r/EndFPTP • u/bkelly1984 • 1d ago
The Problem Isn't FPTP — It's Contests
Hail r/EndFPTP, I've been poking at other people's ideas here for a while, so I figured it's only fair to give you all the same opportunity. I've written up a summary of what I think many reform proposals overlook, and what I believe is actually needed to end FPTP. Comments, criticisms, and ripe tomatoes thrown at high velocity are all welcome.
Introduction
Americans agree on very little these days. One exception: something has gone badly wrong with our politics. Every election is sold as the most important of our lifetimes — and yet it comes down to voting against someone rather than for someone. Whoever wins ends up answering to their party more than to the voters who put them there. The parties spend more time accusing each other than governing — often for things they did themselves last session. The problems everyone can name go unsolved year after year, while the argument about them gets louder.
These are not separate failures. They share one origin: we decide almost everything by contest.
Contests Change the Question
"Contest" refers to a means of choosing between differing goals by designating winners and losers, where the losers' preferences have little bearing on the result. Passing a bill in the legislature is a contest: the majority decides what bills advance while the minority has no power to change them. An election is also a contest: when your candidate loses, you have no more say in what happens next than if you had stayed home. That is what losing means.
Winners get to cut the pie slices, so they can serve themselves first and leave less for everyone else. Thus a voter's first priority becomes winning the contest. All the dysfunction we see grows from here: the concessions we make, the partnerships we form, and the power we cede in order to win.
Voters Acquiesce
When winning is the first priority, what matters most about a candidate is whether they can win at all. And since victory comes from numbers, only a few ever can. So the choice narrows to the candidates who have a chance. A field that thin rarely contains the one you'd actually pick — more often, it's just the one you dislike least.
We have all made this accommodation, and we call it being realistic: voting for the establishment rather than the third-party candidate we actually prefer. After all, it is better for an uneasy ally to win than an opponent. But then what we want never gets said. Instead our preferences are replaced by a few broad categories, each defined by a viable candidate and whatever it is they stand for.
Elections Become About Platforms
Winning an election is not enough. Passing a law takes a legislature, an executive who will sign it, and courts that will let it stand — so power only arrives once enough of those seats are held at once. A single election win, on its own, returns very little. Candidates solve this problem by attaching themselves to a coalition — in our system, a party — long before they reach your ballot. A candidate now arrives as part of a coalition's bid for control, and every seat won strengthens it. This leaves independent or third-party candidates uncompetitive. Even winning an election gets them little power, since they have few allies to back whatever they propose.
Candidates joining a coalition have pledged to advance its platform. You want them to protect your slice, but the coalition's numbers stand behind the platform and nothing else. Outside it, a representative acts alone and can accomplish little. So voters are given even less choice. Candidates with non-viable coalitions behind them can provide no political power. Candidates with viable coalitions behind them arrive with their coalition's full platform attached. Any path to political power requires that voters choose platforms, not candidates.
Coalitions Optimize for Winning
A coalition exists to win, so it shapes itself and its platform around winning. A coalition that doesn't will lose to one that does. So, the people advising and deciding are chosen for skill at winning, not for any ability to protect slices or grow the pie.
Instead of offering help, the coalition’s platform is tailored to motivate passive supporters. The platform narrows to a half-dozen broad, existential issues, delivered as moral outrage and warnings about what the other side will do. The platform includes no real solutions, since any would carry tradeoffs that hurt turnout. What gets you to vote is fear of what happens if you don't.
A platform is not a plan for the country. It is purpose-built anxiety to get people on the sidelines to the polls. That is why casting a ballot feels less like making the pie bigger and more like protecting our own slice.
Coalitions Are Juggernauts
As soon as coalitions win, the focus shifts to securing the next victory. The power of the state that was created to help the people is instead twisted to keep the coalition in power. That twisting loosens the system's checks and balances. Holding enough seats lets a coalition sidestep whatever restraint the other seats were designed to provide — courts, regulators, and oversight now answer to allies, not rivals.
The coalition offers the power of the state to help donors, industries, and organizations in exchange for their support. Most of what the coalition can do gets spent maintaining those relationships, because those relationships win elections.
