Comment by Nevermark
11 days ago
People vote for people they don't agree with.
When there are only two choices, and infinite issues, voters only have two choices: Vote for someone you don't agree with less, or vote for someone you quite hilariously imagine agrees with you.
EDIT: Not being cynical about voters. But about the centralization of parties, in number and operationally, as a steep barrier for voter choice.
Two options, not two choices. (Unless you have a proportional representation voting system like ireland, in which case you can vote for as many candidates as you like in descending order of preference)
Anyway, there’s a third option: spoil your vote. In the recent Irish presidential election, 13% of those polled afterwards said they spoiled their votes, due to a poor selection of candidates from which to choose.
https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2025/1101/15415...
Please don’t encourage people to waste their vote.
Encourage people to vote for the candidate they dislike the least, then try to work out ways to hold government accountable.
If you’re in Australia, at least listen to what people like Tony Abbott, the IPA, and Pauline Hanson are actually saying these days.
A spoiled vote is at least better than not voting at all.
Because now that means there's an indication of what percentage of the populace are saying "These candidates don't qualify for my vote"
In the U.S., I feel like the primaries are the place to vote for and work for the best candidate possible. That's the time to be idealistic and pursue the perfect candidate.
At the general election, you need to be pragmatic, and decide who is the least worst and vote for that candidate, because the nominee will probably never be someone who is your ideal choice. But in a two-party system, a vote for a third candidate at that level ends up being an effective vote for candidate you _don't_ want. That's not politics, that's game theory.
There's a lot more subtlety to it in a parliamentary system, and I can see some advantages to it, but at least here in the States where it's First Past The Post with a Two-Party system (which is mathematically inevitable with FPTP), sometimes you need to place strategy or ideals.
That’s much more true for Nixon in 1968 than Morrison in 2019
Because the US has a “hard” two party system - third party candidates have very little hope, especially at the national level; voting for a third party is indistinguishable from staying home, as far as the outcome goes, with some rather occasional exceptions
But Australia is different - Australia has a “soft” two party system - two-and-a-half major parties (I say “and-a-half” because our centre-right is a semipermanent coalition of two parties, one representing rural/regional conservatives, the other more urban in its support base). But third parties and independents are a real political force in our parliament, and sometimes even determine the outcome of national elections
This is largely due to (1) we use what Americans call instant-runoff in our federal House of Representatives, and a variation on single-transferable vote in our federal Senate; (2) the parliamentary system-in which the executive is indirectly elected by the legislature-means the choice of executive is less of a simplistic binary, and coalition negotiations involving third party/independent legislators in the lower house can be decisive in determining that outcome in close elections; (3) twelve senators per a state, six elected at a time in an ordinary election, gives more opportunities for minor parties to get into our Senate - of course, 12 senators per a state is feasible when you only have six states (plus four more to represent our two self-governing territories), with 50 states it would produce 600 Senators
And minor parties receive funding from the Australian Electoral Commission if they receive over certain percentage of votes.
It was 5% last time I cared to be informed by may be different now, and they would receive $x for each vote, or what ever it is now.
Currently minimum 4% of formal first preference votes, which gets you $3.499 per a first preference vote (indexed to inflation every six months)
Then you automatically get paid the first $12,791, and the rest of the funding is by reimbursement of substantiated election expenses.
This is per a candidate (lower house) or per a group (upper house). And this is just federal elections - state election funding is up to each state, but I believe the states have broadly similar funding systems.
https://www.aec.gov.au/parties_and_representatives/public_fu...
https://www.aec.gov.au/Parties_and_Representatives/public_fu...
Note the US also has public financing for presidential campaigns, which is available to minor parties once they get 5% or more of the vote. But in the 2024 election, Jill Stein (Green Party) came third on 0.56% of the popular vote. The only third party to ever qualify for general election public funding was the Reform Party due to Ross Perot getting 18.9% in the 1992 election and 8.4% in the 1996 election. There is also FEC funding for primary campaigns, and I believe that’s easier for third parties to access, but also less impactful.
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Also, there is nothing centre-right about Susan Ley.
She is the leftest left leaning leader of the Liberal party I’ve ever had the misfortune of having to live through.
She was absolutely on board with this recent Hitlerian “anti-hate” legislation that was rammed through with no public consultation.
Okay, that’s a bit uncharitable. We had 48 hours.
And the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security definitely gave the literal thousands of submissions due consultation before recommending the original, un-split bill pass.
Third parties exist. Folks act like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan don't exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_United_States_presidentia...
18.9% as recently as 1992. I predict we will have a similar viable third party showing sometime in the next few elections due to the radical shift in the party system that AI is causing as we speak. I really hope Yang Gang can rebuild itself and try again, maybe without #MATH.
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Minnesota_gubernatorial_e...
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man" - George Bernard Shaw
In the US, there are tremendous structural barriers for third parties. They exist, it is just extremely difficult for them.
The centralization of power of each of the two dominant parties nationally at the expense of a more decentralized parties with strong state variability as in the past, makes it even more difficult for third parties to gain traction against all that coordination.
Perot had the best chance, but managed to blow it by bowing out and then back in.
I do think you are right, that times of great dissatisfaction are rare openings for third party candidates, if someone special enough appears. 2020 would have been a great election for that - but an inspiring third party candidate can't be manufactured on demand.
People have a choice between being rational and optimizing the alignment between the outcome and their preferences, or being irrational and doing something else, like not voting, spoiling their ballot, voting for a probabilistically infeasible candidate, voting "on principle", "sending a message", etc.
Combined with the quirk in Australia’s preferential voting system that enable a government to form despite 65% of voters having voted 1 for something else.
As a result, Australia tends to end up with governments formed by the runner up, because no one party actually ‘won’ as such.
I can think of an exaggerated scenario though in which that sounds reasonable depending on the goal:
say preferences are 1 (low) to 5 (high).
suppose 65% of the population ranked candidate A at 5 and B at 4, and the other 35% ranked A at 1 and B at 5. the majority doesn't get their favorite choice, but they do get an outcome they're happy with, and the minority doesn't have a horrible outcome. Exaggerated, but I don't think situations like this are unrealistic.
Absolutely, of course there are secenarios where it can work well.
Where it fails is when one major party is saying: we will drive up energy prices with Net Zero ideology, make housing unaffordable, import foreigners at a ratio of 5 to 1 local births…
And that other party is offering the same to a higher degree.
There are other options. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party is polling strongly. Let’s see if that results in actual votes.
South Australian state election coming up 21st March this year - I’m encouraging everyone I know who lives there to at least listen to Michelle Grattan podcast.
https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/politics-with-michelle...