#us electoral system

[delvinanaris]

It is impossible to elect a third-party president in the US currently.

Not merely "unlikely, but you can do it if you try real hard": impossible.

There are third-party candidates who aren't even on the ballot in enough states to add up to 270 electoral votes. For them, it's mathematically impossible to be elected, no matter how well they do.

Even for third-party candidates who are on enough state ballots, approximately no one knows their names, platforms, or parties. The strongest showing a third-party presidential candidate has ever made in modern times was Ross Perot in 1992, with ~19% of the popular vote. He received no electoral votes. Since then, some of the rules have been changed to make it even harder for third-party candidates to get attention.

But it gets worse.

A third party, generally speaking, is going to be moderately well aligned with one of the two major parties on many issues, but either has one particular issue that they champion very strongly (rather than trying to have a broad platform like the major parties), or simply stakes out a position further from the center, but in the same general political direction.

Because of this, and the fact that they cannot win, the better a third-party presidential candidate performs, the more they will harm the cause they seek to support.

To illustrate this, consider a hypothetical presidential election where the major party candidates are Davis and Roberts, and there is a third-party candidate Thompson who is doing historically well. Thompson's politics largely align with Davis's, but skew farther in the same direction. Both Thompson and Davis disagree strongly with Roberts, and do not want to see a Roberts presidency.

If we then consider a hypothetical state where there are 1 million people who will actually vote, let's say that 400k of them support Roberts. The other 600k all agree on opposing Roberts, but 250k of them think that Davis doesn't go far enough, and will vote for Thompson. This means that the final vote tally in that state will be 400k for Roberts, 350k for Davis, and 250k for Thompson.

If Thompson had not been running in that race, Davis would have won handily. All the people who supported Davis and Thompson are disappointed, and Roberts won despite getting a minority of the vote and the political makeup of the state being strongly tilted in Davis' favor.

This is the case because of our voting system: each person only gets a single vote to cast for President. If we had the opportunity to cast multiple votes in any of the various ways that are out there, it would be much, much easier for third parties to be viable, because someone who likes Thompson would be able to vote for both Thompson and Davis—thus guaranteeing that even if their first choice doesn't win, they're still not making it any easier for the candidate they strongly oppose to win.

So anyone who wants third-party candidates to be viable should, in the moment, be voting for the major party candidate that most closely matches their beliefs, while advocating hard and in every way they can for an alternative voting system, such as Ranked Choice Voting (which has some momentum behind it right now).

To bring it back to the current election, everyone who wants Trump to lose, but votes for anyone other than Kamala Harris, is actively working against their own interests.

(Hopefully that was the part you were confused on; if it's more about why voting for Kamala is not a vote for genocide, that's a whole different post, and all I'll say about it here and now is that the notion that she actively supports genocide is unquestionably propaganda, and likely derives from Russian psyops.)

[thellawtoknow]

Electoral System in the US

Understanding the Electoral System in the USFederal Level: The Electoral CollegeWhat is the Electoral College?How Does the Electoral College Work?Allocation of ElectorsWinner-Takes-All SystemElectoral MajorityKey States in the Electoral CollegeSwing StatesDefinitionKey Swing StatesOther Influential StatesLarge States with Predictable OutcomesEmerging BattlegroundsCriticisms and Reforms of the…

[captainjonnitkessler]

I think the issue I'm having with the "you can't blame the average voter, you should blame the institutions that were supposed to prevent those voters from being stupid!" is that it inherently buys into the idea that there's some sort of elite class that's supposed to do the *real* ruling and average people aren't supposed to actually be able to choose their representatives because they're too stupid and ignorant to be trusted.

Like, Republicans already believe that! That's WHY they vote for people like Trump, who vow to take down those establishments, punish those elite, ivy-tower academics and give "the American people" a real voice in government!

And it also presupposes that those institutes have WAY more power over people's opinions than I think they do. Like if Trump had been tried for treason, do you really think that was going to convince his voters he actually did it, or do you think they would have used it as proof that Biden was using the Justice Department to prosecute political enemies? If the news had gone harder on Trump's fascism do you think it would have reached more people, or do you think he would have spun it as "they're attacking us because they know that we're winning and we're going to bring freedom back to America!"

And I don't know the answer! Maybe it WOULD have swayed enough people. I definitely think the courts and the news and the Democrats should have tried harder, just because it's the right thing to do to attack fascism on every available level. But I don't think you can say that we definitely would have won if they had, and I think if we HAD run that play and lost we'd be listening to a bunch of people talking about how obviously we went in too hard and we should have focused more on solidarity and outreach. Hindsight is 20/20, y'know?

