7 ms·

It's considered to be up to the voters to pick the best candidate.

Dailiessfie 2y ago
In the US you're way too willing to accept family dinasties for this to be true. Max age should be retirement age - max duration of the term. In my opinion career politicians should be ended altogether but that's another matter.
inopinatus 2y ago
Sadly, this has never happened, anywhere, ever. The distinguishing and necessary result of democracy, practically unique when compared to any other form of government, is that it provides a nonviolent means to remove aggressively incompetent people from office.
- avar 2y ago
  > Sadly, this has never > happened, anywhere, ever. Didn't this literally just happen? If Biden hadn't suffered in the polls after the nature of his debate performance, I don't see how we'd be here today. However indirect the mechanism by which he was ousted, it ultimately comes down to an assessment of what candidate voters would have been willing to back.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    >Didn't this literally just happen? >If Biden hadn't suffered in the polls after the nature of his debate performance, I don't see how we'd be here today. No, this didn't happen at all. There has been no election yet, and polls are not elections, they're just random-ish samplings. The polls showed voters weren't very enthusiastic about Biden, but back in 2015, the polls showed that Trump was absolutely certain to lose in a landslide to Hillary, and that didn't happen. I do agree with the poll results this time around, but that's just my opinion and not at all backed up by an actual election, which we now won't have (since the election will have a different candidate). We'll see how well the new candidate fares. >However indirect the mechanism by which he was ousted This "mechanism" was not part of the government at all, and not really part of "democracy". It was just a bunch of opinion polls organized by mostly the press, and they influenced Biden to stop his campaign, but again this is not some central feature of democratic systems at all. The only way of truly assessing what candidate voters choose is to have an election. Everything else is just guesswork.
    - carso 2y ago
      And I wouldn't be sure the polls were the key factor - big donors calling the shots by withholding funds may have been the deciding factor.
    - Shoop 2y ago
      Didn’t 538 give Trump an ~1-in-3 chance of winning?
    - GolDDranks 2y ago
      From an outsider perspective, the US bipartisan system seems to be a big problem. There are almost no meaningful choices. Moving to transferable vote would perhaps improve things? But I doubt that would happen anytime soon, because the current system is a live-lock of two wrangling powers that don't want more competition.
      - kagakuninja 2y ago
        First we have to git rid of our ludicrous electoral college system. This requires a constitutional amendment, which must first be approved by 2/3 of both houses of congress, then ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures. Since that is the only thing that has enabled Republicans to barely win presidential elections since 2000, we will not get anywhere close to passing such legislation, let alone get it approved by 3/4 of the state legislatures. As a side note, the last attempted constitutional amendment was the Equal Right Amendment, giving equal rights to women. It was proposed in 1972, and is maybe close to finally being approved. https://www.equalrightsamendment.org https://www.equalrightsamendment.org
        vkou 2y ago
        > This requires a constitutional amendment, which must first be approved by 2/3 of both houses of congress, then ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures. Actually all it requires is the state legislatures of enough states to hit 270 EC votes to pass the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta.... It's at 209/270 at the moment. The electoral college is an utterly idiotic system, but can be broken from within.
  - inopinatus 2y ago
    Polls are not an election, indirectly or otherwise. The people who care most about polls are a) pollsters, and b) hacks writing tedious process stories. My point includes the suggestion that there is never a "best"; the optimal outcome is to elect the least worst candidate. ALI: I shall stay here and learn politics. LAWRENCE: That's a very low occupation. ALI: I had no thought of it when I met you. The paradox of government is that the people most qualified to hold office - almost any office - are deterred from it by the sheer awfulness of the jobs. Someone deselecting themselves is in the general category of the dissuaded, even if they've done it before. c.f. also Adams on presidential elections, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416
    - hunter-gatherer 2y ago
