• Instigate@aussie.zone
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    8 months ago

    I’m often torn when talking about how to vote in US elections because you guys have to balance ideology with the need to be pragmatic far more due to the First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system. The only way that Democrats get a serious signal that they need to move left is by voting for far-left candidates, even those who aren’t on the ballot, but that runs the risk of handing the election to the Republicans.

    Y’all seriously need some Ranked Choice (RC) voting. I have never once voted for a major party number 1 in any election I’ve participated in, and that’s never caused my vote to be ‘wasted’ like it can be under FPTP. Mandatory voting would really help too - it would expose the fact that Republicans only make up around 30% of all people and they’d never be able to govern outside a coalition ever again.

    I firmly believe that if the US got rid of the primary elections and implemented both RC and mandatory voting, we’d be nearing the end of Bernie Sanders’ second term right now.

    • Rinox
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      8 months ago

      It’s not that it runs the risk, it’s a guarantee. There’s no situation in which another more leftist party gaining a significant number of votes doesn’t mean handing the presidency over to the republican party. Fptp is a really bad system.

    • Onihikage@beehaw.org
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      8 months ago

      Y’all seriously need some Ranked Choice (RC) voting.

      I really would like nothing more than to get some tasty, tasty STAR voting up in this mess we call a democracy.

      • HulkSmashBurgers@reddthat.com
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        8 months ago

        It’s always discouraging to me that when the topic of alternate voting methods comes up, RCV is always mentioned as the way to go. It seems to be the alternative voting method most people are familiar with.

        RCV has it’s problems and there are demonstrably better voting systems such as you said STAR voting.

    • OurToothbrush@lemmy.mlM
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      8 months ago

      STAR or ranked choice voting wouldn’t really fix the big issue. The issue is that we live in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, not that we don’t have enough bourgeois parties able to compete.