Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Really, the election process needs 3 reforms, which are mostly based off Australia's system. Firstly, preferential voting so that running third party doesn't sabotage everyone with a similar position. Secondly, assign electoral college votes according to the % of voters in a state that went either way, instead of winner takes all, so everyone's vote matters, not only those in close states. Lastly, make voting compulsory, so even if people are apathetic their voice will still be heard.

The US's separation of powers are a really good point of their system. However I believe that their HoR decides the districts which is just mental. They need an independent body to do this like we have in the UK. Also agree on the less of Winner takes all, which gets progressively more stupid as the states get more populous. Going on the CD models of Maine and Nebraska seems a good compromise if you could keep the districts sane.


I dislike pulling it out into a PV system though - that doesn't work well for a one top job. If the president were elected by Congress then that would be more reasonable, but still the more proportional the system gets the less accountable politicians are at staying true to their word and the more parties get involved creating a mushy compromise all the time. Hell the parties can barely agree within themselves.

Also if people want to waste their vote let them - if they don't want to engage in democracy then they should not be forced, it devalues the privilege of a democratic system.

[Commodore]

Also Adrien I think you are perhaps not really appreciating the VASTNESS of the US, and how different states often dislike each other. I've always been told to view each state as a country bound by the federal system. There are no national newspapers for example. There are probably a lot of Midwest voters that got peeved that got peeved Hilary didn't bother going there whilst Trump was campaigning hard.

A lot of Euros seem to miss this. A third of a billion people sprawled across a continent with far more ethnic diversity than even the most counter-colonized European nations can imagine. Historical models you should look at are imperial, not national; the actual ruling nation is a fairly small place and people running from Washington through New York to Boston, largely Puritan-descended, with close cultural (and ethnic) colonies established in Chicago and through the western coast.

[scooter]

To play devil's advocate, there is a decent argument in favor of the Electoral College. Enforcing a two-party system (which is pretty much what it does) IN THEORY makes it difficult for an extremist outsider to come in and benefit from a split vote. I honestly totally subscribed to this up until the last 12 months. Electoral College at least ensures your winner will net at least 45% of the vote, whereas without it 30% would be totally feasible. I shudder to think of what the president might look like if the wrong 30% pulled it off while the rest squabbled over a divided field. Fixing the primaries would go a long ways to making the general election feel less frustrating.

One other side effect: if the EC was abolished, I actually think you'd see a lot of campaigning in the same exact states, just less extreme. Shocker: swing states tend to have a lot of swing voters in them. Best bang for your buck would still be catering to them.

Of course, the trade-off (beyond the popular/EC split) is that most peoples votes literally don't matter. I live in a light blue state (Michigan), and I was talking to a friend in a dark red state yesterday. The joke was that his vote didn't count, and if mine counted it meant Trump was almost certainly going to win, so it didn't really count.

Also, dividing votes out by congressional district sounds nice in theory, but in practice where districting is a partisan cheat-fest, that seems like a bad idea. It would only work if districts were drawn fairly, and I don't think we're close to solving that one.

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WALL OF TEXT: Let's Fix Voting!

Attempting to set partisanship aside as much as possible, here's how I would Fix Voting if I were dictator for a day. Some of these would of course benefit one party over another, but this is a serious attempt to ignore that and focus exclusively on what would be the fairest way to do things. The parties would gradually "reset" themselves anyway if one gained a serious advantage from all this. The goal should be to get the most possible people voting and get the most satisfying possible result. The one thing a lot of people agreed on was that our two options were bad. That may not be solvable, but it sure feels improveable.

1) Temporarily disable the Electoral College for, say, 2-3 elections. This would require another Scooter The Dictator Day 12 years in the future for me to decide if the experiment worked or not. I think it would, but I'm not completely confident enough to say remove it forever.

2) You get more than 1 primary vote. Primaries are totally broken. Trump won because he stuck out the most in a massive field and therefore differentiated himself enough to get a fan club, and Clinton won because her field of opponents was made artificially small. Both of them won their party nomination with under 20M votes in a country of 320M people! So I would decree that you get to vote for up to 3 people, and you rank them 1-2-3, with top getting 3 votes, 2nd getting 2 votes, and 3rd getting 1. Casting all 3 votes is not mandatory.

