The flaws of FPTP voting are generally well known at this point. Extremely popular policies are given no platform in the US two party system. But could a grassroots network of vote compacts negate the spoiler effect?
A big-tent psuedo-party could hold a parallel primary before elections, agreeing to use all votes for a candidate if a critical threshold is reached. A green light candidate would need 51% (+ X% margin) of internal votes and ~40% of total election votes (varying by historical election turnout). Otherwise the voters default to least evil of the two party system.
The first question is legality, which I have no clue on. However, political parties are built on the idea of shared voting power, so I don’t see how any argument against this scheme would make sense.
The second question would be logistics. Validating public voter identities is easy enough, but there would need to be a system of representative conventions to maintain trust. A local group proving unity by winning a local election would grant them access to a higher tier, up to the national level.
Obviously there are more complexities in reality (eg: the US electoral college, real life voter loyalty, etc…), but could it work?
I think this would rely on community activism; in America today most activism is internet based, and not neighborhood oriented.
So, I think this has happened before, but not since the collapse of local community politics in the 1980s; but someone more knowledgeable of history could probably find examples from the 1970s and 1960s or earlier.
it’s a great idea and definitely could be used as a stop gap; and I hope to see it used later as community activism gets a reboot later.
But if it can work before then, that would be great