Should America Do Away With Political Parties?

[Socialist EU]

I wish you all the best of luck in the elections, I'd be interested to see what percentage of the vote your party gets and whether they increase their vote count.*

*Of course, using 'official' election results doesn't give you a very good idea of how they went, they're often referred to as 'other'.

Fair point. We'll see soon enough. I know we won't have a "President Stewart Alexander," but t'll be interesting to see if a third party gets more than one percent, preferably not the Constitution or Libertarian parties.

I'll be TG'ing you post election, I'll be curious myself.

[Wamitoria]

I wish you all the best of luck in the elections, I'd be interested to see what percentage of the vote your party gets and whether they increase their vote count.*

*Of course, using 'official' election results doesn't give you a very good idea of how they went, they're often referred to as 'other'.

Fair point. We'll see soon enough. I know we won't have a "President Stewart Alexander," but t'll be interesting to see if a third party gets more than one percent, preferably not the Constitution or Libertarian parties.

If any one party gets more than 1% of the vote, it'll probably be the Libertarian Party.

Much higher name recognition than the various socialist parties, and the Green Party is pretty much hated by many people.

[Socialist EU]

Fair point. We'll see soon enough. I know we won't have a "President Stewart Alexander," but t'll be interesting to see if a third party gets more than one percent, preferably not the Constitution or Libertarian parties.

If any one party gets more than 1% of the vote, it'll probably be the Libertarian Party.

Much higher name recognition than the various socialist parties, and the Green Party is pretty much hated by many people.

You mean the "You are Libertarian, we're not a party" Libertarian[classically liberal] party?

[Aglorea]

We haven't adapted the Constitution in any meaningful way in the past two hundred years or so. Other than that I generally agree with what you said, even if I am a bit less optimistic about the decline of partisan politics.

And as for the discussion on the electoral college a page back, I'm quite fine with it. Electing the president by popular vote would be too democratic for my tastes.

I have a few black friends who want to disagree with that.

But we haven't. There have been more rights granted through various amendments, true, but fundamentally the Constitution itself hasn't been meaningfully changed. As far as that goes, the most radical change would be electing senators by popular vote.

[Crogach]

If we really want to make the US a multiparty democracy on the federal level you're going to have to do a few things:

-Elect the president directly via popular vote.
-Triple the number of senators allotted to each state, such that each state is a six-person constituency
-Use the single transferable vote (STV) with the Droop quota to elect senators
-Use instant runoff voting (IRV) to elect representatives and the president.

How STV works:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote

How IRV works:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_runoff_voting