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First past the post voting is the sole issue that is keeping legitimately contending third parties off of our ballots.

Installing ranked choice voting (or one of its very close cousins) is the the number one reformation change that can be made to give the people their voices back. So of course, the powers that be are terrified of it… no surprises here.

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finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
There are other issues, too, like North Dakota getting 2 Senators representing 783,926 people while California gets 2 Senators representing 38,940,231 people, or a ratio of almost 50 to 1.

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- Bravo@eviltoast.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  The EU has a similar system:
  
  Each EU member state gets ONE seat at the EU Council, regardless of population. This is comparable to the US Senate.
  
  Differences in population size are accounted for by EU Parliament, where the number of MEPs (Members of European Parliament) a member state gets is determined by population. This is comparable to the US House of Representatives.
  
  Finally there is the EU Commission which is the executive branch, comparable to the US president and cabinet.
  
  The point of the EU Council/US Senate is to protect isolated regions from getting steamrolled by urban regions. Farmers are comparatively few relative to city industry workers, but any nation, union or federation is built on the back of farming. However, due to the distance and lack of interaction between city dwellers and rural dwellers, it’s easy for city dwellers to grow disconnected from the reality of just how important the rural dimension is, and vote for laws that only suit the city. It is utterly necessary to create a system which balances the two.
  
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  - finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    See, I disagree with the last sentiment, because the states with the majority of people SHOULD make the decisions. That’s pretty much the definition of Democracy. A state with 1/500th of the people which drill oil and mine coal should not get to decide, for example, environmental policy and power infrastructure at the same level as the states with all of the people. The small state which are heavily indoctrinated to a specific religious doctrine should not dictate how we approach bodily autonomy. A small state which only gets news from radio and cable TV owned by a monopoly should not decide our foreign affairs.
    
    They should fucking Lump it, and appreciate their autonomy on local economy.
    
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    Bravo@eviltoast.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    That’s a cheat, though. Both the American and EU states only agreed to join their respective unions in the first place on the promise that these systems of balances would give them this level of input on union policy. Without such assurances, what small nation would ever agree to become inevitably subordinate to the whims of a larger state? It would never happen, and the western world would remain fractured into small nation-states constantly warring with each other, failing to cooperate and probably getting picked off, one by one, by nations like China or Russia which have no such qualms about forcing a union through conquest.
    
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- morgan_423@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Plenty of issues overall, sure, but I’m speaking specifically about the statistical inability to vote for third parties and have it mean anything.
  
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  - finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    We could elect more third party members if we had more, and proportional, seats to elect progressives to.
    
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