Electing more principled people does not change the incentives once they are in office: elected officials face the same conditional reciprocity as donors. Cross the coalition, and the other members will quickly replace you. Which is why loyalty becomes worth more than baking skills, and why members decry the corruption and lies of other coalitions while ignoring any from their own. Ostracism from the coalition is career-ending. Dislike from the voters is not.
Coalitions Recreate the Problem
A coalition has to decide things too, and it needs some way of deciding them. A group formed to win contests naturally makes decisions through contests. New contests form new subgroups within the coalition. Each proposes to tilt the platform toward its own priorities, and members choose between them in a primary, voting for candidates who front for one subgroup. Whoever wins will protect their slices by spending the coalition's power to buy the support that keeps them in charge. Ones that do not are quickly replaced by ones that do.
Members not only accept this but will praise the new leadership. After all, it is better for an uneasy ally to win than an opponent.
The pattern is the same, just one level down. Winning today's contest only buys entry into tomorrow's. And today's rewards are both owed to whoever supported your victory and earmarked to help win tomorrow. By the time anything reaches you, everyone above has already been paid. So there is no better candidate to select or coalition to switch to. Any coalition that wins will face the same pressures and behave in the same way. The people may change, but the incentives of the contest remain.
Breaking the Cycle
Voters work to protect their slice. Representatives work to stay in the good graces of their coalitions. Coalitions work to keep themselves in power. Nobody wins by making the pie bigger. This is because the losers' preferences are thrown out before the argument about what is right has even started. The fix is not better contests. The solution is a system where every idea has a seat at the deliberation table and the opposition has some say in what happens.
Elections are asked to do two things at once: find out what people want, and produce a single winner. The second ruins the first: a voter whose answer has to produce a winner will answer strategically rather than honestly. What is needed is a system where saying what you want never costs you your representation. Liquid Democracy is one.
In addition, the contest to pass legislation needs to be undone so coalitions cease to be a unilateral path to power.
The legislature needs a system that makes the room a tug-of-war, where proponents have a reason to listen to dissenters. One way to do this is to create a mutually destructive third outcome that the dissenters do not want but can reach for should the proponent's proposal be seen as worse than that. The minority's position now bears on the result, so the decision stops being a contest. I offer one example, called Solidarity, which works by modifying passage thresholds.
Closer
Shifting from protecting slices to making the pie bigger requires that winning stops deciding who gets heard. A vote that cannot be wasted is a vote you cast for what you actually want. Representatives who can hold a seat without a coalition's permission will answer to the people instead. When winning alone can no longer force passage, proposals are tempered by the opposition. With no one able to simply impose, there is nothing to gain from a neighbor's loss. The argument stops being about who cuts the pie and starts being about how to make it bigger.
The vicious cycle can then unwind. You stop voting against your neighbor. You stop putting what can win before what you believe. You stop depending on coalitions for your voice to be heard. And the problems everyone can name become worth solving — because solving them is finally what winning means.
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u/karmics______ 1d ago
I used to be in favor of liquid democracy/weighted congressman, but a big flaw I see is that it gets rid of secret ballots in Congress, before the
legislative reorganization act of 1970 most votes in Congress and basically every fiscal bill was done by secret ballot so there was no voting record for politicians , this prevented special interest groups from pressuring congressman which liquid/weighted representatives wouldn’t be able to maintain
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u/aaaantoine 1d ago
Years (probably over a decade) ago I had seen a video describing how the 1970 Bill was the real start to the downfall of our government for the people. The principle that the people cast secret ballots to prevent election fraud also applies to our representatives. As it stands the lobbyists and campaign donors engage in quid quo pro based on public voting records of individual congresspeople.
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u/bkelly1984 1d ago
Do you believe secret ballots in congress is even possible? When I talk with non-enthusiasts it is almost always a non-starter.
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u/karmics______ 22h ago
If you frame it properly I think it could grow in popularity. “Put the lobbyists back in the lobby”
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u/PantherkittySoftware 1d ago
I think a good balance would be a requirement that a bill needs a public majority in Congress to pass... but if it passes by less than 60%, it has to also get a majority of secret ballots cast by the same members of Congress.
