Why US elections only give you two choices

We don’t like the two-party system. So why do we have it?

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America’s two-party system is widely hated. Very few Americans think the two major parties do an adequate job representing us, and most say more parties are needed. But when it comes time to vote, very few of us actually vote for third-party candidates. Often, this is explained as either a failure of will (we’d have third parties if more people would just vote for them), or a conspiracy (the political and media establishments suppress third-party candidates and ideas).

And it’s not that those things aren’t true. But there’s a much simpler explanation, and it’s the very basic rule governing almost every single one of our elections: Only one person can win. If you’re American, that probably sounds utterly reasonable: what the hell other kinds of elections even are there? But the answer is: lots. Winner-take-all elections (also called plurality voting, or “first past the post”) are actually a practice that most advanced democracies left behind long ago — and they’re what keep us from having more political options.

Even if you’re not sold on the need for more parties in the US, though, scratch the surface of “only one person can win” a little and you start to see how it actually produces perverse results within the two-party system as well. It’s a big part of why the political parties have moved farther apart from each other, and it leaves about half of the country without any political representation at all. Watch the video above to see how.

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00:00 Two choices
1:05 Winner take all elections
3:05 Proportional representation
6:14 How to change things

This video was inspired in part by this 2017 video by Liz Scheltens, Mallory Brangan, and Matt Yglesias, which I really recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd-9op64t2M

Sources and further reading:

The political journal Democracy devoted an entire issue to the idea of proportional representation in the US, with essays by several of the people who have thought the most about it: https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/70/for-a-better-democracy-proportional-representation/

The advocacy group Protect Democracy put together a really helpful primer on the different kinds of proportional representation and the philosophy behind it in general: https://protectdemocracy.org/work/proportional-representation-explained/

Protect Democracy also authored this report about how to actually change the law that prevents proportional representation in the US Congress: https://protectdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Towards-Proportional-Representation-_-March-2023-.pdf

The organization FairVote mapped out what multi-member congressional districts would look like throughout the US: https://fairvote.org/sample-fair-representation-act-maps/

RadioLab did an episode explaining single transferable voting, Ireland’s electoral system, that I found really fun and helpful: https://radiolab.org/podcast/tweak-vote/transcript

Here’s the 2023 poll showing that two-thirds of Americans want a viable third party: https://news.gallup.com/poll/512135/support-third-political-party.aspx

The UK’s Electoral Reform Society has a helpful resource on which countries use which kinds of electoral system: https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/which-european-countries-use-proportional-representation/

The Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center has info on where in the US ranked choice voting is already being used: https://www.rcvresources.org/where-is-rcv-used

The federal law mandating single-member districts for congressional elections is the 1967 Uniform Congressional District Act. The language is here in Section 2c: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2011-title2/pdf/USCODE-2011-title2-chap1-sec2c.pdf

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