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?
There is no future in this country so long as we use First Past The Post voting.
If yall dont want a future, thats fine by me. I never had one in the first place.
Fully agree, but posted this more as theory on a potential way out of a two party hegemony. It also requires a lot of time and trust building to have any effect, so probably not applicable to US’s current crisis. But there are a lot of countries that still use FPTP in some fashion, it might be applicable there.
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
If I’m this confused now, I can’t imagine what the average American voter would think when presented with this.
For the average voter it’s not much different than a regular political party: vote for this candidate if we endorse them. The actual math and projections of when to trigger this can be coordinated and agreed on by people you/your local representative trust.
The theory is simple but it probably would be trial and error in practice. For example, if our actual turnout votes for an endorsed candidate differ from our pledged voters by X% then we need to increase our number of pact members proportionally before triggering.
Easier to just invade the primaries of the traditional party. I think a lot of our problems as a nation come from poor primary turnout.
Would this be similar to what you’re thinking of?
Very similar, but that’s only at the national level and controlled by establishment parties. I could see, for example, Texas + Florida + other red states falsifying their election results or ramping up legal disenfranchisement to capture blue state votes.
There’s also no inherent political unity in that agreement, any state could (should?) break the pact if they think it’s in the best interest of their voters. Either way I think they would be careful not to allow anything that significantly disrupts the system.
This theoretical system is driven by popular policy, no popular vote or fair representation comes into play. There could be a far right psuedo-party in the same way as a progressive left. At the end of the day achieving a critical mass is still needed to trigger the pact/win the election.
In practice it might not get as far to the left/right as you want, but this release valve would prevent the Overton window from being pushed way outside of popular opinion. I think a key outcome would be pushing in election reform candidates, eventually replacing this impromptu system with proper representation.
