I moved from a PR country to a FPTP one (Canada) and my experience is exactly the opposite - as a left-leaning individual in a conservative ward, there's no way for my vote to ever count. But yeah, now my interests are directly ignored by a dude with a newsletter, an email address, and an office.

The idea is that you would now engage with your dude and your fellow citizens in that conservative riding and be a moderating influence.

You are all in the same boat in a sense that’s more local and less abstract than with proportional rep.

Considering its a safe conservative riding, that engagement is ignored and goes no where. Politicians here are the same as anywhere else, they will focus on where the money and the votes come from and ignore the rest.

Which is why voting needs to be effective, and FPTP is exactly why there are so many "safe" ridings for the various parties.

Why would they engage with you? If they are safe, there's zero need for them to give you the time of day. How do you propose moderating someone who can tell you to fuck off with impunity?

> I moved from a proportional-representation country to a FPTP one (Canada) and it's so much better to have a specific individual who is my MP.

You're mixing things up. FPTP isn't what gives you "a dude with a newsletter, an email address, and an office" and prop-representation doesn't prohibit having one either.

You can have both. Selected the candidate and proportional presentation. Most popular party candidates get elected.

Multiple proportional systems don't require lists and provide the best outcome.

Comparing FPTP to a worse system and decided FTPT is awesome while ignoring its known and widely discussed flaws surprises me. Its not really open for debate these days although people love to reject reality.

> Its not really open for debate these days although people love to reject reality.

Whenever I see something is not open for debate, I view it with a lot more skepticism. Almost always, this type of framing, to make an idea untouchable, leads to abuse. We saw this in a lot of the “trust authorities” type messaging in the pandemic.

Gravity's existence isn't open for debate, that doesn't mean there isn't more to learn about it.

The studied and understood outcomes of FPTP systems in the real world have all shown similar issues trending towards 2 party systems, being susceptible to vote splitting on one side of the spectrum and leading to 'strategic' instead of 'idealistic' voting.

There are worse systems by far, and better systems. Ignoring the bad because you can think of a single worse system is ignoring reality.

> Gravity's existence isn't open for debate

What? Of course it is! There are physicists looking for the unified theory who hypothesize that there may be a unified way of understanding all the forces. IANA physicist by any stretch so maybe I've misunderstood the Great Courses and books I've read, but gravity is actually quite poorly understood to us currently.

But the broader point about things not being open for debate is dangerous, and I think you unintentionally demonstrated a real-life reason why. If we stop questioning gravity and trying to understand it's cause better (which IMHO primiarly happens through reasoned, intelligent debate) then we stagnate, and stagnation can be dangerous as from there it's a short hop and a skip to regression.

If you want to make the argument though that some things aren't open for debate, I think there are stronger cases, like the Cartesian "I think therefore I am" is hard (though not impossible) to argue against because it forces the thinker to make arguments for their own non-existence, which is a tall order for a person who by definition must exist in order to do so.

Gravity isn't understood, but it exists as a force regardless. We know it does, no one debates it does, but whatever we _call_ it might change, and how we understand it will inevitably change.

That was my point. Gravity as a force exists, but the understanding of that force is still being developed. We might even change the name, but there is no doubt the force exists.

I should have worded it better. Extrapolating from that is probably not achieving much.

Ah fair, I do see your point on a difference between existence and understanding. Though, some of the theories I've heard basically posit that gravity doesn't really "exist" in any sense that we have of it now, but is rather just an exposed slice of some higher dimensional reality that we can't experience entirely. But, to your point, something obviously exists there because it's measurable, repeatable, etc, so from that perspective nobody is questioning it's existence.

Also what came to mind was picturing Einstein doing his thought experiment where he was in an elevator at various levels of acceleration, and his observation that there was no way to tell the difference between the force felt from gravity vs. the acceleration. That to me feels a lot like quesitoning the "existence" of gravity! But I don't think we're really disagreeing, more were just operating with different definitions in mind of "existence."

Appreciate the discussion!

One of the outcomes of the 2015 election was that we had an electoral reform committee that evaluated various electoral systems to see what best fixed Canada's problems. 88% of the experts that spoke to committee said that Proportional Representation was the best system for a country like Canada.

Maybe this issue is technically open for debate, but the enormously strong consensus from experts in the field weighs to one side of the issue.

I am a centrist. There have been a ton of studies on various sides of the spectrum highlighting issues with FPTP as a system.

Its not they disagree with _me_, they disagree with the overall state of political science and its years of research into the outcomes of systems, not just what people "want"

FPTP has many many flaws, one being that it trends towards a defacto 2-party system due to strategic voting, especially if only one spectrum is divided (i.e. liberal/ndp, or alliance/progressive conservatives back a few decades ago).

The Anonymous Party list, and opaque process are not inherent factors on any of the replacements for FPTP, in fact the only one WITH the list was supposed to be an open list, and that was the system with the least political support.

Ranked/alternate voting, STV and other options directly address the issues with FPTP without introducing the drawbacks of MMP/unelected leaders being selected for seats.

Ranked/alternate voting and STV shouldn't be lumped into the same bucket.

Ranked voting is a majoritarian variant of FPTP that doesn't fix many of the flaws of FPTP. There is still the flaw of "favourite betrayal" that induces a need to vote "strategically".

Single Transferable Vote involves ranking candidates but is a Proportional System.

Alterate ranked voting somewhat addresses the idea of needing to strategically vote (favorite betrayal) in favour of your ideal candidate, but only to a degree depending on the parties and initial polling support (a runaway party you don't like will still lead to strategically voting for the party most likely to beat them). Its proportional in that the winners have to get at the most amount of votes across the ranks after eliminations, i.e. you can't win if no one picks you as second/third option, so you have to be picked by someone therefore you are considered to be representing them.

STV does a much better job of it and is why I was strongly in support of STV over AR/MMP or other options.

Countries with two parties often collapse into inaction where nothing ever changes too.

There is no way 2 parties can represent the diversity of opinions and ideas in the country.

2 parties means power tends to jump back and forth due to the recent ruling party doing badly vs the opposition actually providing an alternative and compelling change. This means parties tend to "lose" more than actually "win" elections.

2 dominant parties when one side of the spectrum is split among 2-3 parties tends to allow a smaller minority to achieve stronger governments which is not representative. I.E the split on the right in the 90's allowed the Liberals to have many successive majority governments despite less than 50% of support for many of those elections. In the aughts the alliance and PC merger turned that around and now the NDP and Liberals tend to split the left to a degree and the right can win a strong majority with 35-38% of the actual vote. This doesn't benefit any side long term.

"getting things done" isn't always the best metric for a political party, especially when they don't have the public support for their changes.

STV or various other methods that allow proportional results while maintaining current representation and government size were the best outcome, but didn't benefit the liberals so they dropped it.

Totally agree, 'dude with a newsletter and an email address' is very underrated.