> Very quick solutions that at least drive politics towards the middle vs extremes
This is a very good goal if you want to replace duopoly which alienates a large number of people with monopoly which alienates a larger number of people.
What we need is almost the opposite: a system that, to the extent possible without compromising things like manageable legislature size and personal electoral accountability, provides proportional representation so that governing compromises are forced out in the open between parties in government, rather than done behind the scenes within parties so as to attempt to attain a minimal winning coalition leveraging limited substantive choices in the general election.
(Using Single Transferrable Vote, or a similar system, in small multimember districts, say 5 members per district, would do this quite well.)
Can you say why you were prefer STV over simple approval voting where the top 5 vote getters win? Substantial distortions are still possible with STV, and it is complicated. By contrast "50 candidates are running, the voters get 50 votes, the top 5 vote getters win" will have distortions similar to STV, but the math is simple and everyone can understand it. What benefit does STV have?
That might be the right system to make voting on lots of media practical threw terrible input devices but when we are talking about a political system that decides how to use nuclear weapons, the effort is worth it.
This is a very good goal if you want to replace duopoly which alienates a large number of people with monopoly which alienates a larger number of people.
What we need is almost the opposite: a system that, to the extent possible without compromising things like manageable legislature size and personal electoral accountability, provides proportional representation so that governing compromises are forced out in the open between parties in government, rather than done behind the scenes within parties so as to attempt to attain a minimal winning coalition leveraging limited substantive choices in the general election.
(Using Single Transferrable Vote, or a similar system, in small multimember districts, say 5 members per district, would do this quite well.)