Electoral reform - A top issue

[Arse Biscuit]

It's fine the way it is.

 

[Fork Cartel]

any of these are better than fptp anyways, who really cares about the minutiae of getting it exactly right

 

[Oh Long Johnson]

Any American STV proponent is a secret Green Party faggot, and this is the honeypot.

 

[Un Platano]

What not enough people realize is that congress is most of the time more important than the president in the institution of policies. When people debate democracy they almost always focus solely on the election of the president an d no one else. That's ignoring two thirds of the relevant bodies. Congressional election turnouts are woefully low because people don't care about them- they don't regularly see their congressman on TV, the elections happen more often, and the campaigning is much smaller. As a result, people have a general disregard for the importance of them in the US government, and how they balance each other.

• Big states have an advantage in the House
• Small states have an advantage in the Executive
• Both are equal in the Senate (which keeping in mind is generally the most powerful part of the US government)

It is a great way to keep both minority and majority interests from being thrown under the bus. A democracy is not an effective system if it will allow 60% of a voter base to entirely screw over the other 40% and justify it as democratic, and given the partisanship of modern America that would almost certainly happen if a direct democratic system were enacted.

There's also arguments that the electoral college is undemocratic because electors can choose against the will of the people, but that's an irrelevant argument because the only time faithless electors have and ever will have altered the results of a vote was in 1836.

 

[Arse Biscuit]

I just love watching armchair political theorists nit-pick a system that has lasted 240+ years and left us on the very top of the world-wide shit heap.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

 

[Star Wormwood]

Best reform would be having election day on Sunday instead of Tuesday tbh

 

[Alec Benson Leary]

Only property-owners and veterans should vote. Only those with something to lose should be allowed to play the game.

That's an oversimplification. People who don't own property still stand to lose by bad decisions, plus there's that whole paying taxes thing.

That said, I think there's a lot to be said for a system that requires people to earn their vote. I'm the weirdo among my friends because I'm the one who does not think starship troopers was too authoritarian. Like, I don't appreciate that some shithead who thinks the earth is 6,000 years old and that obama's birth certificate is fake no matter what evidence there is, or that vaccines are a conspiracy because they've never even known anyone who had measles... I don't like the fact that person should get a vote that counts as much as mine. Every other form of power with reaching consequences that affect other lives, we say comes with responsibility, but not voting?

 

[Ti-99/4A]

I'm the one who does not think starship troopers was too authoritarian.

People who think it is overly authoritarian either didn't understand the book, or only saw the movie.

 

[cuddle striker]

fuck electoral districts.

one person one vote, non taxpayers don't get one, and make it a transferable vote also.

edit: I think if you pay in, you get a say. fuck that "property owner" thing. if you pay taxes you get to vote. it's your money they're gonna spend, whether you own a plot or not.

 

[AnOminous]

fuck electoral districts.

Gerrymandering is the problem, though, and it's rather difficult to solve. Senators are elected by the entire state population, and if you elected House Reps that way, you'd get a homogenous bunch of exactly the same people out of all of California, and they have a ridiculous number of reps. In a sense, that would deny regional populations any representation at all in the House.

Unless you went to some proportional representation system, which isn't going to happen without a constitutional amendment, it would actually break a lot of things.

 

[cuddle striker]

Gerrymandering is the problem, though, and it's rather difficult to solve. Senators are elected by the entire state population, and if you elected House Reps that way, you'd get a homogenous bunch of exactly the same people out of all of California, and they have a ridiculous number of reps. In a sense, that would deny regional populations any representation at all in the House.

Unless you went to some proportional representation system, which isn't going to happen without a constitutional amendment, it would actually break a lot of things.

yeah I kind of lean toward one person=one vote, absolutely, just because of this. I'd like to see proportional vote for all taxpayers, with a second option/runoff ballot.

it would break things to get to it, but those things likely need to be broken. on the state level, it'd be great if we had the Senate set up to represent population instead of state borders, and for the House, let it be very localized. that would give the House control to the less populated areas, balance the Senate, and make the presidential race a single vote per person, all counted equally.

I think all the races should have runoff/second choice. I think Senate and Presidential elections should be restricted to taxpayers only. Let everyone who lives in an area vote for their local rep, though.

 

[AnOminous]

The problem is all these alternate systems could just as easily be rigged and with the near impossibility of amending the Constitution easily (which is actually a good thing), it's not like you could dynamically react to this to fix these things in real time.

 

[cuddle striker]

The problem is all these alternate systems could just as easily be rigged and with the near impossibility of amending the Constitution easily (which is actually a good thing), it's not like you could dynamically react to this to fix these things in real time.

this is true, but I do think it would be a more fully representative system and less loaded with dumb fucks.

 

[Feline Darkmage]

Relevant to our site.

