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Comment by gondo | Hacker News Reader

It puzzles me how come in USA people are considering only 2 candidates to chose from. At this stage it looks like people are not voting for the candidate they agree with, they are choosing the candidate they disagree with the most and then voting for the other one. This is only 1 step better than how it used to be in USSR where people had an option to chose essentially only 1 party. (sure officially there were more parties, as there are more candidates in USA, but it wasn't a real option in reality). Still far away from European democracies where each election you have multiple parties competing.

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It's an inevitable result of winner-take-all, first-past-the-post voting. This video explains the situation very well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

Short of revolution, we aren't ever going to see a representative democracy here, because the two parties in power have us perfectly divided 50/50, and the status quo benefits them both greatly.

this seems to be a problem of presidential democracy (voting for 1 man). parliamentary democracy, where people are voting for a party and even specifically for multiple people nominated by the party, is solving this problem.

Right, but how do we get the US to move to a system of proportional voting and power? We're never going to get a president+congress that is controlled by one party to vote and pass new laws / ratify new amendments that change the system such that they'll no longer be in control. And we can't get the current two parties to agree on whether the sun is hot or not, let alone on radically changing the way our democracy works.

The cynic in me suspects that, despite all the fiery rhetoric, both parties are in fact very happy with the status quo and the partisan divide that exists in this country. Aside from a few battleground states/areas, most seats are perfectly safe. Mississippi isn't going blue, and California isn't going red.

I don't think your opinion is cynical. Don't be afraid to draw logical conclusions. Don't allow political correctness to make you feel sorry for, you know, using your brain. You're not the problem here; the red-vs-blue crowd is.

The most obvious avenue is to promote ballot propositions to change the voting mechanism, in states that allow this, like California. California recently changed to "open primaries", for example. (A bad idea, that one, but approval voting or score voting could go through the same way.)

It'd need to get pushed from outside the major parties, I guess by someone genuinely public-spirited, since the benefit is very diffuse and long-term. Unless some Machiavelli can figure out an angle -- I sure can't. Once it's had a toehold in a couple states for a few election cycles, though, I think there's a good chance it'd spread, because it seems hard to argue against once it's on the table as a serious option. (Maybe the strongest move then for the parties would be to muddy the waters with instant runoff voting and other such complications.)

(I think approval voting is more 'American' than proportional representation and haven't really thought about how we'd move to proportional rep, but there's the same first step available.)

Your characterization of this election is wrong.

43% of Americans approve of Clinton[1].

33% approve of Trump[2].

That means the vast majority of Americans are not choosing the lesser of two evils. They actively like one candidate or the other (or both).

1. http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/hillary-clinton... 2. https://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/donald-trump-f...

this charts (as many published polls) are based on very small samples. asking 1000-3000 people. yes those people are selected to sample the whole spectrum, but if they are always the same people, you can not claim that they are representative anymore. as simply by asking the poll questions you are turning group of people who "don't care about the election" into the group "was forced to think about election and now have an opinion".

Huffington Post, seriously?

Per ABC News (which is still pro-Clinton), they are both equally unpopular:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/poll-clinton-unpopularity-hig...

Huffington Post is a respected poll aggregator. Also, I wasn't showing you unpopularity. I was showing you popularity. Those are different.

Those polls don't necessarily mean that people aren't choosing the lesser of two evils. Those questions aren't asked in a vacuum. Most of the polls ask about people's opinion of the candidates in a Clinton vs Trump context. Even if that wasn't the case, people might still feel that they have to support one candidate over the other.

It's hard to make people throw away their biases and ask themselves why they really support something.

your statement is non-sensical. what, did you add together 43 + 33 = 76 therefore the majority are satisfied?

that's crazy talk. the best case scenario is that 43% of the electorate is satisfied. both candidates are very very far away from being acceptable to a majority of the entire electorate.

In France there is a two step election : during the first round, people choose between multiple candidates (around 10). The two candidates with the most votes are selected to go to the second round, where people choose the next president.

There is a saying that during the first round you vote for your favourite candidates, while during the second you vote against the one you don't want to see in office.

This seems to be what is happening now in the US

I heard an interesting idea which would be to place always a "none of the above" option on the ballot for any position, and in the event that option took majority, all candidates listed would be disqualified completely, and new ballot would need to be made.

this can very easily result in never ending loop.

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