      I've recently wondered what a sortitionist democracy would look like, something were the legislative and executive branches are randomly selected throughout the popukation much like a jurry to serve for a few years. I'm not aware of any places in history that had something like that. I've actually had a few runins in my past with some US senators where I got to actually sit and listen and converse about some problems. I was always unimpressed with the caliber of the man, to be honest, in terms of both their emotional and cognitive prowess. Having random people vote on the issues probably wouldn't yield worse results. Something I've come to believe is that US democracy doesn't naturally select for anyone based on leadership skills, credentials, or any virtue that is needed in such a role. It seems to select for people who can get votes, which can mean a lot of things. I think that is a key issue.
      - tsimionescu 2y ago
        A very important point in politics that doesn't often get discussed is that simply holding a legal office doesn't give you any actual powers. The most likely result of a sortitionist system would be that the bureaucracy controls the state, and that the officially appointed leaders are strictly figureheads. Despite what the law says, people in the administration don't actually have to follow the orders of their appointed superior. If they feel that the senator/congressman/president/etc can be fooled, or simply that enough of their colleagues are on their side, they can just ignore even direct orders. What's the senator going to do? Call the police because their subordinates are ignoring them? So one of the most necessary qualities in an official is being able to control the levers of power - through connections, charisma, physical power in ages past, money - whatever it is, you need your subordinates to actually do what you tell them. Government isn't a boardgames where people follow the law just because those are the rules of the game.
- DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
  That totally worked in 2016?
Supermancho 2y ago
This is flawed. How are is a voter supposed to be able to pick the best, with inaccurate/no information? It's impractical. Like a laws passed to protect a person by name would be impractical. It doesn't scale. The US has suffered for the lack of information. How can this be addressed, in the next 20 years, is a much more interesting question.
- fluidcruft 2y ago
  Seems more like a competition issue. In general if both parties weren't entrenched to this degree, they would be out competed by a group with increased transparency. "Vote for the black box behind the curtain!" vs "Vote for the person who's talking to you!" should be a pretty easy win at the poll. IMHO what we are seeing is a systemic result of the lack of competitive elections and winner-take-all and how it interacts with parties. The parties are far too comfortable. If they expected to have to compete, they wouldn't select vegetables.
  - autoexec 2y ago
    We'd have to replace our first past the post voting system if we wanted to make more parties viable and unsurprisingly most of the people our flawed system keeps in power aren't very eager to change it.
  - Sabinus 2y ago
    I highly recommend Australia's ranked choice voting. We still have two party politics, but if a party goes too far from the electorate they'll lose to an independent or minor party. It allows candidates to target the reasonable majority instead of encouraging fishing for the votes on the fringes.
tomohawk 2y ago
The Democrat party cancelled primaries in a few states to prevent anyone from running against Biden. The party picked this guy. https://floridaphoenix.com/2024/03/20/chair-nikki-fried-defends-democratic-partys-move-to-cancel-primary-desantis-ridiculed-the-move/ https://floridaphoenix.com/2024/03/20/chair-nikki-fried-defe... https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bidens-democratic-challengers-hit-ballot-access-roadblocks/story?id=105882807 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bidens-democratic-challenger... https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2023/12/08/dean-phillips-might-file-challenges-after-being-left-off-florida--n-c--ballots https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2023/12/08/dean-ph...
- lupire 2y ago
  No one is required to vote for a party's nominee.
  - drewcoo 2y ago
    > No one is required to vote for a party's nominee. How primaries work is entirely up to the party. They may require votes, weigh some votes more than others, or whatever other scheme they choose internally.
    - nozzlegear 2y ago
      Did the democrats do that this time?
- TheKarateKid 2y ago
  Very ironic coming from the same party that claims they need to "protect democracy". They aren't even allowing "open and fair" elections in their own candidate selection process, yet we're supposed to believe they will do that on a national level? As Maya Angelou once said, when people show you who they are -- believe them.
