Well, Obama won.

[seawasp]

Which is better than the only practical alternative.

I did not vote for either one; I knew that New York would be going to Obama barring an act of God directly changing the minds of millions, so I took the opportunity to vote for a third party.

However.

In the next four years, we need to *MAKE* a third party, and WIN, and kick BOTH the Democrats AND Republicans out.

Because honestly? There's not really much difference between Obama and Mitt. The news and each groups' boosters like to talk up the differences like they're huge, insuperable gaps, but they're really both much closer to each other than either of them would have been to, say, Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon, let alone Jimmy Carter or JFK. While Mitt and his party do seem more bound up with the obviously 1% interests, Obama's got plenty of support and interests in those areas as well; he just played the stage somewhat differently.

We need to BREAK the two party system. We need to SHATTER it. It needs to be turned into a system of PEOPLE, not organizations that perpetuate themselves as though the purpose of politics was to perpetuate politics.

Comments

[seawasp]

How does the current system dictate there be two and only two -- legally, rather than by habit? Not saying it doesn't, but I don't recall anything in my own knowledge that says it's so.

There's quite a movement currently for "National Popular Vote", which would seem to eliminate the necessity for any parties at all, let alone two and only two; if a hundred million people voted, and ninety-eight candidates got a million votes, and the 99th got two million, the 99th would be the winner.

[kengr]

And the 99th winning is why such a system would *not* be acceptable. The winner has to get the *majority* of the votes cast, not just more than any other candidate. That 99th candidate may hsave more votes *for* him that the other 98, but he's got 98 million voters who *don't* want him and only 2 million who do.

That's simply not a viable system.

If we are going to have more than two choices, we need a voting system that lets voters list candidates in order of preference. Not necessarily the Australiam system, but one of the several systems in use that *do* allow for such things.

[seawasp]

But the current system doesn't give the Presidency to the person who gets the majority of popular votes. It goes to the guy selected by the electoral college, regardless of whether fifty million people voted to him or none, in theory. So clearly there's no requirement that the person who gets the majority of popular votes wins.

(What happens if guys in the electoral college say "Hey, I'm not voting for either one" and thus make it impossible for a majority to be achieved? Yes, it's never HAPPENED, but I see no reason to believe it's physically impossible)

[murstein.livejournal.com]

What happens if guys in the electoral college say "Hey, I'm not voting for either one" and thus make it impossible for a majority to be achieved?

That could be . . . interesting. Some States make it illegal for an elector to vote for anyone other than the person who won their State; I'm suddenly curious whether those laws are in compliance with the US Constitution. (But not curious enough to do the research tonight.)

The most viable way of getting a President not from the Big Two would be for nearly all the States to adopt proportional voting, instead of nearly all having winner-takes-all. For Congresscritters, it's even easier: You just have to have more people who vote for something other than the Big Two.