"my crook is great but the rest of these crooks..."
FTFY.
Plenty of voters KNOW their representatives are crooks. But they're crooks on the "right side", so they're cool. They're using their crookedness to push law through ethically void means that often border on legality, which is fine so long as they're usually pushing their constituents agenda in doing so OR simply fucking over the other side. Those people voting for Jewish Space Lasers Marj and Child Sex Trafficking Gaetz know exactly who those people are, as do every single Twice-Impeached, Convicted Felon Trump voter. It's not an awareness issue.
Ranked-choice means nothing if you have single-member districts, other than maybe allowing some third parties to get in. You can still gerrymander and stuff.
What you really want is multi-member districts or just nationwide PR, but that is anything but simple…
Yeah, 96% of RCV elections in the US elect the first round winner anyway. In part because proportional representation is the ultimate goal, I think Approval Voting is a better first step towards fixing our elections. You can very easily adapt it to proportional methods in ways that the voter can actually understand. Fargo and St. Louis use it for their normal elections and it's caused majority winners to go way up. It elected the first black woman to mayor for St. Louis, so that's pretty neat.
Majority voting system is the main problem. Electoral college is the version for presidential elections, but it needs to be changed to a proportionate voting system for congress as well.
As the US is very state-based, you could do a version like Germany where you vote for a local candidate as well but the proportion of the congress equals the whole proportion of votes.
The electoral college has nothing to do with electing legislators (it is only used for the presidency), and alternative voting methods to go to are great but don't do shit if the candidate is running unopposed (and a lot of these chucklefucks are).
He probably should have advocated for a system that wouldn't reault in this bullshit then. Federalists vs Democrat-Republicans became the de-facto state of US politics immediately after ratification of the constitution. You don't get to complain about your dog shitting on the carpet if you never let it out.
He didn't write the constitution alone and subsequent Congresses and presidential administrations had over a century to heed his warnings before the duopoly became unassailable.
Hell, as late as 1912, Teddy Roosevelt had a realistic chance of winning back the presidency as the head of a more progressive party (the aptly named Progressive Party, better known as the Bull Moose Party) that he founded the summer of that year!
You could run yourself in the cases where a candidate is unopposed. People there have the right to vote, to run as a candidate etc. I guess they could have some sort of law to force participation but I think that would be counter to idea of freedom instead of helping it.
This is why I think we should bring back anonymous voting for Congress. We have anonymous voting for civilians, but anyone can buy or threaten a Congressman into voting. Also, since we'd be judging Congress as a whole instead of as individuals they'll be a lot more likely to at least appear to do a good job because even good and loyal Congress critters could lose reelection if people hated Congress.
I realize this is an unpopular opinion because "How do we know they're doing their job." Well, their job is to work with their classmates to do a good job for everyone, not just to earmark pork and get stock tips.
Gerrymandering is one place where I don't think would be fixed with a "Ranked choice" voting method vs FPTP. If the authors of maps draw districts with a moderate majority leaning one way, the general ideology will still be represented in the final vote.
Correct. The solution is representatives who support non-FPTP systems. Your options are Democrats (some have some support for non-FPTP), Republicans (passionately oppose non-FPTP because FPTP is the only way they win) and third-party choices who actively support non-FPTP (single digit percentages of voter share).
The only rational play is to vote D while doing everything possible to campaign to make those third-parties viable. Voting R is failure. Not voting is failure. Voting for non-viable third-parties is failure. D is a means to an end, necessary but not sufficient.