[akiizayoi4869]

Raise your hand if you think that the electoral college needs to go

[aibidil]

In honor of Debate Day (I'm cringing already, and I have to watch with my kid for a school assignment): I keep seeing political posts on here that demonstrate a misunderstanding of the American electoral system, and I want to explain a few points. Because I have a PhD in Political Science and apparently I can't help myself.

E.g. "You people keep saying to vote for the (blameworthy) democrat and then force them to the left, but then you never force them to the left!" <- in a way, this statement is true enough, but not for the reasons that it seems to imply.

The US Constitution doesn't establish a two-party system. However, it does establish the Electoral College, which is a major way in which the US electoral system diverges from a popular vote. The manner in which each state chooses and constrains its electors (the people who make up the Electoral College) is left to the states, but 48 of the 50 states use a voting system called "First Past the Post," or first-preference plurality. FPTP is a system in which voters choose one candidate and the candidate with the largest number of votes (a plurality) "takes it all," even if they do not secure a majority of the votes. So if there are three candidates—say, Gore, Bush, and Nader—and Bush gets the plurality of electors, Bush wins. Even if more voters voted for Gore than Bush. Even if Nader voters indicated in exit polls that their second choice was much more likely to be Gore than Bush. US Congressional seats, likewise, are elected in single-member districts with FPTP winner-takes-all. So in a FPTP system, the makeup of the electoral body is not proportional to the votes cast by voters, and in the Electoral College, it may lead to results in which a candidate with a plurality of overall votes doesn't win the election.

Single-member FPTP systems therefore discourage voting for smaller parties and encourage, as the rational outcome of the electoral system, strategic voting for one of two big parties. This is in direct contrast to electoral systems that run on some variation of proportional representation (ranked preference voting, multi-member districts, etc), where the percentages of votes for each party are reflected in the final makeup of the elected body.

So even though there's nothing in the US Constitution saying we have to have a two-party system, in Political Sciencey terms: Duverger's Law states that all FPTP systems will become two-party systems. This is true because it is the logical outcome of rational actors operating in the system.

Okay, but who cares if we have a two-party system? We can still push democrats to the left, right?

Well, kind of? But ultimately, not really. Because think about it: if you have two parties competing for votes among the entire populace, they can only position themselves against the other party. You've got one candidate on the right and one candidate on the left. Committed leftists and committed right-wingers are going to vote for their party (or not vote at all). There's no incentive for a party to make any concessions to those voters. Whose votes are they trying to get? The people in the middle. Those are the only people they should care about, if they want to win. So the voters in the middle can exert influence over the platforms, and that has the effect of pulling both sides toward the very middle.

(One thing that has happened in recent years is that the Republicans have been successful at moving the entire distribution of votes farther to the right. This hasn't changed the fact that the two-party system will always pull both parties toward the center of the vote distribution, but it's definitely fucked us over. If the democrats had any way to enact this sort of shift, I would be all over it, but I don't see how they could. The entire system is fucked even beyond all I've already said by gerrymandering and the fact that leftists are geographically isolated in cities, both of which systematically benefit the right, so it doesn't seem likely that the democrats could be successful at a shift like that without changing some of the laws about gerrymandering, if not also the Electoral College.)

On the other hand, in systems that have more than two parties, you end up with bimodal distributions of votes. Why is that? Because say you have three parties on the left, and voters know that they aren't throwing their vote away if they vote for a smaller party. What will happen? The three parties on the left will be vying for the votes of the leftists. And the same thing will happen on the right. In this way, the voters will pull the party platforms farther from the middle, out to each side. The leftmost and rightmost "fringe" parties will each get a small proportion of the votes, and the more mainstream parties will get more, but those fringes have much more power than they ever could in a two-party FPTP system.

So when people say, "You say, vote for the democrat, then force them to the left, and then you don't force them to the left"—correct. There is no clear way to force a democratic candidate to the left in our two-party FPTP system. How would one even do that? The only thing leftists can threaten is to not vote, when not voting will certainly benefit the candidate on the right. So, sure, you can do that—if you want your behavior to benefit the right as a way to threaten the left. Some people will make that choice, but not many, because it will help the right!

To be clear: this is fucked! I think this is fucked! But we get nowhere by sticking our heads in the sand about how the electoral system actually works.

I'm not pretending that there's only one right way to act. Our system is fucked and has been for a long time. What I do think is key is understanding how the system actually works and making your decisions from there.

For me, I've often said, "Vote for the democrat for harm reduction, because that will absolutely reduce harm compared to the republican candidate. Then, fight the system." But I realize this maybe wasn't specific enough. What I mean when I say that is: I will vote for Kamala with zero qualms. Because I believe that Trump would be worse for literally every demographic in the world that I care about. To me, that's the only thing the vote is about. Do I agree with Kamala on Israel-Palestine? No. Do I think Trump would be worse for Palestinians and for American Jews (probably for Israeli citizens too)? Absolutely. Do I shudder to think what happened last time Trump had control over creating the Supreme Court? YES.

