US Authoritarianism

We just need the correct voting system.

Approval or STAR would be best.

There's momentum behind the false start, RCV. That system is fundamentally broken in many of the exact same ways as First Past the Post.

RCV is also broken in wholly unique ways. Like failing monotonicity. It's the only system where showing a candidate more support can cause them to lose, and cause your least favorite to win.

The guy who first invented the system (a nerd named Condorcet, living some 200 years ago) took and set it aside as a bad idea.

Then a couple other nerds messed with it to make STV, the single transferable Vote, which is actually a multi-winner system.

Some other nerds just flat out resurrected Condorcet's failed voting system as IRV, or instant runoff voting. This was a bad idea, but at the time there weren't many other options. (The Condorcet Method is clunky and still broken, and Condorcet died in prison after criticizing the newly written French constitution as not being very egalitarian)

Anyway, skipping ahead to the 1990s and an organization called FairVote pops up pushing a renamed version of IRV as a fix to every single election problem ever.

But the thing is, by this point we knew that it wasn't.

See first a dude named Durverger came along and figured out that First Past the Post was shit. But in a math way.

Durverger's Law shows that over time, any voting population using First Past the Post will fall into a Two Party system. There are no exceptions due to what is called the Spoiler Effect.

Then in the 1970s a dude named Kenneth Arrow got his PhD showing that any ranked voting system is subject to the same faults as First Past the Post, just at different places in the process. (Arrow's Impossibility Theorem)

Which is where we come back to Approval and STAR. Both are Cardinal voting systems. You do not rank candidates against each other, but rate them independently against an arbitrary scale, like 0-5. Then you simply count the ratings. Since two (or more) candidates can have the same rating, the spoiler effect never comes into play. Making cardinal voting systems the only voting systems that can support viable third parties.

Approval is dead simple and is actually fairly old. It was used for a few centuries to elect Popes until some nastiness and war with multiple people claiming to be the rightful Pope.

STAR was invented a decade ago with the use of computer modeling and population surveys and shit. It's literally the best voting system designed to date. Provided your goal is giving the most people possible a voice in your election.