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[–][deleted] 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

The problem lies with the current election system. Under plurality voting (which many countries unfortunately use) you're told to pick one candidate and shut up. It's a system that's rife with issues and is shown to lead to consistently poor leaders being chosen, 2 party dominance as opposed to proportional and diverse representation, and also is easily manipulated by political candidates. For instance, the Republicans have at times paid third party candidate (the Green Party), often by quietly funneling money to the campaign, in order to run a spoiler candidate who'd steal votes from their Democratic Party opponent.

Because of America's fundamentally broken election system, you're forced to pick between a mediocre but unappealing candidate in the form of Biden, whose voting history leaves much to be desired, or a literal psychopath who views fascist dictators with the utmost adulation in the form of Trump, and for whom objective reality is merely optional. Picking a third party is wasting your vote, and there is literally no alternative left-leaning party that cares about progressive reform but isn't entirely subjugated by trans activism. There's no room for any nuance in your choice due to the election system.

Serious reform requires changing our election system to something like Score Voting, which is far more resilient to manipulation, allows you to express an opinion about all candidates, does not have spoiler candidates, and gets far better election results.

As an interesting bit of reading: Hillary Clinton was the spoiler candidate in her own election. Had anyone other than her run in her place, Trump would not have been elected: https://www.rangevoting.org/USA2016retro.html

Unfortunately, because election reform would threaten the 2 parties in power, it will be difficult from a practical standpoint to get change. The closest you might be able to do is convince one party or both to use a much better voting system in the primaries, thus improving the quality of the candidates (i.e. we almost certainly would not have seen Trump as a frontrunner, who directly benefited and was probably elected due to the many pathological behaviors plurality/first-past-the-post voting displays).

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

But how would you be able to convince candidates to do so during primaries if it’s against their benefit?

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It's only the presidential elections where they would strategically benefit from maintaining the current, badly flawed system. It would actually directly and significantly benefit both parties to use score voting during the primaries, by greatly increasing the quality of their elected frontrunner candidates and therefore giving them a better shot at winning the presidential election. Even if they refuse to reform the presidential election as a way of keeping themselves in power (by refusing to overturn the system that gives them 2 party dominance), by using an improved voting method in the primaries they'd give themselves a very big advantage in the quality of candidates elected that would hopefully carry through to the presidential election, and we'd get improved presidential choices (i.e. no Donald Trumps).

For instance, if one party used score voting in their primaries while the other did not, there's a very good chance the party that reformed its primaries would immediately gain a large power advantage by electing truly popular candidates chosen without any of the vote splitting problems of plurality voting.

Now, they'd hopefully see the benefit for the country as a whole after using it in primaries and want to reform the presidential/senate/governor elections and so on to use the same, but there's no guarantee of that.

Pleas to both parties to at least use score voting in their primaries and the arguments why are detailed here for both Republicans and Democrats: https://rangevoting.org/ForReps.html / https://rangevoting.org/ForDems.html