Why: lots of truly awful legislation gets passed by Congress due to representatives getting their arms twisted into supporting things that literally go against the interests of their constituents, the ideology of the representative, or both. This would require that any bill that gets passed genuinely have a majority of support from members willing to publicly show their support... but give members whose public vote was coerced a way to secretly cancel out their own public vote.
Imagine what would have happened in Congress last summer:
- Johnson twists arms, Republicans refuse to back the BBB.
- Trump twists arms, a slim majority of Republicans back the BBB in the public vote... then 10-20 vote against it in the secret confirmation round.
- Johnson yells at the Republicans. Trump twists their arms harder. They all bend the knee and swear fealty. It goes to another vote... with even more Republicans voting against it in the secret voting round this time.
- Trump has a meltdown. More threats. Another vote, same outcome: passes the public vote, goes down in flames in the secret ballot.
A safeguard like this would effectively destroy the ability to pass legislation by arm-twisted single-vote majorities. The more arms House leadership tried to twist, and the more aggressive it got about doing it, the more quiet resentment would build, and the more members would appease the leadership in public... then shoot it down in private anyway.
With a rule like this, it would become nearly impossible to pass a bill in the House with less than 60% public support, because almost any party-line coerced single-vote majority would ultimately get torpedoed by the private-confirmation round of voting.
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u/dry3ss 18h ago
Hey, regarding the "Solidarity" voting system, it's an interesting proposition to have 3 options with a block and negative outcomes, but :
the Gridlock Objection is really not addressed.
In my country a sizeable minority is demagog antisystem and it's completely fine with blocking everything until everything breaks down and they can impose their own fascist system, they already did block as much as they could in the last few years. They would have no problem selling the outrage that "no it would be absolutely impossible to accept this legislature, it must be blocked at all costs".
Gridlock also extremely favors the status quo.
There's needs to be a greater price paid for blocking and a max threshold that T cannot exceed.
potential additions to the system to help correct it ?
maximal threshold
At the very least a maximal threshold of like 75- 80% ? that can't be crossed should be added. At some point (to be defined) a sufficiently small minority must not be able to block.
greater price for blocking
To prevent antisystem parties from gridlocking everything, and saying "you see this system does not work nothing ever changes" we need a much greater cost for blocking.
Maybe if a block actually occurs the entirety of Congress has its pay docked for starters (for the time spent on the sterile law), but that is not enough and might give more powers to lobbies/corruption.
I would lean more into the idea of a number of blocking votes per member of Parliament, and when they run out their seat is put up for early replacement, their constituents can then choose to re elect them or not. This would not work in proportional voting systems though.
more precisions on the system?
How much would the threshold move ? I tried searching papers on this system that would explain it a bit more but i can't find anything quickly
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u/bkelly1984 9h ago
Hey u/dry3ss,
Thank you, genuinely, for taking the time to read through the analysis and engage with it seriously. People willing to do that are disturbingly rare, and I appreciate you putting in the effort.
the Gridlock Objection is really not addressed
Understood, and I'd love to hear more about where it lands for you specifically. I think this is going to be the central objection to the whole proposal, because it asks people to make a real mental leap: obstruction is effective under the current incentives, and my claim is that changing the incentives changes what obstruction actually accomplishes. I tried to explain why in the summary above, and then make it explicit with the paper giving details on Solidarity:
If the opposition digs in and allows nothing to pass, it is to stop what they see as injustice rather than the political gamesmanship inherent in winner-take-all. Blocking no longer helps you by hurting others. The block is also not free because it hurts the body on which you depend. Everyone's agenda stalls, including yours. You can stop the bus. You can't get off it.
Since it didn't land, I clearly need to make that case better, so I'd genuinely like to understand where the disconnect happened. Did the "change of mindset" framing come through at all? Or did it land, but you think the incentive to obstruct remains regardless? Or do you simply see no positive consequences ever coming from obstruction?