 

[Alec Benson Leary]

People who think it is overly authoritarian either didn't understand the book, or only saw the movie.

Thank you.

 

[AnOminous]

People who think it is overly authoritarian either didn't understand the book, or only saw the movie.

I think it's overly authoritarian, actually, but not in the sense of being fascist, or in the sense of Michael Moorcock's bomb-throwing "Starship Stormtroopers" essay attacking it as virtually being Nazism. For a more overtly authoritarian novel that actually could be fairly accused of approaching fascism, though, I'd recommend Farnham's Freehold. It's a really fun book, though.

A lot of the absurdly polarized attitudes toward Heinlein go right back to the propeller beanie crowd in SF fandom going nuts on Usenet decades ago. I wouldn't be surprised if Godwin's Law directly came out of those threads, because it used to be all you'd need to do to start a huge flamewar was crosspost something about Heinlein to 20 unrelated newsgroups, somehow insult Apple products in it, claim Star Wars is better than Star Trek, and dogs are better than cats.

 

[TowinKarz]

IMHO, the system doesn't need fixed.

The cries that it's broken is just whining from people who lost after getting used to winning and putting in little to no effort this time around.

 

[DuskEngine]

That's an oversimplification. People who don't own property still stand to lose by bad decisions, plus there's that whole paying taxes thing.

That said, I think there's a lot to be said for a system that requires people to earn their vote. I'm the weirdo among my friends because I'm the one who does not think starship troopers was too authoritarian. Like, I don't appreciate that some shithead who thinks the earth is 6,000 years old and that obama's birth certificate is fake no matter what evidence there is, or that vaccines are a conspiracy because they've never even known anyone who had measles... I don't like the fact that person should get a vote that counts as much as mine. Every other form of power with reaching consequences that affect other lives, we say comes with responsibility, but not voting?

you realise a congenitally wheelchair-bound person would also be a second-class citizen in a stratocracy though

 

[Alec Benson Leary]

you realise a congenitally wheelchair-bound person would also be a second-class citizen in a stratocracy though

I fully admit the problem of judging who's fit to participate and who's not.

But shouldn't there be something? You have to take a written test to get a driver's license, because while you might think no one should impede on you driving, the fact is that you can't drive without impacting the other people around you. Why shouldn't you have to take a test to prove you understand the things you're voting on? Like, it could be simple questions: "this vote is for judicial seat 12 in your district. Please describe what the person who wins this vote will be responsible for." or something to that effect, to demonstrate you understand that "muslim" is not a type of fabric before you vote against it. (A more fitting comparison than the DMV might be that immigrants are required to take knowledge tests as part of legally entering the country. Why are voters not held to a similar standard?)

And yes, I am aware that "tests" were used to keep black people from voting in the Jim Crow era. I know a lot more thought would have to go into how to implement it. I just think "fuck it, give it to everyone and let the chips fall where they may" is not a good system. People don't use power constructively when they don't even appreciate having it.

 

[AnOminous]

I fully admit the problem of judging who's fit to participate and who's not.

But shouldn't there be something? You have to take a written test to get a driver's license, because while you might think no one should impede on you driving, the fact is that you can't drive without impacting the other people around you. Why shouldn't you have to take a test to prove you understand the things you're voting on? Like, it could be simple questions: "this vote is for judicial seat 12 in your district. Please describe what the person who wins this vote will be responsible for." or something to that effect, to demonstrate you understand that "muslim" is not a type of fabric before you vote against it. (A more fitting comparison than the DMV might be that immigrants are required to take knowledge tests as part of legally entering the country. Why are voters not held to a similar standard?)

And yes, I am aware that "tests" were used to keep black people from voting in the Jim Crow era. I know a lot more thought would have to go into how to implement it. I just think "fuck it, give it to everyone and let the chips fall where they may" is not a good system. People don't use power constructively when they don't even appreciate having it.

My own gay-ass test that also coincidentally would happen to favor me would be to give all voters a test when they vote on various basic facts of U.S. government. Not partisan "facts" but objective facts from the Constitution, like "what are the three branches of the U.S. government" and shit like that. No matter what your score, you'd still be permitted to vote, but if you literally knew jack-shit about the government, why should your vote carry much weight? So your vote would be statistically weighed and accorded value according to what you actually know.

You wouldn't want to make this too ridiculous, to the point just getting a few answers wrong would completely fuck you, so maybe halve your vote if you're a standard deviation tarded, or double it if you're a standard deviation smarter, etc. This would not only improve the results of voting, but incentivize actually knowing something about how the country is run.

Dipshit ideas like this could really fuck up everything, though.

Imagine the massive rigging that would immediately take place whenever one of the scumbag parties got control of it. Imagine the 4chan autists who would immediately hack any imaginable test, figure out how to score 18 standard deviations above the norm and make a meme President again.