4 ms·

It's not a democratic process. The gerrymandering, electoral college, all of it is trash. Not to mention the core parts of the system such as identification ar

by ilaksh 2y ago

It's not a democratic process. The gerrymandering, electoral college, all of it is trash. Not to mention the core parts of the system such as identification are completely outdated. We should have had ranked choice voting years ago at the very least.

innocentoldguy 2y ago
The electoral college is one of the ways we protect the rights of the minority. Without it, we’d be a democracy and that wouldn’t be good.
- jryan49 2y ago
  What stops the electrical college from giving the majority an advantage?
  - hagbard_c 2y ago
    AC does that, without the electrical college it would just be DC all the time with ever increasing polarisation.
- 0134340 2y ago
  Only the rights of the minority which live in less populated states and thereby the rights of the others are subdued. So those people don't deserve equal weight to their votes?
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  The EC was never supposed to represent the minority. It only does today because the number of congressional representatives is unfairly capped.
  - innocentoldguy 2y ago
    I don't know where you're getting this idea since one of the main goals of the Electoral College was to protect smaller states from more populous states dominating presidential elections. Boudreaux, Paul. "The Electoral College and Its Meager Federalism." 88 Marq. L. Rev. 195 (2004). Available at Marquette Law Review.
- kagakuninja 2y ago
  It was enacted so that the minority of slave owners could get their 3/5 slave representation without letting their slaves vote.
red016 2y ago
[flagged]
epoxia 2y ago
I personally prefer approval voting over rank choiced voting. Simpler and gets most of the way there. Also, ranked choice voting is incompatible with the electoral college. As much as I despise the electoral college, a constitutional amendment to correct it is seemingly impossible. Not sure how ranked choice voting would work with an interstate compact though.
- bitshiftfaced 2y ago
  Same here. Way more people will understand how approval voting works when compared to rank choice. Not to mention, it incentives candidates to behave with more tact, rather than be so adversarial. You see this in how approval voting elections have less adversarial, negative ads.
  - Izkata 2y ago
    Also because ranked choice has multiple rounds, it allows for splitting the vote in unexpected ways. This happened recently in France (I think) where the majority would have approved of either of two candidates, but the third was the one that won because of how the second choices were split after the first round. That can't happen with approval voting. Also, with approval, there's an additional much more hidden advantage: There's no limit to how many you can vote for, so you can vote for your ideal candidate and an acceptable moderate without feeling like you're throwing away your vote. It makes it more likely for moderates and third parties to win over the more extreme candidates.
the_snooze 2y ago
People always complain about those structural things but don't actually want to exercise the immense power they have right now: voting in primary elections. Primaries have abysmal turnout rates, and given the geographic self-sorting and gerrymandering, serve as the de facto election in most places. Politicians know their real constiuencies are the 10% of people who turn out in primaries. Those are the folks they're afraid of. Everyone else is ceding that power by not participating.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  In a lot of states, primaries require registration/party membership to participate in. Effectively more gatekeeping. Additionally, the two parties have no interest in breaking the two party power struggle.
  - the_snooze 2y ago
    To the best of my knowledge, party registration in closed primary states is just an additional question on the voter registration form. It's not exactly an onerous cost unless you're someone who regularly switches which party's primary you want to vote in. That said, even in open primary states, primary election participation is low outside of presidential contests. I served as a poll worker once for a US House/Senate primary, and my precinct got about 7% turnout, and I'm in an open-primary same-day-registration state.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    More than that, though I agree with everything you're saying, is nobody even considers congresspeople in these discussions. Everyone focuses on the president and how they appoint the judicial, congress is where everything (read: nothing) happens.
  - stcroixx 2y ago
    Sometimes they just annoint a candidate without having a primary at all.
    - 2y ago
burky 2y ago
I 100% agree. It’s always disheartening to see how different the spread is between the popular vote and electoral vote. It’s such a sham and we should move to ranked choice voting, but sadly I don’t think it’ll ever happen with the current political layout.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
> We should have had ranked choice voting years ago at the very least. If we could somehow "fix" voting (in many or all cases this is a constitutional modification, no simple task), why would we even keep voting at all? Voting's just bad. The things that you and everyone else like about democracy, ironically, have nothing to do with voting. You like the idea that any small child, boy or girl, can grow up to become president. That there is no ruling caste, and so on. That we have peaceful transitions of power from one administration to the next. That there is some sort of time limit on how long one can hold office. All these things are achievable in a superior system: sortition. Everyone who qualifies (35 and up, no a felon, natural born citizen) has an equal chance at becoming president (similar for other offices). We do 20 or 30 drawings so that if anyone rejects, we go on to the next. Trying to fix voting when the fundamental flaw with it is that all of us, to the last, is simply not intelligent enough to cast a vote wisely, can't be fix with vote diddling and runoffs and ranked choices and whatnot. The defective portion of the mechanism's still there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  Sortition also helps with the whole "those who crave power should be the furthest from it".
- tayloramurphy 2y ago
  In the US system, I'd be in favor of just having the House of Representatives by done via a sortition process. I have a hard time imagining the Senate and President being done that way... but maybe it actually wouldn't be any worse than the status quo!
