Well, for starters, we have 2 political parties that dominate most elections. Everyone is told that if they don't like what those parties stand for they need to hold their nose and vote for the one of the two that they dislike less, lest the worse one win.
My personal favorite (to draw attention to) contributing factors are:
- Plurality voting (the possibility of third parties 'splitting the vote' helping otherwise generally unpopular candidate winning)
- Money money money money money. There's not much to stop someone with lots of it from influencing elections by e.g. running attack ads against the person they don't want to win. We talk a big talk about the voters having power, but when most people don't have the time or energy after spending it all making money for the guy who's going to run those ads, they're not going to be well informed.
And there's no incentive for this system to change on its own. Our politicians and the people/corporate entities who pay for them care more about staying in power than they do about 'freedom' or 'democracy' or their constituents' general well being. Our best hope is that people will come to realize that the problem is systemic and start demanding systemic change.
> we have 2 political parties that dominate most elections
Here in Argentina we use the two-round system (also known as the second ballot, runoff voting or ballotage) to avoid that issue. To win the presidential election, a candidate must get more than 45% votes or 40% AND 10% of adventage over other candidates. If this condition doesn't apply there is a next round where the candidate with most votes wins.
Imagine the following situation:
You got three candidates for the elections: a. Trump (39%) b. Clinton (38%) c. Sanders (23%)
There is going to be a second round, but maybe Sanders voters are going to vote for Clinton to avoid Trump winning. In the current system Trump would have win. You could argue that in the current system Sanders voters would have voted for Clinton but maybe they thought Clinton was going to win since Trump didn't have much chanced.
With the two round system this becomes explicit.
This let's you vote for your favorite and in the second round you pick between the two big candidates.
