The problem with our present system for electing Congresscritters or members of any multimember policymaking body, from any third-partisan’s point of view, is that a first-past-the-post single-member-district system naturally forces a two-party system. Consider: Suppose, in your state’s next election, 10% of the voters vote Libertarian (or substitute Green, or Socialist, or Constitution Party, whatever, same mechanics apply) – how many Libertarians get elected? None, because there are not enough Libertarians in any one district to form a plurality (majority = 50%+; plurality = more votes than any other candidate gets – which is all you need to win). No political party, therefore, can make it save by being a “big tent” party – which leads to the confusion as to, e.g., just what the GOP stands for these days, when it includes libertarians and paleocons and neocons and theocons and bizcons and those factions don’t always see eye-to-eye. That is why America has always had a two-party political system, except when it had a one-party system. There is no room for more than two.
Under a proportional representation system (which most of the world’s democracies use, in one form or another), if the Libertarians get 10% of the votes, they get (more or less) 10% of the seats. There are various forms of PR, but they all have that goal in mind.
“[Legislatures in the United States] should be an exact portrait, in miniature, of the people at large, as it should think, feel, reason, and act like them.” – John Adams
“… the portrait is excellent in proportion to its being a good likeness,…the legislature ought to be the most exact transcript of the whole society… the faithful echo of the voices of the people.” – James Wilson at the Constitutional Convention.
But what we have instead, what the single-member-district winner-take-all system inevitably produces, is more like a distorting funhouse mirror, with some parts of the image-of-the-whole-people grossly exaggerated and others shrunk to invisibility. That is the whole point of Republican gerrymandering, lately, but they didn’t invent it. It is inherent in the SMD system, in fact. PR makes gerrymandering moot or impossible.
See also:
Instant-Runoff Voting: For filling a single seat, presidency, governorship, etc.; though it could also be used to elect legislators. The way it is now, if there are more than two candidates in the race, you have to pick just one – which presents the “spoiler” problem – in 2000, a vote for Buchanan was a vote for Gore and vote for Nader was a vote for Bush. With IRV, you get to rank-order the candidates by preference; if your first choice does not get a majority, your vote still counts to elect your second choice. E.g., you could have voted “1 – Buchanan; 2 - Bush; 3 - Gore; 4 - Nader”; or, “1 - Nader; 2 - Gore; 3 - Bush; 4 - Buchanan”; or whatever order-of-preference seems best to you.
(The similar approval voting or Condorcet system, where you just vote “yes” or “no” as to each of several candidates, does offer certain abstruse-to-all-but-polysci-nerds-even-worse-than-I advantages over IRV. But, I’m thinking IRV is better for America, because, 1) it’s an easier sell – the chances to rank-order the candidates is more psychologically satisfying to the voter; and 2) the results, how the voters rank-order the candidates, produces information of greater civic value.)
Electoral fusion: Simply, one candidate running as the nominee of more than one party (and, perhaps, on more than one ballot line). This strengthens a third party by putting it in a position to offer its endorsement to a major-party candidate (conditional, presumably, on the candidate adopting public positions somewhat closer to the third party’s), which could make all the difference in close races. Fusion is now illegal in most states, however.
All these structural/systemic electoral reforms are pro-multipartisan – meaning, the dominant two parties will vote for them when turkeys vote for Christmas.
However. Remember how women got the vote in this country? Not all at once, that’s how. It was a shocking idea at the time, going against centuries of cultural assumptions that the public realm belongs to men. But California and a few other Western states tried out women’s suffrage, and after a few election cycles with women voting, society there did not collapse; so eventually it became plausible to propose such a reform at the national level.
So it could be with proportional representation, etc. – let a few states try it first for electing state legislatures and local councils and commissions and boards, and see what happens. Then the idea of adopting it for the USHoR, even if that requires a constitutional amendment, becomes easier to sell.
At present, the biggest obstacle to the introduction of proportional representation in America is that nobody knows what it is. I have often asked candidates for public office their opinions on it, and always, it turns out, I have to explain the most basic concepts to them. Everybody always seems to think that by “proportional representation” I mean racial gerrymandering or something.
The best hope for PR, and Instant-Runoff Voting, and Electoral Fusion, in America, is that, some day soon, all the third-party movements in America, from Communist to Constitution, would awaken to the fact that they have a common interest in such basic structural electoral reforms, and that they should join forces, at least on that one particular set of issues. That would make for a very interesting movement.
The question is, can political activists of such widely differing world-views hold their noses and work together?
Third parties in the United States. The “Big Three” are the Libertarians, the Greens, and the Constitution Party. If they all signed on for an electoral-reform movement, the others probably would follow.
I don’t see how.