Preferential voting would be really bad imo @kennith. It would basically just mean a permanent Liberal Party dictatorship, because all CPC voters would put them Libs over NDP and all NDP voters would be Libs over Cons.

And that system can actually make it harder for small parties

I do agree wit that assessment.

Like in France the National Front gets almost no seats even with 20-30% of the public supporting them

because most people dislike them

fptp is less powerful and less damaging when only house members are directly elected

FPTP appears unfair, but I think it may be.. the most fair.

its the least unfair

that's the way to word it 😎

none of them are remotely fair

something though, the us is designed for gridlock

I suppose the issue is that people get upset that the party that forms majority is not always the popular party.. (eg. trump)

ironicaly right now the system is closer to how its intended to work than it has been for deccades

but people forget that they only get a vote for their local MP.

not anything else 😛

well, thats actualy due to the citizens voting on president

i think perhaps a seperation between local representation and who takes federal power might be needed.

IIRC you get to vote on president, but the elctoral college makes the real vote?

the way it used to work is that the state govenor appointed electors confirmed by the state senate to vote for the president

but then the states changed it so that the electors are all of the party that recieved the most votes

because my local conservative or liberal might be the best option, but i sure as hell don't want either of them in power federally.

in effect, it forced you to pay attention to your state government

we really never pay attention to state governments anymore, which is bad because something like 95% of legislation in the us is state level

in any given state.

@Shai'tan complicated... isn't it.

@ShardS that change sounds like it was pretty damaging.

Sounds... unconstitutional

but it was for democracy so it's good

nah, the constitution says that electors can be assigned as the state wishes

ahh, damn, nothing to fallback on then.

the reason its not popular vote, is that the president unlike senators or representatives is supposed to represent every state

and every region in those states

makes sense

one thing would be better civics classes. i mean hell i passed mine and i swear to you i was absent more times than i was there. i pracitally treated that class as a spare

even back then, they were worried about a few small geographicaly urban regions dominating the political sphere because they had high population density

I don't think I took a civics class.

"Social Studies" was about as close as I came.. and we only talked about canadian politics for 6 months of my last year of high school.

as it is right now, 60% of the us population is in cities, 85% is in suburbs towns or cites

we are one of the LEAST urban western countries and we are still urbanized to heck

Proper Civics education is step one in making a better political system you have to know how it works to find out what's wrong with it.

if I recall, in strict popular vote, the 14 largest us cities have more votes than the rest of the country