premature insurgerator

One of the many reasons the 2nd impeachment is worth it: it kept the coward from trying anything more in his last days.

you're not wrong, but then again, the bare minimum represents a vast improvement

Absolutely!

+ loads of independants dont belong to a party

Also barely a theory, more of a random notion. I'm not interested in politics at all in general.

Thinking about it a bit more, using occams razor.. Its a lot simpler to assume that the main problem is that basically unfettered corporations pretty much run the US with their insane lobbying power and intimate relationship with government.. and changing the system of voting and whatnot wouldnt really make any difference.

you don't say.

Take that Occam's razor approach to the realization that America is not a democracy, but an oligarchy. The powers that be would never allow ranked voting because it would result in a deconsolidation of their political sway.

It would spawn a political environment requiring more politicians to pay off, and a (quite ironic) free market of competitive donation demand.

So yeah, we're going to be a two party system for the rest of our lives unless the GOP actually can't control their base and it fractures like a half-hatched egg on a dirty sidewalk.

Fingers crossed.

It's a catch-22 because the parties that get into power have zero interest in changing the system that gets them power. That's if you take the cynical assumption that parties exist to get elected, not to govern fairly or whatever.

Here in Canada the Liberals promised in the 2015 election that "this will be the last election with first-past-the-post" (i.e. plurality voting within a district). Once in power they did some studies and concluded that they didn't want to change the system after all. Surprise surprise.

I like the Canadian system of having a local Member of Parliament that in principle represents a small enough number citizens, so that said citizens can reasonably go and talk to their MP. Unfortunately with big mega-parties, those MPs are more responsible to their party leadership than to their actual voters.

I don't like standard proportional representation because it necessarily requires a larger number of candidates per voting district and thus dilutes that "local representation" that I want. My favourite system is one typically called "ranked ballot", "instant run-off", or "transferrable vote".

Basically you keep the districts the same, but you rank your candidates. Upon tallying the votes, the system basically does an instant multi-round election where the candidate with the least rank-1 votes gets eliminated, and any voters who chose them instead have their 2nd rank upgraded to 1st. You proceed until only 2 candidates are left and then the majority takes it. In this system, every single voter who completed a ballot gets to have a say on the binary choice between the final 2 candidates without apriori excluding other options.

The main downside of ranked ballot is that it sorta sounds complicated and the established powers explicitly use that in their attack ads. In British Columbia we had a referendum about moving to proportional representation and the Liberal party ran radio ads telling people the system was confusing without even explaining it. The thing is it's not actually that complicated, it's just that the current system is so established that we take its complexities for-granted.

Anyways, I'm pro-reform and I'd still support proportional representation even if it's not my favoured system.

Shit, missed the reply:

"The main downside of ranked ballot is that it sorta sounds complicated and the established powers explicitly use that in their attack ads."

Which is exactly why ranked voting will never take place in America. Half of the voting populace are so brain-dead that Republicans could shoot down any reform by calling it a "commie tactic".