desh | (no subject)

I think that makes more sense in a parliamentary system than in a...um, whatever we have, with the district representation stuff and the strong executive stuff and all.

Also, the Canada system makes sense the more parties you have. Here, if you hate the two main parties, your best option is to fix one of them by your primary voting. In Israel, which I gather is like Canada but with lots more parties, you can vote for some minor party that better represents your interests. With no primaries and 2 parties, I'd feel quite disenfranchised.

If there were no primaries, maybe enough people would actually feel like you needed more than two parties. :)

Our system is structured for two parties, though. (For example, a third-party that gets 10% of the congressional votes statewide will not have 10% of its congresspeople from that party; it will likely have none, unless most of those 10% are all in the same district.) There's no way to fix that systematically without blowing up much of the system. It's just different than in Canada/Israel.

Not so much different. A party that gets 10% of the votes in any one area in Canada won't win any seats either. Israel is proportional representation, Canada is "winner-take-all", except that instead of a state-by-state basis, it's a seat-by-seat basis.

So you need usually about 40% support in any one district to win a seat, and quite often parties like the Green Party will win 15% of the popular vote and no seats.

i have to agree with fweebles here.
our system has historically only supported two parties at a time, but i think that has more to do with habit than with fundamental structures.