We don’t need more ideas, we need the political will to try one. And that is the real problem.
But to your main point: the will is not in publishing this, but in spending every day winning hearts and minds in small town bars and community centers. I could certainly use some help.
My personal favorite approach at the national level would be Ranked Choice [1], as that would preserve the (IMO important) single decision maker in the executive branch, while removing the incentive to vote for someone you hate just because they aren't as bad as the Other Guy. Interested to hear if HN knows of other/better ways to accomplish the same
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...
The problem with Ranked Choice with more than two parties is that the centrist parties tend to win more often because they are more likely to be the second choice of people whose first choice is a left or right leaning party. That can be a problem if they get 100% of the power when they win.
PR is better because how much power each party has depends on what percentage of the votes they get in the first round (there not being subsequent rounds), so it is unlikely they will get 100% of the power and everyone's vote counts because it increases the power of the party they voted for.
With Ranked Choice, you may end up getting your second or third choice instead and your first choice then has little to no power.
Most of the democracies in the world today use PR (at least 2/3rds) instead of FPTP (about 1/3rd). Ranked Choice is less common.
Otherwise, I'm as much in favor of RCV as the next guy, or maybe more. New York implemented RCV for some smaller-scale things, so I was happy to actually do a ranked choice, instead of putting all my vote into strictly one option, last time I voted.
That being said, this state government seems rather large for Minnesota, a state with a population of six million people. 67 senators and 134 representatives, and that's within the clunky three-branch system of government copied from the US Federal Government. Those numbers are bigger than California's which has a population that is five times larger.
I'm not sure what the right ratio is, but the level of disenfranchisement is palpable.
* the 2 extremes: far-right, far-left
* the 2 biggest one: Milei and Cristina
* Like 3 small/medium in the middle
So you can select something in between. They work as informal alliances, so the parties in the middle most of the time align with one of the big ones, but they may switch in particular cases.
It makes it harder for the big parties to do very stupid things, but they can manage to do stupid things anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My concept is that the whole idea of two-parties-bad appeals to people who are more interested in parties than policies. I don't think it matters what the name of the party is if they have the same policies.
This post is an interesting mathematical exercise, but RCV actually has the potential to succeed.
Only when there is a sizable number of disgruntled voters who are unhappy with both the red and the blue, and would vote for specific decent people, not party affiliation, then RCV has a fir chance of being adopted, I assume.
But I do like the idea of list systems. Geographic districts are an artifact of slow communications, which don't exist any more. My neighbors and I have fewer overlapping interests than they did in the past.
Also, having viable third party choices puts more pressure on larger parties to field more widely palatable candidates, or risk losing their majorities
If someone doesn’t tow the party line, the party would immediately replace them the next year and this would give parties even more power.
