Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[GlyphGryph]

Yes, run-offs systems are inferior to AV systems in several ways, but not by much. In standard scenarios, the different was small, and even in worst case scenarios IRV, at least, was still twice as effective at reflecting voter desires than FPTP. (AV is 4 or 5 times in worst case conditions - most of its advantage does come from edge cases that will not matter in most elections, but do occasionally occur)

And there have been successful third parties, but they tend to be regional parties. It's possible to have two /different/ parties in every state and end up with a stable system that results in in a hundred different parties in the senate with FPTP. It's just.. vanishingly unlikely, considering (especially nowadays) the benefits of national organizational support.

Though up until recently, and even today among the Dems, we actually have more than two "parties" in government - but they end up falling under one umbrella or the other almost solely for support purposes. *blue dog democrats cough*

[mainiac]

If people are just dying to vote for viable 3rd party candidates then why can't these candidates win in democratic or republican primaries, most of which are open to independent voters?

[GlyphGryph]

Because that doesn't make any sense at all? -_o

Then they wouldn't be third parties. And they'd still have to work within the chosen party's organization, which means well fuck getting enough support if your platform is cross party, so you end up playing to the base and owing favours and getting beat out because the base shows up a lot more than independents when you're talking about a party built for the base.

In essence - if half the independents for the guy in the republican primary, and half in dem primary, /he still loses/. Vote splitting in reverse! And I can't think of many states that let you vote in both.

But yah, you don't win a party primary without party support. Look at Gary Johnson.

[kaijyuu]

Political parties are very much a "rich get richer" scheme in the US, since people tend to vote for candidates they know actually exist. Of all the noise that hits your ears daily, the large parties will be spewing a much larger share of said noise, and the small ones get drown out.


I would say third parties would have a much greater chance of success in the US if every party had equal access. That's practically impossible to accomplish. Hence, the proposed changes to voting systems instead.

[thegoatgod_pan]

Political parties are very much a "rich get richer" scheme in the US, since people tend to vote for candidates they know actually exist. Of all the noise that hits your ears daily, the large parties will be spewing a much larger share of said noise, and the small ones get drown out.


I would say third parties would have a much greater chance of success in the US if every party had equal access. That's practically impossible to accomplish. Hence, the proposed changes to voting systems instead.

See I just don't see why one would vote for a third party. E.g. as a liberal I support the democrats.  If democrats piss me off it's because they are either not liberal enough, or pursue a cause I don't consider primary/or think of as a waste of political capital (e.g. california failing with gay marriage but banning McDonalds happy meals from San Francisco--good job liberal voters, fail to protect civil liberties but install nanny government).  I imagine conservatives feel the same with all their RINO and tea-party nonsense. 

So what exactly could a third party offer? Those who argue for a "mix-of-the-best-idea" purple party politics...well...I am just not convinced the right has good ideas, or even really ideas--as far as I can tell the right-wing can barely decide what they themselves stand behind.

E.g. if a left-wing person is generally and dependably pro-environment, pro-gay, pro-choice etc (with exceptions and some variations), a conservative may or may not be pro-business or pro-life depending it if its a bible-belt conservative or a wall street conservative, tea party or corporate boardroom.

If it is difficult to produce a coherent right-wing platform, there is certainly little hope of gleaning the best of it and combining it with the best of left-wing ideas. Conservatives are having a hell of a time deciding what they stand for this election, but they sure know what they stand against, which again makes a compromise near-impossible (and I don't blame them, after Bush, our tea-party congress and this election season I really can't take republicans seriously as thinkers or even people with good intentions for the country~~and I imagine they feel likewise about Obama)

So really a third party would have to offer something not already offered, which is...well nothing, madness; Ron Paul's legalize heroin and shut-down public education or Nader's vote-for-the-left-to-divide-the-left--radicalized versions of the two main parties.

There is no purple states for us...just red and blue, and the older I get the less I care if red states want , say, an oil pipeline poisoning their land in exchange for corporate profits or an education system which will produce no scientifically competent students. Republicans like voting against their own interests for the sake of god, capitalism and delusions of imperial grandeur--let 'em. /rant over

[GlyphGryph]

See I just don't see why one would vote for a third party. E.g. as a liberal I support the democrats.  If democrats piss me off it's because they are either not liberal enough

You just answered your own question. If the party that is closest to you isn't close enough, why wouldn't you want to support one that's closer?

You also seem to be under this radical assumption that every third party is some strange combination of the Republicans and Democrats. Policy-wise, both parties are mostly identical (though the parts where they differ are often big deals). If people value things in opposition to policies both parties hold, why would they vote for either? And that's the position where third parties really show their strength.

See the Pirate Party in Europe for a recent example of being "the only party on the block to take a certain stance people think is incredibly important".

[mainiac]

See I just don't see why one would vote for a third party. E.g. as a liberal I support the democrats.  If democrats piss me off it's because they are either not liberal enough

You just answered your own question. If the party that is closest to you isn't close enough, why wouldn't you want to support one that's closer?

To repeat the point that apparently sailed right past your head:

If people are just dying to vote for viable 3rd party candidates then why can't these candidates win in democratic or republican primaries, most of which are open to independent voters?

This is why Ralph Nadar has 0% of the influence that Denis Kucinich has despite having a substantially larger base of support.  It's a winner take all system, you have to actually win the darn election to win the election.  And if you are to the left of the democrats but can't win a democratic primary you are not viable in a general election.

[GlyphGryph]

You... you don't really seem to have a grasp of how this works. You do realize that other countries with different systems have multiple parties, right? That get elected?

Do you seriously think the Pirate Party platform, for example, would have /any/ influence at all if they had run as some other  party? Fuck no! They would have been bloody trounced, because they are running in a primary for people who vehemently disagree with them. Yet they STILL managed to win elections in Euro countries.

