It's a fun thought experiment. I'm going to cop out and say I just wish my country had more than Republican and Republican Lite to vote for.
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2025
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Doesn't the US have more than two options?
Depending on the voting system, that's basically just a rhetorical reframing.
Would you get the least worst candidate? I would try it.
Another scheme is random selection of a citizen, like jury duty. You have professional civil servants but the leader is randomly selected and if the leader is doing badly it triggers a new selection.
Define badly
Soet of like ranked cboice, which Australia uses.
Better do it like the old Greeks: they voted twice. Once to get someone into office, and once at the end of the term whether to banish him or not.
Elections would take 10,000 years.
There is a system that does exactly this, everyone puts the candidates in their preferred order, and a computer just does the "rounds".
Probably the best way ever, because you end up with the least disliked choice. IIRC. We closed places at work with a system like this, went very well.
But that's still voting for your preferred candidates. The OPs proposal is like doing tribal council from the Survivor TV show but for our government.
reality TV style
You have to play the dead grandma card at exactly the right moment.
No, you submit an ordered list from most preferred to least preferred. The computer then calculates how the TV show would have ejected them one after another.
Of course, you wouldn't get influenced by the TV show etc.
Australian here, this is how our voting system works. My method is literally putting the most repulsive politician last and then working my way up until I get to the least-repulsive.
Politicians dropped from the rounds can nominate another politician of similar views to give their votes to, so eventually the whole thing coalesces into politicians from three or four parties getting elected, but still gives the opportunity for minor parties to become major parties should the standing government of the day really piss people off.
It's a great system. Worth just clarifying that the "nominating" is just the candidate suggesting who to put which numbers next to, not actually them saying who the runoff vote goes to.
You don't have to do it iteratively, just count the sum of the "out" votes from a single voting and the one with the least wins.
Still not a good system in my view, though...
Good point. Let's make it more efficient!
Everybody gets one vote and one veto.
You can vote for anyone, even yourself, but if a single person vetos you, you're out.
Add up the votes, remove everybody with vetos, and there you go!
This is how we end up with a dog president and honestly I’m okay with that.
Might work harder to shut down USPS though.
That's pretty much where I'm at anymore.
That's a really interesting idea.
I would like to see it tested in the real world.
That’s how instant runoff voting works (assuming you’re still starting with a small list of candidates).
I guess it would lead to politicians being even more sycophantic before elections to not exhibit any possible trait that could be seen as negative.
Not a good system, I think.
They already do that.
As others said, the practical interpretation of OP's idea would be that you just vote down all the candidates you don't want to win. Then the least-disliked (read: most moderate and inoffensive) candidate wins. Good. This is what should happen. Government should be moderate and boring. In an ideal world the government would never be in the news because things are going well and nothing of note is happening.
I don't trust anyone TOO perfect. Eliminate him!
Or just let them compete on an island which gets smaller and smaller until there's just one person standing!
HUNGER GAMES style.
And put them all in the Big Brother house and film them 24/7.
Do we send the candidates off to a desert island to survive for a couple weeks while this is happening?
Honestly with how much of a reality show the US already is, I'm surprised this hasn't been tried and televised lol
My solution to politics: if 50,000 people vote that we should execute you, we execute you. Pretty soon there would be no politicians left.
You realize that most people dislike taxes more than they like functioning schools, right?
As a sudden change that does something. I'm less excited about the steady state. I think nobody does anything publicly that could get attention, because being known gets you killed with surprisingly high probability.