Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

Easy answers like this are always oversimplifications. There's problems with our voting system but there's no serious reason to believe simply switching to a different style of voting system alone would fix anything.

We also have terrible gerrymandering that ensures seats are hard to change.

Effectively no limits on political contributions thanks to Citizens United (not that things were great before that but they've gotten much worse) means that the best funded candidate tends to dominate. Not always, but it's a huge uphill battle and makes it nearly impossible to be an unfunded candidate taking on the two main parties of the US.

People pushing easy answers like this aren't doing anyone any favors. Even if somehow their favored solution got adopted, when it fails to be the panacea they've promised people will reject it and call it a failure even if it might have helped the situation.

A new voting system won't solve all of our various failures of democracy, but as long as we pick one of the good voting systems we should be in better shape than we are now.

Opposing reform because it won't magically fix some tangentially related problems doesn't make sense to me.

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

Didn't Clinton outspend Trump 2:1 and still lose?

And in the UK the Remain campaign massively outspent Leave and still lost (the government did a mailshot to every home in the country arguing for Remain and that alone cost more than the entire Leave campaign did .... and then they did lots more campaigning on top!).

The theory of the concern about Citizens United is that people can buy elections. That theory appears to be false.

Did you even read what I said?

> means that the best funded candidate tends to dominate. Not always, but it's a huge uphill battle and makes it nearly impossible to be an unfunded candidate taking on the two main parties of the US.

Yes Clinton lost despite outspending Trump, but Obama outspent Romney, and lots and lots of other races go in the favor of the candidate who spent the most.

Two high profile exceptions don't prove the rule false.

> Two high profile exceptions don't prove the rule false.

Actually, they do.

> Actually, they do.

Really? That's your reasoned stance? So if I say "Not all blonde people eat boogers." but then find two videos of blonde people eating boogers then my rule is no longer valid?

Unbelievable.

You haven't proven that they "tend to dominate". You'd have to show that statement with statistics. Even if you did it'd be a correlation/causation fallacy (winners may spend more because they have more supporters who donate to start with).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com