Pushing for voting for other parties in most of the US gets you nowhere because of the way our elections work in the first place. At least, outside of elections where parties (and policy in general) barely matter at all, like very small municipalities; but generally unless you get the entire city council and judicial system in that town/county progressive it’s pretty hard for small-town politicians to make much meaningful change anyways. Although it’s not impossible – recently an “independent” (I think Republican but idk) city council member I directly voiced my concerns to right before the election about the lack of investment in sidewalks, public transport, and other non-car infrastructure in our small extremely conservative town actually got some sidewalks built which was great.
With the state level, though, it’s not coming unless you live in a state with some sort of multiple answer voting like RCV (like Instant-Runoff Voting / IRV), approval voting, cardinal/rated voting (like STAR voting or score/range voting, etc… Or if you live an extremely progressive state where candidates that advocate for that kind of system are able to get voted into office, almost always a Democrat or sometimes an Independent aligned with Democrats.
IMO the ideal voting system would be Condorcet Single Transferable Vote / CPO-STV (same exact thing as STV to the voter, but implementing a variation of the Condorcet Method under the hood, which would be the most proportional system in both multi-winner and single-winner elections) but I don’t think that’s actually used anywhere, and a system with such computationally heavy internals would be a hard sell to people who already see IRV as “controversial”. As long as we get anything other than FPTP, we can make it better later, the specifics don’t matter too much.
For the curious, STV (Single Transferable Vote) is essentially the same as IRV (Instant-Runoff Voting, known simply as ranked-choice in the US although there are other ranked-choice systems) except it’s multi-winner instead of single-winner, where you can “rank” multiple candidates, and if your first choice candidate is eleminated or if they have surplus votes, your vote is instead “transferred” to your second candidate. The Condorcet system is basically a voting system that takes into account every possible candidate match-up, and makes the winner whoever has the most votes in each individual match-up – it’s very computationally heavy since, especially in elections with many candidates and in multi-winner variations, you can have extremely large amounts of matchups. You can combine STV with the Condorcet method and get CPO-STV, which would theoretically be the system which would be the hardest game/“tactically” vote in (a.k.a. people wouldn’t have any incentive to vote against a candidate they like in order to make a different candidate more likely to win, thereby increasing the chance of a candidate they don’t prefer winning) and achieve the most proportional/happiest-choice voting.
Pushing for voting for other parties in most of the US gets you nowhere because of the way our elections work in the first place. At least, outside of elections where parties (and policy in general) barely matter at all, like very small municipalities; but generally unless you get the entire city council and judicial system in that town/county progressive it’s pretty hard for small-town politicians to make much meaningful change anyways. Although it’s not impossible – recently an “independent” (I think Republican but idk) city council member I directly voiced my concerns to right before the election about the lack of investment in sidewalks, public transport, and other non-car infrastructure in our small extremely conservative town actually got some sidewalks built which was great.
With the state level, though, it’s not coming unless you live in a state with some sort of multiple answer voting like RCV (like Instant-Runoff Voting / IRV), approval voting, cardinal/rated voting (like STAR voting or score/range voting, etc… Or if you live an extremely progressive state where candidates that advocate for that kind of system are able to get voted into office, almost always a Democrat or sometimes an Independent aligned with Democrats.
IMO the ideal voting system would be Condorcet Single Transferable Vote / CPO-STV (same exact thing as STV to the voter, but implementing a variation of the Condorcet Method under the hood, which would be the most proportional system in both multi-winner and single-winner elections) but I don’t think that’s actually used anywhere, and a system with such computationally heavy internals would be a hard sell to people who already see IRV as “controversial”. As long as we get anything other than FPTP, we can make it better later, the specifics don’t matter too much.
For the curious, STV (Single Transferable Vote) is essentially the same as IRV (Instant-Runoff Voting, known simply as ranked-choice in the US although there are other ranked-choice systems) except it’s multi-winner instead of single-winner, where you can “rank” multiple candidates, and if your first choice candidate is eleminated or if they have surplus votes, your vote is instead “transferred” to your second candidate. The Condorcet system is basically a voting system that takes into account every possible candidate match-up, and makes the winner whoever has the most votes in each individual match-up – it’s very computationally heavy since, especially in elections with many candidates and in multi-winner variations, you can have extremely large amounts of matchups. You can combine STV with the Condorcet method and get CPO-STV, which would theoretically be the system which would be the hardest game/“tactically” vote in (a.k.a. people wouldn’t have any incentive to vote against a candidate they like in order to make a different candidate more likely to win, thereby increasing the chance of a candidate they don’t prefer winning) and achieve the most proportional/happiest-choice voting.