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    This would ruin the political parties. The only way they survive is that any rep or senator who says "screw you, I'm in office now and you can't make me do anything" finds that the party withdraws campaign support next go round. With no one (hardly ever) getting a second term in office, without there being campaign money, parties die. Maybe the polarization dies too. Oh, and no need for term limits anymore. Sort of baked in, without needing to be explicit. I'm undecided on whether we'd get more ijit populism or less. Quite honestly, I think senators should be picked by the states... the 17th was a mistake. It made a bicameral Congress essentially unicameral.
currymj 2y ago
i would like a better voting system in the US. but e.g. Australia has a great voting system (on all levels from the voting rules to the election day administration), yet they still seem to have fairly screwed up partisan politics. i think it might improve things but wouldn't help make politics fundamentally better.
- NoboruWataya 2y ago
  A more democratic process doesn't in any way guarantee better government. I guess we all ideologically believe that, on balance, over the log run, democracy tends to produce better outcomes than the alternatives, but it's very noisy. Sometimes (not too infrequently, in fact) the people want the screwed up partisan politics.
- returningfory2 2y ago
  Yeah. Honestly, while I 100% agree that the electoral college and gerrymandering are trash, I feel people do use them as mechanism to avoid dealing with the fact that someone like Trump is just genuinely really popular. Next Tuesday he has a decent shot of being the choice of more than 50% of voting Americans. Ultimately any fair system would still give him the presidency in this case.
- squishington 2y ago
  This is largely due to the media environment (Murdoch) being full of disception. Also, many Australians are politically unengaged. Even the highly educated ones. I have friends and family who are engineers (like myself), lawyers, medical professionals and don't even read the news, have no interest in politics. It's a form of parochialism. The attitude is "so long as I'm doing fine, why do I need to pay attention". I find it very depressing.
roenxi 2y ago
That would have no impact on elections being close. There'd still be a marginal voter and the candidates would still vie for their vote. The reason for tight margins is because modern polling and statistical techniques are both so good. It is easy for people to figure out when they are losing and change their tactics. Changing the voting system doesn't alter that dynamic.
LVB 2y ago
We don’t even need to ditch the electoral college, but "just" get the states to more proportionately assign their electors, as Nebraska and Maine have done. But good luck with that, too. Can you imagine trying to convince, for example, California to proportionally allocate their 54 votes in this political climate and give Trump 40%?
- kagakuninja 2y ago
  If everyone else (and specifically Texas) went proportional, then why not. Until then, CA changing the votes would be a massive give-away to Republicans. BTW, people are overlooking that Nebraska doesn't allocate proportionally, they allocate the votes according to the outcome of each congressional district, which are probably gerrymandered. The overall winner gets the 2 votes for the senate seats.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  You'd probably need a critical mass of states to agree to do it at the same time; as you say it would ~never make sense for a state to be the _first_ (or, well, first big state) to do this.
zahlman 2y ago
TFA is about elections (and also binary referenda) generally, not anything to do with the USA.
hagbard_c 2y ago
No, the electoral college seems to be mostly OK to me since without it the elections would be forever determined by a few densely populated coastal cities - which is also where the politicos would turn all their attention to. The rest of the USA would be treated as those districts in those Hunger Games books, as regions from where the stuff you eat and the stuff you build stuff with comes from but otherwise uninteresting and unimportant. Ranked Choice is also a bad idea because it is too complicated, just do what many sane countries do to great effect: paper ballots, filled in with a pencil, deposited in a ballot box under the eyes of a staff member. One ballot per person, mail-in voting restricted to those who absolutely need it. Voter ID for everyone, no exceptions. Early voting is mostly OK as long as the ballot boxes are kept under watch ALL THE TIME, no exception. After the polls close the ballots are hand-counted in the polling locations, then sent off for an automatic machine recount. Mail-in votes are counted beforehand and the results of that count are made available when the last polling booth closes - this is important because 'late mail-in votes' can be used to 'fill in the gaps' which is not what should be happening in free and fair elections. Provisional results will be available on the same day as the elections are held, those provisional results will become final after all results are in and the machine re-count is finished. The only technology needed is a scanner and a tabulator, Herman Hollerhith [1] could have supplied these. So: paper ballots, hand counted, verified through machine counting. Voter ID like all civilised countries use, no exceptions. Mail-in voting only for those who absolutely need it. Early voting on polling locations OK but the ballot boxes should be guarded 24/7 in an open and verifiable manner, no exceptions allowed. Results available on election day. [1] https://www.britannica.com/money/Herman-Hollerith https://www.britannica.com/money/Herman-Hollerith
- UncleMeat 2y ago
  Take a look at the map of campaign stops for the Trump and Harris campaigns. Not exactly covering the broad country. The electoral college sure doesn't seem to be making sure that broad swathes of the country are not ignored. People vote. In a world with a national popular vote it wouldn't be cities deciding elections, it would be people. Every single person would have precisely the same say in the outcome.
  - 2y ago
tiberious726 2y ago
Bearing in mind Arrow's impossibility theorem, why do you believe ranked choice is an obviously better voting mechanism?
yongjik 2y ago
I fully agree with you on gerrymandering and electoral college, but when 45-50% of voters think Trump is a viable candidate, this isn't something that can be fixed at the election system level. Society is broken at a deeper level.

