Party politics does exactly the same thing yet I don't see people arguing against it.

Originally Posted by Missileer

A popular vote is no better than anarchy. That was not the way the founders meant for things to be decided, by mob rule. That simply encourages buying votes with promises that can't possibly be fulfilled. If a politician promises everything for nothing, then the ones who vote for him/her become a bloc who are ignorant to the facts of life that success is not won through sloth and procreation at the expense of taxpayers. It has never worked and never will.

True. I made a mistake here, I said popular vote went I meant to say parliamentary system -as opposed to the electoral collage. We should adapt the systems found in Canada and Europe, they seem to be more accurate, fair and harder to cheat.

Take the 2000 election as an example. Gore beat Bush by over 500,000 votes (1/2 a Million people) and we STILL got Bush. Any system that allows that to happen is a flawed system.

Originally Posted by mmarsh

True. I made a mistake here, I said popular vote went I meant to say parliamentary system -as opposed to the electoral collage. We should adapt the systems found in Canada and Europe, they seem to be more accurate, fair and harder to cheat.

Take the 2000 election as an example. Gore beat Bush by over 500,000 votes (1/2 a Million people) and we STILL got Bush. Any system that allows that to happen is a flawed system.

The same sort of thing happens in the UK, representation in government is based on seats or constituencies typically covering districts of 50-100k people each. If one party has enough of these to form a majority they form a government irrespective of the % of overall vote.

There is a more serious problem with this sort of system though. For example say you have two dominant parties, the third although significant in number will have limited representation. Say two of these three parties believe in approximately the same thing, but their vote is split then they will gain far fewer seats between them than one slightly stronger party that believes in something different. This effectively happened in the 80s allowing Thatcher to dominate with only about 40% of voters in the country preferring a right wing government. After allowing for those who didn't or couldn't vote for one reason or another I suspect the figure is nearer 30%

The result of all this was a drastic move to the right by the split party (labour /SDP liberal) in an attempt to minimise the vote going to the conservatives. Today we have three right wing parties with the left being marginalised altogether.