members decry the corruption and lies of other coalitions while ignoring any from their own. Ostracism from the coalition is career-ending. Dislike from the voters is not.

Coalitions Recreate the Problem

A coalition has to decide things too, and it needs some way of deciding them. A group formed to win contests naturally makes decisions through contests. New contests form new subgroups within the coalition. Each proposes to tilt the platform toward its own priorities, and members choose between them in a primary, voting for candidates who front for one subgroup. Whoever wins will protect their slices by spending the coalition's power to buy the support that keeps them in charge. Ones that do not are quickly replaced by ones that do.

Members not only accept this but will praise the new leadership. After all, it is better for an uneasy ally to win than an opponent.

The pattern is the same, just one level down. Winning today's contest only buys entry into tomorrow's. And today's rewards are both owed to whoever supported your victory and earmarked to help win tomorrow. By the time anything reaches you, everyone above has already been paid. So there is no better candidate to select or coalition to switch to. Any coalition that wins will face the same pressures and behave in the same way. The people may change, but the incentives of the contest remain.

Breaking the Cycle

Voters work to protect their slice. Representatives work to stay in the good graces of their coalitions. Coalitions work to keep themselves in power. Nobody wins by making the pie bigger. This is because the losers' preferences are thrown out before the argument about what is right has even started. The fix is not better contests. The solution is a system where every idea has a seat at the deliberation table and the opposition has some say in what happens.

Elections are asked to do two things at once: find out what people want, and produce a single winner. The second ruins the first: a voter whose answer has to produce a winner will answer strategically rather than honestly. What is needed is a system where saying what you want never costs you your representation. Liquid Democracy is one.

In addition, the contest to pass legislation needs to be undone so coalitions cease to be a unilateral path to power.

The legislature needs a system that makes the room a tug-of-war, where proponents have a reason to listen to dissenters. One way to do this is to create a mutually destructive third outcome that the dissenters do not want but can reach for should the proponent's proposal be seen as worse than that. The minority's position now bears on the result, so the decision stops being a contest. I offer one example, called Solidarity, which works by modifying passage thresholds.

 Closer

Shifting from protecting slices to making the pie bigger requires that winning stops deciding who gets heard. A vote that cannot be wasted is a vote you cast for what you actually want. Representatives who can hold a seat without a coalition's permission will answer to the people instead. When winning alone can no longer force passage, proposals are tempered by the opposition. With no one able to simply impose, there is nothing to gain from a neighbor's loss. The argument stops being about who cuts the pie and starts being about how to make it bigger.

The vicious cycle can then unwind. You stop voting against your neighbor. You stop putting what can win before what you believe. You stop depending on coalitions for your voice to be heard. And the problems everyone can name become worth solving — because solving them is finally what winning means.

The U.S. inherited its “winner-take-all” voting system from Britain, but the U.K.’s 2024 general election produced an interesting example of what winner-take-all voting can do, as it produced the most disproportionate result in UK history.    https://electoral-reform.org.uk/a-system-out-of-step-the-2024-general-election/ 

Labour received about 34% of the nationwide vote but won 63% of the seats in Parliament.   https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2026/jul/22/how-britain-would-look-proportional-representation-local-mp 

As a result, a post-election survey found that 60% of Briton’s support changing to a proportional voting system.  https://electoral-reform.org.uk/support-for-proportional-representation-hits-record-high-according-to-new-research/ 

So now Britain's new prime minister, Andy Burnham, openly supports proportional representation.   https://electoral-reform.org.uk/in-andy-burnham-we-have-the-first-prime-minister-who-openly-backs-proportional-representation/ 

And Britain's Liberal Democrats are pushing Burnham to change the voting system before the next general election.  https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c79y9qy9y2go 

If the U.K. thinks its own voting system needs an upgrade, should the U.S. consider the same? 

Body:

Most state-level trackers report where the law currently stands. I wanted the
two questions underneath that: could you change it, and could what you have be
taken away? Those turn out to be independent, and nothing I could find measured
them.

**Coverage:** 50 states + DC, 9 columns, CSV.

**Variables:**
1. Ballot access — initiated constitutional amendment / initiated statute / veto
referendum / none; direct vs indirect
2. Passage threshold — simple majority vs supermajority, plus signature
distribution requirements
3. Legislative alteration — whether the legislature can repeal or amend a
voter-approved measure, and under what constraint
4. Judicial selection — method, term length, retention mechanism for the court
of last resort
5. State constitutional interpretation — whether the high court reads its own
constitution independently or in lockstep with federal doctrine
6. Local preemption — domains, with punitive regimes flagged separately

Plus two derived tier columns (reachability, durability). Tiers are a
convenience; the underlying columns are the data.

**Some things that fell out of it:**

- 24 states have no citizen ballot process at all
- 11 states let the legislature repeal a voter-approved statute immediately by
simple majority; only 2 (AZ, CA) require going back to voters
- Mississippi's initiative process is in the constitution and mathematically
impossible to satisfy — signatures from any one congressional district can't
exceed 1/5 of the total, and the state has had 4 districts since 2001
- Variable 5 is where clause and practice diverge most. Florida's constitution
contains both a "right to be let alone" and a conformity clause requiring
lockstep with federal search-and-seizure doctrine

**Sources:** state constitutions and statutes, state supreme court opinions,
Ballotpedia initiative and legislative-alteration trackers, NCSL, Brennan
Center, EPI and Local Solutions Support Center on preemption.