by ilaksh 2y ago

innocentoldguy 2y ago

The electoral college is one of the ways we protect the rights of the minority. Without it, we’d be a democracy and that wouldn’t be good.

jryan49 2y ago
What stops the electrical college from giving the majority an advantage?
- hagbard_c 2y ago
  AC does that, without the electrical college it would just be DC all the time with ever increasing polarisation.
0134340 2y ago
Only the rights of the minority which live in less populated states and thereby the rights of the others are subdued. So those people don't deserve equal weight to their votes?
candiddevmike 2y ago
The EC was never supposed to represent the minority. It only does today because the number of congressional representatives is unfairly capped.
- innocentoldguy 2y ago
  I don't know where you're getting this idea since one of the main goals of the Electoral College was to protect smaller states from more populous states dominating presidential elections. Boudreaux, Paul. "The Electoral College and Its Meager Federalism." 88 Marq. L. Rev. 195 (2004). Available at Marquette Law Review.
kagakuninja 2y ago
It was enacted so that the minority of slave owners could get their 3/5 slave representation without letting their slaves vote.

red016 2y ago

[flagged]

epoxia 2y ago

I personally prefer approval voting over rank choiced voting. Simpler and gets most of the way there. Also, ranked choice voting is incompatible with the electoral college. As much as I despise the electoral college, a constitutional amendment to correct it is seemingly impossible. Not sure how ranked choice voting would work with an interstate compact though.

bitshiftfaced 2y ago
Same here. Way more people will understand how approval voting works when compared to rank choice. Not to mention, it incentives candidates to behave with more tact, rather than be so adversarial. You see this in how approval voting elections have less adversarial, negative ads.
- Izkata 2y ago
  Also because ranked choice has multiple rounds, it allows for splitting the vote in unexpected ways. This happened recently in France (I think) where the majority would have approved of either of two candidates, but the third was the one that won because of how the second choices were split after the first round. That can't happen with approval voting. Also, with approval, there's an additional much more hidden advantage: There's no limit to how many you can vote for, so you can vote for your ideal candidate and an acceptable moderate without feeling like you're throwing away your vote. It makes it more likely for moderates and third parties to win over the more extreme candidates.

