World reaction to long queues of voters in US | Hacker News Reader

World reaction to long queues of voters in US

bbc.com

133 pointshhs262 comments

The people behind this would tell you it's a "feature": by making it incredibly undesirable for people in densely-populated areas to vote (which almost universally lean Democratic), you ensure that only the "right" people are able to vote.

I eyeballed a few people making that very same argument right here on HN but draped in the typical and disgusting line about “personal responsibility” when someone was lamenting how difficult some states are making it to even get registered.

HN always has these "hot takes" discounting any societal failings, probably because the average user expects their worthless "Facebook for dogs" idea to turn them into a billionaire and want to keep low taxes

hey, once Intel's computerized nose takes off https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-is-teaching-a-computer-c... my facebook for dogs is going to be raking in the bucks!

Long wait times are occurring across the US this year for early voting; I spoke to someone in Texas (a historically Republican stronghold) who told me lines were 2 hours long in his area on the first day of early voting.

US election regulations aren't designed to handle this level of early voting because there has never been this much demand for it. You can debate whether that should change or whether election officials should have been able to forecast this increase in demand (I would say yes to both), but I don't believe this to be as nefarious as you claim.

In a vacuum, sure.... but when they are removing ballot drop boxes that are already in place, you can’t say that it is because they didn’t forecast demand... it is intentionally reducing capacity after increased demand was already anticipated.

>but I don't believe this to be as nefarious as you claim

You might want to pay more attention, then.

Take your Texas example: the state is currently in a legal battle over the Governor's surprise order two weeks ago to only allow one ballot drop per county [1], meaning that Harris County with 4.5 million people went from 11 drop locations to 1, the same number as rural counties with only several hundred people. And, of course, the high-population counties are the urban ones that reliably vote Democrat. This is just one of many examples from around the country of Republican governors/legislatures moving to reduce or remove early voting infrastructure.

This is indeed an usual election, but there is unquestionably also a systematic campaign being waged to reduce voting by the Republicans.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/10/13/trump-j...

No, I don't need to pay more attention since I'm fully aware of that decision, but thanks for your condescending attitude.

What impact does that decision have on the long lines in nearly every metropolitan area in the US, including places like mine which have no record of any claims of voter suppression or interference at the state level?

I've heard people unselfconsciously testify against translation (Chinese, Spanish) of voting materials and ballots. Worse, they advocated literacy tests.

Jim Crow much?

There's plenty of popular support for disenfranchising eligible voters.

I seems that is on purpose, yep. If you didn't see this speech yet, maybe you could find it enlightening:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpBo_T3Kwjc

It is a feature but not how you’re describing.

The US governing system is designed in such a way as to move at a glacial pace but also to not make mistakes or over correct. The polling systems may seem broken now but will inevitably get corrected over time.

Further, the US take states’ rights seriously and allows states to make many key decisions in terms of how they wish to hold elections. The thinking is that you’d rather have Johnny down the street dictate your election than someone you’ve never heard of in Washington DC.

It’s en vogue to shit on the US election system right now but y’all are still using first-past-the-post just like the US. Seems a bit hypocritical.

> The US governing system is designed in such a way as to move at a glacial pace but also to not make mistakes or over correct. The polling systems may seem broken now but will inevitably get corrected over time.

Is that what the 3/5ths compromise was about? Jim Crowe laws? Poll taxes? Poll literacy tests? Purging voter rolls?

The notion that any of these "features" are necessary for good governance is ludicrous.

3/5 was written into the Constitution - that couldn’t have been helped.

The rest were mistakes, yes, but they make the case for an even higher majority to pass a law, not a lower one. They’re state issues, not federal issues. If you don’t like the distributed governing system of the US, that’s fine, but the system was designed for local majorities to be able to self-govern on internal affairs and, to that end, I would argue that those were successful pieces of legislation. Sure, their intentions were misguided, but the US system was not designed to deal with bad people and I would argue that no system in the world is well-able to deal with bad people.

What? So much of our constitution is designed to deal with bad people. It is why the whole idea of a balance of power is in place.

It's been nearly 250 years.

So, these lines are not representative of an actual election day. Actual election day is November 3, 2020.

Some states are in early voting right now [0]. That typically means that there's a very limited number of polling stations open. For instance, in Pinellas County, FL there's only 5 early voting locations, compared to 301 poll locations during election day. That's a 60x discrepancy! This is for 713,000 registered voters. Pinellas county early voting also doesn't start until next Monday, October 19.

I think there was likely not much thought put into the number of early voting locations. It's always been viewed as a low-budget, customer-friendly alternative to voting on election day. That probably should have been re-evaluated given the pandemic and the likelihood of greater numbers of early voters.

And by far, the biggest problem is that election day is always on a Tuesday and is not a national holiday. IMO this would be the best change to make first, to enable more people to be available for voting.

[0] The availability and dates of early voting are determined at a state level.

The history of voter suppression in certain states cannot be ignored. The argument you're presenting is misleading because the intent of the system is clearly to discourage specific groups of people from voting. There's a long history of voting machines not working (on purpose), inadequate staffing, restrictive laws, and all of this malfeasance curiously manifesting in neighborhoods with specific demographics. People are saying the pandemic and high voter turnout changes things but...

> The Clayton County resident, who registered to vote in Georgia when he moved six months ago, showed up at the Frank Bailey Senior Center in Riverdale, Georgia, at 9 a.m. hoping to cast his vote early. At 2 p.m. Dubose had just reached the front of the line -- that ran hundreds deep and snaked around the senior center into the back parking lot.

https://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/28/georgia.voting/index...

> According to a local election official interviewed by CBS News' Phil Hirschkorn, the last "early voter" in line for Saturday's truncated early voting in Palm Beach County finally got to cast a ballot at 2:30 a.m Sunday morning, which means that voter waited in line for more than seven hours. In Miami, another traditional Democratic stronghold, the wait was said to be nearly as long.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/no-one-...

> The history of voter suppression in certain states cannot be ignored.

Agreed but mostly orthogonal. Providing early voting at all is a drastic improvement reducing voter suppression. Since it lasts for multiple days, it allows for many more people to vote on days off work and other commitments, when they may not be able to easily vote on election day. Providing better early voting would of course do an even better job of this.

You can’t ignore the attempt to actively make early voting WORSE though, like Texas removing ballot drop off locations that were already in place and changing the rules to only allow one location per county. That isn’t “old rules are out of date and need updating”, that is “actively making the current system worse to suppress voting”

I'm not sure what you're looking for here? Do you want an endorsement that I don't like voter suppression? Because sure, I don't like voter suppression. But you keep bringing up points that are at best tangentially related to the actual topic at hand here. I don't dispute that there's shit that happens, but I also don't see the connection to long lines at early voting.

> I think there was likely not much thought put into the number of early voting locations. It's always been viewed as a low-budget, customer-friendly alternative to voting on election day. That probably should have been re-evaluated given the pandemic and the likelihood of greater numbers of early voters

This part of your earlier comment makes it seem like you are arguing that the early voting issues are simply logistical issues because they didn't "re-evaluate" their process for the pandemic.

I am pointing out evidence that these problems aren't from a lack of planning, but from active suppression.

If you look at any particular incident (like the long lines for early voting in this case), you can think of a lot of innocent reasons it might be happening. When you see the pattern, and you see clear and active suppression, you can't just say "well, all of these other incidents are just poor planning"

You are using the phrase “active suppression” in a way I have never seen it used before.

Extending the use of the phrase to describe these sort of political tactics has a downside. It waters down the emotional impact of the phrase when being used to describe, say, the poll tax or grandfather clauses in the US South. Real voter suppression.

And thus, in a backhanded sort of way, dilutes the honor of those early civil rights workers who fought, and sometimes died, so that everyone got a chance to vote. Why would you want to do that?

> So, these lines are not representative of an actual election day.

So you claim. And yet we regularly see this kind of pictures on actual US election days. For example, a very quick DuckDuckGo image search for "us elections long lines" leads to this as the second hit: https://www.firstpost.com/photos/world-gallery/us-2012-elect...

Here's hard data showing that long lines like these aren't the norm: https://medium.com/mit-election-lab/insights-into-voting-wai...

Correct. The sabotage is targeted. Per that cite, non whites experience longer waits.

Agreed, and that's not acceptable, but no group is experiencing wait times of several hours each election, which seems to be the conclusion drawn by many readers of the BBC article.

There is so much evidence that people are denied the opportunity to vote.

