The control of our nation by two parties is a result of the way we count votes, but there is no good reason to do things this way.

First-past-the-post voting, also called "plurality", only allows you to express your approval (a "yes" vote) for one candidate. ALL other candidates are treated the same, whether they are just as good as your top pick or are the absolute worst: They all get a "NO". If there is a second favorite you would rather have than the worst, plurality does not allow you to express this. The more good candidates there are, the worse it gets. Similar candidates in plurality voting are called spoilers because they take votes away from each other. Plurality voting is fundamentally flawed since it does not allow voters to say which candidates they think are good and which they think are bad.

Each election, between 33 and 60% of eligible voters do not even vote, in part because they know the current system is very broken and does not respect their vote for something better than either of the two mainstream parties is offering. We can achieve unity with like-minded people by using a method called Approval Voting.

Approval voting is immune to spoilers and solves the two-party problem: You can vote for third party candidates without regrets because your vote for one does not take away your ability to vote for another candidate. This opens the door to having more viable candidates in each race, and third party candidates can actually win.

Without a single mainstream "opposition" party to scapegoat and where similar candidates can share a voter base, there is much less mudslinging. Candidates and voters are incentivized to learn about the real issues and consider solutions, including from sidelined third-parties. This eliminates much of the temptation to vote along party lines. The parties will actually have to become better since there are more realistic options to choose from.

Approval Voting also greatly reduces the time required to vote and count votes when compared to every other voting method. It is extremely simple to count and audit: All you have to do is count up the votes and the candidate with the most votes wins. No multiple rounds or computers are required, ever. Because it is so simple and easy to count, Approval Voting is the key to returning to paper ballots.

No. RCV or Ranked Choice Voting is a form of Plurality voting where you have a ballot and you rank the candidates from your most favorite to your least favorite and then candidates are eliminated one by one, usually by a computer, if they aren't in enough voters' "first place" positions. This makes RCV very expensive and complicated to count and nearly impossible to audit. One of the sneaky side effects of RCV is that many of your preference votes end up not being counted at all because of early elimination. These votes can actually completely change the outcome of the election, but RCV just throws them away.

RCV is also known as multiple-round plurality. One of the problems with plurality is that it splits votes. If you have two good candidates, you cannot vote for both of them, and a vote for one of them is counted as a vote against every other candidate you like, and each of them is counted exactly the same as your worst option. Plurality stinks for this reason it easily causes contention and division among well-meaning voters. RCV pretends to solve this by giving you multiple rounds and ranked preferences, but in every round, it's still using plurality, which means it is still prone to this effect of discarding votes and pitting good candidates against each other, and just takes more time to count besides, which is an argument used by very wealthy donors to try to push more and more computers into elections, making transparency and audits impossible. RCV would be more aptly named "divide and conquer" since in many of the rounds you have acceptable or decent candidates infighting against each other, whittling each other down until they are easily overcome by an adversary, even when that adversary only has a minority of support. In RCV, eliminated candidates can actually be the most popular. RCV is expensive, complicated, still unfair, and it throws away votes that could have changed the outcome.

This can never happen with Approval Voting, since you can vote for the candidates you like and no votes are discarded; all of them are counted at one go, and multiple rounds are never required.

The Constitutional method of voting was replaced by a two-party system (first-past-the-post) in 1804 by the 12th Amendment. Nearly every public school history textbook claims that the 12th Amendment was created to add a tiebreaker due to inadequate tiebreakers existing in the Constitution, but this is untrue; the 12th Amendment does not actually provide a failproof tiebreaker either. Instead, its main effect was and is to install a two-party system, ensuring that the quality of presidential candidates would decline over time. How does it accomplish this? By removing the Approval Voting aspect from our presidential elections and paving the way for consolidated partisan tickets. The Constitutional method has been entirely forgotten. Today, practically no one even knows that a better system ever existed, despite it being in plain print in the US Constitution.

The Constitution does not grant any power to political parties. The people are meant to be free to form their own associations and vote for whomever they please. The founding fathers including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison warned us against the dangers of letting parties take control. National parties are especially dangerous since they consolidate power and supply out-of-state funding to state and local races, inverting the Constitutional standard of the supremacy of individual and states' rights. Measures like the 12th Amendment and partisan primaries were added to grant special powers to national parties, which have the effect of leading us astray and drawing us into shouting matches rather than intelligent, civilized dialogues. We have come to seek out brash and popular personalities who are supposed to "beat" the opposition instead of searching for real solutions or decent candidates.

No, the two-party system was caused by the 12th Amendment and the migration of electoral power into two "mainstream" political parties by acts of Congress. Originally, all parties held an equal opportunity to nominate candidates and have them elected president, even if they were local parties. The two-party system is only a consequence of first-past-the-post voting systems. The US Constitution originally required a different system that would not allow control by two parties, but instead encourages a more open marketplace of ideas.

Disclaimer: No, but the Founding Fathers clearly anticipated the hyper-partisan and counterproductive condition we are in today, and came up with solutions that are so simple and effective that we are rightly astonished by them. We should definitely be taking more notes from the Constitution as opposed to the modern trend of explaining away or else outright ignoring the unfettered genius that crops up in very many places in the Constitution, such as that obscure little "vote for two" phrase that would abolish the system of two-party control by letting us express our true feelings and have our votes actually counted outside of just our favorite candidate. We needn't be preoccupied about perfection while our current system is obviously wrong and has a clear solution already provided for us.