I want you to imagine the US without a Two-Party-system.

[DetlefK]

I want you to imagine the US with an electoral system that is not winner-take-all.

I want you to imagine the US with an electoral system where Third Parties have a chance to represent their point and are not automatically relegated to spoiling elections.

I want you to imagine the US with an electoral sytsem that says that it's okay for the Democrats and the Republicans to break up into smaller parties.



I want you to imagine a US where AOC and Bernie and Liz Warren don't have to suck up to a party-establishment for fear that falling out of line will cost the Democrats elections.

I want you to imagine a US where establishment-Democrats and Greens and Social-Democrats and the whole rest can run for seats on their own merits, without the pressure that not being No. 1 automatically throws the election to the Republicans.

I want you to imagine a US where it is possible for Republicans like John McCain and Mitt Romney to just walk away from the crazy and run for seats on their own merits, without the pressure that not being No. 1 automatically throws the election to the Democrats.



I want you to imagine a political system where hyperpartisanship is a political death-sentence because your party will never get more than 50% in elections and if you don't play nice, no other party wants to ally with you.

I want you to imagine a US that has not just Democrats and Republicans.

I want you to imagine a US that has a wide variety of parties and where voting is not a life-or-death issue.

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Some imagination-- multiple parties seem to work only in a parliamentary system, not ours...

We have had small parties since the beginning, and they have been merged with bigger ones or disappeared.

[Kurt V.]

2. K&R

[Everyman Jackal]

3. With more than 2 parties there is a strong chance

that no one will get 50% of the electoral votes or if we have changed to a popular vote the same then The House picks the winner from the top 3 vote-getters with each state getting one vote. The Senate picks the vice-president with the same rules. We could end up with the president and the vice-president being from different parties. If the president is not picked by January 20 the Speaker of the House is acting president until a president is picked or until the next election in 4 years. I imagine that if the vice-president is picked but not the president the vice-president becomes the president and he or she asks Congress to vote on his or her recommendation for vice-president. There isn't a run-off or a new election. Which means the citizens of the country do not get to chose.

[DetlefK]

6. You are making it needlessly complicated.

Each party presents a presidential candidate. You vote for a party, not a President. The parties divide up the seats of Congress among themselves. And then Congress elects one of the presidential candidates to be President, thereby assuring that whoever gets to be President also has the majority of votes in Congress.

Even if candidate A gets the plurality of votes, that means very little, because the other parties could team up and combine their votes to give another candidate the majority of votes.



There is a wide variety of ways how to do it. Do not confine yourself to a political system that says that people must vote on Tuesdays because they have to sell their crops on the market by Saturday.

[Everyman Jackal]

8. If no one receives a majority then it goes to the House for President.

Each state gets one vote so Wyoming with 1 member and California with 53 members each get one vote.

[NotASurfer]

4. I like to imagine a ballot initiative that adds a third chamber to some state's legislature

Where members are selected at random and serve a month at a time, kind of jury duty in a different way. You'd get a good approximation of proportional representation over time. No heavy lifting, just an up-or-down vote on legislation before it goes to the governor.

Depending on how large that assembly was, it might also affect application of parts of the Constitution referring to the most numerous body of the state's legislature

[MineralMan]

5. First, you will have to eliminate majority election winners.

In fact, you'll have to remove majority rule from just about everything.

We already have multiple political parties, but they are stymied by that majority rule thing. And yet, they persist.

In order to implement a true multi-party system, we would have to change the Constitution, which includes majority rule language. That's not going to happen, because the very people who would change the Constitution were elected by a majority vote. They're not likely to want the change.

So, it's easy to imagine a multi-party political system. A number of countries have such a system as part of their parliamentary system. In most cases, though, their governments are not as stable over longer periods of time. That is the disadvantage. If coalitions in legislative bodies fall apart, the government must be reassembled and new elections held.

I doubt people in this country would go for that change, so it's not going to happen.

It's an imaginary idea at best, at least where the United States of America is concerned. In the meantime, there are other very important issues to deal with.

[Wounded Bear]

7. Parliamentary systems are not immune...

or even safer from Trump/Hitler/Mussolini like takeovers.

The Weimar Republic and Italy were both parliamentary states, like most European democracies.

[hunter]

9. Imagine California.

Our legislature has been Democratic since 1997.

The Republican Party ain't coming back.

There are major and minor factions within the Democratic Party, but they are all Democrats.

We will achieve your vision nationally when the Republican Party dies, hopefully by Trump-induced suicide.