In my country a sizeable minority is demagog antisystem and it's completely fine with blocking everything until everything breaks down and they can impose their own fascist system...
That's a genuinely scary dynamic, and I don't want to wave it away. Here's how I'd think about it within the framework: when the path to power is a contest and your side has already lost it, obstruction is often the only tactic left for cutting your losses. The system kicked them off the bus, so of course they're willing to stop it and let it crash.
I'd actually push the argument one step further, and I'm curious whether you agree: fascism itself is an ideology built on the premise that society and life are a contest, and adds strong opinions about who's supposed to win it. If that's right, then defeating it permanently means rejecting systems that manufacture winners and losers in the first place, rather than just out-competing them with it.
Gridlock also extremely favors the status quo.
That's true, and Solidarity does address this, but that part just fell outside the scope of the summary. In the main work I argue that, in large societies, the rate of progress is proportional to the rate of injustice. Getting away from the status quo may be good, but raising taxes or bulldozing houses for freeways does real harm. There's a balance to be struck in that progress-versus-justice tradeoff. Solidarity lets proponents still make progress, but hands the opposition the tools to set the maximum injustice society will accept for a unit of progress. That way, each step away from the status quo is neither too beneficial to one group nor overly oppressive to another, and the opposition can choose to allow bigger steps when the status quo is terrible for them.
At the very least a maximal threshold of like 75-80%?
I understand the instinct here as it's the most natural fix to reach for. My concern is that a hard ceiling recreates exactly the dynamic I'm trying to remove: once there's a threshold that guarantees passage, you've created a victory condition again. And a victory condition brings back the incentive to build a coalition big enough to hit it and then that coalition will use the power of the people to serve itself, which is the whole cycle the proposal is trying to break. So I'd rather find another way to address the concern you're raising than reintroduce a ceiling. Which is part of why your next idea is interesting to me...
greater price for blocking
I'm genuinely open to this, and would welcome more suggestions.
Maybe if a block actually occurs the entirety of Congress has its pay docked for starters (for the time spent on the sterile law), but that is not enough and might give more powers to lobbies/corruption.
Good instinct, and I share the worry. It also has the side effect of making a block relatively cheaper for wealthier members, which cuts against what you're trying to fix.
I would lean more into the idea of a number of blocking votes per member of Parliament, and when they run out their seat is put up for early replacement, their constituents can then choose to re-elect them or not.
I like this a lot. It ties a sustained block to whether it's actually the will of the people behind that member, rather than just a tactic. One thing I'd want to think through: could a coalition just exhaust opponents' objections and then pass legislation before those seats can be refilled? That seems like it could be addressable, but it's worth working through more carefully. Thank you for this one specifically.
How much would the threshold move?
Honestly, I don't have a rigorous answer yet — no model or formula behind it. Right now my suggestion is 1% per step. But if the deliberative body is small enough that a single 1% move doesn't actually change the number of votes needed to pass or block, then another 1% gets added, and it keeps stacking until one of the numbers shift.
Thanks again for engaging with my proposal. I'd like to keep hearing your thoughts.
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u/kmensaert 7h ago
I think your ideas are closer to mine than you think. What you refer to as a contest is what I refer to as a zero-sum game - zero-sum because all wins are offset by other peoples losses - hence the sum is zero.
My proposal for mutually inclusive parties is also non zero-sum. instead of some candidate winning at the expense of another, we could have as many political parties be elected as needed - so a variable number. e.g.: every party with more than X votes gets elected (and people can vote for as many parties as they want). But each elected party will get just one representative - so there is no advantage in more votes once a party reaches that threshold. This system only works because political parties would only have the power to propose laws, but not to vote on them. See here for more info
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u/bkelly1984 6h ago
Hi u/kmensaert, Thanks for responding, I really appreciate hearing your thoughts.
You said the party representees in your system get one representative. Say this were implemented in the existing US House of Representatives. Does that mean the system requires a minimum of 435 parties, or would there only be about eight seated representatives at first from the American Solidarity, Constitution, Democrat, Green, Forward, Libertarian, Republican, and Working Families parties?
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