General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Now do you understand why so many of us termed our vote as being for the lesser of two evils? [View all]PrMaine
(39 posts)Our current electoral system really forces our elections to be between two major parties. Whenever a third party develops any significant strength, the spoiler effect causes the candidate who is most disliked by the voters to win and that danger encourages the two parties that are most alike to merge into one. Having more than two parties is an unstable condition because with three or more parties the majority of voters tend to be so unhappy with the results of elections.
Following one of our elections, half or even more of the electorate is unhappy with the result. But how could we expect any better? In our elections we never bother to ask voters who they dislike - as if that is immaterial.
Suppose instead we allowed voters to choose whether to vote against one candidate or for one candidate (with the net vote being the for-votes less the against-votes). If we had done this in the last election for president, it seems quite possible that both Obama and Romney would have received nearly a zero net vote count - opening up the possibility of electing one of the third party candidates.
Of course with politicians understanding the new system their campaigns would change. The system would penalize a candidate for being divisive and certainly for insulting a large segment of voters so there likely would be fewer negative ads. Since third parties would have a chance it is likely that the media would start to treat them with more respect and help the public to know more about them.
But note that in system terms, it would now be precisely the two-party system that becomes unstable. We would gradually have at least three and probably more significant parties in real competition - and wouldn't that seem better.
Impossible you say? Remember that our elections are at most at the state level. Even in elections of our president we really are voting for a state office official to send to the electoral college. We could try this system at a state level or even at a local level to test how it works.