Ranked voting is also a solution, and not too different from what you propose.
My proposal is just trying to break up the “winner gets all” politics in Congress right now. Corporations buying politicians is a whole nuther problem.
I think that is what Australia does. It is more complicated. To my mind, preference voting is conceptually simple - all options you could tolerate are equal, which beats putting lots of parties in a strict order. That would allow me to vote for “anyone but the Tories”.
The French system is to have repeated polls, rejecting the least popular candidates. This is often seen as the best system money can buy, but even that can be gamed. Preverence voting seems no worse, and does it in one round of votes, with a recognisable voting paper. Proportional representation, which the UK Liberals advocate, is really complicated, and your vote for a local person may be re-used tactically to elect someone you didn’t vote for somewhere else.
The city I live in has run-offs, similar to France’s system. The problem is far more people vote in the first round than in the run-off election, usually because most of the other races on the ballot were decided on the first round. Some congressional races also end up with run-offs and those don’t get as much attention, either.
We managed it at least once. And Nick Clegg’s political career didn’t survive it and whether the LibDems will survive it is still in doubt.
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With their cowardly refusal to convict him, it is now the Party Of Trump a.k.a. ‘Fascists’.
This already exists. It is called ‘The Democratic Party’. It is just not quite as nakedly in the pocket of Oligarchs as the old GOP was, but it has been steadily sliding rightward for 40 years.
If this new conglomeration wanted to be truthful (ha!) about who/what they represent, they would call themselves Oligarchic Libertarians, or the Koch Party, or somesuch. With any luck they would siphon off enough votes from the POT/Fascists to render both moot.
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count on it –– just waiting for it to happen
beware - once the Progressives hit the road, don’t be surprised if the centrist dems and the traditional republicans join –– all they are interested in is taking the money, they are flexible on principals.
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You’re describing a parliamentary system, basically, and I think it does have a lot of advantages over the US system. Canada’s, for example, works very well for the most part. There are some broken edge cases, like minority governments that can’t do much. But the system can’t become paralyzed for decades on end, or totally ruined when one party decides to stop being reasonable. As @gracchus said the real problem is that the US was not supposed to have parties at all, and backed into it without any planning. So the system isn’t built to accommodate half the representatives forming a block and refusing to govern. Adding parties to evolve it into a parliamentary system might work, but it seems like a difficult thing to do because it requires a lot of powerful people to relinquish part of their power. I don’t see that ever happening in the US. Reforming government is probably impossible when nearly half the country wants to abolish it completely. The US has a deep cultural problem that has to be solved before anything else.
I hope the US figures this out though, because if the country collapses into civil war or other chaos, Canada is going to be in a bad spot. Smart Canadians don’t feel schadenfreude when things like Trump happen. The smart ones worry like a cat on a bed when the human rolls over.
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“Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”
– Pierre Trudeau speaking to the Washington Press Club, March 1969
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