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Democratic Party escalates efforts to block third parties from US presidential ballot (www.wsws.org)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] -4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I, unfortunately, think that would be a good thing. People don't understand just how powerless and meaningless 3rd parties are and how totally manipulated they are by the existing party structure.

I say unfortunate, because that's not ideal. In a functioning democracy, robust 2nd and 3rd tier parties should play a powerful active role in setting policy and be enabled to negotiate from strong positions and form opposition coalitions. But that's NOT the system we have and voting 3rd party will never make it into a system like that. The system we have is broken and packed with malware written in legalese. 3rd parties are extra processes that do nothing but steal system resources and help the barely functional democratic process to crash.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

I think most third party voters are single-issue and understand that their vote is more of a protest than anything else. Even in a FPTP, non-ranked voting system, third parties are good for bringing niche concerns to the national discussion and their policies are sometimes co-opted by one of the larger two.