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Comment by nerfhammer | Hacker News Reader

FPTP makes no difference when there are only two possible options.

It's surprising that the referendum will pass with a simple majority, though. This seems like a 2/3 or 3/4 kind of decision to me.

Just for comparison: to pass a US Constitutional Amendment, it requires consent of 2/3 of both houses of Congress and ratification by 3/4 of all US states. Treaties require consent of the President and 2/3 of the Senate.

And none of those -- even if you assume every representative in every body involved is elected solely based on their position on the issue in question and votes in accordance with the position on which they got elected -- requires even a majority (much less a 2/3 or 3/4 supermajority) in the electorate.

and the US has the absolute worst recording on changing their constitution. The last amendment (the 27th) was ratified in 1992 and took nearly 203 years to become law. I think they should lower the barriers to getting stuff done.

Absolutely not. Changing the structural framwork of the nation is not something to be done based on an issue's short term popularity. If the issue can maintain consistent support for a decade or more that's a lot better signal that it might be a good long-term idea.

Sure, but 2 centuries is a little long.

Is there another current government that's older than 2 centuries? I think we made a tradeoff for stability. Arguably that worked out well.

The UK government is continuous from at least 1688 and arguably earlier.

What an incredibly misleading statement. Even a minimal review of the history[1] shows that the 27th amendment was not under consideration for 203 years; rather, it was originally proposed in 1789, and interest in it was not revived for roughly 200 years.

As to the other amendments[2], 203 years is an extreme and unrepresentative outlier. The original bill of rights took a little over 2 years to ratify, and nearly all of the rest have taken under 1.5 years. The only one to take longer than 3 years was the highly controversial 16th amendment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Unit...

The wikipedia article you quote doesn't back up your claim. In fact quite the opposite.

From the article. 1) The 27th amendment was first introduced in the house in 1789. It was first ratified by a state in 1789 "Maryland – December 19, 1789" It was last ratified in 1992 "Michigan – May 7, 1992"

You do under stand that those 3/4 and 2/3 representatives can all be elected with 51% of the vote right?

So if a hot upstart party filled both houses of the Congress with 51% win margins per representative, they can then easily pass a constitutional amendment.

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