I would suggest that the solution is less voting. Ballots are insanely complicated and there’s absolutely zero knowledge the average person has about whether any of the people are good candidates. So then they turn to their favorite voting guides which just shifts the power to unaccountable political groups instead of making the single representative you elect responsible for figuring it out. And there’s too many elections - non presidential year elections give the power to a motivated and vocal minority which is not what you want because it lets shit stirrers seize control when no one is paying attention.
Parliamentary systems are the only democratic systems I’m aware of that ever features more than 2 parties in a FPTP system as well.
It's not just about candidates for positions. I live in Colorado which allows citizen ballot initiatives and it's allowed us to reject actions of the government the populace disagrees with or to enact change they refuse to. A few notable examples are rejecting the 1976 winter Olympics from being hosted in Denver and the legalization of medical and recreational marijuana. Our ballots tend to be large and all citizens are mailed out what is know as "the blue book" months before the election which is a comprehensive guide to all the non-candidate questions including pros/cons and financial breakdowns. Between this and all-mail voting, we had the second highest voter turnout in 2020 and an extremely political engaged and knowledgeable electorate. I definitely would not trade it for less say in the political process.
> accompanied by competent, autonomous civil services. That’s not something America has.
That's a bold claim. The federal system can be incompetent and isn't autonomous. But lower level local ones tend to be especially if far away from politically contentious topics until you get to counties that are really small. Representative elections are both about accountability and about representation so I don't have to worry about minutia. As long as rules are followed and you have systems that remove influence peddling (not so much appointments as above-board job interviews with many candidates), then you can let failing to follow such rules be a scandal that takes out the politician that tried to corrupt the system.
Or we could have more elections, with each focusing on a specific topic. The biggest advantages here are that you only have to vote in elections you care about and that the more we exercise a process the better we get at it. Of course the time burden on voters is greater.
Or we could invert a lot of the races. I am college educated but never involved in law, how can I reasonably pick a judge or DA? What I want is my representatives to choose one, and then have a very low threshold for a special election to fire (“recall”) the person if they do a bad job. And only need that because my representatives have shown that they won’t.
Any sort of non-in-person voting is a security nightmare. But I am very sympathetic to the people who want to make it easier. I think we should vote on a Saturday or Sunday instead of a weekday, we should make it a federal holiday in order to close as many businesses as possible, and I think that employers who stay open should be required to give paid time off to vote, that doesn’t count against vacation or sick leave.
Re: FPTP vs ranked choice/condorcet/instant runoff/etc
In US elections, any alternative voting system would essentially require computers. With all the complexity, problems and mistrust that they bring. Also those alternative systems are subject to gamification as shown in recent elections in Alaska and France. No fraud or illegality, but the will of the people was arguably thwarted by introduction of confounding candidates.
Re: parliamentary vs US representation
US was designed to have a true republic (not a democratic republic) but with a democratic lower house as a counterbalance to a non democratic upper house. The 17th amendment screwed us as it made sure that all the drama from the lower house spread to both houses, and now our congress is entirely captured by lobbyists as every legislator now has to worry about financing campaigns. It wasn’t supposed to work that way.
The US was not supposed to be one big country with uniform laws. It was supposed to be N number of mostly independent states with a common currency + a common defense + a safeguards against states taking advantage of each other. The basic assumption is that most laws are not one-size-fits-all, and that each state should be largely autonomous and figure out the laws that work best for that state’s citizens.
The more people you try to put under the same set of laws, the more likely it is that the weak will be taken advantage of by the strong. Take California water management- the populous cities, in true democratic fashion, determine what farmers can do with the water on and under their land, and special interests can contribute to campaigns for favor and end up getting water rights to water on your land, because democracy!
But all these are the “why” of the US election system, which is kinda orthogonal to how we vote and count.
> US was designed to have a true republic (not a democratic republic) but with a democratic lower house as a counterbalance to a non democratic upper house. The 17th amendment screwed us as it made sure that all the drama from the lower house spread to both houses, and now our congress is entirely captured by lobbyists as every legislator now has to worry about financing campaigns. It wasn’t supposed to work that way.
That's a pretty rose-tinted description. The 17th amendment came about because the Senate was cartoonishly corrupt under the previous system. It should tell you something that it was ratified by the very state legislatures whose power it diminished.
I find it interesting that all the countries that the US "helped" to democratize all end up with a parliamentary system instead of the US system. Unfortunately I suspect the US is just stuck with it.
I find it very funny that in star trek, the orwell, star wars; the governing body has always 2 aliens per race because you have that weird 2 people from every state… so naturally the whole multiverse must be governed by the same absurd system :D
> Ballots are insanely complicated and there’s absolutely zero knowledge the average person has about whether any of the people are good candidates.
You can say this with a straight face about the presidential election because it's a statistical tie. But it's laughable at the municipal/county level. Even at the state level it's often not true-- e.g., in Ohio were savvy enough to reject a marijuana legalization referendum (which they overwhelmingly wanted!) because it would have given a tiny cartel control over growing it. That caveat wasn't in the text of the referendum IIRC, so somehow a majority of Ohioans defeated it using their "absolutely zero knowledge" of the inner workings of that proposed law.
> So then they turn to their favorite voting guides which just shifts the power to unaccountable political groups instead of making the single representative you elect responsible for figuring it out.
There's a human web of trust lots of voters use to navigate the complexity of voting. The more local you get the more effective it is. At the municipal level there's a chance you're web includes the people directly involved in an issue, in addition to people who can help you judge the veracity of those people!
> And there’s too many elections - non presidential year elections give the power to a motivated and vocal minority which is not what you want because it lets shit stirrers seize control when no one is paying attention.
Sounds like you're hedging here-- what exactly does "give the power to" mean? If you're saying that special interests have more power to slip in corrupting legislation or install lackeys during an off-year, that's definitely not true. The worst stuff gets passed through when there's a lot of noise to cover it-- like presidential elections or national disasters.
Parliamentary systems are the only democratic systems I’m aware of that ever features more than 2 parties in a FPTP system as well.