The horrific nightmare scenario where Congress picks our next president
The horrific nightmare scenario where Congress picks our next president
Yes, you read correctly, the 535 folks whom 80 percent of Americans dislike make these momentous decisions.
One thing I worry about is a contingent presidential election. That situation arises when no candidate gets a majority of electoral votes (270 of 538). Should this situation arise, Congress gets to pick the next president and vice president.
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you say shit show, I say grab some popcorn. It would be one hell of a ride. And whoever schemes thier way in will get very little done because of a lack of support. But if a third party got enough votes it becomes official in some capacity. Then there would be lots of changes. And really change is what we need.
Watching your house burn down from the inside might make some hot popcorn.
the problem is Democrats aren't willing to play the long game on democracy. If there is space for a third party its at the state level and its pushing reforms like proportional voting and constitutional amendments as part of a vision to make the US walk the walk on democracy - to end the shallow lip service talk on democracy.
Nobody has tried the convention method yet for constitutional amendments and it would probably be easy to push something like "states may not gerrymander, and the number of representatives assigned to state and federal legislatures must be proportional to the overall vote for each party."
Nah. No meaningful change there can happen without removing fptp.
Not sure what fptp is. But a third official party would change a lot of things.
FPTP: "First Past The Post", the system of election where the winner is simply the one candidate who receives the most votes even if it's not a majority (for example if many candidates ran and many received a significant share of the votes). FPTP is simple to carry out, but it's often criticized for the fact that the winning candidate can be someone whom a majority or even a large majority of the voters didn't want. The two-party system in America usually obscures that issue in general elections because they turn into, effectively, elections with only two significant choices so the winner tends to have a majority as well as the greatest number of votes. But the problem does show up sometimes in primaries.
FPTP can be contrasted with other systems such as ranked-choice voting and proportional representation.
I listened to a podcadt on ranked choice voting. It seemed pretty good.
It wouldn't be unlike the birth of the Republican Party in the 19th century and the death of the Whigs.