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It's largely because increased voting overwhelmingly (and almost exclusively) benefits one side in the US. While it's obviously good to have increased participa
by caslon 5y ago
It's largely because increased voting overwhelmingly (and almost exclusively) benefits one side in the US. While it's obviously good to have increased participation in democracy, the side that's going to more or less cease to exist if we ever get even 80% citizen participation obviously has an incentive to make voting harder.
- madeofpalk 5y agoI'm not sure how you rationalise that with the fact that Australia consistently votes in a right-wing government. UK (which doesn't have compulsory voting) also reelected a right-wing government.
- jwmhjwmh 5y agoThey were talking about the US specifically.
- DFHippie 5y agoHere's a recent article about the special electoral conditions in the US: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/advantage-gop/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/advantage-gop/
- trhway 5y agoAustralia has 83%+ (with 67% being of British ancestry) and UK has 86% white population while US has 60% non-hispanic white population (with no such single major ancestry inside it like the British ancestry of the AU and UK white populations). Thus there are huge sources of racist/xenophobic voting power drivers that the right-wings in AU and UK can tap into while doing so in US causes blowback of similar scale and which grows with voting participation increase.
- mastax 5y agoThe "wings" are not very comparable between countries. They are influenced by their environment. I can confidently say that an alternate universe where those countries had US-style elections would have very different parties, though not necessarily more US-like.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- smhost 5y ago"we can't have democracy because then the anti-democratic party would have to change" is my favorite talking point
- caslon 5y agoI'm not defending the anti-democratic party, I'm simply explaining why increasing voting access is so controversial in the US: because a party with outsized power does not want to lose their power. Fully for democracy over here.
- LordDragonfang 5y ago"More people voting always hurts <x party>, and helps their opponents" has always seemed to me like an admission that <x party> is innately anti-democratic, and I don't know how people ever spin it otherwise.
- caslon 5y agoAbsolutely! That's...pretty much exactly what I said.
- mbg721 5y ago"Requiring ID to vote always hurts <y party>" has always seemed to me like an admission that <y party> is innately anti-democratic, and I don't know how people ever spin it otherwise.
- yifanl 5y agoI don't follow how flipping the point from "more voting" to "less voting" while not flipping the "anti-democratic" clause tracks.
- mbg721 5y agoIf 8 of my dead great-grandparents vote for Mayor Daley, but I vote against, his 8-1 victory isn't democracy.
- KittenInABox 5y agoI think this is a bad faith response to the poster you're responding to.
- mbg721 5y agoI'm not trying to respond in bad faith; I'm pointing out, albeit by hyperbole, that "more voting" can still be anti-democratic.
- jolux 5y agoI used to think this was true, but I think the last election has proved this theory wrong. The Democrats won, but there was record turnout for both candidates, and it was a lot closer than many were expecting. Republicans are in the process of making it so it doesn’t matter who wins.
- Jcowell 5y agoI feel this doesn’t account for districts that were Gerry wandered and what would have happened had there been fair drawing of districts I. These communities. This is Where number allocation is more important that how many numbers there are.
- bobthepanda 5y agowell, there's an entire class of seats that by definition can't really be gerrymandered (Senate seats are always statewide). Those did not flip nearly as hard as polls had projected.
- jolux 5y agoRight, exactly. People were predicting a blowout and it ended up 50/50 in the senate. The electoral college was comparatively rather close too.
- InitialLastName 5y agoBarring historical arguments about the Dakotas, modern Gerrymandering doesn't meaningfully apply to the presidential election, which was also closer than many forecasters predicted.