(November 9th, 2016, 09:23)BRickAstley Wrote: 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.
I really doubt it. The election being by popular vote would straight up remove the artificial ways that certain people's votes count more than others due to winner-take-all by state:
1) Votes in big states are worth more; basically the people in them have banded together to form a more powerful negotiating entity representing their contstituency
2) Votes in close states are worth more; votes in heavily partisan (compared to the nation as a whole) states are worth next to nothing
3) Votes in less populous states are worth more (due to the +2 electors per state rule)
Instead, each vote would be worth the same: 1 vote. In this world, campaigning is based solely on the cost to earn votes in different places. Campaigning would be biased towards:
1) Easily swayed people
2) The general interest
Big states are currently worth more because they're allowed to pool their voters into a single bloc. With a simple national vote, you'd see candidates' effort spent to convince various citizens equal out a lot more. This seems like an obvious beneficial change to me.
The other big thing I'd like to see is approval voting, aka you can vote for one OR MORE candidates for each position. It's not as sound as condorcet or IRV but it's damn easy to understand and it gets you most of the benefit.
Also, I just want to say that I voted by mail, which you can do in Washington state and it works great, and it's a travesty that some states make you wait in line to be allowed to vote.
The fact that everyone has different ideas about how to make things better, and inertia is a powerful force means that realistically things are unlikely to change. That and that those in power likely benefitted from the setip.
I just wish they would formally call the last 3 states so I can take my winnings on the election and offset my new laptop purchase! If only I had stayed up, I could have piled more on Trump as the odds swung stupidly for such a close election. A huge amount of money has been lost and made from this election. In particular the ECV spread bets could have quite easily bankrupt some people.
A more exact statement might be "swing voters in big states are currently worth more". Texas and California voters are ignored while Florida voters are courted.
Yeah, Silver pretty much nailed this one perfectly. He predicted very clearly why Trump's route to victory wasn't that far-fetched.
(November 9th, 2016, 18:10)Brian Shanahan Wrote: 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).
The general philosophy at the time seems to have been that gridlock > tyranny, so err on the side of opening the door to gridlock instead. I certainly can't say I disagree. I do agree that a fair number of things feel outdated, but it is harder for a President to go full-Turkey here than elsewhere for these reasons. There are many days where I long for a Parliamentary-style system, but on a week like this where the country veers into a strange place, I'm sort of glad gridlock is the status quo. Mixed feelings for sure.
(November 9th, 2016, 17:40)Mardoc Wrote:
Scooter Wrote: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.
Yeah okay, I'd retract the elimination of midterms. My concern with it is the low turnout and how to remedy that, but making voting less inconvenient would go a long ways.
(November 9th, 2016, 17:40)Mardoc Wrote: 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.
The logistics is certainly a challenge, but I don't think it'd be quite that bad. For one, the polling places would never be nearly as full as they are because people are coming over a more spread-out period. Staffing could actually be a little bit lower. The bigger thing for me is standardizing it across states to prevent partisan hackery. A less extreme solution would be multi-day voting with it being a holiday.
For example, I live in a state with no early voting AND no DMV. The only place to get a state-official photo ID (Secretary of State) typically will average you a 2 hour wait, and it's often closed by 4pm. I did say "average" 2 hour wait. In the month leading up to the voter registration deadline, it's worse. I wish I was joking.
(November 9th, 2016, 17:40)Mardoc Wrote: 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.
I imagine a lot of people sort of agree (I do), but they probably disagree with the extent you have in mind (I probably do). And of course, when you agree on a problem but not a solution, things normally don't change.
(November 9th, 2016, 17:39)ReallyEvilMuffin Wrote: 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.
To explain, the videos you see are pretty rare exceptions. They happen in quite a few places, but with a country as huge as ours, seeing 4-5 videos is a drop in the bucket. I waited for about 20 minutes (8am pre-work rush), and from people I talked to that was on the high end of the spectrum. Still, any wait is a bad thing because waits affect turnout. Also, merely seeing a line like that on TV can convince someone not to go out and vote, even if their precincts polling station is a ghost town.
Many of the massive lines have a few things in common by the way. They tend to happen more often in districts with specific demographics. States set their own rules on district drawing, polling placement, and voting hours. I'll let your brain fill in the rest. (This is why I don't take vote fraud complaints very seriously. Why cheat by putting in tons of effort to add a few votes when you can just suppress turnout in areas unfavorable to you. That's a thing we actually have evidence of happening, and it gets much less attention.)
(November 9th, 2016, 22:39)greenline Wrote: 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.
This is an excellent point, and absolutely accurate. I would add that he took care to explain in some detail what a 20% chance meant in this context, both mathematically and philosophically.
(November 10th, 2016, 08:30)scooter Wrote: Yeah, Silver pretty much nailed this one perfectly. He predicted very clearly why Trump's route to victory wasn't that far-fetched.
(November 9th, 2016, 18:10)Brian Shanahan Wrote: 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).
The general philosophy at the time seems to have been that gridlock > tyranny, so err on the side of opening the door to gridlock instead. I certainly can't say I disagree. I do agree that a fair number of things feel outdated, but it is harder for a President to go full-Turkey here than elsewhere for these reasons. There are many days where I long for a Parliamentary-style system, but on a week like this where the country veers into a strange place, I'm sort of glad gridlock is the status quo. Mixed feelings for sure.
You think? Presidents with the house and senate have been able to pretty much do what they want, as long as they didn't get caught. It's not going to change under Trump.
The thing about the founding fathers wanting to prevent the rise of a tyrant is a crock of shit and always was. Tyrants more easily happen when political systems are narrowed and artificially kept in stasis than when democracy is allowed to flow unhindered. For example, it wasn't Hitler that created most of the systems which allowed him to seize unfettered power, enabling acts and other suspensions of the Weimar constitution had become common by 1933, Athens didn't gain tyrants under the democratic system but under Spartan tutelage (and it was their antipathy to democracy in their client states which saw them develop as tyrannies), and the big one the Roman Empire only came about because the political system under the Republic had ossified while magnifying the prizes and punishments for victory and defeat to such a massive extent.
On the other hand you've got countries like interwar Czecho-Slovakia who embraced democracy and maintained both it and the rule of law until they were conquered by superior arms.
Travelling on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
@Scooter, voter suppression is a serious problem in the US. Voter ID is theoretically a good thing, but most voter ID laws have been designed to disenfranchise young people and minorities. That's why you have bullshit like concealed carry licenses being counted, but not university IDs.
So in summary, a dash of voter suppression, plus an enthusiasm gap from an uninspiring candidate and a negative campaign, means that millions of progressives couldn't be assed to vote. And even some members the Obama coalition flipped from Dem to Rep. Those can be won back with a better candidate, and Trump's populism is a giant crock of shit anyway.
Congrats America, the elites won, kiss your education and healthcare and environmental laws goodbye, hello tax breaks for billionaires and zero regulation for wall street. Because look where that got us last time.
(November 10th, 2016, 00:29)Cheater Hater Wrote: 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 wasn't comparing Nate to other prediction services, but to his past election predictions; there's a huge disparity there.
