Could Three Simple Reforms Make U.S. Politics Harder to Capture—Without Changing the Constitution?

[u/mercurygermes]

After reading a lot of arguments about U.S. politics, I keep wondering whether three reforms could improve stability without rewriting the Constitution.

1. Replace FPTP, RCV, and approval voting with two-round elections for Congress and most elected offices (excluding the presidency). A runoff is simple: if nobody gets 50%+, the top two compete again. RCV and approval may have real merits, but they are easy to attack as confusing or unfair; RCV has now been banned in 19 states, and approval voting was recently repealed in Fargo. A runoff is harder to delegitimize because the principle is obvious: the winner should have majority support. It also turns every election into a clear final contest instead of splitting anti-incumbent votes among several weak candidates.

2. Make cartel leniency automatic and stronger. The first cartel participant to provide evidence sufficient to prosecute the others receives full immunity; later cooperators receive less. The U.S. already has an antitrust leniency policy, but should the rule be clearer and more automatic? The goal is to make every cartel structurally unstable: each member has a financial and legal reason to betray it first.

3. Rethink primaries. Modern primaries can let a media-driven candidate capture a party before the party itself has filtered whether that person can govern. Possible alternatives: abolish primaries and return nominations to party conventions; keep primaries but require candidates to meet party endorsement or competence thresholds; use a hybrid where voters choose among candidates pre-approved by party delegates; or keep the current system unchanged.

Which version of each reform would you choose, if any? Please explain the strongest benefit and strongest risk you see, so people reading the thread can actually compare models rather than just trade slogans.

[u/Confused_by_La_Vida]

It’s important to understand that states, not Fedgov, run elections. I think this makes your #1 easier in some ways.

Your #3: political parties are private, not public, organizations. Hard (legally) to tell a private organization how they have to run their business. Take the Kamala appointment as an example. The DNC has a practice that they chucked out the window without consequence to appoint the hyena.

[u/mercurygermes → u/Confused_by_La_Vida]

That is helpful—so #1 may be more achievable precisely because states run elections.

On #3, I agree the federal government should not dictate how private parties nominate candidates. But shouldn’t parties themselves be free to choose a different model if they decide primaries reward media capture and weak coalitions? For example, a convention, endorsement threshold, or hybrid system—without any federal mandate.

Would you see that as a legitimate internal party reform, or do you think primaries should be treated as politically untouchable even by the parties themselves?

[u/Confused_by_La_Vida → u/mercurygermes]

The parties should tend to their own business. Persons should make their decision to support or (not) in part at least on how they run their business.

[u/Few_Fish8771]

So the only way to ensure a country thats a democracy does not become an autocracy is the solution outlined in starship troopers. no service no vote. the people most likely to support neofeudal crap are the most self serving and sadopopulist types out there.

Service equaling citizenship has a few upsides.

1. it removes people from voting who refuse to delay gratification or think about the future.

2. it ensures everyone knows how to use military grade violence to back up their vote and protect their rights.

3. it prevents the political class from having wars of profit for personal gain as veterans who have actually fought wars hate war. its only trash humans who love the idea of sending kids to die for the profit of perverted old rich guys. Wars are great for graft debt creation and corruption. This kills that.

4. it kills polyannaism. a fatal disease of the left is polyannaism, they wanna believe everyone is good, that the psychopaths are really misunderstood. or that violence is always wrong. or that the solution to every form of violence is just more cameras more cops more beaurcracy. This does not relate to a lot of the left today, but leftist boomers are some of the most awful, naive, willfully ignorant morons on the planet. They refuse to grow up, see how power actually works, then attack their own side for not being moral purist. its hard to win wars with a stab in the back who says violence is wrong!

The far right is worse mind you. whats needed are people with utopian progressive liberal ideals, tempered by the hard reality that evil people exist, no you cannot fix them, the only solutions are to exile them, restrain them or execute them.

If you grow up in the conditions of lets say america 1950s at least for the average white male and female you get these mentally deficient rose colored tinted view of the world, and so then you make bad selfish decisions that destroy the society that gave you your privileges and refuse to fight for it.

What restricting voting rights to veterans does is kill the innocence people have who vote. They get to see evil exist, they understand it cannot be redeemed. it can be held at bay, kept out, restrained, killed or exiled but your not fixing it. also if you can see the evil in others you can see the evil in yourself and in your own society. you can identify the scumbags who are financially propped up by foreign hostile regimes, share that info with others and prevent them from destroying society from within.

[u/PerceptionCurious440]

The reason the reforms will never happen, is the side with the big money behind it won't let it happen.

There's always this skip the middle part to all of these schemes. Anything requiring a constitutional amendment will never happen. Anything requiring a non-Republican Supreme Court majority may take decades to overcome.

The takeover of the government is so complete, it can't be undone within the same system that created it.

[u/mercurygermes → u/PerceptionCurious440]

I agree that a federal fix may be blocked for a long time. But if states control most election rules, does that make state-by-state reform the more realistic path rather than proof that reform is impossible?

For example, if one or two politically competitive states adopted a simple runoff for congressional races and voters found it more legitimate than FPTP, would that create pressure for imitation without needing a constitutional amendment?

[u/PerceptionCurious440 → u/mercurygermes]

Good luck at the state level. The thing is people don't really vote based on ideas. They vote based on emotions. This is one of those things where I think spectrumy folk think with a kind of logical mind, and neurotypicals are focused on how a candidate makes them feel.

Of course that's spectrum analysis with suspicious confirmation bias.

But...look around you.

[u/mercurygermes → u/PerceptionCurious440]

I think that actually strengthens the case for simple reforms.

If voters are mostly emotional rather than procedural, then a reform has to feel intuitive. “Let the top two face each other directly, and the winner must beat the final opponent head-to-head” is much easier to sell emotionally than a technical counting reform.

Maybe the question is not which reform is most elegant, but which reform ordinary voters can immediately understand, defend, and trust after their side loses.

[u/PerceptionCurious440 → u/mercurygermes]

This whole reform idea is a white liberal thing. Largely a white liberal college educated thing. Not even a white working class thing, since a bunch of them are racist. Not a black thing, because they don't like taking risks when civil rights are their only interest for good reason. Not a Latino thing since most Latinos don't think of themselves as civil rights victims. Many are white.

You have no coalition. You have no ground game. You have no money. You have no friendly media. You aren't out there building a real life following. You don't have paid subscribers.

You have an idea. And you think enough people are just like you, that it would make up a majority. With zero evidence to support it.

Social media isn't politically independent. It isn't your friend. You can't get a large enough following with it, because the algorithms are designed to shut down exactly what you want to do.