I'm still pissed off about blacks being turned away in Ohio 2004. They literally just closed and locked the doors. Telling the 1,000s of voters standing in the cold rain for hours to piss off.

To cite one example.

And it keeps happening.

Yes, I haven't seen a single person saying that voting in the US is perfect or that no voter suppression takes place.

What I am saying (and others are as well) is that the BBC article seems to be mischaracterising/misunderstanding what is happening with respect to the very long lines for in-person early voting in this specific case.

Ok. We need a "Yes, and..." way to respond to issues, acknowledging the problem while vetting specific reports.

Because I admit I read your responses as denial or concern trolling.

Peace.

Thanks for this! "Not the norm" is a bit of an over-interpretation though. That data shows that in many states such lines were indeed the norm until very recent reforms (as in, there is only one post-reform data point to go on). And that the reforms didn't help non-white voters to the same extent that they did white voters.

The data shows that hours-long waits are not and haven't been the norm, as I stated.

There is data on wait times from 4 elections in the article, none of which supports a claim that the wait times shown in the BBC article are at all normal.

It's obvious that you're looking to draw a very specific conclusion regardless of the data presented, so best of luck with that.

"Not the norm" is a cop-out. Is it the average person's experience? No, and nobody says that it is. The BBC article doesn't say that the average voter needs to wait for hours. But many voters do.

It's not a cop-out, it's a summary of the facts, as opposed to your claims that "many" voters wait in lines like the ones shown in the article and the random picture you found.

Like many of the individuals quoted in the BBC article, you know nothing about how voting in the US works and don't understand why people are choosing to stand in these lines right now, weeks before the actual election day and before all early voting locations are even open in many areas, but are very eager to make condescending comments.

Thanks for confirming my suspicion that you have no interest in a discussion about anything other than your inaccurate, preconceived notions.

It's you who is being condescending. Anyway, we both seem to agree that people -- an unknown number, and certainly not the average voter -- stand in lines for hours to vote. I acknowledge that you think it's significant that they are choosing to do so.

713,000 voters for 301 locations. Assuming 356k vote on election day, and voting takes place over 12 hours. That's still about 100 per hour and location. And that's ignoring that most will likely vote on their way from/to work (spices in demand), and that polling locations are most likely not perfectly distributed according to the population distribution.

Germany has 73,000 locations for 61,690,000 voters. Germany has roughly 4x the number of locations per voter.

I assume it takes 20-25 minutes to cast a ballot.

I once timed voters, data gathering in the debate between paper ballots vs touchscreens. From signing the poll book to dropping ballot in the box. Avg 21 minutes, for both paper and electronic (no significant difference). For a moderately sized general election ballot (~40 issues and races).

Election administrators absolutely know these timings, how to properly do capacity planning. Whether they admit it or not.

In my jurisdiction, dropping off a ballot is trivial. It's just a box. Drive or walk up. Open safety door. Drop the ballot.

I read that Texas requires proper identification to drop off ballots. And prohibits 3rd party help, eg wife cannot deliver husband's ballot. (I can't imagine any scenario where that extraneous step is merited.) So factor in the actual time & motion data per jursidiction. Because as we know, every jurisdiction insists on doing their own thing, independent of all other considerations.

So in Germany, the ratio is 845 voters per place. this seems to be quite high compared to North America.

For comparison, here are the numbers in Canada for 2019 [0]:

Registered electors: 27,300,000

Polling places: 20,000

Thus, the ratio is 1365 ppl per polling place.

This is only 60% of the ratio in Germany. I am from Canada and I don't think we have any problems with voer supression.

[0] https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=med&dir=bkg&do...

Are you saying that this is fine because everyone knows early voting means limited number of polling stations?

You also cherry-picked a specific county with an extreme difference. Are they all 60x difference?

I didn't cherry pick, I picked a county I'm familiar with because I live there. Maybe some other people can chime in with their local areas. But since Georgia was one of the two areas mentioned in the article, let's look at Fulton county, which is where Atlanta, GA is located. It looks like there's about 30 early polling locations [0] vs 380 or so polling locations on election day [1]. So still 12-13x differential.

[0] https://www.fultoncountyga.gov/services/voting-and-elections...

[1] (PDF) https://www.fultoncountyga.gov/-/media/Precinct-LocatorNovem...

EDIT: I forgot the address the first sentence. I believe I made it quite clear that I see missed opportunity here.

I posted something similar to the parent below.

There has been 1 open polling location in my county, with a dozen or so more opening this week, and hundreds more opening for election day. All the other counties near me are following the same model.

I haven't seen data for every locality, but in my experience, yes there is an extreme difference between the number of early polling locations vs. the number open on election day.

> “ And by far, the biggest problem is that election day is always on a Tuesday and is not a national holiday. IMO this would be the best change to make first, to enable more people to be available for voting.“

that would be nice and i’d support such a bill, but it wouldn’t likely increase voting rates drastically, as many (esp. working class) folks still work on (most) holidays.

to increase participation materially, the motivation to vote needs to be intrinsic (duty, patriotism, solidarity, optimism, etc.), and we can foster that through better voting mechanisms (score voting), more choice (election finance reform), proportional representation, less corruption, and more fairness and honesty. a tall order for sure, but something we need to be pushing and making progress toward every single election.

just make the voting day into 3 voting days and legally require employers to give employees a day off to vote at full pay or face severe punishment up to jailtime.

Emphatic agreement. There are no silver bullets, quick fixes.

At the end of the day ordering the new iPhone should not be easier than voting

Clearly you don't remember the lines of people camping out multiple days to pick up an iPhone...

Then Apple adapted by allowing preorders. Now suffering the queues is elective.

This is hilarious to me because you are basically making the correct point, but with the wrong conclusion. Let's take as a potentially erroneous given that early voting worked perfectly OK. Then, in 2020, it's run exactly the same, but demand is larger than in previous years [0]. That might result in exactly what's being reported here.

So yes, Apple made a mistake with a novel experience. Looks like various supervisors of elections are maybe also making a mistake with a novel experience. But I the latter doesn't get the same slack as Apple?

And, to be fair, at least my local supervisor of elections sent extra mailings this year making it abundantly clear that mail-in voting was an option and how to register for it. So they did make obvious the availability of the preordering equivalent.

[0] I won't say larger than anticipated, because the likelihood is that no one bothered to anticipate at all. Otherwise they might have figured to open more early voting stations this year.

Election administrators are pretty good at projecting turnout. Historical data and all that. In the year 2020, there's exactly no reason any jurisdiction should have anything less than perfection running poll sites.

The only slack (goodwill) I'm willing to grant admins this cycle is the massive pivot to postal ballots on short notice, while fending off widespread sabotage and harrassment.

Postal balloting is very different from running poll sites. Oregon and Washington experienced a lot of growing pains. And they made the transition gradually. Even so, our admins experienced a lot of burnout.

I imagine OR and WA admins are in a lot of Zoom calls with noobs nationwide. Alas, some jurisdictions don't want to learn.

I expect 2020's election to be the biggest fubar imaginable.

Generally speaking, commercial enterprises are more accountable to customers and efficient than state endeavors. Fanatics still line up and camp overnight to obtain a new iPhone when they are first released.

That said, I've never waited more than a few minutes when voting on election day in the US.

Do queues like this normally happen for "early voting"?

It's both amazing and terrible. Amazing to see people standing up for their rights and voting in the face of adversity, these voters deserve praise and are role models for the country.

Terrible because it means that they are in corrupt districts that are not properly facilitating democracy. Worthy of a federal corruption investigation potentially resulting in criminal charges. Though I am very glad people are willing to put in the time, it's a terrible thing that they are required to.

With all her flaws, India's elections and its election commission does a stellar job.

Just look at the stats for 2019 elections [1] (copying few of them):

1.035 million: The total number of polling booths across India.

2: The maximum distance in kilometres from any given voter’s house to he nearest polling booth

3.96 million: Number of electronic voting machines (EVMs) in use this election

1.7 million: Paper trail or voter-verifiable paper audit trail machines. It is a documentary record of the voter having exercised his franchise

11 million: Election personnel being deployed to conduct polls

15,256: Height of the world’s highest polling station, in Tashigang, Himachal Pradesh, in feet

35: Kilometres an election team travels just so the only resident of the remote Gir National Forest in Gujarat, where Asiatic lions outnumber humans, can vote. The temple priest gets his own polling station, complete with an EVM

[1] https://qz.com/india/1591214/indian-election-2019s-voters-po...

