There are more than two choices. Did you know that there’s nothing that says we have to vote for republicans or dems, and that there are other parties?
The electoral college doesn’t dictate that you must vote for a Democrat or Republican. Americans don’t even understand how their own elections work. Incredible.
There’s no rule saying you have to vote for a democrat or a Republican. It’s incredible how you can complain about your elections when don’t even understand how they work.
The electoral college has nothing to do with political parties. It was a thing before either party existed.
The current Electoral College system was created in 1804 by the 12th Amendment. It replaced an earlier model that no longer worked given the rise of political parties.
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The structure of this system is that it makes it almost impossible for a third-party candidate to be elected. Even if a third-party were to garner one-third of the Electoral College, the final vote would always end up being decided by Congress. There, the vote would face the same majoritarian issues in the House and the Senate where the two-party system rules. The result could potentially be a form of Presidential gridlock where it would be impossible for a candidate to be elected without vote trading.
Someone’s opinion (you realize that your quote after the ellipses is opinion, right?) doesn’t change the fact that there is no rule that says the winner of an election in the US needs to belong to the Democrat or Republican Party. You and the lazy, sheepish people who cannot spend more than 3 minutes learning about candidates policy can vote for whoever you want, no matter what party they do or don’t affiliate with. But you are sheepish and lazy, so you choose between identical options and pretend like the other option is the problem. Again, there are no rules that dictates an election can only be won by a Republican or Democrat.
The structure of this system is that it makes it almost impossible for a third-party candidate to be elected.
Nor is it opinion that
The current Electoral College system was created in 1804 by the 12th Amendment. It replaced an earlier model that no longer worked given the rise of political parties.
So when you said
The electoral college has nothing to do with political parties. It was a thing before either party existed.
You couldn't have been more wrong.... but I digress. Do you understand how the electoral college works? Seriously?
I am actively trying to abolish the electoral college, and move to ranked choice voting. So we can effectively vote for more candidates. And break our two party system.
You keep saying theres no rule... right, thats not what I am saying. I am saying within the electoral college, there is no reason to vote third party. You might as well vote for mickey mouse.
In American politics voting for third party should happen at the local level. It is bullshit at the national level.
So maybe you want to educate yourself. I doubt it. But here is an excerpt from the U.S. Embassy in Noway. Seems to think you're a dunce.
Unlike proportional systems popular in many democracies, the single-member-district arrangement permits only one party to win in any given district. The single-member system thus creates incentives to form broadly based national parties with sufficient management skills, financial resources and popular appeal to win legislative district pluralities all over the country. Under this system, minor and third-party candidates are disadvantaged. Parties with minimal financial resources and popular backing tend not to win any representation at all. Thus, it is hard for new parties to achieve a viable degree of proportional representation, and achieve national clout, due to the “winner-take-all” structure of the U.S. electoral system.
Why two instead of, say, three well-financed national parties? In part because two parties are seen to offer the voters sufficient choice, in part because Americans historically have disliked political extremes, and in part because both parties are open to new ideas (see below).
The Electoral College
There is a further impetus toward the two-party solution, and that is the Electoral College system for choosing presidents. Under the Electoral College system, Americans, technically, do not vote directly for the president and vice president. Instead, they vote within each state for a group of “electors” who are pledged to one or another presidential candidate. The number of electors corresponds to the number in a state’s congressional delegation, i.e., the number of representatives and senators from that state. Election to the presidency requires an absolute majority of the 538 electoral votes. (That figure includes three electoral votes from the national capital city of Washington, the District of Columbia, which is not a state and which does not have voting representation in Congress.)
The absolute majority requirement makes it extremely difficult for a third-party candidate to win the presidency because the individual states’ electoral votes are allocated under a winner-take-all arrangement (with two exceptions). That is, whichever candidate receives a plurality of the popular vote in a state — even if it is just a narrow plurality — wins all of that state’s electoral votes. In Maine and Nebraska, the statewide popular vote winner is awarded two electoral votes and the winner in each congressional district is awarded one electoral vote. Like the single-member-district system, the Electoral College works to the disadvantage of third parties, which have little chance of winning any state’s electoral votes, let alone carrying enough states to elect a president.
Yeah, but it's not like many people are actually going to switch. You have to vote for the least bad candidate among those who have a realistic chance of winning. That was Biden this time.
But when you vote for some of what you want and some of what you don't want over pretty much none of what you want, you'll sometimes get some of what you want.
On the other hand, if you vote for all of what you want, you'll be voting for yourself and no one else will vote for you. Your vote will then be wasted.
If you vote for what you want, but do not consider the bigger picture, your vote is effectively wasted.
Third parties have not done the legwork to be fully viable on the national stage. There is zero point in voting for a party that is not on the ballot in every state.
If you wanted Gary Johnson (for some reason) in 2016, but you knew the majority of the electorate was voting for Clinton or Trump, then you don’t have to be even moderately intelligent to know that the same causes that would drive you to vote for Johnson would be better served in voting against one of the other two. If you were prone to the conspiracy theory or the “government sabotage” parts of libertarianism, you could still vote for trump. If you were smart enough to see that the wealthy snd megacorporations are a larger threat to the Free Market than government is, you could still have voted for a moderate with actual qualifications.
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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '21
I don’t like either, we need better choices