Tell me - how does that make any sense with your strange logic there?

If you run in the democratic party then you have to get the support of the democratic votes to win, despite democratic voters being a minority of voters. Same for the republican primary.

Do you think Bernie Sanders and Lieberman had no influence, then?

[palsch]

I'm a fan of AV and pushed for it in the UK referendum, but I'm much less convinced it would work in the US.

In the UK it was a direct counter to the form of tactical voting that already existed. That is to say, people in the UK would often vote to keep a particular party out based on their perceived notions of the others. This lead to absurdities like people voting Labour when their preferred Lib Dems were actually in second place, closer to Tories they so desperately wanted to beat (I grew up in a constituency this happened in).

The problem in the US is more about building third parties. Without existing parties that people actually prefer over the Big Two you aren't going to get much benefit from AV, and frankly it's flaws are more likely to cause problems. There are three big ones I see.

1) Insufficient candidates and hard partisanship can defeat the purpose.

AV is based on the winning candidate being preferred by the majority of the population more than the other options. This means that, ideally, no candidate would win with less than 50% of the vote. Usually when you have a large enough number of parties representing a continuum or at least range of views this is how it plays out; people are more willing to rank parties that they might not otherwise vote for to show preference over the ones they truly despise, so the preferences trickle down till someone gains the consent of a majority.

But in cases like the Burlington mayoral race in 2006 there simply weren't enough candidates and the vote was too partisan. A full 10% of voters registered only a first preference for the immediately eliminated Republican, leaving Bob Kiss to win with only 48% of the voters registering a preference for him. And this was in a state and election with a strong third party (who won).

"Only" 48% sounds weird compared to a FPTP system, but AV gains a hefty chunk of it's moral justification from actually resulting in majorities, and situations where pluralities can win introduce other errors.

2) Counting orders can make a difference.

This is especially true in heavily partisan races where people don't register second or lower choices and the overall vote depends on a plurality. Some counting systems eliminate all candidates under some threshold (or even everyone other than the two largest parties) immediately while others eliminate them in order from lowest to highest from the first elimination to the winner. In some situations this can change the result of the vote, the former more quickly giving lower preference votes to the biggest parties while the latter allows a consensus choice to build from smaller parties.

3) Weakens mandates.

Especially in cases where either of the above apply and so the AV system itself has given a weaker mandate than it usually does. Especially in the early years you can expect a lot of attacking winning candidates based on their winning on second or lower preference votes. In my view this is part of the point; you have to fight to remain attractive to a wider swath of the population than previously. But in many cases AV could make it harder for such representatives to claim the authority to push their agenda. That can hurt the population that elected them more than having a strong representative who won with a bare plurality in FPTP.

[GlyphGryph]

palsch, I... I honestly have no idea what you are describing, but that's definitely not an AV system.

Did you mean to say IRV? IRV is the one that does rankings. Or Range Voting, that does rankings too. There is no "counting order" for AV. There is no "preference order".

The first is true, but significantly less likely to occur than in FPTP, so not sure how its a problem?

Overall, your post is terribly confusing.

You even explicitly link to a race that didn't use AV.

Edit: So, just looked it up, and apparently the UK has a vastly different definition of the acronym AV than I'm familiar with. To clarify, no one here was calling TopUp (how does that get shortened to fucking AV?) the better system, but rather Approval Voting. Top-up is pretty terrible, but maybe better than what was there? I dunno. Why not just straight IRV then? It seems so random.

[RedKing]

You... you don't really seem to have a grasp of how this works. You do realize that other countries with different systems have multiple parties, right? That get elected?

But....we're talking in the context of the US elections here. What other countries have or don't have is irrelevant to the discussion. In the US FPTP system, 3rd parties serve no real electoral purpose. They can try to help move the debate, and very rarely you get a situation where they can peel marginal votes from one or both main parties (think Perot in 1992). But by and large, they're political masturbation.

Oh, and Sanders and Lieberman both ran as independents rather than 3rd party...and both essentially caucus as Democrats.

[sluissa]

But in cases like the Burlington mayoral race in 2006 there simply weren't enough candidates and the vote was too partisan. A full 10% of voters registered only a first preference for the immediately eliminated Republican, leaving Bob Kiss to win with only 48% of the voters registering a preference for him. And this was in a state and election with a strong third party (who won).

"Only" 48% sounds weird compared to a FPTP system, but AV gains a hefty chunk of it's moral justification from actually resulting in majorities, and situations where pluralities can win introduce other errors.

In any case, we voted in a President with only 48% of the votes going to him. So yeah, either way, doesn't really sound any worse than what we already have.

Honestly, any reasonable alternative would be better than the way things go now.

[GlyphGryph]

In the US FPTP system, 3rd parties serve no real electoral purpose.

-_____-

Yes. That is the issue. He was arguing that they would continue to serve no electoral purpose in systems other than FPTP.

And, less electorally, they serve the purpose of changing the narrative. 3rd parties mostly gain significance by losing it, as one of the larger parties shifts to steal their votes. But that's not meaningless! And occasionally they topple a major party completely.

And yes, Independent is strictly superior to third party with the way our system works at the moment, by far, simply because it allows them to caucus with a major party.

[jester]

Surely if a 3rd party got say, 25% of the vote then the other 2 parties would have to at least look at instituting some of their policies?

[kaijyuu]

That's only really possible with a party split, ala the bull moose party. Generally the two parties have a decent handle on what people want (when they're not issuing propaganda telling people what they want), plus the fact most people consider 3rd party votes wasted votes, all of which means that a large 3rd party turnout is extremely unlikely.


Were it to happen without a party split, one (or both) parties would've really screwed up and put forth candidates damn near no one wants.