2 km to the nearest pooling booth from every house hold? That doesn't seem to make sense.

Why this does not make sense? Can you elaborate?

It seems to good to be true?

Here's a 2019 report from the Boston Globe about the extreme lengths that poll workers will go to in India to ensure access:

https://www.bostonglobe.com./news/world/2019/04/13/poll-work...

"The polling booth in Gir Forest National Park in Gujarat is set up for the sole human inhabitant, a Hindu priest who lives among the lions. Polling officials hike for a whole day to reach the remote village of Malogam in Arunachal Pradesh, where just one woman is registered to vote."

"Another Ladakh station, Anlay Pho, is so high at 4,500 meters (almost 15,000 feet) above sea level that polling teams must carry oxygen tanks."

"The voting machines were protected inside waterproof boxes and other polling material was kept dry under layers of plastic cover. The journey ended with a splash: Priyadarshini and the team clambered out and waded through waist-high water to reach the shore. All this for just nine voters."

"Many polling booths in remote areas have no mobile connectivity. Here too, the team had to use wireless sets and satellite phones to send the commission’s mandated twice hourly reports on the progress of polling."

Such a strong commitment to democracy, even through all the other messes in India, is beyond heartening. Such efforts should be emulated throughout the world.

I can see why that can be hard to believe.

See the report from Reuters[1]

Also there is a book written [2] "An Undocumented Wonder : The Making of the Great Indian Election"

https://graphics.reuters.com/INDIA-ELECTION-STATIONS/010092F...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22119020-an-undocumented...

With over one million polling booths it was about 3 booths per a square kilometer.

EVMs have always had vulnerabilities and should not be trusted. They are forbidden in Germany.

https://indiaevm.org/

The comment was not about the EVM but the sheer personel & logistics deployed to make voting as convenient as possible. Remember India is not a rich country like US, so think in that context as well.

India was doing same scale pre evm as well. Logistics has not simplified all that much because of evms.

There are voting booths for literally for one person.

Amazing and terrible I think it is pretty fitting.

As a Swiss I have voted almost every single time (about 4 times a year) since I was able to, but I have never even left the house for doing that beyond dropping it off in the next regular or official mailbox. I don't know what a polling stations look like from the inside after 15 years of voting, and being completely honest, I probably couldn't be arsed for the majority of votes/elections to go stand in line somewhere in the rain for doing so.

Potential manipulation risk for mail in voting in general aside, what I found baffling doing a quick google search on administrative cost of an election is how much more the US seems to be spending per citizen than Switzerland.

Switzerland spends a little less than 2$ per voter whereas the US spends 10$, at least according to this article

https://electionlab.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2019-01/mohr...

What would make it so much more expensive? Staff cost? Much larger geographical distribution of voters? Or just being inefficient?

As a reference, in Switzerland 80-90% of votes are mail-in.

Do you have to provide ID when voting in Switzerland?

You automatically get all the material sent from the municipality you are registered in (this is mandatory) around 2 months before each vote in a re-sealable envelope that contains information how to vote, a one-off voting id, the ballot and an inner envelope to place the ballot to be separated from id before counting.

You can either just send back the envelope with your vote via normal postal service for free, put it into a voting drop box that some places have, or bring voting id and ballot to a polling station.

I’m not completely sure if you need other form of ID when voting in person. But don’t think that would be a problem since everyone has a national id card.

https://www.ch.ch/en/demokratie/votes/how-to-complete-a-ball...

That's one problem with voting in the US. It seems that the democrats do not want people to use ID (e.g. a drivers license) when voting. It seems quite obvious that it will prevent voter fraud. They keep pointing to Europe all the time, but then when their policies are contradictory, they're quiet about it.

In countries in Europe (such as Switzerland) where all citizens are issued some form of National ID this isn't an issue. In countries such as the US, or the UK, where forms of government ID are common but not universal, passing laws requiring ID verification to vote is voter suppression. Across all groups it is the poorest that do not have a form of government ID - https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/campaigns/upgrading-our-...

In the UK there were 28 counts of election fraud at the 2017 election, a rate of 0.000063%. Whereas estimates of people without government ID range around 10% of the population (as of 2016, anyway) https://identityassurance.blog.gov.uk/2016/01/25/estimating-...

This is very much a "We've investigated ourselves and found that we did nothing wrong" situation.

It drives me nuts that the "opposition" party is not responding to this with calls for mass action to demand fair elections, including occupations and strikes if necessary, but by exhorting unlikely voters who feel apathetic to vote harder against voter suppression.

Any reform will come from outside the system. Said from experience.

I share your frustration. I worked on election and voting issues for a decade, fulltime for two years. I was slow to realize that my Mr Smith Goes to Washington folk theory of politics has no basis in reality. The only successes me and mine achieved were thru bringing pressure.

I highly recommend Camp Wellstone's training for organizers. (Please share recommendations.)

Electeds, leaders, and partisans to effect change is a misunderstanding of what they do. They are in a neverending knife fight for power. Any actual policies are merely the playing cards in the game. Sure, many pols do hold one or two firm positions, for which they will expend "political capital".

Leah Stokes' recent book Short Circuiting Policy is a very good, data driven explanation of policy formation. I collect books about politics, policy, etc. Mostly to better understand and learn from own experiences. Many very good.

That said, Stokes most closely matches my understanding of how legislators behave wrt policy.

Totally agree about inside/outside the system. I'm in this org and we won an unlikely major victory this year (not voting rights but still cool) because our city councilor member has a clear understanding her power to negotiate and legislate for positive change is virtually nil, but her power to agitate and build mass movements to bring pressure is high. Unfortunately almost no other orgs/elected officials embrace this strategy right now (yet).

I think the article neglects this fact for some reason but the actual tax legislation that was passed was written by Democrats, not us, and they try to frame it as their own idea... but the reality is they passed it literally the day after we announced we had enough signatures to put our somewhat larger tax on the ballot, in response to it.

https://www.socialistalternative.org/2020/07/09/amazon-taxed...

Congratulations. Nicely done.

There's a droll quote from a political to the effect "I have to find out where my voters are going, so that I can lead them."

As you know, waterdowned legislation is sometimes passed to blunt or diffuse a competitor's initiative. And the rest of Seattle absolutely does not want Sawant's name in headlines.

Other Councilmembers may not like Sawant, but they absolutely respect her as a politician, especially noting that she does a great job representing her constituents. (Source: served on local Dems e-board, have had many sidebar convos.)

For my part, I'm really uncomfortable with the notion of backseat drivers. I expect the person I vote for to do the work. But given her successes, I need to reassess Sawant's decision making process. Thanks for nudging me.

Oh cool, you're in the Seattle area? I moved away from there this summer.

> I'm really uncomfortable with the notion of backseat drivers

I assume this is referring to her being accountable to Socialist Alternative? I understand why this sometimes seems weird to people. But it's impossible get anywhere as a politician without a base of support. Kshama is open about who hers is. Corporate Democrats (and Republicans of course) are not, and tend to surprise people after the fact with their governance when they refuse to, for instance, tax the rich, or hedge on the question indefinitely. I think Kshama's ability to campaign for things and then consistently fight for them after getting elected is closely related to having SA, to not just do necessarily collective political analysis, but also do the work of mass campaigns. By contrast, traditional politicians also offload a lot of political work, but to an array of personally appointed policymakers, lobbyists, private-company executives, and others; while SA is democratically run, the corporate lobbying groups are only accountable to capital. I don't think there is a sustainable path in between these two options.

Democratic Party members mostly hate their politicians. They're often seen as parasites. They just use the party to get elected. Dems would love to have the kind of relationship Socialist Alternative has with Sawant. Though, in truth, the delegation for Ballard & North Seattle has been pretty good during my direct involvement.

Now that I've played the game a little bit, I don't understand the Corporate Democrat label. As Jesse James said, he robbed the banks because that's where the money is. Same for fund raising. That's been slowly changing on the left as parties wane and interest groups rise. That guy from QuarkXpress was an early pioneer of this model.

I now think of The Struggle as entities defending the status quo (establishment, duopoly) and everyone else storming the castle. That's neither bad or good; it just is.

And per Francis Fukamaya's vetocracy thesis, the connection between our party system and the widespread dysfunction in governance is fairly loose. Right now any one can do anything without much fear of repercussions, esp on the left. Said another way, I agree with Ezra Klein's thesis that if we make the (lowercase) democratic reforms to enable majoritarian rule, then the party system can grow to actually mean something.

