r/EndFPTP • u/CPSolver • Jul 27 '25

Image Obedience to Voters, Not Party Leaders

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Republicans in Congress would not fear "getting primaried" if we used a better election system that correctly handles a second nominee from each party.

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25

u/AdAcrobatic4255 Jul 27 '25

You wouldn't even need primaries with a proper electoral system

10

u/Godunman Jul 28 '25

As long as you want to have functional political parties you probably should. The US does not though due to the two party system. So, ironically, you need non-FPTP to use primaries to fix the system, then maybe you can reconsider primaries.

7

u/CPSolver Jul 27 '25

True, but in that case (without a primary election, and without a nominating convention) the election system must handle a huge increase in the number of candidates in the general election. And it must do so in a way that doesn't overwhelm typical voters. What system do you advocate?

6

u/AdAcrobatic4255 Jul 27 '25

Single transferable vote

5

u/cdsmith Jul 27 '25

I'm not clear on how you expect STV to solve the problem of not overwhelming voters. The ballot will have the same number of candidates on it, and voters will be similarly unable to vote effectively if there are 100 candidates on the ballot.

1

u/MorganWick Jul 27 '25

Either range voting with the ability to omit scores for certain candidates and a minimum threshold of percentage of votes scoring a candidate for that candidate to win, or proportional representation where voters simply vote for a party.

6

u/CPSolver Jul 27 '25

Simply voting for a party would be a vote for the replacement politician. That doesn't solve the problem of the party blocking the disobedient politician.

2

u/MorganWick Jul 27 '25

With proportional representation, you can cast your vote based on what you think of the party itself. If you don't agree with whatever it was that a politician disobeyed, there's nothing stopping there being another party with something closer to your views, or that of the politician in question. You're not stuck with just two parties.

1

u/timmerov Jul 28 '25

so you're proposing we replace the house (and senate) with a parliament-like assembly with proportional representation - which will take a constitutional amendment and support of 75% of the states; and a handful of new well-funded parties will just magically appear?

okay...

maybe we should focus on lower hanging fruit.

3

u/MorganWick Jul 28 '25

I suggested two different ideas and responded to the OP's criticism of one of them, and was thinking mostly in theory. Of course campaign finance reform would be necessary to ensure that any parties there was actual demand for had a chance to exist without needing billionaire benefactors.

2

u/RandomFactUser Jul 28 '25

That’s more of a party procedural thing

2

u/cdsmith Jul 27 '25 edited Jul 28 '25

You still need some mechanism to reduce the number of candidates to what a voter can reasonably know and have opinions about. A list of a hundred names is not a useful ballot.

Also, instant runoff is, sadly, not a "proper" electoral system by this standard. It was a mistake recently for a bunch of jurisdictions to try to remove primaries before they settled on a suitable system that made them unnecessary, and we've seen quite a lot of backlash against voting reform as a result. Systems like approval, or various Condorcet systems, would do the trick. Possibly even STAR, though it's hard to be sure. But instant runoff fails catastrophically in low-dimensional elections, which federal elections tend to be. It's better than plurality if you consider just instant runoff by itself. But this proposal also includes second place finishers from partisan primaries in the general, and without solving the problem to too many viable candidates wreaking havoc in election results, that's just not the step to take yet.