Doing this would force primary candidates to campaign for those 2nd and 3rd votes just as hard as those 1st votes. The optimal strategy currently is to rile up your base to support you moreso than try to persuade folks on the fence. (This varies a bit based on the size of the primary field of course, but this setup would also encourage bigger fields in a more sane way.) In the 1-2-3 system the optimal strategy would be to, yes, establish a base, but then appeal hard to folks who prefer other candidates to agree that you are an acceptable backup plan. This should result in a far more substantive, sane debate and result in fewer people being angry when their preferred party nominates something like we just got. It's not bulletproof, but I think it's highly unlikely either Trump or Clinton would have won their primaries in this system. That's a good thing because they have the two lowest favorable ratings of any nomination winner in polling history which indicates both of their bases would have generally preferred someone else.

If I got a repeat dictatorship role, I'd explore something similar for the general election. Less convinced there's an obvious way to implement it there, but it's possible.

3) Make voting 1,000% easier. It's insane that in many states (like mine) the only way to vote is the messy absentee system or at one specific physical location for a 12 hour on a work day. Voter suppression at its finest. Also, the voter ID debates won't end because reasons, so that needs to be addressed in a way that doesn't screw the poor and satisfies the crowd that thinks this is a problem.

So election day is now election week. You get 7 days, and they're open from 6am until 10pm every day that week and midnight at least twice. At least two of those work days are now national holidays (let's say Thursday and Friday because people procrastinate), and 24-hour type employers that don't close on holidays must give their employees at least 2 paid days off at some point that week. Everything would be standardized state-by-state to ensure states aren't abusing their power to set the rules. This includes preventing things like, oh I dunno, long lines due to suspiciously understaffed stations in specific demographic neighborhoods.

Finally, every voting location will have a station where you can obtain a valid photo ID if you do not yet have one. Consider it a mini SoS/DMV location. This eliminates a barrier to voting and makes it possible to require a photo ID without suppressing turnout.

4) Either eliminate mid-term elections by tweaking terms to all end on the same cycle, or do the same exact week-long thing for midterms. Unsure of which would be better. I lean towards the former since the week-long bonanza is a big commitment.

5) Congressional District's shape, size, and population are determined by an algorithm effective immediately. If 50% of House voters vote Republican and 50% vote Democrat, the results should be pretty close to 50/50 with some mild random chance variation. That's not true right now, and it often hasn't been true. The emphasis of the algorithm would be to spit out box-shaped districts as best as possible while maintaining a fairly even population count in each.

If this proves as unrealistic as I suspect it might be, the bipartisan commission plan that a few states do seems to work okay and would at least be an improvement on the status quo. Super open to being convinced on the ideal way to do it fairly. More important to me is to take the power away from partisans because obviously.

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There, I made voting suck less. Most (all?) of these are fantasies, but that's sort of the point. Tear me a new one about my dumb ideas.

[Brian Shanahan]

I've seen the petition to allocate electors by congressional district like Maine currently does. That makes a lot of sense to me.

Just looked this up, some more context:

The state has four total votes. Two go to the statewide winner, and one each goes to the winners in the two congressional districts.

And Nebraska is the same:

Nebraska has five electoral votes, as it has three Congressional districts and two Senators. Two of these electoral votes automatically go to the winner of the popular vote. The other three go to the winner of the popular vote within each district.

First thoughts, this seems to be better than either current winner take all, or making everything just go to popular vote. I wonder if you applied this model to all states and retroactively applied it to this and past elections what changes would happen, if it seems to be a 'better' system.

For that to work you'd need to take boundary changes out of political hands. As it stands, the way most states are districted enacting such a law would give permanent control to the republicans.

[AdrienIer]

IIRC there are a few states that have signed a charter to change it. They represent something like 180 EVs and if enough states sign it (states that make up for 270EVs) the states that signed the charters pledged to send electors for the candidate who won the popular vote. That means that if enough states sign it by 2020 the electoral college system will be effectively gone.

Does the charter just mandate electors to follow the vote in their area, or does it aim to get rid of the electoral college altogether and elect the president via popular vote?

Because changing the constitution isn't going to happen you can't get rid of the electoral college. What they would do is, instead of sending (n) electors of the affiliation of whoever won in the state they'd send (n) electors of the affiliation of whoever won the popular vote in the whole country. If states making up more than 270 EVs do that then no more discrepency between being elected and getting the most votes. I think NY just signed it, bringing its signators closer to 270 EVs.

