Problem lies in the ‘first-past-the-post’, aka ‘winner-takes-all’ system. There are others, like the electoral college, but I digress.
Third party candidates only ever bleed votes from another in FPTP. Assuming RFK is going after Democratic/‘swing’ voters he’ll potentially end up costing the Democrats votes in key states which, at the margins we’re currently seeing, would potentially allow Republicans to win, holding slightly more votes to be ‘first-past-the-post’ at the end of ballot counting even though a majority of people would’ve preferred a Democrat representative anyway.
Under the FPTP system, voting for RFK as a protest vote, at his 10% margin, becomes a wasted vote because of how FPTP works.
The only true way to fix this is ‘single transferrable vote’, or ‘ranked choice’ voting. Voters simply rank their preference from most desired (1) to least desired (n) on a single ballot.
If the first round of counting doesn’t yield a winner (usually 50% of ballots + 1 ballot in a candidate’s pile), the candidate with the least amount of ballots is eliminated. Ballots are then redistributed from the eliminated candidate, according to the voters next preference on their ballot, amongst those candidates who remain.
Process continues until a candidate has 50% of ballots + 1 ballot in their pile.
The best version of this is ‘full’ preferential voting (every candidate must be numbered), rather than ‘optional’ (number at least one candidate; better versions of this are ‘number at least n candidates’). Optional preferential votes ‘exhaust’, potentially becoming wasted, if the voter didn’t number all the boxes.
This will allow people to protest vote, without actually wasting their vote.
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