I recognize that I'm way to the left of most participants. I have strong affinity for MLK, David Graeber, Jonathan Rawls, and maybe some others. I started as a Green and still (probably) believe in its platform. But Nader nuked that party. (I'm still mad.) And like most Democrats, I joined with the intent to oppose Republicans. aka Negative partisanship. I think this setup is terrible.

Back when I was attending all the third party meetups (Greens, Socialists, Libertarians), I was struck that those members were making an affirmative choice, standing for what they believed in. That's a much more healthy approach.

To feel that vibe, I've focused more on issue based orgs, vs party politics. Gay marriage, weed, sustainability, etc.

So I thank you for sharing some of your Socialist Alternative experiences. I need to go check them out.

This is why, if the U.S. can avoid becoming a failed state in the near future where laws mean nothing for those in power, the most important priority should be to change how voting is done to allow ranked choice and end the duopoly. It's not rational in most cases to try to run third party candidates given how the math works out currently, but we desperately need to make that viable. Perhaps if a single-issue voting reform party was created and it deliberately and rigorously avoided all wedge issues it could work. The second you tack on any other platform agenda it'll be the same old story, though.

I'd rather see approval voting than ranked choice. The outcomes are roughly the same, but the system is easier and less disputable. Which is very much a feature in the US; remember hanging chads in the 2000 race? If they can dispute that, then they can certainly dispute any unclear ranking marks.

And also because ranked choice usually comes along with instant-runoff here in the US, which is possibly the only system with worse outcomes than first-past-the-post.

http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

Note that the two weird graphs are always plurality, aka first past the post, and Hare, aka instant runoff. Also note that there's no obvious difference in any of the graphs between approval and Condorcet, even though Condorcet is ranked.

I would actually still prefer IRV to FPTP. The center candidate's boundary can be unpredictable, but the other boundaries are in basically the same place as they are for approval and Condorcet. FPTP shifts all the boundaries and drastically reduces or eliminates center candidates' winning regions. (I'd also prefer it to Borda, which drastically enlarges center candidates' winning regions).

That said, I agree that approval seems to strike the best balance between simplicity and outcome, with the caveat that where possible we should also have proportional representation rather than winner-take-all districts, e.g. https://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation

Agreed on all accounts. I'm mostly just disappointed that, when the chance comes to actually affect change, we seem to mostly just be moving from one provably broken system (FPTP) to another (IRV). While at the same time increasing complexity more than necessary to achieve a better outcome.

But even with IRV, I would be happy I could finally throw some votes at third-party candidates whose platform I align with, without throwing away my entire vote.

> It drives me nuts that the "opposition" party is not responding to this with calls for mass action to demand fair elections, including occupations and strikes if necessary

Whether or not that is justifiable by the level of offense (which I think it is), I don't see any indication that it would be tactically smart in the current context, and actually a lot of reasons to the think it would be catastrophically counterproductive.

The problem with a federal corruption investigation is that the people in charge of the investigation need to not see themselves as being on the same "team" as those doing the suppression.

>Worthy of a federal corruption investigation potentially resulting in criminal charges.

Except these voter suppression tactics are currently being applauded and encouraged at the federal level, which is itself engaging in similar tactics.

The election is a still almost a month away. I fully support improving election processes and infrastructure and think election officials could have foreseen this demand, but I would argue that most of your comments are hyperbole.

No one in the US is required to vote weeks in advance of election day in person.

This article is an incredibly misleading, fake positive framing of what is in reality a rapidly failing democratic system. An 11-hour wait to vote is absolutely prohibitive to many of the people who most need change, on top of being terrible for everyone else; not that that is anything new for the US. It's basically a poll tax, which is one of the most regressively anti-democratic tools, but applied unevenly by location. There is not close to a technical need for this, even if we used completely low-tech voting and had all the necessary COVID-19 safety measures. As Glenn Greenwald tweeted, "Few things function efficiently in Brazil. And yet -- in a country just a little smaller & way poorer than the US -- elections work smoothly. Held on a Sunday, mandatory voting, automatic registration at 16, polls open at 7am, close at 5pm, all votes reliably counted by 8:30 pm."

The article is the election version of "feel-good" stories about people who work into their late 80s or 90s in low-paying jobs and are given some token gift like a car by their boss, in response for years and years of life stolen from them. Infuriating.

What on Earth are you talking about? The headline, first paragraph, and last two thirds of the article are all about _criticism_ of long voting lines. The fact that they spend part of the article acknowledging that some in the US take pride in coming out to vote in the face of long lines doesn't mean that they're taking this position, especially given that most of the article is dedicated to criticism of the conditions.

Hm, I skimmed this but might have come away with a skewed sense of the balance between reactions to it.

Early voting is always hit or miss on the first day. Did a 4 hour stint once myself years ago. Couple of dudes went the next day and got in and out. Voting on the proper day is usually fairly easy enough. Most employers work with you to do so. One time it was a 1 hour wait on election day. Few years later it took less than 20 mins total from parking going in and driving off. All at the same location. Early voting locations have a secondary issue as they usually have an amalgamation of several districts. So the biggest hold up is making sure you have the correct ballot. As depending on where you are at you may have a different ballot per precinct. I may be in district 'xyz' for this congress man but not on the ballot for the mayor of the city because I do not live in a city. That sort of thing.

mandatory voting doesn't sound very good to me for a few reasons. winning with 30% of eligible votes is functionally equivalent to winning with 51% (ie, you still get the office), but looks a lot different. forcing people to pick one seems like a way to make the strongest of several weak candidates appear more legitimate. as misguided as it may be, I think individuals ought to have the option to signal their dissatisfaction (or apathy) with all the viable candidates by abstaining entirely.

one final thought: someone who cares so little about voting that they would only do it under compulsion seems like someone I would probably prefer not to vote. this is assuming, of course, that the reason they don't want to vote is not because of procedural obstacles. if you don't know anything about the candidates other than their names, your vote probably does not contribute much to the democratic process.

Mandatory voting doesn't preclude writing in nothing if you prefer. And for people who are uninformed, well, having to go through the motion helps that some. More than anything else, this would force the government to make it possible, easy, and routine for current non-voters to vote, which would dramatically shift election results to the left economically.

Ultimately partisans of either persuasion portray opposing voters as uninformed. I'd even suggest that a healthy portion of voters on any side have poorly formed reasoning skills.

What is the standard for being an informed voter?

I can easily imagine the backlash if there were a test for competence wherein voters were required to identify fallacious arguments.

I agree, but was trying to say that if someone is afraid that most nonvoters are uninformed (debatable), making voting mandatory would cause many nonvoters to learn more about it.

There should be an option for "none of the above" or "withdraw consent" if voting becomes compulsory.

Every ballot I've ever filled out has had blanks for write-ins. Sometimes I've written myself in. Sometimes, I write "no confidence". Sometimes, I simply leave the provided choices blank.

It's different for referenda -- no write-in on those. But you can still leave it blank.

And nobody will know (unless you're the idiot that writes theirself in), because your ballot is secret. Turning in the ballot can be compulsory without making it compulsory to actually fill it out.

Compulsory voting would improve election integrity. It'd enable accounting style end-to-end auditing. Closing some attacks vectors, like ballot stuffing.

I'm fine with "mandatory like the flag code".

I'm not fine with "mandatory like the speed limit".

I live in a city/town in Georgia USA with a population of about 25k. I have never waited more than 10 minutes to vote. This type of thing (long lines in Atlanta) was in the news last year during our very close gubernatorial election and I don't think it's far fetched to say that it decided the election.

As I recall, the main reason in the news was that there were so few voting machines available in Atlanta. My observation as I walked in to vote instantly (on Election day mind, not early voting) was that we had 3 voting machines at my polling place.

It seems a pretty simple thing to me that if I can vote in 10 minutes or less and people are waiting for hours and hours in Atlanta (taking time off from work, giving up their whole day?), then it seems fair to me that my polling place can do with 1 voting machine and they can take the other 2 to Atlanta. And of course I'm assuming that this strange distribution of voting machines exists in many other polling places as well. If it didn't fix the problem, then it could at least make it a little bit less bad.

A lot of people outside the USA don’t realize we don’t have an election. We have 51 parallel elections, each with their own rules.

For example, you’ll never see long lines like that in California or Oregon.

For some reason people are super allergic to having federal standards on how federal elections should be run.

