239
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
239 points (90.8% liked)
Ask Lemmy
26916 readers
1730 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's an inevitable conclusion of our winner take all voting system. "The man with the most votes wins." If 4 candidates run, and they get 22% 22% 16% and 40% of the vote, the man with 40% of the vote wins the race, and 60% of the population didn't get the candidate they voted for.
Now imagine you've got a red, orange, green and blue party. Orange voters get together and decide "You know, the Red party's platform is pretty similar to ours, what if we didn't run a candidate next time and instead encouraged our voters to vote for the Red candidate instead? The blue candidate won with 40% of the vote, but our two parties put together would have 44%.
In the next election with three candidates, the red candidate wins 44% to 40%, prompting a similar conversation at the Green party headquarters. Soon enough there are two parties.
We're one of if not the oldest representative democracy in the world today; our constitution is 250 years old, there's some old bugs still in the code base.