Why US elections only give you two choices

America’s two-party system is widely hated. Very few Americans think the two major parties do an adequate job representing them, and most say more parties are needed. But when it comes time to vote, very few people vote for third-party candidates. Often, this is explained as either a failure of will (the country would have third parties if more people would just vote for them) or as a conspiracy (the political and media establishments suppress third-party candidates and ideas).

And it’s not that those things aren’t true. But there’s a much simpler explanation, and it’s the very basic rule governing almost every election in the US: Only one person can win. If you’re American, that probably sounds utterly reasonable: What the hell other kinds of elections are there? But the answer is: There are lots. Winner-take-all elections (also called plurality voting, or “first past the post”) are a practice that most advanced democracies left behind long ago — and they’re what keep the US from having more political options.

Even if you’re not sold on the need for more parties in the US, though, scratch the surface of “only one person can win” a little and you start to see how it produces perverse results, even within the two-party system. It’s a big part of why the political parties have moved farther apart from each other, and it leaves about half of the country without any political representation at all.

An alternative to winner-take-all elections would be some kind of “proportional representation,” in which a share of votes would simply result in a share of seats. Fortunately, we can look to many, many other advanced democracies for functional examples. Watch the video above to see a few.