Sure, run your state however you want. But it’s messed up that I, a Californian, have no say in how elections are run in Florida, even though it has a big effect on me, and vice versa.

Ya, it's nutty making.

Post 2000, with HAVA et al, the EAC.gov has done some good recommending best practices and codifying rules. It's not nearly enough.

I'd love for USA to have a GATT style body. Then maybe some day our elections could brag about meeting the Carter Center's minimum standards for integrity and accountability.

https://electionstandards.cartercenter.org/

It's not messed up, and the Framers agreed, hence why every state is allowed to determine how to run its elections. The argument of federal power at that scale was lost long ago. If one doesn't like the way one's state exercises its power, one can move to another state. This is a feature, not a bug.

That made sense in the 1700s when communication was slow and the states ran mostly independently.

It makes no sense in our modern world of connectedness.

It’s only a feature because the framers of the constitution didn’t have the foresight to see a more interconnected world.

And telling people to move is a better counter today than it would have been in the 1700s due to ease of movement and communication.

Except that ease of movement and communication have nothing to do with moving one's home, because you can't bring your land with you.

It does however have everything to do with elections.

I feel like I shouldn't have to move to a different state for my vote to matter.

Telling someone to move because they don’t like their government makes no sense, because you can’t take your land with you.

I have never in my entire life waited longer than five minutes to vote in any election in a municipal, provincial or federal election. That includes early voting or election day voting. I walk over to a school near my house (or community center, or church) and vote. I can't understand how anyone in the US accepts the status quo of their terrible and flawed election system.

Make it a terrible experience, especially in lower income and minority communities, and you don't really have to worry about courting those people since many won't be willing, or able to vote.

What is the alternative to acceptance? My state has closed hundreds of polling places over the past decade or so. Mostly in poor area, college towns, or cities. What should we do if our option for making our voices heard are removed?

I hope we just make voting compulsory and a national holiday, but I won't hold my breath.

NC? GA? Another state that was (prior to 2013) limited in what it could do by the VRA?

I moved out of there just before all that hit, and straight to GA where I got to see their version of it. Now I'm in CO, and my ballot showed up over the weekend. I'll fill it out tonight and submit it by this weekend. Much smoother experience. It's pleasant being somewhere that doesn't seem to be actively disenfranchising its residents.

I don’t spent more than five minutes voting either, but that’s only because Oregon figures it out and does statewide mail in ballots and automatic registration. It’s stilly the other states are so far behind.

It's not about being "far behind", these delays are intentionally engineered where they're happening.

Yes, some of these are very obviously intentional. But California just now getting on the mail in ballots train does put them far behind. Some 20+ years behind. That’s pretty far if you ask me. (Yes I know they’ve had absentee, I used to vote that way).

>I can't understand how anyone in the US accepts the status quo of their terrible and flawed election system.

Your next paragraph shows you understood all too well. People support things like long voting lines because it suppresses the votes of other people they don't think should be voting at all.

Your experience is the norm for almost all Americans as well, on election day (or with normal levels of demand for early voting). Unfortunately, it's not the norm for everyone, but the lines described in this article are caused by an enormous increase in demand for early voting, not the other more serious issues you're attributing them to.

Basically, people voting now are choosing to stand in these long lines to vote.

How do you suggest that people in these lower income communities stop "accepting" this status quo?

In Australia we have two things the US system desperately needs: mandatory voting and preferential voting.

Preferential voting allows you to vote for a third party without wasting your vote.

The standard argument against mandatory voting is people not wanting the uninformed to vote (trust me, they're voting) and the usual US predilection against that infringing "freedom". I was sympathetic to this until I saw the US system in practice.

Waiting for hours in line to vote is exactly why mandatory voting is better: optional voting encourages voter suppression. If you think one party doesn't make it harder to vote in areas where they have a disadvantage you're crazy.

Also, voting needs to be moved to the weekend. This makes finding venues easy: you use schools. This is what we do in Australia.

In Australia voting typically took me 5 minutes at most.

Mandatory voting in the US would simply be an excuse to fine or jail the same people that are targeted for voter suppression.

Also personally I'd just rather people who have no interest in voting not be forced to randomly choose candidates just because they are forced to vote. Along that line, voting in person should universally become optional with mail in/drop off becoming the norm. I'd always had a valid reason for absentee voting when I had residency in my home state and it would take me atleast a day to properly research the down ballot candidates. I now live in a state with judges on the ballot and it took me an entire weekend to actually look through everyone that wasn't in the federal races. Mandatory voting, especially without universal access to absentee voting, would just exacerbate the issue of people just voting based on name or party instead of stance when there are so many people on the ballot.

"Mandatory voting" is perhaps a misnomer because what it really means is "mandatory attendance". There's nothing stopping you from going to the polling place and putting thee piece of paper with no votes into the ballot box. In Australia some people deliberately place such "spoiled ballots" or only vote on the stuff they care about. It's completely fine.

What you can get fined for in Australia is not getting your name crossed off when attend a polling place, not for failing to supply a complete and valid ballot.

In Australia you can also vote "above the line" or "below the line". Voting "above the line" means you just select a party (and this includes minor parties) and use that party's preferences (which must be filed in advanced).

Voting "below the line" had become sort of involved because there was ultimately dozens of Senate candidates and you once had to number them all. They reformed this so you only have to put in as many preferences as you like (so only numbering 1 to 6 out of 40).

Another detail: in Australia you have two ballots. One for the House of Representatives and the other for the Senate. You can vote above/below the line separately on each.

Many people would love to see literally all of these reforms. You correctly identified the problem, though:

> If you think one party doesn't make it harder to vote in areas where they have a disadvantage you're crazy.

Difficult to enact meaningful reform when the people in power have an existential need to prevent it.

Exactly. Both parties will complain about parts of the voting system that made them lose. Then when they come to power again won’t change what made them win (which is naturally what caused them to lose originally). This is why we’ll never see the delegate system go away.

It is several weeks until election day. Right now some areas have early voting available. Early voting is available in most areas every day of the week for several weeks prior to election day, including weekends.

During early voting you can choose to vote at any location in your county which often include convenient places such as the grocery store, instead of being required to vote at your assigned district polling center, which is usually a public school, but is sometimes another government or community building.

I cannot remember waiting in line to do early voting even once. Sometimes I would go to the grocery store two or three times during early voting and see a line to vote, and I just wait until I see no line. There are always surges in the first and last days of early voting, but a big lull in the middle.

I don't disagree with moving voting to the weekends, but I can confirm that when I was attending High School some 20ish years ago, our school would block off the path from the entrance to the gymnasium from student traffic, and use it as a polling place during the school day.

Students old enough to vote were encouraged to go do so during their lunch or free period.

Some areas do make the effort to make the elections fair to all. It's a shame that there are so many areas that don't.

I'm in america, and never had more than 30 minute wait to vote. But I'm in Massachusetts and we have early voting and a election commision that seems to want to make it easy.

Mandatory Voting actually seems like an interesting idea. Work/Government would have to make accommodations.

Voting rules here are handled by local entities (cites, counties and states). So sometimes sadly it gets gamed to try to favor one group of voters over another.

Its kinda a mess. Lawsuits are common.

Some states use preferential voting for local elections, but right now Maine is the only one that does it for the presidential elections. I hope preferential voting will be the next major change to the election, after the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact gets enough members to activate.

Ugh, the popular vote. It's such a mistake, even in this form with the compact and I really wish people would realize it.

Put it this way: what happens (and this will happen) when the popular vote is ridiculously close? We had a preview of this in Florida in 2000 when a few thousand votes decided the election. Now imagine the litigation, the endless recounts and the uncertainty but it engulfs the entire country. Imagine an election decided by less than 10,000 votes and litigants try to scrounge up a few dozen votes in every county in the country.

As much as people like the crap on the electoral college it has (thus far) done one thing well: and that is to create w winner. Creating a winner is _way_ more important than creating the "right" winner.

The one big problem with the electoral college is that the Founders never envisioned the huge population disparities we have today ie California has >500 times the population of Montana, Vermont or North Dakota.

There are legitimate issues with the electoral college. A national popular vote for president is not the answer.

My voting location is a school, but voting days are always on weekdays while school is in session. The voting public occupies the school's gym, so it annoys me that the students must forgo PE and physical activity for the day for my precinct to vote.

Voting should probably be a higher priority than PE. It's one day.

One difference in US is there are lot of jobs which have elections like sheriff, judge, board comissioners etc.

