Sidebar - Political Scientist Hat

Someone on Facebook mentioned that Maine passed ranked choice voting.

This is the kind of dull and boring topic that I wish more people found interesting.  Especially if it forced us to consider different structures.

See, the rules we pass affect how politics are played.  Just as the rules in baseball, football and basketball do.  The NFL may decide to change where the line of scrimmage is on an extra point kick.  You're still playing football, but the decisions you make will be different.

Same thing in politics.  Americans have been complaining for years that we don't have a viable third party.  That our choices are often limited to two candidates that we don't really like, and are forced to pick the lesser of two evils.  (voting in the primaries is one way to help change that, but unfortunately the less politically active ones don't do that.)

There are some big systemic reasons why that happens.  Some have to do with the whole 'first past the post'  thing.  You have to have enough support to win, or you get nothing.  Even if you have support from a third of all the voters, if you didn't get the most votes you won't have any representation.  It also means people are afraid to vote their consciences, since a vote for that third party might allow your least favorite candidate to win instead.  (That's what Maine's new law would address.  Vote for your first choice.  Election officials will see if any candidate has a clear majority.  If not, they eliminate the candidate with the least support and assign those votes to their second choice, and so on until there's a candidate with a majority)

This may encourage more people to vote third party, but it still means those third parties have no influence unless they get a majority somewhere.

I personally like mixed member proportional representation, because you vote for your candidate and your preferred party... And the legislature is created to represent the proportion of those votes.  So you get your preferred candidate, AND if 20% of the population votes libertarian, or green, or constitution, or whatever... they also get a seat in the legislature.   It does mean you're more likely to build coalitions, but I think it's a little more clear how much support there is for, say, Christian Conservatives vs.  Libertarians and you don't have one party trying to meet the (sometimes conflicting) needs of both.

Our original rules are one part of this, and I don't think mixed member proportional representation was something anyone had thought of yet when we created the Constitution.  Unfortunately, there's been some changes that make it even more difficult for a viable third party.  (we've had third parties in the past, or rather one party would fall apart and get replaced by another.  The Federalist Party, Whigs, etc.)

Thing is, in their quest to continue winning elections the two major parties have voted in laws that consolidate their holds.  And make it even harder for a third party to win.  Gerrymandering is part of that, of course.  But so are laws that require more signatures to get on the ballot if you're not backed by the existing parties.  Then there's the media, which just doesn't give other parties the visibility and attention needed to get elected.

Our two parties do tend to co-opt issues that start gaining support, so it's not as though they're completely out of touch.  Plus we've got polls (when they ask the right questions and have an accurate method of analyzing the data).

Still, there's a reason the average American gets sick of being presented with choices that only barely match what we want.  (though that collective 'we'  is funny, in that the issue I care about most may not be what someone else cares about.  So we're both unhappy with our choices, but for different reasons)

One of the terms I dislike most come election time is the concept of a mandate.  Just because you won, doesn't mean you have a mandate for your full agenda.  You might have won because we're punishing the current party, or because most of us want decriminalized or legalized marijuana, but maybe we don't actually want to privatize social security.

Of course, given the muddle of a two party system (and the outsized influence of money), it's sort of a guessing game for the winners to figure out which promises to pursue first and hardest.  Sure, there's polling to help sort that out.  And some people may not have a specific preference, other than "Fix it",  but if you guess wrong then at the next election the voters will be voting to punish you.

Or just voting against you because the economy tanked.