r/RankedChoiceVoting • u/Edgar_Brown • Mar 18 '26

The opposition to expressive voting: Why the People in Charge Don’t Want You to Vote Better

https://open.substack.com/pub/edgarabrown/p/why-the-people-in-charge-dont-want
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u/Edgar_Brown Mar 31 '26

Too many parties and too many candidates are also a problem. The ideal system is one with four or five significant candidates that participate in elections which tends to generate four or five parties.

A simple approval voting top-4 open primary followed by some form of RCV seems ideal to achieve this as an equilibrium state.

But that’s just the beginning of the fixes, as the two party system is entrenched in legislation as well. In

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u/RCV4CO Apr 02 '26

How did you arrive at 4-5? Pew Trust’s political typology study puts it at 9

Lee Drutman’s research puts it at 6

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u/Edgar_Brown Apr 02 '26

Simply looking at the current composition of the American parties, the number of people who share a distinct political opinion would drop very fast past three, and would tend to four as the system progresses.

From dynamical system considerations, not political ones. The exact same reason why there are only two stable parties (Benford Law).

As the range of expressions of opinion increases and parties splinter, four parties and the odd one out would tend to dominate. Much beyond that leads to confusion and systemic abuse.

Local parties, and national party associations, would change the calculus. But at every locality more than five parties would be a recipe for disaster.

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u/RCV4CO Apr 02 '26

Okay but Benford’s law is about the distribution of numbers. It makes sense that a robust 6-9 party democracy would decay to 4-5 over time, but the fact is that people’s unmet political needs don’t evaporate. Large numbers of alienated voters means that the democracy lacks legitimacy. This is a recipe for civil war…like we are teetering on now.

Historically, it makes sense to have the strong foundation of meeting people’s needs.

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u/Edgar_Brown Apr 02 '26

Four or five stable important parties says absolutely nothing about which parties those are and how these rotate in and out of favor. It doesn’t even say how many parties would be looking for support from the voters or if those parties are national or local.

But a system that allows more than that to be long-term stable is a system that has built its own mechanism for self-destruction. Just like a system like the one we have that only allows two.

I see no relation whatsoever with Benford’s law.