But when I say, "Then, fight the system," I mean specifically: the number one thing that leftists should be doing if we want to make any headway, if we want to shift that distribution of votes back from the rightward journey its taken in recent years, is to fight to overturn the electoral college and gerrymandering. Every tiny step we take in making our electoral system closer to the popular vote favors both principles of democracy and the left. If we can amend the constitution (this is enormously difficult) to get rid of the Electoral College, then we can turn to changing the electoral system to something other than FPTP.

I do not mean "vote for Kamala and then spend 4 years yelling at democrats for not being leftist enough." I agree: that is a terrible strategy, and will do nothing.

We can't keep ignoring, in between elections, that the voting system itself is where our focus should be! We can't keep pointing fingers at each other, even though we're all acting within the constraints of a fucked system, every time an election comes along! Maybe I'm getting old but I am so weary of this! We can't somehow willpower our way out of the system in which our votes are being cast! We have to change it!

[gaylenin]

i try and be as like. levelheaded responding to people here but like calling me american is such a rage button for me. turns me into a frenzied dog. its such a casual way of showing that nowhere exists to you beyond the US

[southsidestory]

I would really like people outside of the US, who are so quick to point fingers at this entire country when half of us are suffering, to please

sit the fuck down

[starlightseraph]

comrades, don’t kill yourselves.

i know that shit fucking sucks. all of it.

think of all the people in seemingly hopeless situations around the world and throughout history. all the people for whom the world is or was literally ending. all the people who stared down the barrel of a gun or watched as a bomb fell to the ground and who still chose to have hope.

so many people have been in far worse situations or had more immediate tangible threats breathing down their necks.

i’m not saying this to mean that you don’t matter, that your struggle is insignificant.

i only mean that if hope persisted then, hope can persist now. many times before has someone hoped against all hope, fought against all odds, and won.

think of the children who dug through the rubble in hiroshima, in iraq, in korea snd vietnam, and all those who are doing the same in gaza right now. who braved gas and bombs and guns to walk to school in ireland. somewhere in their hearts was a flicker of unlikely hope, one that kept them trying, kept them from falling to the ground silently. we’re not anywhere near that. if they can have even the tiniest amount of hope, then so can you.

the election of one alt-right lunatic over a centre-right genocide funder is not the end of the world. as in, the world will literally keep spinning, the human race will keep existing, and someone somewhere will always be good and worthy of fighting for betterment and even one person like that is cause enough to keep hope alive.

yes, this may bring disasters for women, for queer people, and for the material conditions of many, many within the united states. if only for the abject shameless incoherence of it all.

but there is good. somewhere, in someone. there is hope, as there has always been, from the beginning of time, through plagues that wiped out villages so thoroughly that no one was left to bury the dead, through wars and evil that seemed all encompassing and never-ending.

if you live in the imperial core, i promise that this isn’t the end, and it isn’t as course-of-history altering as you might think. in the aforementioned far worse conditions, which were largely created by the united states itself, people organise, they protest, they laugh. the turn of america ever farther right would have continued regardless of who won. if you truly want change, you cannot achieve it within the us framework. you cannot imagine that voting would save you. it won’t. it may stall, but that’s about it.

the world still spins. human hearts continue beating. we continue to fight and to struggle against a system that made these our only choices, for a revolution, for a better world. it is always possible.

[sorryiwasasleep]

[nuninho2000]

You know what surprises me the most ? Is not the fact Donald Trump won the elections but the fact he won in the popular vote .

I mean , in 2016 when he won the elections he didn't win the popular vote but got elected thanks to the electoral voting system but in this year's elections he won in both .

[havegaysex]

For the record I think people who aren't voting to be much worse and dangerous for democracy at large than people who protest vote.

[tinkerbitch69]

Well… NYX #5 feels particularly poorly timed, huh?

[toddandersonn]

bestie I'm scared for you and luna

I mean... at least he's been banned from running for any government position for the next 7 years, but yeah, they'll find a replacement. Things already don't look great considering that the right-wing candidate won the mayor election in my city last month, so 🫠

[eleventhhourfactor]

They're still counting votes aren't they?

They are, but considering how the popular vote currently stands and where undecided states are leaning, it would take a bombshell moment to turn this ship around.

[natalias-pierogi]

I hate that I have to care and worry about the US election. Bitch why does it have to affect ALL OF THE FUCKIN WORLD, jesus Christ

[tshifty]

.