this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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Politics
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Actually, write-ins are a thing, so you literally can vote for anyone else than him and Trump.
This rhetoric that a vote for someone who represents you is a waste if they do not have a realistic chance to win, would equally apply to an unequal match-up of Dem vs Rep, but it's never deployed that way; it's only used to argue against smaller candidates. You never see people arguing that Democrats should have voted for a Reagan because a vote for Mondale, who had a 0% chance to win (he only won one state- his home state of Minnesota), was "a waste".
Voting has to be about political representation, otherwise Democracy is just a veneer for selecting a plutocrat or oligarch to be the new figurehead for a while. Half of Trump's appeal was his (fake) rhetoric that he wasn't that, which Republican voters actually acknowledged they'd been selecting for years. Too many Democrats have yet to admit this to themselves about our party-preferred candidates. Obama won with record numbers, both terms, because he wasn't this.
Obama was one of those '0% chance' candidates early in the primaries according to political pundits in 2008, too.
No one has a chance to win until people actually vote for them.
Get involved at the state level to implement ranked choice voting. It is the first and most important political change.
https://fairvote.org/
I prefer Approval Voting, but no voting system by itself will solve the two party system. We need to move to proportional representation. Something like 5 member districts using Sequential Proportional Approval Voting would be ideal.
But really, anything is leagues ahead of single-winner "choose one."
Yes to everything you just said.
I have one counter example against proportional representation vs districts that worries me. Harvey Milk won his city supervisor post after San Francisco moved from proportional to district. This was because a lot of gay people lived in his neighborhood. I don’t think he would have won in a proportional election. Will similar minorities now be oppressed by the majority if we move to proportional?
It would depend on how you set up your proportional system. There's a million ways to do it. Under my favorite system, 5-member proportional districts, yes, Harvey would have been elected. The legislator is cut into districts, each district has five members, who are elected using some proportional or semi-proportional method (again, I like harmonic approval). Harvey likely would have won one of the seats in his local district.
I'd have to look up the previous method San Francisco used in order to understand how the council used to work. The proportional method might have been pretty terrible.