amadeuspagel 2y ago
The constitution has a lower limit on the age of the president, why not an upper limit?
- krapp 2y ago
  It was written during a time when the average life expectancy of men was around 40.
  - IAmLiterallyAB 2y ago
    Perhaps but people weren't getting dementia at 40 back then. It's not really relevant what the average life expectancy was
    - krapp 2y ago
      >Perhaps but people weren't getting dementia at 40 back then. Exactly. There's no point in putting an upper age limit on a position when no one lives long enough for age to even be a factor.
      - dllthomas 2y ago
        Except many of the actual people with their names on that document lived to be older than Biden is now.
      - the_sleaze_ 2y ago
        The average life expectancy was much lower, but there were plenty of gray-beards around. Socrates made it to 71.
    - drewcoo 2y ago
      > people weren't getting dementia at 40 back then Citation needed. That claim seems clouded by today's standard of living. Before there was clean drinking water, alcohol was much more widely consumed. Were people demented, drunk, or experiencing alcoholic dementia? Before OSHA, jobs could cause similar symptoms. "Mad as a hatter" referred to hat-makers commonly getting mercury poisoning, as one example of job-induced dementia. Before the FDA, we have examples from food and medicine. Etc.
JoshTriplett 2y ago
With a better voting system (e.g. Approval or Condorcet) and nothing preventing a dozen candidates from running, that would be much more feasible. These go hand in hand: our current voting system breaks down if multiple candidates draw votes from each other, but a better voting system would be immune to that failure mode and could give people a free choice of several reasonable candidates without having some of them withdraw and throw their support to others.
- DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
  my thinking exactly why is it that there are not the best 5, 50 or 500 people on the ballot and I as a voter can mark any and all that I think I know will do the job the way I want them to
  - xp84 2y ago
    Only (relative) nerds would be able to figure this out in practice. Using a voting system that “the common man” doesn’t fully understand is unfortunately kind of elitist/classist in its effects even though i understand that’s not the intention of the many who wish for it.
    - JoshTriplett 2y ago
      > Only (relative) nerds would be able to figure this out in practice. "Check the box next to anyone you approve of" is not hard to figure out. "Write down the candidates you find acceptable, in order of preference" is not substantially harder, either, and provides additional benefit (the ability to express a preference among the candidates you approve of).
      - xp84 2y ago
        This is just the thing you “voting system optimizers” miss! Yes, “check each one you approve of” is easy if you the voter aren’t meant to understand how it works. “If you just shut up and do what you’re told by the political scientists, it’ll all work out.” It’s the ‘how it works’ part that loses people. Strategies employed by those who understand it fully can even advantage more savvy voters over the ones just strictly following instructions. For instance, manipulating ranked choice by strategically not choosing any second or third choices. People know that they don’t know fully how systems besides FPTP work, and it makes them feel like these are a way to cheat them. The instructions are simple, the mechanism and the possible ‘optimization strategies’ are more complex. I’m not saying people are stupid, just not experts in this flavor of nerdery, and suspicious.
sumedh 2y ago
> It's considered to be up to the voters to pick the best candidate. Democrats didnt get a chance to do that with Biden this time, there was no primary.
- nozzlegear 2y ago
  There was a primary, every state except Florida held one. Dean Philips is the only notable person who ran against him, but you did in fact have a chance to vote/caucus for someone other than Biden if you were a democrat.
drewcoo 2y ago
The DNC picks Democrat candidates. The purpose of superdelegates is to overrule popular votes in primaries. To make nominations "less chaotic." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate
- nozzlegear 2y ago
  > In 2018, the Democratic National Committee reduced the influence of superdelegates by barring them from voting on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention, allowing them to vote only in a contested convention.
BurningFrog 2y ago
Looks like I didn't make myself understood. I meant that if the voters don't want an 82 year old president, they can just not vote for him. I did not talk about primaries.
grecy 2y ago
> It's considered to be up to the voters to pick the best candidate So why can't I pick a candidate that is under 30, or born overseas? The rules make no logical sense and need updating.

