Most european countries use 2 round elections or proportional representation.
In Britain, they use First-Past-The-Post.
Ranked Choice ftw.
It would be possible to get a majority and take all with only 23% of the votes. The David Cameron Tories won with 27%. We need a PR system.
PR will only work if safeguards can be put in place beforehand to prevent one or more parties (political or individual) in an alliance causing a complete government shutdown every time they don’t get their way.
What are the odds, do you think, that such safeguards would be put in place when the larger political parties prefer FPTP?
It’s good enough for all the parties internally.
Same shit in Canada or Quebec, take a look at Quebec 2022, 3 parties got ~15% of the vote, check the number of seats:
It would be helpful if this included an explanation, rather than just an assertion. Can you explain how FPTP allows this, and how proportional representation fixes it?
You decide to create your own party. The Chocolate Party.
Under FPTP, after intense campaigning, you get 21% of the votes nationally. It’s a huge achievement. 1 out 5 people trusted you. Millions of people voted for you. Sadly, you only won 1 race. You were defeated in the other races. So you get 1 representative in parliament. The millions of people who voted for you ? Their voice is underrepresented.
Under proportional representation, if you win 15% of the total votes, you automatically get 15% of the seats in Parliament. Every single vote matters.
Another negative consequence of FPTP is that it discourages people from creating new political parties when your society is divided.
Many Canadians voted for the liberal party of Mark Carney. Why? Because they didn’t want Pierre Poilievre to be Prime Minister. They don’t like the Liberal Party. But they were afraid that voting Green or NDP would split the votes.
Many americans vote for a Democrat because they fear that if they don’t, the Republican candidate will win. Many americans vote Republican because if they don’t, they fear the Democratic candidate will win. Everyone is afraid that splitting the vote means the people they really don’t want in power will win.
CGP Gray has a good explanation how FPTP works and how it breaks down and ends up typically collapsing down into a 2 party system or is wildly unrepresentative in multi party systems.
Basically fptp is a winner take all system, whoever gets the most votes wins and beats everyone else in the race. It doesn’t matter if you won by 1 vote or by 1 million votes the result is the same, you won. So if one party can maintain just a slim plurality across numerous districts, they win those districts despite not getting the majority of votes and everyone else’s votes essentially do not count in the greater whole.
There is no voting system that fulfills all the Condorcet criteria; they all have some corner case
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
What is your reason for saying that?
Just saying something negative makes it seem like it’s a bad idea, but that just encourages people not to change at all. A voting system that tries to satisfy the Condorcet criteria will be far better than any FPTP system.
It’s easier to tear down than it is to build up. What’s your proposed alternative?
Did you make a similar comment to OP, who only spoke negatively of a well-used and well-understood system?
What is OP’s proposed alternative? What’s a realistic plan to get there?
Did you make a similar comment to OP, who only spoke negatively of a well-used and well-understood system?
What is OP’s proposed alternative? What’s a realistic plan to get there?
Here’s what OP said in the body of their post.
Most european countries use 2 round elections or proportional representation.
Although I’m not sure when they wrote that. The post was edited, so it’s possible that it wasn’t there when you first saw the post, and didn’t re-check the post before writing this comment.
Yes, it’s very interesting.
Ranked choice’s corner case is non-monotonicity, meaning you can harm your chosen candidate by ranking him higher. That’s why I prefer something like range voting.
I also prefer range or approval voting
Correct!!
Everyone loves to whine about the system when a corner case hits, but they all have corner cases. You have to pick your poison.
Sounds like a shitty system!
What other European country uses two round elections apart from France?
