People really need to understand the math here instead of listening to what politicians themselves self-interestedly complain about.
The modern balance of power remains on a razor's edge and constantly flips because both parties have learned to run data-driven campaigns. That would be as true if neither party did gerrymandering as if both parties do as they do now. Whatever the district which is closest to being flipped, that's the one where they would concentrate their resources. If one party started to get significantly more than 50% of the seats and the other significantly less, the loser would change some of their positions until they were back in the running because getting some of what you want with 51% of the seats is better than getting none of what you want with 39% of the seats.
The actual problem is not the electoral college or gerrymandering or The Despicable Other Party, it's first past the post voting, because that's what creates a two party system. Have your state adopt STAR voting or score voting and see what happens.
> Have your state adopt STAR voting or score voting and see what happens.
There have been ongoing efforts to ban things like ranked choice or other options at the state level and now it's being pushed federally (Make Elections Great Again act MEGA).
That's true, but it's not honest. What actually happened is there were TWO parts to it.
The first part, which is the part people actually read:
> "The amendment also changes a line in the Missouri Constitution to specify that “only” U.S. citizens have the right to vote, rather than “all” U.S. citizens."
The second part banned rank voice voting.
Nobody, I mean nobody read the second part.
The first part of the ballot measure was _already illegal_. It was simply used as a tool to scare people into voting against rank choice voting.
At least one place in Alaska, I think two boroughs, have local laws that allow RCV.
Ranked choice voting sucks anyway, and that section doesn't seem to prohibit score voting. You're not "voting" for more than one candidate, you're scoring all of them; you're not "ranking" candidates, you're scoring them (and you could e.g. give two candidates the same score); you're not reallocating votes from one candidate to another, you're electing the candidate with the highest score.
It's also not clear that bill is going to pass. It seems full of other things Democrats have a major incentive to filibuster.
It's not even clear that Republicans have any reason to prevent score voting. One of the failure modes of ranked choice is that you can end up with more radical candidates winning where one party already had a majority because it allows the majority party to run a radical candidate next to a moderate one, but then if the radical candidate gets more votes from their own party, the race becomes the radical vs. the minority party after the majority party's moderate candidate got excluded, and then the radical candidate wins. They saw what happened in New York and didn't like it. But Democrats should have exactly the same concern -- what do you think that does if you adopted it in the South -- and in general ranked choice makes polarization worse. Ranked choice actually does suck.
Whereas score voting does something else. If you run a radical, a moderate from the major party and a minority party, the moderate from the majority party wins because there is no run off election, they just got the highest score because they scored better among the minority party than the radical and better among the majority party than the minority party candidate. And when more candidates than that run, the most likely to win is the one that best represents the entire district, which reduces polarization, and that's to the benefit of everybody.
The modern balance of power remains on a razor's edge and constantly flips because both parties have learned to run data-driven campaigns. That would be as true if neither party did gerrymandering as if both parties do as they do now. Whatever the district which is closest to being flipped, that's the one where they would concentrate their resources. If one party started to get significantly more than 50% of the seats and the other significantly less, the loser would change some of their positions until they were back in the running because getting some of what you want with 51% of the seats is better than getting none of what you want with 39% of the seats.
The actual problem is not the electoral college or gerrymandering or The Despicable Other Party, it's first past the post voting, because that's what creates a two party system. Have your state adopt STAR voting or score voting and see what happens.