When the only perceived means of winning is making others lose, most people are going to lose.
The US should never have used plurality voting. It functions as the inputs to the Nash Equilibria decision matrix, our individual votes being against a perceived evil rather than for a value which supports civilization.
If instead of {+1, 0, 0, 0...} we used {+1, +0.5, -0.5, 0, 0, 0...} with each non-zero value used at most once and without duplication of candidate, we would be able to vote for the outputs of the decision matrix--our combined decision--and avoid the tragedy of the commons. I believe the coordination problem is the Great Filter, and going interplanetary won't solve the underlying math of shooting first being incentivized by winner-take-all, and the risk of mutually assured destruction.
The Partial Vote system as I call it would still be one voter one vote, it would just be easier to express it in separate components rather than listing all permutations.
Edit: Also, try applying ranked choice to a nash equilibrium matrix. There are some pathological cases to using rankings for a single-seat (result) selection process, where a voter might have had a better result for them if they hadn't voted. That can't happen with the partial votes described above.
Too complicated. Americans don't even understand the much simpler and (IMHO) sufficient ranked choice voting [1]. Alaska, a deep red state, sent a Democrat to Congress because the voters split their votes between 2 Republican candidates because they didn't rank both candidates.
While I think RCV would be better, I still don't think it solves the problem. There are a bunch of ways in which our system is designed to create a two party system, such as what constituionally happens if no candidate gets a majority of votes in the electoral college [2].
That aside, look at other countries. Has more than two parties really helped in practice? Germany, the UK, Israel and France all have 3+ parties in their house of representatives equivalent and all have swung to the right.
Practically speaking, we could solve a bunch of our problems by simply repealing the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 [3], which set the number of House members to 435 and a district size of 700k+. This would take a simple majority in the House and Senate and would revert district sizes back to 30,000. This would kill gerrymandering, practically speaking.
Ranked choice for single-seat elections can create situations where your ballot backfires, which is why it has been tried and rolled back. It works for proportional representation, but then you've got people divided ideologically rather than by region and their local communities.
The divide by ideology (proportional), or into "safe" one-party states and "battleground" states (plurality in the US) is the biggest issue, the two parts of the human experience losing touch with why the contrasting values exist in the first place.
That said, good point on the issue of the size limitation on the House.
The US should never have used plurality voting. It functions as the inputs to the Nash Equilibria decision matrix, our individual votes being against a perceived evil rather than for a value which supports civilization.
If instead of {+1, 0, 0, 0...} we used {+1, +0.5, -0.5, 0, 0, 0...} with each non-zero value used at most once and without duplication of candidate, we would be able to vote for the outputs of the decision matrix--our combined decision--and avoid the tragedy of the commons. I believe the coordination problem is the Great Filter, and going interplanetary won't solve the underlying math of shooting first being incentivized by winner-take-all, and the risk of mutually assured destruction.
The Partial Vote system as I call it would still be one voter one vote, it would just be easier to express it in separate components rather than listing all permutations.
Edit: Also, try applying ranked choice to a nash equilibrium matrix. There are some pathological cases to using rankings for a single-seat (result) selection process, where a voter might have had a better result for them if they hadn't voted. That can't happen with the partial votes described above.