Abolish nomination by state-run primary election. The state has no business conducting an election to determine a party nomination. The United States, so far as I know, is the only democracy in the world to indulge in this bizarre practice, and it’s also the only democracy with only two viable political parties. The two are not unrelated.
Better still: Allow every party, including the minor ones, to use state facilities to run its own primary. There would be a Libertarian Primary and a Green Primary and so on.
A more accurate one is “How can we unjigger the system to remove the obstacles placed by the incumbent major parties?”
State-run primaries for small parties can be ugly, because the small party membership gets swamped by ideological outsiders and kooks. We’ve had situations where third parties have gained temporary and local “major party” status in Illinois (“major party” = 5% of the vote in a given jurisdiction = state-run primary in that jurisdiction for the next election), and it never helps the party. Instead, the party loses control of its own nominating process, and becomes a “flag of convenience” by which outsiders can gain ballot access for the fall election.
I’d prefer to see the state decoupled from the nominating process for all parties, which I believe would lead to more numerous and more ideologically coherent political parties. Even countries with first-past-the-post systems (UK, Canada, Australia) support more than two viable parties when the parties control their own nominations.
So make it a “closed primary” system (you have to pick a party when you register to vote and you can vote in that party’s primary and no other’s).
Well, I’ll be. Thanks, BrainGlutton. Now I know the name. Works pretty well in NY, too.
Runoffs.
They don’t have to be instant; there’s little benefit to an IRV system, and it’s just a tad geeky and gimmicky to your average voter.
But if there’s a runoff if nobody gets 50%, then one can vote for a third-party candidate of the left, right, or center without affecting the ultimate outcome. So people can vote their conscience in the election proper, then vote for the lesser of evils in the runoff. This would allow a third-party candidate’s full potential electoral strength to be realized.
Like BrainGlutton, I also think ballot fusion (never knew it had a name before) would help too.
The idea here is that a minor party can list a major-party candidate as its candidate for offices where it’s not running a candidate of its own, and have them count towards that candidate’s election. For instance, suppose John Edwards is the Dem nominee next year. The Greens could list him as their nominee as well, and votes for Edwards as a Green would count towards Edwards’ election just as much as votes for Edwards as a Dem.
You’d think it would work that way everywhere, but no - only in seven states.
The advantage to a minor party is that one can vote for the major-party nominee while simultaneously indicating support for the minor party and its principles.
Both runoff voting and ballot fusion allow people to support minor candidates or parties in what now would be “I’d vote for X if it wouldn’t elect that bastard Z by doing so” situations. It makes no sense at all to have a system where voting for a candidate further to one extreme helps the mainstream candidate nearer to the opposite extreme, but that’s what we’ve got, and that needs to change.
Closed primaries solve the previous problem, although they require third party registrants to make a considerable sacrifice by foregoing the possibility of ever voting in the major party primaries.
But perhaps I should have been clear, the “problem” with primaries isn’t that they advantage the dominant parties, it’s that they distort the process in such a way that new parties will never become viable. With state-run primary elections, the nominating process and the election process are the same.
If you’re capable of winning an election as a third party candidate, you’re almost always capable of winning a major-party primary, and that becomes the easier route to office. Viable new parties never get started, because viable candidates have no reason to start them.
In countries with more restrictive nominating processes, this isn’t always true. The British Labor Party, the Canadian Reform Party (which became the Conservatives), the German Greens–in almost any other democracy, one could cite parties newer than either American party, founded by candidates with enough electoral appeal to win but no prospect of winning existing party nominations.
You may say, so what–candidates who would start new parties in other countries win party primaries here instead. But understand the consequence–two and only two parties, with little coherent ideology, destined to live forever.
Howard Stern made a vanity run for Governor of New York in 1994. He had his followers join the Libertarian Party and flood out the regular members with nominations for Stern. So a closed primary doesn’t prevent abuses of the system.
