What’s your opinion on First Past the Post Voting System?

22 comments

1. That’s how we vote for president (amongst others)

   The president has to get the majority to win (at least, the majority of the electoral vote)

   If there’s no majority in that particular race then the House of Representatives chooses the president

   ——

   Other situations are pluralities.

   For example, Trump won the primaries with 25% of Republicans voting for him to be the candidate.. 3/4 of Republicans wanted a different candidate in 2016

2. Im very open to alternatives, but in general I’m fine with a first past the post election process. What I’m not a big fan is the American election process, how we structured are government, and our brand of federalism in general.

3. I think it’s one of the biggest reasons why the U.S. is locked into a two-party system.

4. It sucks. It’s by far the biggest factor behind our two party system, which is the biggest problem with American politics imo

5. It’s in desperate need of an update.

6. It’s a bad system. Preferential/ranked choice, is much more sensible.

7. Bad system, I’d be up for more a proportional representation/ranked choice style voting setup

8. Bad but unfortunately it won’t be replaced with a better system. Even the people calling to get rid of the electoral college just want it replaced with a crappy FPTP system that won’t fix any of the electoral colleges issues because those issues are all due to FPTP…

9. As outdated and unhelpful as the electoral college.

   Both need to die. We the People deserve more choice in who we want to lead us.

10. It sucks

11. Seems like normal voting to me. The one with the most votes wins. Is this not the norm in democracy?Was not familiar with this term before. (Ignorant American)

12. I’m a results based person. It’s clearly not producing great results.

13. Not the best but I can live with it.

14. You mean the way voting has been done for generations? It’s worked fine for a long time.

    The alternatives all seem to be ways for people to vote for their favorite alt-party candidate *and* still vote for the primary party candidate most like their alt-party candidate — eg, I can vote for the Green Party and still vote for a Democrat as a backup. It’s like they don’t want to have to choose. Choosing is what an election is.

    Horror stories for ranked choice voting may be rare (but then, so is ranked choice voting), but it appears people can get confused and/or tire out and basically get their ballot thrown out because they didn’t vote for enough people for the same office.

15. Opinion in what context?

16. Reddit hates it so you know it has to be good

17. I am in favor of systems where the majority winner aka 50% +1 votes is the winner. I think we should give ranked choice voting a chance. It is gaining ground so that makes me happy.

18. It’s real bad.

19. It’s got a lot of negative secondary effects, like voting the lesser evil and excluding all but the two largest parties from competition.

20. I like ranked-choice voting because it increases optionality for the voter. But people blame first-past the post for a lot that it really isn’t at fault for.

21. Sucks. Pretty much sets up every election to be about the most culturally visible fight of the moment.

    I’ve thought about this a lot, and I really think a better system would feature a weighted representational legislature, partnered with RCV for executive positions. Allowing districts of any kind is just going to result in a masking of people’s interest behind whatever the issue of the moment is, and introduces a lot of really nasty other problems. Everyone would vote for someone they think is a good representative, and then all the representatives would have voting power equivalent to how many votes they won by. There’s some details to be worked out in this new approach, but importantly it avoids the problems of masking smaller issues and gerrymandering as best as possible. The executive offices would have to still be one person wins, but they can at least be the most popular leader of the proposed candidates.

22. When you combine it with the primary system that we have for nominating candidates, where a small number of partisan voters determine their respective parties’ nominees, it’s a disaster.

    In a lot of states/districts, you may be left with two unpalatably extreme candidates and thus have to choose the lesser of two evils.

    I like the jungle primary system that they use in states like Washington and California. In that system, anyone can run in the primary. The top two vote getters advance to the general election. What this means is that in safe blue or safe red districts, you may have two Democrats or two Republicans in the general election. However, there will still be a number of voters from the opposite party, and they can and often do play kingmaker. Thus, the candidates have to strike a more moderate tone so that they can win voters that ordinarily vote for the opposite party. As it stands right now, the key to winning safe blue or safe red districts is to be as extreme as you can get away with. And that’s why we have so many nut jobs at the Capitol.