In the US you're way too willing to accept family dinasties for this to be true. Max age should be retirement age - max duration of the term. In my opinion career politicians should be ended altogether but that's another matter.

inopinatus 2y ago

Sadly, this has never happened, anywhere, ever. The distinguishing and necessary result of democracy, practically unique when compared to any other form of government, is that it provides a nonviolent means to remove aggressively incompetent people from office.

avar 2y ago
> Sadly, this has never > happened, anywhere, ever. Didn't this literally just happen? If Biden hadn't suffered in the polls after the nature of his debate performance, I don't see how we'd be here today. However indirect the mechanism by which he was ousted, it ultimately comes down to an assessment of what candidate voters would have been willing to back.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >Didn't this literally just happen? >If Biden hadn't suffered in the polls after the nature of his debate performance, I don't see how we'd be here today. No, this didn't happen at all. There has been no election yet, and polls are not elections, they're just random-ish samplings. The polls showed voters weren't very enthusiastic about Biden, but back in 2015, the polls showed that Trump was absolutely certain to lose in a landslide to Hillary, and that didn't happen. I do agree with the poll results this time around, but that's just my opinion and not at all backed up by an actual election, which we now won't have (since the election will have a different candidate). We'll see how well the new candidate fares. >However indirect the mechanism by which he was ousted This "mechanism" was not part of the government at all, and not really part of "democracy". It was just a bunch of opinion polls organized by mostly the press, and they influenced Biden to stop his campaign, but again this is not some central feature of democratic systems at all. The only way of truly assessing what candidate voters choose is to have an election. Everything else is just guesswork.
  - carso 2y ago
    And I wouldn't be sure the polls were the key factor - big donors calling the shots by withholding funds may have been the deciding factor.
  - Shoop 2y ago
    Didn’t 538 give Trump an ~1-in-3 chance of winning?
  - GolDDranks 2y ago
    From an outsider perspective, the US bipartisan system seems to be a big problem. There are almost no meaningful choices. Moving to transferable vote would perhaps improve things? But I doubt that would happen anytime soon, because the current system is a live-lock of two wrangling powers that don't want more competition.
    - kagakuninja 2y ago
      First we have to git rid of our ludicrous electoral college system. This requires a constitutional amendment, which must first be approved by 2/3 of both houses of congress, then ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures. Since that is the only thing that has enabled Republicans to barely win presidential elections since 2000, we will not get anywhere close to passing such legislation, let alone get it approved by 3/4 of the state legislatures. As a side note, the last attempted constitutional amendment was the Equal Right Amendment, giving equal rights to women. It was proposed in 1972, and is maybe close to finally being approved. https://www.equalrightsamendment.org https://www.equalrightsamendment.org
      - vkou 2y ago
        > This requires a constitutional amendment, which must first be approved by 2/3 of both houses of congress, then ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures. Actually all it requires is the state legislatures of enough states to hit 270 EC votes to pass the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta.... It's at 209/270 at the moment. The electoral college is an utterly idiotic system, but can be broken from within.
- inopinatus 2y ago
  Polls are not an election, indirectly or otherwise. The people who care most about polls are a) pollsters, and b) hacks writing tedious process stories. My point includes the suggestion that there is never a "best"; the optimal outcome is to elect the least worst candidate. ALI: I shall stay here and learn politics. LAWRENCE: That's a very low occupation. ALI: I had no thought of it when I met you. The paradox of government is that the people most qualified to hold office - almost any office - are deterred from it by the sheer awfulness of the jobs. Someone deselecting themselves is in the general category of the dissuaded, even if they've done it before. c.f. also Adams on presidential elections, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416
  - hunter-gatherer 2y ago
    I've recently wondered what a sortitionist democracy would look like, something were the legislative and executive branches are randomly selected throughout the popukation much like a jurry to serve for a few years. I'm not aware of any places in history that had something like that. I've actually had a few runins in my past with some US senators where I got to actually sit and listen and converse about some problems. I was always unimpressed with the caliber of the man, to be honest, in terms of both their emotional and cognitive prowess. Having random people vote on the issues probably wouldn't yield worse results. Something I've come to believe is that US democracy doesn't naturally select for anyone based on leadership skills, credentials, or any virtue that is needed in such a role. It seems to select for people who can get votes, which can mean a lot of things. I think that is a key issue.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      A very important point in politics that doesn't often get discussed is that simply holding a legal office doesn't give you any actual powers. The most likely result of a sortitionist system would be that the bureaucracy controls the state, and that the officially appointed leaders are strictly figureheads. Despite what the law says, people in the administration don't actually have to follow the orders of their appointed superior. If they feel that the senator/congressman/president/etc can be fooled, or simply that enough of their colleagues are on their side, they can just ignore even direct orders. What's the senator going to do? Call the police because their subordinates are ignoring them? So one of the most necessary qualities in an official is being able to control the levers of power - through connections, charisma, physical power in ages past, money - whatever it is, you need your subordinates to actually do what you tell them. Government isn't a boardgames where people follow the law just because those are the rules of the game.
DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
That totally worked in 2016?