No, I think Shodan and I are pretty much in agreement on this topic. I’ve always thought that the reason people vote for Democrats and Republicans is because that’s who they want to vote for. I don’t think there’s any bias in the electoral system against third parties.
But other people have argued there are obstacles preventing people who would actually like to vote for third parties from doing so. So, in the interest of fairness, I was asking people what they think those obstacles are and how they should be removed.
This isn’t a matter of a difference of opinion, but simple factual error on your part. Examples:
Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania Election Code, which is not available online, contains the requirements for getting candidates for office on the ballot in Pennsylvania. There are different requirements for major political parties, minor political parties and “political bodies.” These differences, which include the number of voters required to sign nominating papers, have become controversial in recent years because minor candidates must collect far more signatures than candidates in the major parties.
Illinois: Major-party statewide candidates need 5,000 signatures; independent or third party candidates need 25,000 or 1 percent of the voters in the last general election, whichever is less. Major party US. House candidates need 600 signatures; independent or third party candidates need 5,000. Major party candidate for state Senate or state House need 300 or 150 signatures, respectively; independent and third party candidates need 3,000 or 1,500.
I trust that your ignorance has been put into retreat, at least for the moment.
Freddy the Pig makes a key point.
In today’s electoral system any third party candidate who could win the general election will almost certainly be able to win the primary for one major party or another. Or, to turn it around another way, if they can’t win the Democratic primary or the Republican primary, how can they have any hope of winning the general election?
While it is true that primary voters don’t neccesarily reflect the general voting population, the notion that the parties are run only by extremists is false.
So we have a system today where any aspiring politician chooses the major party that provides the best fit for them, and would never consider joining a third party. Third parties are for cranks, anyone with any talent that actually wants to govern rather than complain and bloviate joins one of the parties that actually has a chance. It’s a self-perpetuating system in that way.
But is this such a bad thing? The two parties are not static entities, they are the sum total of their members. Today’s conservative southern religious Republican party bears no ideological relation to Lincoln’s northern progressive anti-slavery party. Today’s Democratic party bears little ideological relation to FDR’s Democratic party, and that party was in no way similar to the Democratic party of the 1800s. Under our system the parties serve the candidates, rather than the candidates serving the party.
The big obstacle is the argument that a vote on a third-party candidate like Ralph Nader or Ross Perot is “wasted”, i.e., that you only have an effect in the election if you vote for one of the two major-party candidates. That argument would go away if you had some kind of run-off voting, ensuring that candidates only get elected if they have a majority of the votes cast.
With an instant run-off system, you can get results like this one. This one’s particularly complex because one of the independents was the sitting member, and used to belong to the ALP. In a two-party system, the major parties would be ALP (Labor Party) and LIB (Liberal Party). But, although the seat ought to be very safe for Labor, the Labor candidate only just got in – and the other major party came 5th, after two independents and one Green candidate! You get results like that because there’s no argument that votes for minor party candidates or for independents are “wasted”.
Well, people won’t vote for third parties if they’re just simply not viable. While Vermont may regularly send independents to Washington, that’s more a product of Vermont’s unique politics rather than the success of any third party in Vermont.
As example, let’s take voter John Doe. John Doe is 35 years old, makes $45,000 a year, has a wife and two kids. He’s a Democrat who is pro-choice and against the war in Iraq. Come election day, in his Congressional district three people are running. One, is the incumbent Republican who is hardcore pro-life and was one of the most outspoken supporters of the Iraq war in Congress, and continues to be so. The second candidate is a moderate Dem who is vaguely pro-choice but waffled on the issue and avoided it during the campaign, who believes that our commitment in Iraq must be reanalyzed and has said he “might” support a time-table for withdrawal. The third candidate is a member of the Social Democratic party, is outspokenly and without reservation pro-choice, and is in favor of a strict time table and assertively stated his position on both issues throughout the campaign.
Steve, I agree that some states put up real barriers against third parties. My own state, New York, is one of the worst offenders. I completely agree that these obstacles should be removed.
