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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

> It's one thing to consider problems that might be in play if a bare majority had arbitrary power. ..... including the United States

The last election for the POTUS had the declared winner elected by an overall loss of 3mm votes.

The UK is plowing ahead with a hard brexit with a 52% majority on a 72% turnout (38% of the electorate explicitly said they wanted to leave), with a minority government propped up by a bribe with a minor political party from Northern Ireland.

I'm sure I can find more examples (and I'm aware that I'm cherry picking examples too), but to say that that you require a "supermajority" in most western countries isn't strictly true. (excuse the phrasing)

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> The last election for the POTUS had the declared winner elected by an overall loss of 3mm votes.

Well, one way to address the problem of the tyranny of the majority is to make minority rule plausible. :b

> to say that that you require a "supermajority" in most western countries isn't strictly true.

A supermajority isn't necessary for many things; a plurality will do for a lot of operations, including becoming POTUS. But in the US there's also some legal concepts that you can only do away with via a supermajority and one spread out over different branches of government at that. Doing away with any of the bill of rights is not happening with a plurality in an election.... because the US already is a republic with a democratically elected representative government based on rule of law set down in a constitution that can't be changed without supermajority buy-in.

Most western democracies that I'm familiar with have some similar sets of principles that aren't up for democratic election (at least, according to the stated rules of the governance game -- unofficially, any principle is always vulnerable to contention and falling out of value, that's a reality of governing human beings, not a flaw in a system of government).

> Well, one way to address the problem of the tyranny of the majority is to make minority rule plausible. :b

It is in some places - the UK had it in 2010, and technically has it right now too. You can't really do miniority rule in a two party system though.

> a plurality will do for a lot of operations,

a plurality in a two party system seems ironic to me, but I understand your point.

> The UK is plowing ahead with a hard brexit with a 52% majority on a 72% turnout (38% of the electorate explicitly said they wanted to leave), with a minority government propped up by a bribe with a minor political party from Northern Ireland.

Well, that's how referendums work, there is never 100% turnout. So the amount of people who votes constitute the "100%" and you only need 51% of that to win a referendum.

Your argument is also not good because by following your logic we could say that almost no US president has ever gotten elected by majority, at least from top of my head I am not aware of anybody actually being elected by getting votes of 51% or more of all eligible voters.

The US presidential elections, referendums and UK parliament elections can't be compared equally, so extending the logic like that doesn't make sense.

For the POTUS elections, trump lost on a count of just shy of 2.9million votes, but won by the electoral college.

By applying that logic to the brexit referendum, breaking up over the 5 countries that voted (england, scotland, NI, wales, gibralter) remain would have won. By dividing up the 382 counting areas [0] I'm sure you get a different result too.

For a UK parliament vote, I'm not sure on what the result would be if you took a voter turnout by percentage across the countries, and then evenly distributed the MPs based on those number of votes, but I'm sure someone has done the analysis somewhere.

To go back on topic, my point was (supposed to be) more about how a tyranny of the majority can happen, and does happen, in western countries (with some slightly alternative points such as the fact that majorities aren't always majorities)

[0] https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/find-information-by-s...

> The UK is plowing ahead with a hard brexit with a 52% majority on a 72% turnout (38% of the electorate explicitly said they wanted to leave)

I hate this argument because you would just not count if brexit had been rejected as you wish it had been. You would just say "sigh it's normal, i'm happy people are not that stupid" and you wouldn't bother arguing with "stupid people".

Even if i wanted to argue on that level, you can say there was - 38% who explicitly said they wanted to leave - 37% who explicitly said they wanted to stay - 25% who had no opinion / didn't care

so it make absolute sense to leave in that case.

EDIT: To be clear i'm not pro-brexit, i just think "echo chamber blah blah biaised opinions" like this one are the reason people "can't understand" election such as brexit and trump and question the legitimacy...

so it make absolute sense to leave in that case.

That's one way to look it at it. Another is to take the result and say there is no clear majority either way, and since there is no clear public majority for either option it should be up parliament to decide since that's their job.

> I hate this argument because you would just not count if Brexit had been rejected as you wish it had been.

That's absolutely not true. I never said that Brexit shouldn't happen based on that majority. I was simply pointing out that a bare majority in this case _has_ provided arbitrary power. Reading anything further into my comment is disingenuous.

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