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Sorry, I cut my sentence short. It was supposed to say something along the lines of not seriously seeking the Office. Perot and Nader both have/had serious and important initiatives, but I don't think either one of them really wants to be President.

A two party system is an almost inevitable result of the First Past the Post system we use. There are a few ways we could fix the problem - the best way would be to implement some kind of corrective system so that parties which received a larger percentage of the national vote than the percentage of the legislative seats would get extra seats... they do something like that in Germany IIRC.

So you'd have the 435 House guys elected as they are now, then another, say, 65 guys selected from parties who are underrepresented in the legislature. Imagine that the Dems get 45% of the national votes, Reps get 45%, Green Party gets 6% and the Tea Party gets 4%, but the seats are distributed, say, 220 for the Dems, 215 for the Reps, none for the other two. No fair! It should be 225,225,30,20, so the Dems get 5 additional Representatives, the Reps get 10, the Greens get 30 and the Teas get 20.

(That's a pretty neat and orderly example; what happens if the majority party got more seats than their national results would grant them? They don't lose seats, but the 65 seats are granted in such a way that the most underrepresented party gets preference. So they look at the ratio of the number of seats you have to the number of seats you "should" have, and the party with the lowest ratio gets a seat; repeat 64 more times.)Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.

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