Supermancho 2y ago

This is flawed. How are is a voter supposed to be able to pick the best, with inaccurate/no information? It's impractical. Like a laws passed to protect a person by name would be impractical. It doesn't scale. The US has suffered for the lack of information. How can this be addressed, in the next 20 years, is a much more interesting question.

fluidcruft 2y ago
Seems more like a competition issue. In general if both parties weren't entrenched to this degree, they would be out competed by a group with increased transparency. "Vote for the black box behind the curtain!" vs "Vote for the person who's talking to you!" should be a pretty easy win at the poll. IMHO what we are seeing is a systemic result of the lack of competitive elections and winner-take-all and how it interacts with parties. The parties are far too comfortable. If they expected to have to compete, they wouldn't select vegetables.
- autoexec 2y ago
  We'd have to replace our first past the post voting system if we wanted to make more parties viable and unsurprisingly most of the people our flawed system keeps in power aren't very eager to change it.
- Sabinus 2y ago
  I highly recommend Australia's ranked choice voting. We still have two party politics, but if a party goes too far from the electorate they'll lose to an independent or minor party. It allows candidates to target the reasonable majority instead of encouraging fishing for the votes on the fringes.

tomohawk 2y ago

The Democrat party cancelled primaries in a few states to prevent anyone from running against Biden. The party picked this guy. https://floridaphoenix.com/2024/03/20/chair-nikki-fried-defends-democratic-partys-move-to-cancel-primary-desantis-ridiculed-the-move/ https://floridaphoenix.com/2024/03/20/chair-nikki-fried-defe... https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bidens-democratic-challengers-hit-ballot-access-roadblocks/story?id=105882807 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bidens-democratic-challenger... https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2023/12/08/dean-phillips-might-file-challenges-after-being-left-off-florida--n-c--ballots https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2023/12/08/dean-ph...

lupire 2y ago
No one is required to vote for a party's nominee.
- drewcoo 2y ago
  > No one is required to vote for a party's nominee. How primaries work is entirely up to the party. They may require votes, weigh some votes more than others, or whatever other scheme they choose internally.
  - nozzlegear 2y ago
    Did the democrats do that this time?
TheKarateKid 2y ago
Very ironic coming from the same party that claims they need to "protect democracy". They aren't even allowing "open and fair" elections in their own candidate selection process, yet we're supposed to believe they will do that on a national level? As Maya Angelou once said, when people show you who they are -- believe them.

amadeuspagel 2y ago

The constitution has a lower limit on the age of the president, why not an upper limit?