But as a practical matter, they’re ineffective. While they are wrongful obstacles, they are ones that most third parites have learned to surmount. So while they should be abolished as a matter of principle, their existence doesn’t explain why third parties don’t get votes.
That’s true, but it assumes that they intend to win the general election in the first place. In systems that are friendlier towards small parties it is possible for niche parties to hover around, say, 10% forever and still make a vital contribution to the political system. Whether that’s a good thing is of course a matter of personal political preference.
Even if the parties evolve there is still a different issue. At least from an outside perspective the two major parties seem incredibly huge and ill-defined. They combine very diverse political standpoints. A system that allows them to split would not eliminate these standpoints but it could make the choices more transparent. Each of the smaller, more coherent parties has its own platform, organization and candidates without as much need to appease people with different political standpoints. Of course it’s likely that those smaller parties would have to form coalitions and reach some form of consensus with their allies but at least that happens in a transparent process and voters can influence the relative weights of the partners directly.
[QUOTE=SaintCad
…
Second, repeal the XVIIth Amendment to allow a third party strong in a state to get appointed more easily (e.g. Vermont Progressive Party)
…
[/QUOTE]
SaintCad, could you elaborate about this point please? I don’t follow what you mean.
In the system used in the US, John Doe’s most rational vote would be for the Democrat candidate, even though the third party might be closer to his personal position. In the system used in Australia, John Doe’s most rational vote would be for the Social Democrat candidate, with a second preference going to the Democrat, because he’s more likely to get a candidate he wants elected that way.
So if you want to work out what would happen in a US House of Reps election with proportional representation, you shouldn’t just look at the voting figures in present elections, because some votes will change: some people will be voting Libertarian, or Green, or for independents, or for conservative Christian candidates, instead of Dems and Repubs, because they will no longer be “wasting their votes”.
So both major parties would have fewer seats, and it might become difficult to impossible for either to put together a majority without getting support from minor parties and independents. This might not matter so much in the US, but in a parliamentary democracy, where the prime minister must have a majority in the lower house, it can be an issue. (But note that Ireland, New Zealand and Tasmania are all parliamentary democracies using PR in their lower houses, and they seem to get along just fine).
Actually they are mostly unrelated. First Past the Post voting systems lead to few parties, almost unheard of coalition governments, and often times two parties. The United States has developed certainly institutional biases against third parties (like State run primaries) however, all that getting rid of those biases does is allow very small, minority third parties to exist, and even then only sporadically.
Essentially the United Kingdom is a two-party state. Labour and the Conservatives, in a huge number of districts throughout the UK, the Lib Dems can’t field a viable candidate. Historically, the UK has been a two-party state, the existence of some Lib Dem MPs does not actually change that fundamentally, as the United States has had periods where three parties were relatively active as well (such as prior to the Civil War and during the Progressive movement.)
If you just want third parties to have a few seats here and there, then getting rid of institutional biases would help. If you actually want third parties to have a significant role in government, you have to get rid of FPTP and go to a proportional voting system, it’s pretty much the only way.
Pretty much any example of a FPTP system where there are viable third parties can be explained through certain innate peculiarities in the structure of said country. For example in Canada, without the presence of the various regional Quebecois parties throughout Canada’s history you’d essentially have the Liberal party and the Conservatives trading power throughout Canada’s history. The fractured nature of conservatives throughout the middle-20th century sort of shows that Canada really is fundamentally a two-party state. The conservatives in Canada were successful in the 19th and early 20th century when they were a solid front, when they started fracturing in part because of electoral failures, the Liberals pretty much ruled Canada. Elections almost became a referendum on how the Liberals were governing than actual contests between political parties, non-Liberal formed governments typically spiking up only when the Liberals had embarrassed themselves on a large scale. It’s not really surprising that when the two major conservative parties merged to form the Conservative Party of Canada that the Conservatives started actually taking part in governing.