Prefential or ranking systems work better when you vote a party and /or have less positions to vote for.

We don't have either of those things in the UK and I've never had to queue to vote - the whole process only takes a couple of minutes.

In Ireland we don't have mandatory voting but we still provision polling stations to handle the possibility of all voters actually voting.

The result is when I lived in a high turnout area, I once had to queue 10 minutes to vote when I had to do it during lunch time, and now I live in a low turnout area 10 minutes is the time from leaving my house to being back having voted in between.

I've voted in the centre of cities and in rural areas in Scotland for ~35 years and I've literally never had to queue - I usually vote in the early evening as well which I would have thought was a fairly popular time.

> I've never had to queue to vote

In live and vote in the US. Never waited in a queue. Just dropped off my ballot at a local ballot box. Not sure why the people in the article can’t do that, but I’ve lived in 4 states and all of them had ballot boxes.

Many states don't have ballot boxes, and a LOT of people are distrusting of mail-in and absentee voting which forces them to vote in person.

In the US, one can vote for any party (preferential voting). There are other parties in America but you seldom hear about them. Two examples are the Green Party and the Libertarian party.

You may be more familiar with the term "Rank-Choice Voting". Outside of the US, that system (ranking the candidates in order of your preference, with runoff or similar allocation methods in the case that nobody gets a majority) is called preferential voting. Being able to vote for any candidate on the ballot paper is a consequence of having a secret ballot system (nobody knows who you voted for), not preferential voting.

Preferential Voting is a system by which you can rank your preferences rather than choosing a single candidate. You might range Green party first, Democrat second. There are various methods of tallying the votes, but it usually means that you can support the less popular candidate without giving up your weight in the choice between two frontrunners.

In a first past the post system like the US has it will always mathematically be a 2 party system. Maybe the democrats or republicans actually self destruct and cease being a party and one of those other parties take its place but there can never be a 3 party government in our system as it's impossible.

I suggest you read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Party_(United_St...

A significant number of Libertarians have held and do hold state legislature positions and governorships.

There is also currently 1 Libertarian in the US House of Representatives.

Libertarian presidential candidates have received electoral college votes in the past.

And

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_third-party_performa...

Preferential voting means you list the candidates in your order of preference. It means you can put your first choice for a small party and if they get eliminated by having the least votes your second choice becomes your vote and so on.

I requested a ballot. I received my ballot in the mail. I filled out my ballot. I walked right up to my elections office, dropped it in a box, with no line. Done.

My problem with all of this is that it’s so easy to do it right, there should be no excuse for all these places to be doing it so wrong.

Washington State has perfected mail in voting, and has done it for over a decade. Just do what they do.

My state opens voting locations and makes it easy to get an absentee ballot and drop it off, no lines, no problems.

Locations with these problems should be embarrassed for not simply looking to locations that do it right, and then copying what they do.

One shouldn't be mislead to thinking these unacceptably long lines are common. From MIT:

> For general elections, the average wait time decreased from 14 to 12 minutes between 2008 and 2012; it dropped again in 2016 to an 8-minute average.

https://medium.com/mit-election-lab/insights-into-voting-wai...

As a data point, we had municipal elections in Vienna, Austria this last weekend. I went there at a "busy" time, so I had to queue for something like five minutes. This is in a city of about 1.9 million inhabitants.

Here's a map of the results of the election: https://www.wien.gv.at/stadtplan/grafik.aspx?lang=de-AT&book... . Ignore the colors, but each delineated area is one "voting district" (Wahlsprengel, not sure if there's a better translation). Each of these "districts" corresponds to a separate ballot box (not a separate polling place; several districts usually have separate rooms at a shared polling place, typically a school). I can't find data on how many districts there are in total, but each seems to correspond to about 500-1000 voters.

Just a little local perspective on the lines in Georgia. The waits that some folks had to endure in the primaries were a huge problem. Georgia absolutely has history of voter suppression like many post-confederate states, and some seriously shady stuff has gone down in the past.

However, the really long lines yesterday were more attributable to incredible turnout on the first day of early voting, which also happened to be a federal holiday so many people had the spare time to come out and vote. There are new voting systems, new volunteers for whom that was their first day running the polls, and a very motivated electorate.

For comparison, today, two days later, I know of at least two people who were in and out in 15 minutes in some of the same areas that had incredible lines on Monday.

There are legit voter suppression stories of great concern in GA, but I don't think the lines of Oct 12 qualify. I'm totally open to being corrected on this opinion though.

The lack of voting booths does seem a bit silly, in the UK during elections there is usually voting booths in pretty much every church, school and town hall so you'd struggle to live more than a mile away from one.

I once got called a "god botherer" by some kid after leaving to vote in a church, that was a bit bizarre.

> in the UK during elections there is usually voting booths in pretty much every church, school and town hall so you'd struggle to live more than a mile away from one.

On election day or in the month leading up to an election? We have plenty of places to vote at in Germany, but only on the day of the election, not for early voting.

Only on the actual election day.

Its not silly, its by design to disenfranchise voting, which benefits one party in particular.

I live in Oregon and can't even remember what it was like to vote in person.

Disgusting country. The GOP is actively supporting and implementing systems of voter suppression, and the opposition party doesn't seem to have the will to do anything about it.

I was concerned about the reports of foreign influence on the 2016 election. Since then, the senators in Washington have made it crystal clear that they do not want to protect the integrity of the election. The Republicans want to win at all costs, and if they can't win they want to poke enough holes in the system to completely undermine trust in American democracy.

And I don't see it getting better. If the GOP stays in power after this election cycle, I am going to be trying to get out of the country ASAP. I've read enough to know that it doesn't get better when the single autocratic power is able to fully insulate itself from the will of the public. At that point, it becomes fight or flight time, and the local gun stores have been sold out for a while.

If the Democrats win this election, their first priority should be holding vote suppressors accountable, and trying to restore faith in the federal system. But I've seen Democrats win before, and they have never failed to disappoint. I am sick of trying to pretend they're good, when the reality is that the opposing party is just so, so bad.

The Democrats are a terrible opposition party. They only look good in comparison with the Republicans and their embrace of full blown doctrinaire fascist ideology.

Good on them, I say. There's clearly a problem if people are having to wait that long to vote (to my knowledge it's rarely happened here in the UK, and I've never had to queue for more than a handful of minutes when I've voted), but I applaud the fact they're willing to wait and how seriously these people are taking their democratic responsibility as citizens. Well done!

If the posted title is correct, this is an article about some comments about some images surrounding an event...the start of an election period.

So if I comment on it, I will be commenting about an article about comments about images about an event. This would violate my rule refusing to comment on things two abstractions away from what passes as reality.

It should violate your rule too.

Cf. the children’s song “There’s a hole is the bottom of the sea”.

“There's a fleck on the speck on the tail On the frog on the bump on the branch On the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea.”

Or “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly”

“She swallowed the cow to catch the goat, She swallowed the goat to catch the dog, She swallowed the dog to catch the cat, She swallowed the cat to catch the bird, She swallowed the bird to catch the spider That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her! She swallowed the spider to catch the fly; I don't know why she swallowed a fly - Perhaps she’ll die.”

Shocking. I live in eastern europe and we've had a parliamentary election this July during the pandemic.

Two volunteers with disinfectant at the entrance to the local grade school. Political party volunteers to oversee the voting. Paper ballots and temp uni students to count them at the drop off sites.

Literally hundreds of countries do the same with no difficulty.

Sounds like this was on election day, which is 3 weeks away in the US and there will be significantly more polling places open then.

I'm wondering if there are ballot boxes like this anywhere in the US?

[1] https://www.wahlurne.de/Wahlurne%20Muelltonne%201.png

[2] https://mobil.express.de/image/31438468/max/600/450/a7c42ec3...

[3] https://scheinwelt.lima-city.de/assets/images/mulltonnen-wah...

The above pictures are from Hamburg and Bavaria. When I saw them for the first time I thought were kidding me.

I think the most worrying aspect is an emerging strain of political thought in the US that USA is merely a republic but not a democracy. I find it quite shocking that it has gained a great deal of acceptance. edit : typo

It's a representative democratic republic. A system of governance need not be a "direct democracy" to be a democracy.

Article 1

Section 1: All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Section 2: The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.

The USA is technically not a democracy and is instead a representative republic which is a fact. I guess you're alluding to how citizens can "vote" which means it's actually a democracy to which I would strongly disagree. I have little to no influence over my government as I live in a gerrymandered district so my representative is decided for me ahead of time. I also only get to pick between 2 old white guys every 4 years which is me actually being optimistic as I don't live in a state that actually decides the presidential election so my vote doesn't matter there either.

