this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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It's only because American Democracy is dead and burried that there are no other choices than these two geriatics.
Healthy and trully Democratic systems naturally respond to a situation such as this by having more choices.
... which many countries don't have, because 'First Past the Post' systems naturally lead to only 2 viable choices.
They'll also be an election coming up soon in the UK - I can choose between 'Sensible Conservative' or the currently ruling 'Lunatic Conservative', but anything else would be a wasted vote.
Somewhere between -'anything else is a wasted vote' and 'leftists who refuse to vote for the lesser of two evils are enabling fascism' - is political leverage to push for better policy.
That leverage doesn't exist when the majority of Americans have an IQ under 95.
Edit: in case the downvoters think i'm just being crass and elitist, the US has a relatively lower IQ score than the rest of the developed world and the average global IQ by definition is 100. I bring up cognitive intelligence scores as a means of illustrating that your average voter in the US doesn't or can't comprehend warring political ideologies and the implications a 2nd Trump presidency will have, as illustrated by working class folks continually voting R.
You cheapen and undermine your argument when you start talking about IQ like that, it conflates some arbitrary measure of intelligence with politics and ideology which has nothing to do with intelligence. Plenty of people who are absurdly booksmart with super high IQs are complete rightwing nutjobs or believe in utterly ridiculous bullshit conspiracy theories that drive their politics.
The cancer is in our cultural belief systems (and alarming lack of empathy as a grounding value) not our brains.
Republican alaska instituted a four candidate IRV system. Its bonkers that people aren't talking about reforming the US presidential election system to something similar. Not to mention a national initiative system. I know these would require constitutional amendments but it doesn't require an amendment to talk about it.
A constitutional amendment isn't necessary to achieve a substantial part of what's necessary for presidential election reform. States choose how to allocate their electors, and could choose to do so proportionally. At least two states already do this. If even just a few key states allocated electors proportionally, the biggest problems with presidential elections would be addressed, specifically, candidates winning the election despite losing the popular vote.
Allocating electors proportionally is probably the easiest path to more sensible elections because states already control this, but more importantly, it's an easy sell to citizens. Convincing citizens of a state to allocate all electors based on the national popular vote despite how its citizens vote is really difficult - no one wants their electoral power to go to a candidate they don't like. The approach has been to get a group of state to agree.
In contrast, convincing citizens to allocate their state's electors proportionally is fairly easy - no one wants their electoral power to go to a candidate they don't like. Support for that doesn't need multiple states to agree. It can proceed individually, and each time it passes, there's an immediate effect. The most important places would be large swing states. It would probably only take Florida, Ohio and Michigan to prevent any realistic chances of an unpopular candidate winning. But you don't need them per se. You could target Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and a few others. Even if just a few states agree, the impact would be very large.
Oh yeah, I lived in the UK for over a decade, right after having lived in The Netherlands (who have Proportional Vote) for almost a decade, and am well aware of just how horribly rigged the British voting and political system are, especially after Brexit (which I saw first hand, after which I did my own personal Leave of a country I, frankly, see no positive future for)
My own country, Portugal, has it's own rigged system that gives nice 15% boosts to representativeness versus actual votes received, for the 2 major parties, though fortunatly it's not just one seat per electoral circle, so whilst nowhere as Democratic as PV at least there are 8 parties with parliamentary representation, small parties still get half the parliamentarians that their votes would've yielded under PV (unlike in the UK where the Green Party gets 1 million votes in 40 million - so 2.5% of votes - and ends up with 1 seat in 600 - so about 0.15% of seats), and even with the rigging the upcoming elections (next month) do not seem on track to yield a parliamentary majority for any one party.