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Comment by andrekandre | Hacker News Reader

  > started voting Green, they're not just going to shrug and keep losing every election. Instead, it would force them to genuinely shift their platform to regain these votes.

has this been know to work historically?

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Yes, in the limited sense that this is a massive known problem with the USA's electoral system, and better democracies than the United States have been formed since then that are less vulnerable to the spoiler effects that resulted in the USA's pathological two party system. Here in Belgium, you can vote for greens, socialists, (thinly veiled) nazis... and they might gain a seat or two in the legislative bodies.

thanks for the reply, i suppose my question was not specific enough.... i agree that without the spoiler effect (first past the post system) 3rd party voting would be an option...

what i was curious though was in the u.s context (where there is spoiler effect) has it been known historically to work?

It's tough to look to historic examples because the polarization in current times is unlike any other time in modern history. In the past people were much more inclined to swap between parties, depending upon the merit of the respective candidates. For instance in 1984 Reagan would take 28% of the liberal vote [1], and win 49 states. He nearly took all 50, but lost his opponent's home state by a 0.18% margin.

In that sort of situation you have the same effect as a strong third party. Politicians had to concern themselves with the interests of voters, or they could actually lose them. Now all they need to do is simply show up on the ballot, and spend the rest of their time making sure people hate and fear "the other side" enough. Accountability is being effectively minimized through this, and civil society destroyed in the process.

This style of politicking is not new, and has countless historic examples demonstrating where it leads. The interests of the voter no longer mattering is but scratching the surface.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2008/results/president/nat...

  > Now all they need to do is simply show up on the ballot, and spend the rest of their time making sure people hate and fear "the other side" enough.

yea, i feel like in some way gerrymandering is a big component in this?

like if you dont ever need to actually need to convince voters in other parties and just appeal to people in your safe district.... doesn't that invite/encourage partisanship even more?

I think a lot of it probably stems from our specific voting system. Gerrymandering is only possible in a system without any sort of proportional representation. And it's these same systems which also tend to lend themselves towards "strategic voting" which motivates to vote for people they don't like, or even against their own self interest.

But this is something I don't tend really think about especially much simply because changing this would require both parties to cooperate to make major constitutional changes, that would result in both those parties losing power. The odds of this happening are probably literally zero. By contrast people dropping strategic voting is something that is at least viable to imagine, and could reasonably be expected to help move things in a positive direction. Thanks to the fact elections are basically 50/50 electorally, it doesn't even have to be many people to have a really meaningful impact.

> Gerrymandering is only possible in a system without any sort of proportional representation.

interesting, so gerrymandering being a second-order effect and the main cause being first-past-the-post/non-proportional representation... interesting.

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