In a democracy I would actually be able to vote on issues and have my voice heard. That's clearly not happening in the USA.

> The USA is technically not a democracy and is instead a representative republic which is a fact. [...] live in a gerrymandered district so my representative is decided for me ahead of time.

In what way is your republic "representative" then?

> The USA is technically not a democracy and is instead a representative republic

I have a degree in political science, and I've never seen anyone who knows what they are talking about use the term "representative republic". The US is, in theoretical structure, both a federal republic and a representative democracy, albeit one with very unequal representation. In practice, it tends to work as something like a plutocratic aristocracy, but its considered impolite in many circles to the point that out.

> I also only get to pick between 2 old white guys every 4 years

That's only true if you choose to restrict yourself to participation in only Presidential general elections, and not all the elections for other offices or earlier parts of the cycle (and also requires an unusually broad definition of "white" [e.g., including Barack Obama, 2008 & 2012] and "guy", [Hillary Clinton, 2016] and "old" [prior to Trump, the last three presidents were elected at ages 46, 54, and 47--though in the first and last cases their opponents were significantly older--which is certainly middle-aged but hardly "old" for a head of government.])

I'm one of those people. I certainly see America as a republic first and foremost.

I appreciate the design of America that incorporates democratically electing one's representives in the House of Representives while balancing the downsides of such a process against other forms of voting.

It's necessary to capture the passions of the body politic at large - which democratic voting does! - but it's also necessary to introduce mechanisms that can serve as a counterweight to the madness of crowds that have been frequently observed in history in America and other countries.

If you haven't done so, do read The Federalist Papers.

I used to agree with you on this line of thinking, but over the past few years my thinking has been changing quite radically.

What good is protections against tyranny of the majority if it just results in tyranny of the minority? The majority will only play a rigged game for so long - as you are beginning to see with Democrats seriously discussing court packing should they win power.

One party has gotten Presidents in twice over the past 20 years without winning the popular vote. Those two presidents who did not win a majority of support got to pick 4 Supreme Court justices, wildly swinging the ideology of the court in the process towards minority views.

A Wyoming voter has vastly more power then a Californian voter in every federal election. When the Founders set up the Senate, Virginia was something like 15x more populous then the least populist state. California is 66x more populous then Wyoming today.

In my opinion - power has shifted far too much to the minority. On issue after issue you can find things like gun control, climate change, healthcare, minimum wage, paid maternity leave with public support in the 60% plus range, yet nothing happens due to the tyranny of the minority (and a good dose of corruption).

We need massive democratic reforms in this country if we want to be able to solve the problems of the coming century, and yes the minority needs to lose some of its protections. I don't think "but tyranny of the majority" holds up as valid argument against reforms given the context of the last 20+ years.

>A Wyoming voter has vastly more power then a Californian voter in every federal election. When the Founders set up the Senate, Virginia was something like 15x more populous then the least populist state. California is 66x more populous then Wyoming today.

Which is why CA has 53 congressional representatives and WY only has one.

You are missing the point. There is a set amount of Representatives (435), and the smallest district by population is Wyoming's at 577,000. In California the average district population is more like 745,000. That gives a Wyoming voter a disproportionate amount of power, and obviously Wyoming and California are just the two clearest examples, this concept plays out over the entire country.

So even in the House which is supposed to be most representative of the majority - the minority has a significant advantage.

All of those methods for balancing the "madness of crowds" (which is a strange euphemism for abolitionism) have been written out of the constitution. Senators are elected by popular vote now. Almost all the day-to-day legislative actions of both houses require merely a simple majority.

The Federalist Papers are centuries out of date. They do not comprehend how modern politics functions. Hamilton could not imagine a multinational corporation with an unlimited purse and fewer limits on their free speech than an ordinary citizen.

I'd like to think we could agree that the Senate has become more politicized in the last few decades.

I think where we disagree is what to do about it.

There seems to be this prevailing cultural view that a democratic election is always good and always produces wise and just results. Where as people like me are fearful of what starts as the wise vox populi devolves into a crowd, transforms into an angry mob, and then the fun really begins!

I always like a line that was attributed to George Washington...

"George Washington is said to have told Jefferson that the framers had created the Senate to 'cool' House legislation just as a saucer was used to cool hot tea."

By directly electing Senators, we have reduced that cooling function.

In my view the Senate has been all too successful at its 'cooling' function. Since the ACA what significant legislation has it passed? Has it done anything besides obstruct in a decade?

The Senate has turned into a freezer :)

The republic-vs-democracy debate distracts from what we should be debating: is our system of representation fair?

Obviously we are a "democracy" (we vote) and a "republic" (for most of history and the rest of the world, this means we don't have a monarch. The US is the exception, where we take it to mean that we have a representative democracy a la Fed. #10.)

Let's say the popular vote (i.e. the mad crowd) votes 45% party X and 55% party Y, but party X get 55% of the representative seats and party Y gets 45%. Why is this fair? Why shouldn't party Y get more seats? Why can't the members of party Y act as a "damping factor" (instead of a "counterweight") to the demands of their own voters?

Well said, and couldn't agree more. An actual democracy is a terrifying prospect.

Republic and democracy are orthogonal. Constitutional monarchy is usually democratic, and republic can be autocratic. Somehow a lot of people miss that.

Depending on how such things are defined, it's absolutely the case, and that is how the system was designed.

But this is true, and has always been true.

This is a result of bad faith astroturfing by conservatives. I'm not really sure the objective other than to have something to say when someone points out the glaringly obvious flaws about the electoral college system. It's not an argument against the electoral college system at all...

The long queues obviously are there on purpose; incredible your sitting government can get away with it. It is really a sign of a broken system - there are supposed to be checks and balances.

What does voter turnout matter when electors are chosen on a district level anyways? Ie a city got its allocated electors versus a town with nicers ques and higher turnout.

For a clear cut example, look at Texas.

“Abbott in July acted to lengthen the early voting period and allow voters to deliver completed absentee ballots in person for longer than the normal period. But after large Democratic counties including Harris and Travis established several sites where voters could deliver their ballots, Abbott ordered Oct. 1 that they would be limited to one… Harris County — home to 2.4 million registered voters and spanning a greater distance than the state of Rhode Island — had designated a dozen before Abbott’s order forced them to close most sites.” [0]

If party A looks at the districts with majority party B voters and targets those areas for polling station closures, that can have a huge effect.

[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/13/texas-election-ballo...

We had a parliament election in Lithuania this weekend. Even with everything taking longer because of COVID-19, I didn't have to wait more than 10 minutes. If you vote in another precinct than the one you are registered at, you might have to wait a bit more (maybe 20 minutes). It really is remarkable just how many small things seem to be broken in strange ways in the US.

The reason for this, as the article aptly points out, is because of the historic technique of the American conservative party (today the American Republican Party or GOP) to restrict the ability of traditionally liberal voters (today the American Democratic party) to vote. Given that the working class, naturalized immigrants, and people of color traditionally vote liberal, the best way to secure a win is simply make it as hard as possible for them to vote. So they've opposed legislation guaranteeing a day off to vote [1], making it fairly impossible for people living paycheck to paycheck. They've opposed legislation to make it easier to vote by mail in ballot [2] which would make it easier for working class people to vote. They've purged voting rolls so that people with less understanding of the registration process find themselves unable to vote on election day [3], and of course the incessant cries that somehow voter fraud is a big enough issue that it's worth disenfranchising thousands with strict voter ID laws. In my home state of texas we had once instance voter fraud in the last 4 years, and it was a woman on parole being lied to by her parole officer about her right to vote.

Typical bad faith conservative arguments include that mail in voting leads to voter fraud (it doesn't), voting holidays are a power grab by democrats (Mitch mcconnell's verbatim words), and that millions of Mexicans citizens / non americans are voting in american elections (also no). In texas the republicam governor said vague things about covid and then banned counties from having more than one ballot drop off location. For reference, my county (harris) has one of the largest cities in america (houston) in it, a population of 30 million people, and can take up to an hour and a half to drive from an edge to the center.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/us/politics/election-day-...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/30/trump-vot...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/31/voter-purges...

Voting issues have been happening in the US for a long time (when the US was founded only property owners could vote).

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

Its only been 100 years since women were allowed to vote, and that barely squeeked through.

