#fun fact out of all the provincial legislatures and yukon only alberta lacks multiple parties represented in its legislature

[catgirltoes]

@xxravenbirbxx @kaiju-kisser Except this isn't about the US President, this is about the US legislative bodies, which elect their members from single-member districts* using first past the post**, exactly the same as how the UK, Canada, Malaysia, Nigeria, and a whole lot of other states elect their legislative bodies. Except all of them have more than two parties represented in their legislatures. Hell, look at how many parties are represented in the Lok Sabha.

Don't get me wrong, FPTP is a bad system, and electoral reform is needed everywhere it exists. But the claims made by US Americans (never anyone else!) display not just a lack of knowledge, but a lack of awareness that they lack that knowledge. And this claim that FPTP cannot elect third parties is, I'd say, pretty clearly the result of US chauvinism. The US uses FPTP and only has two parties, therefore FPTP can only produce two-party systems, according to such people. Ignore any other possible reasons for the rot. Yeah, you have to completely tune out elections in dozens of countries, including two extremely close US trade partners and allies***, but US Americans have proven themselves remarkably good at doing that.

*The US Senate has two-member districts, actually, but the elections for each member are offset from each other usually, and even when they co-occur they're held separately so it's not meaningfully different from a single-member district.

**There are a few US states that use different rules for voting, and for whatever fucking reason US states run federal elections so they can apply their special systems to federal elections. Bizarre country.

***Hey did you know that Canada currently has a minority government? I bet if you're US American you didn't.

Okay what exactly is up with US Americans (and hardly anyone else) claiming that first past the post "inevitably results in two parties"? Because that's, like, clearly untrue, on account of there are many legislative bodies elected by FPTP with multiple parties in them. And I have no idea how US Americans are seemingly so unaware of this. Hell, the UK general election happened just recently, and I saw tons of discussion of why FPTP sucks specifically in the context of a multiple-party system. Do US Americans not know about the Lib Dems? Or the Greens? Or Ref*rm? Or the SNP?