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> I believe that Feinstein is a genuinely bad person, and we would be better off without her

As a Californian, I am constantly ashamed at calling her "my" senator. Why the fuck can't someone reasonable run against her? I guess for the same reason that Bernie is having so much trouble: the Democratic Party is sorta like the Communist Party in USSR; you have to be an insider to get anywhere.

The two party system is decidedly broken. Primaries force us into accepting evil or awful because we've been convinced that at least it's the lesser evil and that we should be happy for that.

Bring about instant runoff voting or a similar system and you strip parties of their power and we rid ourselves of self-serving incumbents quickly.

California doesn't have party primaries.

There's a June election and the top two vote winners go on to November, even if from the same party. That's why California has a chance to prevent a second Feinstein in Kamala Harris. It will be two Democrats in November: drug prosecutor Harris and grassroots liberal Loretta Sanchez.

That's a start, but until you can let people stop having to pick between voting their conscience and voting out of fear, the parties and incumbents can still wield a lot of power, IMHO. Having an election that lets people rank their preferences could remove the voting out of fear and let us actually focus on voting for our hopes and our ideals.

That's just a recognition of reality, though. The Democrats are so dominant these days the party primary is the election. They thought it might be nice to hold the election on election day.

This is new though.

> Bring about instant runoff voting or a similar system and you strip parties of their power and we rid ourselves of self-serving incumbents quickly.

Agreed. I believe score voting is the best option. It's remarkable easy to understand (just rate each candidate, like you rate movies or whatever), minimizes voter regret, avoids spoilers/splits, and avoids the two-party rule we suffer with our current plurality voting model.

I prefer score voting to ranked voting for one simple reason: the voter is free to vote any way he or she chooses. It is not necessary to rank the candidates. If you are equally in favor of two or more candidates you can express that with score voting (give them the same score). Ranked voting requires that you rank candidates.

https://electology.org/score-voting

Those are all really good points – I wasn't necessarily focused on IRV – but, rather, the idea that there are many better options than the current single choice system that would allow people to more freely express their preferences without fear that they'd be "throwing their vote away" or "letting someone else win" by voting they way they really wanted to.

Thanks for the pointer to score-voting – I think I probably agree with your take on its superiority.

I like to point people to https://modernballots.com/

It's great because it has good shiny examples and serves as a practical and superior alternative to sites like Survey Monkey for those common office elections such as "Where should we go for team lunch?".

>we've been convinced that at least it's the lesser evil and that we should be happy for that.

I've always thought every ballot should have the option of:

[ ] None of the above, choose new candidates.

That is a sentiment I share at times, however, as a score voting advocate, I'd like to point out that the consolidation of candidates we see over the course of a campaign, and possibly the small size of the initial field of candidates as well, are largely caused by our plurality voting model. I call it "forced field consolidation" [1] and feel it's a poisonous effect of plurality voting. It causes rifts between the electorate as voters are repeatedly forced to select one and only one candidate at the expense of all others; creating a highly polarized voter landscape.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/more-on-score-voting

People also have to wonder how a candidate can receive the most votes and still looses the election.

* 1824: John Quincy Adams won over * 1876: Rutherford B. Hayes * 1888: Benjamin Harrison * 2000: George W. Bush

All these presidents won without the votes. Hayes was chosen by The House.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...

Added later:

The article you presented on approval and score voting is interesting and I like the idea. I have believed for some time that we need to do away with the party system and let each candidate stand or fall on their own merit.

I don't really fit into any party as I am an independently conservative liberal libertarian with social and anti social leanings.

It seems bizarre a Californian senator would want to introduce a bill that hurts one of the most important industries in her state. It would be like a West Virginian senator introducing an anti-coal mining bill.

Its more like a West Virginia senator on the climate control committee introducing a carbon tax.

She's negotiating between a regulatory body and her constituents and coming down firmly on the side of the regulatory body.

There will be an eventual compromise, but not before her constituency gets the clear signal they should be upping their campaign contributions.

> There will be an eventual compromise, but not before her constituency gets the clear signal they should be upping their campaign contributions.

Considering how long she's been selling her constituents out, the clear signal seems to be that they should be upping their campaign contributions to anyone running against her.

The Feinstein situation is not new, at this point seems a stump should be able to win against her, seems odd for sure..

I think it's more like Jay Bybee's appointment to the 9th Circuit: it keeps the weirdos out West from getting too out of hand.

I wouldn't assume that the general public is strongly against this kind of legislation. A subset (our subset) is, but the HN demographic is small compared to the rest of the country.

The basic concept of strong encryption is not something that most people understand. People are projecting their ideas of physical locks and warrants onto digital systems because that's what they understand. It's flawed, but it's hardly the first or even biggest/most important issue where poor understanding by the public leads to bad legislation.

Every now and then I have to drive through bumfuck Oregon, and the only radio stations are AM talk radio. It would be "educational" to spend some time listening to that every now and then. There are real people on the other sides of these issues that seem blindingly one sided to us. I think a lot of Congress probably just thinks that passing this kind of legislation (on encryption) will make most of their voters happy. Just like shutting down the EPA, or ...

