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Perhaps this question applies more to multi-party systems of the European style rather than the kind of 2 party systems that exist in countries like the US.
So basically, would it make sense if people had 2 votes when voting for a party instead of just 1?
The are 2 big problems with people having only 1 vote. Those problems are that people aren't really that willing to take risks by voting something that isn't already familiar with them which means that people are often willing to hold on to blatantly corrupt political orders even if they themselves actually hate them simply because they are afraid of the unknown and don't want to take risks so they vote the same thing they always do. The second problem is that it is more likely to breed a mindset of "us Vs them" into people by making voting a everything or nothing affair.
If people actually had 2 votes instead of 1, this could be changed dramatically. All of a sudden, people would no longer be forced to vote only for a single party. If they wanted to, they could just give 1 vote for 1 party and another to another party. Picture a scenario: You are unhappy with the manner in which a ruling party is behaving but also aren't really sure if you can trust those other guys. So instead of giving both of your votes only to either the previous guys or only to somebody else, you give 1 of your votes to the old guys and the other to somebody else. In this way you can express your dissatisfaction as a voter without completely giving up on the last guys and thus not make the risk bigger than you would like.
What do you think about my idea? Would this make sense?
I haven't thought this through, but I know much ado has been made about alternative voting systems that could help us get away from our two-party oligarchy.
There are apparently a lot of electoral systems, and I'm sure there are more theoretical ones that haven't actually been tried yet.
As for your idea, well, I know there are places that use a preference system (so, people get multiple votes, and those votes are weighted differently -- you have candidates A, B, C, and D, and you give your first vote to B and your second vote to D, and the second vote is worth less), and this apparently works.
In the United States, people do not vote for "parties". They vote for specific candidates, and can mix their votes in different races between candidates of different parties to the extent that they desire to do so.
Perhaps this question applies more to multi-party systems of the European style rather than the kind of 2 party systems that exist in countries like the US.
So basically, would it make sense if people had 2 votes when voting for a party instead of just 1?
The are 2 big problems with people having only 1 vote. Those problems are that people aren't really that willing to take risks by voting something that isn't already familiar with them which means that people are often willing to hold on to blatantly corrupt political orders even if they themselves actually hate them simply because they are afraid of the unknown and don't want to take risks so they vote the same thing they always do. The second problem is that it is more likely to breed a mindset of "us Vs them" into people by making voting a everything or nothing affair.
If people actually had 2 votes instead of 1, this could be changed dramatically. All of a sudden, people would no longer be forced to vote only for a single party. If they wanted to, they could just give 1 vote for 1 party and another to another party. Picture a scenario: You are unhappy with the manner in which a ruling party is behaving but also aren't really sure if you can trust those other guys. So instead of giving both of your votes only to either the previous guys or only to somebody else, you give 1 of your votes to the old guys and the other to somebody else. In this way you can express your dissatisfaction as a voter without completely giving up on the last guys and thus not make the risk bigger than you would like.
What do you think about my idea? Would this make sense?
No one is "forced" to vote only for a single party now.
No one is "forced" to vote only for a single party now.
In the sense that voting for a third party eliminates a vote for your second choice, the current system does push people to vote for the lesser of two evils in order to keep the greater of two evils from winning.
Put another way, suppose we have candidates A, B, and C, with B the third party candidate. Certain numbers of voters rank them in the following orders.
39 voters: A, B, C
20 voters: C, A, B
2 voters: B, A, C
20 voter: C, B, A
The third group have a strong incentive to vote for Candidate A over their favorite, because they much prefer the outcome of doing so. Voting for their favorite gives the election to their least favorite. Ross Perot basically did exactly this in 1992, and Ralph Nader did it again in 2000.
Some might argue that a runoff system protects against this, but runoffs have their own problems (see the Stanford link in my previous post).
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