the_snooze 2y ago

People always complain about those structural things but don't actually want to exercise the immense power they have right now: voting in primary elections. Primaries have abysmal turnout rates, and given the geographic self-sorting and gerrymandering, serve as the de facto election in most places. Politicians know their real constiuencies are the 10% of people who turn out in primaries. Those are the folks they're afraid of. Everyone else is ceding that power by not participating.

candiddevmike 2y ago
In a lot of states, primaries require registration/party membership to participate in. Effectively more gatekeeping. Additionally, the two parties have no interest in breaking the two party power struggle.
- the_snooze 2y ago
  To the best of my knowledge, party registration in closed primary states is just an additional question on the voter registration form. It's not exactly an onerous cost unless you're someone who regularly switches which party's primary you want to vote in. That said, even in open primary states, primary election participation is low outside of presidential contests. I served as a poll worker once for a US House/Senate primary, and my precinct got about 7% turnout, and I'm in an open-primary same-day-registration state.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  More than that, though I agree with everything you're saying, is nobody even considers congresspeople in these discussions. Everyone focuses on the president and how they appoint the judicial, congress is where everything (read: nothing) happens.
- stcroixx 2y ago
  Sometimes they just annoint a candidate without having a primary at all.
  - 2y ago

burky 2y ago

I 100% agree. It’s always disheartening to see how different the spread is between the popular vote and electoral vote. It’s such a sham and we should move to ranked choice voting, but sadly I don’t think it’ll ever happen with the current political layout.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago

> We should have had ranked choice voting years ago at the very least. If we could somehow "fix" voting (in many or all cases this is a constitutional modification, no simple task), why would we even keep voting at all? Voting's just bad. The things that you and everyone else like about democracy, ironically, have nothing to do with voting. You like the idea that any small child, boy or girl, can grow up to become president. That there is no ruling caste, and so on. That we have peaceful transitions of power from one administration to the next. That there is some sort of time limit on how long one can hold office. All these things are achievable in a superior system: sortition. Everyone who qualifies (35 and up, no a felon, natural born citizen) has an equal chance at becoming president (similar for other offices). We do 20 or 30 drawings so that if anyone rejects, we go on to the next. Trying to fix voting when the fundamental flaw with it is that all of us, to the last, is simply not intelligent enough to cast a vote wisely, can't be fix with vote diddling and runoffs and ranked choices and whatnot. The defective portion of the mechanism's still there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

candiddevmike 2y ago
Sortition also helps with the whole "those who crave power should be the furthest from it".
tayloramurphy 2y ago
In the US system, I'd be in favor of just having the House of Representatives by done via a sortition process. I have a hard time imagining the Senate and President being done that way... but maybe it actually wouldn't be any worse than the status quo!
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  This would ruin the political parties. The only way they survive is that any rep or senator who says "screw you, I'm in office now and you can't make me do anything" finds that the party withdraws campaign support next go round. With no one (hardly ever) getting a second term in office, without there being campaign money, parties die. Maybe the polarization dies too. Oh, and no need for term limits anymore. Sort of baked in, without needing to be explicit. I'm undecided on whether we'd get more ijit populism or less. Quite honestly, I think senators should be picked by the states... the 17th was a mistake. It made a bicameral Congress essentially unicameral.

currymj 2y ago

i would like a better voting system in the US. but e.g. Australia has a great voting system (on all levels from the voting rules to the election day administration), yet they still seem to have fairly screwed up partisan politics. i think it might improve things but wouldn't help make politics fundamentally better.

