U.S. electoral systems -- anachronistic, dis-proportional, locked in two-party straitjacket at least for now -- but room for reform

U.S. election systems stands out as one of the strictest two-party systems in a major country.

Several routes of voting:

presidential, House of Representatives, Senate, state bodies, local bodies,

also referendums in many cases.

Its reliance on single-member districts is likely cause of this but that can be accounted for by the fact that the U.S. election system has not changed to any great degree since the 1700s, and at that time the formulators (and everyone as well) did not know of the range of election alternatives that were possible.

(As well, the national election system once used multi-member districts but that was annulled around 1840. see Montopedia blog "Multi-member districts used more than...")

Third-party candidates are seldom elected, for which many blame the use of FPTP.

U.S. also stands out for its use of

-the use of primaries and sometimes primary runoffs

-the electoral college for the election of president.

-a total number of seats in the House of Representatives (lower chamber ) which has not changed since 1912.

still has 465 members.

in 1912, 465 was roughly true to the cube rule for a population of 92M,

but now (as of 2018) with population of about 324M.

With adherence to the cube rule, the seat count today should be 687.

in 1912 each single-member district held 210,000 people on average;

now each district holds 711,000 people.

the use of single-member districts allows the use of gerrymandering. (States have jurisdiction over elections within the state, so that is another problem.)

-turnout is low -- about 57 percent in presidential elections, and about 39 percent in HofR midterm elections (part of this is caused by the long ballot that is used, which includes national, state and local members and in many cases also ballot initiatives and referendums.

-elections every two years -- a third of HofR members up for election each two years. (That 1/3 -1/3-1/3 rotation does not prevent multi-member contests. it just means that a third of the members have to be elected each two years but does not prevent MMDs nor say that multiple-winner contests are impossible. To make contest DM the largest possible, just divide each state's members into three sections and elect a section every two years, or group states by size and into groups of three, and elect all the members of one of the states every two years in rotation.

The use of FPTP allows dis-proportional results

Presidential

twice in the five elections previous to 2017, the winner did not have plurality of votes.

Trump had plurality in 2024 but did not take a majority of the vote but was elected anyway (Might the third party vote have been able to switch to the Democrats, Trump's election may not have happened.)

House of Representatives

false-majority governments quite common -- not even mentioned among all the other faults.

wrong-winner elections elected in 1914, 1942, 1952, 1996, 2012. the party that won the most votes didn't win majority of seats. (in every election, one or other of the major parties wins a majority of seats.) (this dis-proportional result is not immediately clear as there is no formal or legal mechanism for announcement of the overall vote totals by party.)

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The U.S. arguably has the most complicated process in the world for choosing the president.

a year process in advance of election day.

Nomination/ primaries

Electoral college (flawed democratically by presence of faithless electors )

if no one candidate gets 270 EC votes, then HofR (with each state having just one vote) has to choose winner among three most-popular candidates through runoff elections.

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To placate smaller states from fear of domination by larger states and slave-owning states from fear of domination by "free" states: each state has two seats in the Senate; an Electoral College is used to elect the president; and amending the constitution is very difficult.

"These all work together to make systemic change [change to Proportional Representation] unlikely. The U.S. electoral system is likely to persist as a bit of an anachronistic amalgam of institutional choices made at its founding." (Oxford Handbook of Electoral Systems (2018), p. 735)

The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Systems (2018) gives these facts. (I have added some of my own analysis as well.)

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in local elections some cities are using PR so that is a start.

see Montopedia blog "U.S. cities..."

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