> Every now and then I have to drive through bumfuck Oregon, and the only radio stations are AM talk radio.

I downvoted you because of this. When you're on this soapbox, please bear in mind that some of the people listening are actually residents of bumfuck Oregon. Also, not everyone in bumfuck Oregon is on the political tack that you associate with bumfuck Oregon. Also, they have FM. (Mostly country, I'll grant you that, but still.)

I called it that because that's where I'm from...

And I don't really consider it derogatory. It's really an accurate description. I was referring to the literal middle of nowhere, where no one lives, not even small towns. The places you drive to get to the small towns.

edit: I think maybe the confusion here is that I was not intending to make an association between the people of Oregon and the AM radio callers I was referring to. (The shows you get are nationally syndicated, aren't they?) I only said that because that's the only time I listen to talk radio, and unless you drive through places where it's hard to find any radio station, you probably won't have listened to it before. It's very different from e.g. Fox News, where you hear professional pundits talking about these issues. You'll hear real people stating opinions that others in this thread are assuming can only be the result of blackmail. That was the whole point of the post.

I think those waste places you drive through to get to small towns can be starkly beautiful.

> I think a lot of Congress probably just thinks that passing this kind of legislation (on encryption) will make most of their voters happy.

Nope. There's a faction in the natsec establishment that wants this and so they're getting it. Most people don't care or know enough about encryption to apply that kind of pressure on their congressmen.

I upvoted you to counteract the downvote.

If you think it's bumfuck Oregon say so. I've come to the conclusion after travelling that whenever people form groups they become idiots. You can have a reasonable conversation with any single person almost anywhere, however, the more people involved in the conversation the dumber everyone becomes. Eventually culminating in elections and/or the UN.

If you wish to examine a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon.

I do not like granfallons or a toy balloons, sam I am.

I couldn't agree more, Feinstein has an hidden agenda.

And if they fail this time they have a bill ready the next time 'an attack' takes place. See The Shock Doctrine [0] which centers on the exploitation of national crises to push through controversial policies while citizens are too emotionally and physically affected by disasters or upheavals to mount an effective resistance.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine

Hidden? It's pretty plainly obvious to everyone...

Don't underestimate their potential for ignorance and stupidity. I think the Feinstein bill represents a genuine attempt to push their solution through and not an attempt to force a false compromise later. For that strategy to work, they'd at least need a decent understanding of encryption in order to draft a proposal that was so over the top that the desired compromise would look palatable by comparison. Have you come across any statements from Feinstein, Burr, or their supporters to suggest that they have anything remotely close to that sort of technical understanding of the issues at stake? I sure as hell haven't.

Their bill's text is actually pretty straight-forward when read in light of the level of ignorance on display in their interviews and the WSJ op-ed piece. In fact, the bill matches up really well with how they think encryption actually works: encryption is bad, so just make it effectively disappear.

Unfortunately, the people who can best explain to them why they're wrong are the same people they've already written off as just another competing advocacy group instead of subject-matter experts.

To be fair, that's pretty common in Washington. But the jadedness it creates is hugely problematic when they mischaracterize things. So instead of recognizing the community's pretty obvious credibility, they see the exact opposite.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique

It's too often this instead:

Senate Committee on Candy: "Gum is a problem. Okay, life sentences for anyone caught chewing that evil stuff in public."

The Public: "Well, the law's the law. If criminals don't want to wind up in prison getting raped then they should have thought of that before they chewed a bunch of gum. This is fine. Everything is fine."

It's so classic it has a name: an ambit claim.

That's clawed price anchoring tactic. Just make a high price offer and everything below that seems very cheap. Same with this bill, but I guess everyone knows that his bill can't change the reality but badly damage it.

That's why it's so important to add another Feinstein to the Senate from California this fall. Kamala Harris is a classic anti-drug warrior prosecutor with no respect for civil rights to join Feinstein.

Don't even think of choosing a grassroots Democrat like Loretta Sanchez instead. The Washington establishment wouldn't like it.

I have a positive view of Harris and this is the first time I've encountered this line of criticism. She doesn't sound like an "anti-drug warrior" [1]. What examples do you have in mind?

[1]: http://blog.sfgate.com/smellthetruth/2015/05/19/kamala-harri...

Harris was elected DA in San Francisco in a race against DA Terence Hallinan who was famous for soft-pedaling drug user prosecutions. She immediately stepped them up.

Harris first started barely supporting medical marijuana after constituencies forced her to recently. She's been giving support to federal prosecutions that target dispensaries for years as DA and AG.

She's been saying that she'll tone down drug prosecutions in campaigns and then pushing harder for more vicious enforcement than ever once she gains power in every election she's ever run.

And she still doesn't support marijuana legalization. Still! In California in 2016.

She's smooth and a good communicator, but Harris is all Feinstein inside.