American democracy’s built-in bias towards rural Republicans | Hacker News Reader

American democracy’s built-in bias towards rural Republicans

economist.com

16 pointsfarseer11 comments

Given voter turnout rates around 50% for presidential elections and even lower for House and Senate votes, getting the vote out is an old-fashioned but still viable strategy without resorting to ranked choice.

I doubt voters are sufficiently aware or engaged in most issues to make ranked choice effective.

I think it is also missing the point that the voting machines are in no way set up for ranked. There hasn't even been money to update machines that are 50 years old and punch paper.

Ranked choice would be much much more effective than getting the vote out for addressing the problem of in a more than two way election having the least desired candidate win because the more desired candidates split the vote.

The more good candidates that are widely approved that run, the better the chance in our current system that we'll select someone who is widely disapproved. We can elect someone who would have lost one on one verses any of the other candidates.

https://mobile.twitter.com/NormOrnstein/status/1016789064379...

The Constitution wasn't created by wizards, it's bad, and can be replaced. It's not a democracy if you're ruled by the dead.

With what? On a simple 50%+1 majority of those that vote?

There's a process for changing the constitution, use it.

The process of amending the US constitution is exceedingly difficult. Whether that's wise or not, telling someone who is unhappy with the US constitution to change it is unproductive.

There have been 27 ammendments, including 12 in the last 100 years.

In the 2016 election, no candidate received a majority of the popular vote.

Bill Clinton never received a majority of the popular vote either time he won. George W Bush also didn't the first time, but he did the 2nd time.

Get over it. The US is not a democracy - its a federal republic.

The US Presidential election is not decided by popular vote. It's decided by individual elections in the states. It forces the candidates to care about what's going on in all the states instead of visiting the top 8 cities and calling it a day.

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