NoboruWataya 2y ago
A more democratic process doesn't in any way guarantee better government. I guess we all ideologically believe that, on balance, over the log run, democracy tends to produce better outcomes than the alternatives, but it's very noisy. Sometimes (not too infrequently, in fact) the people want the screwed up partisan politics.
returningfory2 2y ago
Yeah. Honestly, while I 100% agree that the electoral college and gerrymandering are trash, I feel people do use them as mechanism to avoid dealing with the fact that someone like Trump is just genuinely really popular. Next Tuesday he has a decent shot of being the choice of more than 50% of voting Americans. Ultimately any fair system would still give him the presidency in this case.
squishington 2y ago
This is largely due to the media environment (Murdoch) being full of disception. Also, many Australians are politically unengaged. Even the highly educated ones. I have friends and family who are engineers (like myself), lawyers, medical professionals and don't even read the news, have no interest in politics. It's a form of parochialism. The attitude is "so long as I'm doing fine, why do I need to pay attention". I find it very depressing.

roenxi 2y ago

That would have no impact on elections being close. There'd still be a marginal voter and the candidates would still vie for their vote. The reason for tight margins is because modern polling and statistical techniques are both so good. It is easy for people to figure out when they are losing and change their tactics. Changing the voting system doesn't alter that dynamic.

LVB 2y ago

We don’t even need to ditch the electoral college, but "just" get the states to more proportionately assign their electors, as Nebraska and Maine have done. But good luck with that, too. Can you imagine trying to convince, for example, California to proportionally allocate their 54 votes in this political climate and give Trump 40%?

kagakuninja 2y ago
If everyone else (and specifically Texas) went proportional, then why not. Until then, CA changing the votes would be a massive give-away to Republicans. BTW, people are overlooking that Nebraska doesn't allocate proportionally, they allocate the votes according to the outcome of each congressional district, which are probably gerrymandered. The overall winner gets the 2 votes for the senate seats.
rsynnott 2y ago
You'd probably need a critical mass of states to agree to do it at the same time; as you say it would ~never make sense for a state to be the _first_ (or, well, first big state) to do this.

zahlman 2y ago

TFA is about elections (and also binary referenda) generally, not anything to do with the USA.

hagbard_c 2y ago

No, the electoral college seems to be mostly OK to me since without it the elections would be forever determined by a few densely populated coastal cities - which is also where the politicos would turn all their attention to. The rest of the USA would be treated as those districts in those Hunger Games books, as regions from where the stuff you eat and the stuff you build stuff with comes from but otherwise uninteresting and unimportant. Ranked Choice is also a bad idea because it is too complicated, just do what many sane countries do to great effect: paper ballots, filled in with a pencil, deposited in a ballot box under the eyes of a staff member. One ballot per person, mail-in voting restricted to those who absolutely need it. Voter ID for everyone, no exceptions. Early voting is mostly OK as long as the ballot boxes are kept under watch ALL THE TIME, no exception. After the polls close the ballots are hand-counted in the polling locations, then sent off for an automatic machine recount. Mail-in votes are counted beforehand and the results of that count are made available when the last polling booth closes - this is important because 'late mail-in votes' can be used to 'fill in the gaps' which is not what should be happening in free and fair elections. Provisional results will be available on the same day as the elections are held, those provisional results will become final after all results are in and the machine re-count is finished. The only technology needed is a scanner and a tabulator, Herman Hollerhith [1] could have supplied these. So: paper ballots, hand counted, verified through machine counting. Voter ID like all civilised countries use, no exceptions. Mail-in voting only for those who absolutely need it. Early voting on polling locations OK but the ballot boxes should be guarded 24/7 in an open and verifiable manner, no exceptions allowed. Results available on election day. [1] https://www.britannica.com/money/Herman-Hollerith https://www.britannica.com/money/Herman-Hollerith

UncleMeat 2y ago
Take a look at the map of campaign stops for the Trump and Harris campaigns. Not exactly covering the broad country. The electoral college sure doesn't seem to be making sure that broad swathes of the country are not ignored. People vote. In a world with a national popular vote it wouldn't be cities deciding elections, it would be people. Every single person would have precisely the same say in the outcome.
- 2y ago

tiberious726 2y ago

Bearing in mind Arrow's impossibility theorem, why do you believe ranked choice is an obviously better voting mechanism?

yongjik 2y ago

I fully agree with you on gerrymandering and electoral college, but when 45-50% of voters think Trump is a viable candidate, this isn't something that can be fixed at the election system level. Society is broken at a deeper level.