Democrats having lost twice to the electoral college system these past 16 years will probably make it a priority

I mean, it would be a good strategy. That makes large city populations much more valuable, since you're able to reach more people easier, and large cities pretty much always lean more democrat, at least compared to rural areas. 

Also it means all campaigning would switch from our current swing states to just the biggest states. 50 state union, but the most populous 9 states hold over half of the citizens. Basically if you aren't in a top 15 state you won't really matter anymore.

Currently though that holds true for whoever isn't in one of the top 15 swingiest states anyway.  

About the cities getting all the attention, frankly I disagree. In France our candidates spend an aweful lot of their time in low density regions because rural voters are unpredictable. Doing a speech in Paris isn't going to be as efficient as it looks because most people in Paris have strong opinions on politics and have a good idea on who they're going to vote. So while candidates do some speech in big cities they go to a lot of medium cities as well, where the swing voters are.

Also, with how the media works, where you give your message is far less important. Farmers in Kentucky can hear your promises even if you made them in Idaho. And because there are a lot of people who live outside the cities in the US talking to the rural population will still be important.

Because a use of the ECV system is enshrined in the constitution, it needs 2/3rds support of both houses, and 2/3rds support of states to change as it is a constitutional change. Not 1/2 of the ECV.

Also Adrien I think you are perhaps not really appreciating the VASTNESS of the US, and how different states often dislike each other. I've always been told to view each state as a country bound by the federal system. There are no national newspapers for example. There are probably a lot of Midwest voters that got peeved that got peeved Hilary didn't bother going there whilst Trump was campaigning hard.


The way people talk about swing states always puzzles me though - I mean it isn't that long ago that Bush Senior 1988 won 40 states, and before him Regan in 1984 carried 49 states! It is only since Bill that the polarisation of politics happened. The same thing happened in the UK around the same time. Thatcher carried large swathes of Scotland in 1987 and all sorts of seats, and Blair did the reverse in 1997. It is only since then that things do not seem to have changed. Can't explain why that is, people seem to have become more entrenched in their views in both countries though.

I'm not saying a direct popular vote us perfect, or even far better than the current one, just that I don't agree with that particular criticism of it. I'm also stating that soon there will be enough states to change the system. It won't require any constitutional amendment, as each state decides how they distribute their EVs. These 270+ EVs will be decided on the overall popular vote, which will de facto make the US system for president a direct popular vote.

I do understand the vastness of the US, having lived there and been to several cities there. But how many speeches were made by the candidates in California this year ? In Texas ? In Illinois ? If all those different states see 0% of the election, is it fair to those who live there ?

[Bobchillingworth]

Abolishing the Electoral College in favor of a Congressional districts-based points allocation system would be a terrible idea & exacerbate the flaws inherent to the current system, given how intensely gerrymandered said districts are. I'd prefer a system based on a simple plurality of votes nationwide, but I haven't really given it much thought. Scooter's suggestions sound great, but I doubt anything like them will ever come to fruition, for the same reason that disingenuous voter "fraud prevention" measures have proven so popular in many states- some politicians have a stake in minimizing the ability of certain demographics to exercise their electoral franchise.


France is the next nation to watch as the wave of reactionary nationalism continues to crash about the West.

[AdrienIer]

France is the next nation to watch as the wave of reactionary nationalism continues to crash about the West.

I can reassure you on that point. As long as Juppe defeats Sarkozy during the right's primary on the 27th, Le Pen will lose the election. And right now Juppe is looking like he'll crush him.

[Dreylin]

France is the next nation to watch as the wave of reactionary nationalism continues to crash about the West.

I can reassure you on that point. As long as Juppe defeats Sarkozy during the right's primary on the 27th, Le Pen will lose the election. And right now Juppe is looking like he'll crush him.

That's what they said about ... never mind.

[AdrienIer]

I know that after Brexit and Trump you have doubts, but last year's regional elections made it clear that the Le Pen family was not going to win nationally anytime soon, as they couldn't even win the regions most favorable to them.

[Commodore]

I'd bet another couple cycles before that happens, at least, yeah. Probably about 20-30 more of these (sadness warning):

...which is actually a very bad thing. US elections just elevated a centrist with populist trappings, very much letting off steam. I don't see a good outcome of continued pressure.