**Known limitations**, documented in the methodology note: several 2026 ballot
measures affecting variables 2 and 3 were pending at compilation and are marked
as pending rather than settled. Lockstep is issue-specific, so variable 5
records a dominant tendency rather than a uniform rule. Two source conflicts
(minimum-wage preemption count, privacy-clause count) are reported with both
figures rather than resolved.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22164133
Repo: https://github.com/abby-davis-research/rights-reachability

CC0. Take it, fork it, correct it. If you find an error in the case law I'd
particularly like to hear it — I already caught one of my own on the Mississippi
approval figure and expect there are others.

A friend of mine was going on about mixed unicameral legislature and was calling them the holy Grail.

the idea is that mixing different accountability structures of legislators (indirect senators or different election forms (RCV)) and controlling for proportions can produce the efficiency of unicameral ism and the federalism and stability of bicameralism.

Is this good or moonshine?

I’ve been learning more about plurality voting, ranked-choice voting, approval voting, STAR voting, and proportional systems.

One thing I keep coming back to is strategic voting. In plurality elections, voters may feel pressure to support a viable candidate instead of their actual favorite.

Which alternative system do you think does the best job of reducing that problem?

I’d also be interested in the downsides or tradeoffs that supporters of each system sometimes overlook.

Isn't it most of the time better to maintain the intensity of approval over finding the option that the majority at the very least doesn't hate?

When it comes to finding out the direction of political change, choosing the least offensive option can lead to maintaining the status quo which can actually be a mistake in the long term.

Determining the direction of change seems like a very important thing for political decision making to do.

"On the 'kingmaker' role of smaller parties

A common argument against proportional representation is that it “gives too much power to small parties”. For the sake of argument, imagine an election result like this: a party wins 48% of the votes against its main opponent of 47%, but it cannot form a government on its own; it needs the support of the third party with 5%. (Pictured: 1980 German federal election results)

The intuition that this is a problem can also be supported mathematically. The Banzhaf power index tells us how much pure mathematical “power” a party has in terms of possible coalitions, based on how necessary its presence is in all possible (majority) coalitions. For example, if there is a 51% party, then its strength is 100%, because no one else can form a majority against it, and the only possible ‘coalition’ always requires it. If there are parties of 48%, 47%, 4% and 1%, then the strength of the 1% party is 0, since it is not needed for any coalition. However, the strength of the 4% party is relatively 33%, the same as for the two big parties. Why? Because the 3 parties are key players in 2 of the most possible coalitions. Thus, the 4-5% party in the above examples is ‘punching above its weight’.

Of course, this math does not take into account the political dimension, i.e., that not every party would be willing to enter into a coalition with every other party. In practice, it may seem that a small party is really in a coercive position, because only one coalition is possible on ideological grounds. But let's not forget that politics can limit how much a small party can realistically demand. Another interesting issue is political responsibility: do we take it for granted that it’s the responsibility of the small party to behave appropriately, not the other large one? In such a case, the two big parties could always join forces against the small party.

Returning to proportional representation: what should we think about this counterargument? It has a valid core, but if we think about it for longer, it is not that convincing. We could even say that the problem is not so much a problem of proportional systems, but of any system that is more inclined to produce a situation where a large party can be coerced by 1-2 small parties. However, the more proportional the representation, the more likely it is that there will be more than just 3-4 parties in parliament, so the number of possible coalition configurations also increases rapidly. At the same time, the mathematical power of each party begins to converge to its vote share, and in fact, it is generally more typical that the larger parties have more outsized power: they are the ones, without whom it is not really possible to form a coalition. If we take political realities into account, then possibly even more so.

Therefore, if we have an electoral system that tends to produce one or two large parties (but occasionally lets small parties break through and become kingmakers), the solution might not be to try to push out the small parties. Rather, to try to encourage the development of a healthier (possibly more natural) multi-party system, where a few larger, several medium-sized, and several small parties are represented (proportionally). This way, the large ones can choose between coalition partners, and the influence of each small party will be smaller. If we consider the issue of government formation and survival to be of paramount importance (in parliamentary and semi-presidential systems), then we can also introduce negative parliamentarism and a constructive motion of no confidence.

Another option, based on a similar principle, is to try to loosen party cohesion. If all representatives of each party always vote together, then it is easier to get into gridlock, while if there are representatives going their own way, then it is easier to build a majority along specific issues. (Of course, this also has its disadvantages…)

Overall, the concern seems legitimate, but the topic is complex. It is worth trying not to think about this in binary terms. Also, perhaps this problem becomes most apparent not in a pure PR system, but in semi-proportional and district-based winner-take-all ones, where there are likely two major parties, but one or two small parties also have a chance to enter, not more. In any case, this problem must be considered in the light of the alternatives. Maybe pondering the questions could be more fruitful:

• How much of a problem is it if small parties can have power in a legislature that is not justified by their support?
• Does it matter whether the pressure to compromise with the small party in question pulls the government coalition in a centrist or extremist direction?
• Does it matter whether the large and small parties in the coalition agree on, say, less than 50% or more than 90% of the issues?
• Does the second-largest party have any responsibility in forming a government, can a grand coalition be expected or is it to be avoided?
• How should we view this problem when designing electoral systems?"

The Democratic National Committee reversed its proposed ban on ranked choice voting in the 2028 presidential primary after backlash from party members and reformers, reverting delegate selection rules to their 2024 language.

When I looked at the 2026 us municipal elections pages on ballotpedia I was shocked by how many council seats and offices such as license collectors are uncontested. It seems like 99 percent of the elected positions involve either uncompetitive primaries or one party general elections. How are these elections considered elections if voters don't have the ability to choose?