Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)

[Bobchillingworth]

TBH 20-30 more sounds like a vast overestimate.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

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 ?

Yeah I reckon the system could be better, but I think the ECV should be maintained or the election would only be fought in those urban centres. It's undoing has been the hardening of attitudes leaving this small amount of swing states. I do get your premise of a de facto change, but which states are the ones changing? If it is the dem states wanting the change then this of course favours the reps if only these states split the votes whereas the red states continue as winner takes all. So I struggle to see them making changes like this getting an equal red blue mix to do this.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

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.

Not gonna comment on the primaries, not really sure how to fix them. Do you guys also really dislike midterms? Surely they are hugely valuable with the separation of powers? It makes a 4 year mistake possibly only a 2 year mistake, I thought they were a really good part of the system personally.

Also the voter thing. The vids that we see with the voters queueing for so long is NUTS. Seriously, open a few more polling stations! I actually think the UK should cut back on it's absentee voting and make voting require ID. I'm amazed that just saying my name and address is enough to get me my vote card from some random volunteers I never met. The postal voting issues are rife, we have had a few batch voting issues and there are a lot of issues of others returning them, along with elderly voters having them signed by others.

[Mardoc]

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.

This would remove one of the checks and balances of our system.  The whole point of staggering terms is to make sure that big changes take time.  Right now, 2/3 of the Senate didn't have to care a smidgen about getting votes this election, so they're free to get in Trump's way on anything they think is stupid.  The 2018 midterm will be a chance to stop Trump at the halfway point, if his proposals don't work out, by electing a Democratic House.  If everything was synchronized, then both the House and Senate would respond to the exact same pressures that put Trump in place, and he would have a lot more ability to get things done.

Basically, right now a political movement has to stay strong for six years in order to take over entirely.  If everything was synchronized, a political movement that only lasted 6 months would be enough.

I realize this is a bit idealized, since the national political parties can have influence on even a senator who won't stand for reelection for four more years.  But it's still better to have it than not.

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.

Pretty much the only concern I have about this is logistics.  But that's a big concern still!  It's hard enough to find varied volunteers for a 12-hour shift.  You need to double-staff pretty much everyone, with people who prefer different outcomes, to prevent election fraud.  Basically the idea of our current system is to never let any single person or single party have control of a ballot box, or blank ballots, or the question of whether someone is an authorized voter.  If you want to cheat - and I'm sure out of 300 million people there are some - then you get the most bang for your buck by running a polling station.  So how do you get enough volunteers to run the polling station for the Wednesday overnight shift?  Including Democrat poll watchers in Montana and Republican poll watchers in Hollywood?

I only really see one way.  That's to dramatically reduce the number of polling places.  So you trade off having more chances to vote, for those chances being much further away, with many more people trying to get through them.  Sure, you've got a day off, but instead of the polling place being next to your house, it's an hour away, with potentially a 6-hour line.

That said, some states already mostly have this.  Only they call it Early Voting instead of Election Week.  You have to go to the county courthouse to Early Vote, because of the logistics issues, or you can wait for Tuesday and vote at a spot convenient to your house.  It's still a challenge for night shift, I'm sure, but it works out for most everyone else.  And of course, if you're going to Early Vote, the DMV is close to the courthouse - you don't need a mini-DMV for that.

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Fraud is also the main problem with going to a popular vote for president.  Right now, the only places where cheating pays off are swing states.  Where it's easy to find poll watchers from both parties to prevent it.  But make it a popular vote, and suddenly it makes sense to add a few votes for your preferred candidate if you're in a state where people won't mind.

I'm less certain about this one, though, because it seems isomorphic to fraud in a Parliamentary system, and most of the world seems to be able to manage those without crippling levels of fraud.

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All that said, *my* preferred solution is to remove power from the government so that it doesn't matter so much who's got any particular office.  No one really worries about fraud or voter turnout in selecting the county dog catcher.  Unfortunately, it seems most of the country disagrees with me on this.

[Brian Shanahan]

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.

This would remove one of the checks and balances of our system.  The whole point of staggering terms is to make sure that big changes take time.  Right now, 2/3 of the Senate didn't have to care a smidgen about getting votes this election, so they're free to get in Trump's way on anything they think is stupid.  The 2018 midterm will be a chance to stop Trump at the halfway point, if his proposals don't work out, by electing a Democratic House.  If everything was synchronized, then both the House and Senate would respond to the exact same pressures that put Trump in place, and he would have a lot more ability to get things done.

There are far too many "checks and balances" in the US system. I honestly think the system was designed deliberately for paralysis. The country was formed not as a democratic system where everybody could participate but as a loose oligarchy where the power rested with a small (albeit larger than in most other countries at the time, but I'd still reckon the true franchise in the UK was larger) with an illusion of participation for the rest of the population. They aped their system off of that of the Roman Republic after all. And one of the main reasons for this was the maintenance of slavery in the south, the more clever southerners realised that the north would eventually outstrip them in population and economy, so wanted a permanent veto in government.

That was fine for the 18th and early 19th centuries when the country was relatively small in population, economy and actual power. But the system was showing signs of terminal decay by the 1840's and broke down completely in the lead in to the Civil War. After that what the US has had was a moribound system that is very bad at responding to change, exacerbates partisanship and only really works when one party or another has enough power to effectively ignore the system altogether (for example FDR didn't work within the system, he had enough power to bypass it).

[Kuro]

Pretty much just here to say I am one sad panda. At least my state went blue.

And yes, the US system was design to have some level of paralysis, the Founding Fathers said their reasoning was because swift change makes it too easy for kings and tyranny to take over. Who knows if that is why they did it, though?

[GermanJoey]

The world has to hold on for four years.

Related to this, I think LA has just lost its 2024 olympics bid. Paris vs Rome suits me fine so yay I guess ?

Edit : I forgot that Rome withdrew its bid. So LA vs Paris vs Budapest only. Double yay ??

If Trump had used "I will stop the Olympics from coming to America" as a campaign platform, I think that mighta got me to vote for him.

[greenline]

how could Micheal Moore predict this while Nate Silver floundered like nobody's business?

[Cheater Hater]

how could Micheal Moore predict this while Nate Silver floundered like nobody's business?

Because Nate Silver didn't flounder--he was the only major predictor to even think that Trump could win (even explicitly giving the "win while losing the popular vote" case for Trump a 10% chance). I don't normally want to get into politics on the internet, but I'm sick of Nate Silver's name getting dragged through the mud just because people don't understand math/statistics/probability (seriously, the polls overall were more accurate than 2012, but all people care about is the result). Look at the last couple of updates: he kept warning us about all the uncertainty, kept wanting polls in the midwest, and warned that the suspiciously-consistent final batch of polls could have been herding.

[AdrienIer]

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.

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 ?

Yeah I reckon the system could be better, but I think the ECV should be maintained or the election would only be fought in those urban centres. It's undoing has been the hardening of attitudes leaving this small amount of swing states. I do get your premise of a de facto change, but which states are the ones changing? If it is the dem states wanting the change then this of course favours the reps if only these states split the votes whereas the red states continue as winner takes all. So I struggle to see them making changes like this getting an equal red blue mix to do this.

I can't look for the exact map on my phone but I think I remember there being states like one of the Dakotas and Louisiana. It was some red states + some blue states + surprisingly some swing states