krapp 2y ago
It was written during a time when the average life expectancy of men was around 40.
- IAmLiterallyAB 2y ago
  Perhaps but people weren't getting dementia at 40 back then. It's not really relevant what the average life expectancy was
  - krapp 2y ago
    >Perhaps but people weren't getting dementia at 40 back then. Exactly. There's no point in putting an upper age limit on a position when no one lives long enough for age to even be a factor.
    - dllthomas 2y ago
      Except many of the actual people with their names on that document lived to be older than Biden is now.
    - the_sleaze_ 2y ago
      The average life expectancy was much lower, but there were plenty of gray-beards around. Socrates made it to 71.
  - drewcoo 2y ago
    > people weren't getting dementia at 40 back then Citation needed. That claim seems clouded by today's standard of living. Before there was clean drinking water, alcohol was much more widely consumed. Were people demented, drunk, or experiencing alcoholic dementia? Before OSHA, jobs could cause similar symptoms. "Mad as a hatter" referred to hat-makers commonly getting mercury poisoning, as one example of job-induced dementia. Before the FDA, we have examples from food and medicine. Etc.

JoshTriplett 2y ago

With a better voting system (e.g. Approval or Condorcet) and nothing preventing a dozen candidates from running, that would be much more feasible. These go hand in hand: our current voting system breaks down if multiple candidates draw votes from each other, but a better voting system would be immune to that failure mode and could give people a free choice of several reasonable candidates without having some of them withdraw and throw their support to others.

DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
my thinking exactly why is it that there are not the best 5, 50 or 500 people on the ballot and I as a voter can mark any and all that I think I know will do the job the way I want them to
- xp84 2y ago
  Only (relative) nerds would be able to figure this out in practice. Using a voting system that “the common man” doesn’t fully understand is unfortunately kind of elitist/classist in its effects even though i understand that’s not the intention of the many who wish for it.
  - JoshTriplett 2y ago
    > Only (relative) nerds would be able to figure this out in practice. "Check the box next to anyone you approve of" is not hard to figure out. "Write down the candidates you find acceptable, in order of preference" is not substantially harder, either, and provides additional benefit (the ability to express a preference among the candidates you approve of).
    - xp84 2y ago
      This is just the thing you “voting system optimizers” miss! Yes, “check each one you approve of” is easy if you the voter aren’t meant to understand how it works. “If you just shut up and do what you’re told by the political scientists, it’ll all work out.” It’s the ‘how it works’ part that loses people. Strategies employed by those who understand it fully can even advantage more savvy voters over the ones just strictly following instructions. For instance, manipulating ranked choice by strategically not choosing any second or third choices. People know that they don’t know fully how systems besides FPTP work, and it makes them feel like these are a way to cheat them. The instructions are simple, the mechanism and the possible ‘optimization strategies’ are more complex. I’m not saying people are stupid, just not experts in this flavor of nerdery, and suspicious.

sumedh 2y ago

> It's considered to be up to the voters to pick the best candidate. Democrats didnt get a chance to do that with Biden this time, there was no primary.

nozzlegear 2y ago
There was a primary, every state except Florida held one. Dean Philips is the only notable person who ran against him, but you did in fact have a chance to vote/caucus for someone other than Biden if you were a democrat.

drewcoo 2y ago

The DNC picks Democrat candidates. The purpose of superdelegates is to overrule popular votes in primaries. To make nominations "less chaotic." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate

nozzlegear 2y ago
> In 2018, the Democratic National Committee reduced the influence of superdelegates by barring them from voting on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention, allowing them to vote only in a contested convention.

BurningFrog 2y ago

Looks like I didn't make myself understood. I meant that if the voters don't want an 82 year old president, they can just not vote for him. I did not talk about primaries.

grecy 2y ago

> It's considered to be up to the voters to pick the best candidate So why can't I pick a candidate that is under 30, or born overseas? The rules make no logical sense and need updating.