Historically they had "Poll Taxes" (Pay to vote) another form of voter repression (struck down in the 1960s). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_State...

States set their own voting rules, even in national elections. It got so bad in the 1960s the Federal Government passed a "Voting rights act" to try and fix thing. That of course has been dragged through the courts and in the past couple years

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

There are going to be a lot of people still voting into the early hours of 11/4 this year. Add in mail in ballot counting that can't even start until polls close in some states, we aren't going to have a vote count for at least a few days after Election Day.

I have personally waited in line for more than 6 hours to vote on Election Day in the US. How many could not wait that long and had to leave before their vote was recorded?

This is a real thing that happens in many states and should not be acceptable in a democracy.

The GAO has a much better writeup about wait times on election day in 2012.

https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-850

I get the impression that this is an opportunity to paint a political story that makes your side look better (other side is suppressing the vote, therefore my candidate lost!), or perhaps in this specific case, to poke fun at America as it is a favorite international past time.

The data I see shows another possibility: voter turn out has increased by a large amount and the government is struggling to meet the demand. Over 20 years, the number of voters in a presidential election has increased by more than 30 million. That's more than the entire population of the state of New York.

According to [1] and plenty of other studies of their kind, closure of voting locations have been a major problem since the Shelby decision gutted the voting rights acts. Summary:

> We found 1,688 polling place closures in places once covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Of the 757 counties in our study, 298 (39 percent) reduced the number of polling places between 2012 and 2018. Because presidential elections tend to have higher turnout rates than midterms, we analyzed the data to determine whether the number of polling places varied to meet the different demands of each type of election. They did not. Most (69 percent) closures (–1,173) occurred after the 2014 midterm election.

> The Shelby decision paved the way for systematic statewide efforts to reduce the number of polling places in Texas (–750), Arizona (–320), and Georgia (–214). Quieter efforts to reduce the number of polling places without clear notice or justification spread throughout Louisiana (–126), Mississippi (–96), Alabama (–72), North Carolina (–29), and Alaska (–6).

Can't argue population growth in good faith when polling places are actively being shutdown in states with growing populations like Texas.

[1] http://civilrightsdocs.info/pdf/reports/Democracy-Diverted.p...

Texas is really going out of its way to suppress voting.

[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/13/texas-election-ballo...

Thanks for the link. I'm not familiar with that case so there is some further reading for me to do!

The article only mentions in passing that these lines were on the first day early voting was open. Of course if everybody tries to show up on the first day, you're going to have long lines. Those polling places will be open for a total of three weeks (up until the weekend before election day--and in many US jurisdictions early voting lasts even longer, in my area it opened two weeks ago) and for most of that time there will be no lines at all. But that won't get reported in the news because it doesn't fit the "voter suppression" narrative.

> Of course if everybody tries to show up on the first day, you're going to have long lines.

What you seem to take as obvious does not seem obvious at all to me.

Why should there be long lines? It doesn't make any sense at all for a system that typically does voting all at once on one day.

> Why should there be long lines?

Because many people don't stop to think that they have a full three weeks to vote, so they all pile in on the first day as if it were election day (note that the article also talks about yesterday as if it were election day and all these people in the lines would have no chance to vote if they didn't stand there for hours instead of just coming back another day); but early voting polling places, because they are spreading the voting out over weeks instead of all in one day, aren't set up to handle a huge pile of people all showing up at once.

The only long line to vote (and it wasn't anything like the lines in the article, we're talking maybe 25 people) I've ever seen was the one time I voted in a jurisdiction with electronic voting machines.

Otherwise they all had paper ballots and it's never been more than (say) 5 people in line.

Some of these places with the long lines (and clunky voting machines for that matter) are places with a history of voter suppression and I suspect that's the real reason they see these lines year after year and do nothing.

Correct. These are invariably in states where republicans can influence voting procedures.

Over here voting takes one morning (population 11M), results are in by evening. I can't see why it wouldn't scale.

It does scale, however in the USA, the republican party directly benefits the less people vote, so in states where the republican party controls voting means, you'll see things like long lines, arbitrary voter ID requirements, etc. In the USA, voting is handled at a state level.

> the republican party directly benefits the less people vote

True, and they benefit even more when they can actually target the voters of the other party.

[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/13/texas-election-ballo...

Voter suppression is very real and it is very sad. Those in power say they are in power by a majority but that's false. They aren't. Senators in majority represent minority of voters. A President is in the White House who received less votes than the challenger. This so called majority make laws and claims they can do so because they represent the majority of voices in this country, that is completely false.

Are these fair statements to make? Most counties don't set up infrastructure for early voting at the same capacity as they do for election day voting. This level of early voting turnout is unprecedented right? Of course people shouldn't have to wait in line to vote and it's great that these people are but I think people abroad are not getting the full picture.

Why would you wait in line 11 hours to vote when you can drop off your ballot at a ballot box?

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/13/us/texas-election-ballot-drop...

One ballot box per county in some counties means waiting hours in line for that too.

You can also mail them in. That whole thing was a fake controversy.

I suspect you and I define the words “fake” and “controversy” quite differently.

The opinion issued by the federal appeals court gives a lot more context than any news article I've seen. Even if you read just the first couple of pages, you'll be better-informed than 99% of the people talking about this, and I suspect you'll see my point.

http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/20/20-50867-CV0.pdf

I’m not sure what bearing a court opinion has on my criticism of your calling the events that happened in Texas “fake”; regardless that said court decided the impact of Abbott’s proclamation was de minimis.

The court opinion explains what actually happened. My point was that the controversy was fake, not that the events were fake.

Except that one political party has been in the process of attempting to cripple the Post Office and their ability to operate effectively and efficiently for the last 6 months leading up to the election. If I were a paranoid person, I would say it almost looks like some sort of concerted effort.

“They need that money in order to make the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting.” President Trump

Are sure the post office is reliable at this point?

In Texas, where I live, the Republican Governor ordered counties to remove all but one box in each county.

In California, the Republican party setup unofficial drop boxes that aren't legal.

> the Republican party setup unofficial drop boxes that aren't legal.

How is this not a felony? AFAIK it is a felony to set up a fake mailbox to steal peoples' mail.

Some states have allow for ballot harvesting, where you can legally take someone else's ballot to the drop box. So these boxes are a bit of a grey area, as ballot harvesting is legal in CA. The NYT article from this morning said the CA AG has issued a cease and desist order, so its likely to be challenged in the court.

Because where they do exist, it's really hard to tell if that ballot box is real.

Because one political party has decided to install fake ballot boxes.

The Republican Party of California set up ballot boxes in locations frequented by Republican voters so that they can harvest Republican-favorable ballots and... throw them away?

I get that putting up ballot boxes that pose as "Official" should/may be illegal, but the ballots that go into those boxes are going to get delivered and counted.

What they have done constitutes a felony.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ca-gop-ballot-drop-boxes/

Source?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/us/politics/california-go...

Shenanigans are not limited to one of the political parties. https://nypost.com/2020/09/27/project-veritas-uncovers-ballo...

Project Veritas habitually lies to manufacture controversy, and the subject of the video has said that they offered him $10,000 to claim that he was paid to harvest ballots [1], so I think we can dismiss these allegations.

[1] https://www.syracuse.com/politics/2020/10/man-says-he-was-of...

He said he didn't do it? Case closed!

Project Veritas is a famously unreliable source.

That’s kind of the point, not every district has ballot boxes to drop off at. I think some of us (myself included) have forgotten that all parts of the US aren’t the same.

Paranoia that the postman, post office, and several different people are working together to get your vote to not count and you can wait in line to cast your vote and make "sure" it counts.

Or wait a couple days. People who can't wait to vote will head out on day one of early voting.

there are no ballot boxes in many locations and long lines form at them too.

Wait, did I miss election day or something?

Early voting

“Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” ― David Frum, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

A little out of left field but here is my opinion on why we are here.

None of this is possible without the perverted media market that view based advertising has created. The entire political landscape has grown to this mess because of "Click Bait" style ad metrics.

Every single news outlet, media outlet and otherwise has been corrupted and perverted to seek instant gratification and has lowered their editorial bar so low that they'll say, show, do anything that gets more attention. Because attention brings them more ad $.

Without the money flowing from ads via these false metrics, none of these media outlets could exist let alone thrive. And they, are the reason America is so divided. Sensationalism is what is driving the discourse, not intelligence or reason. The power brokers know this and the leverage it very, very well.

We have created a US where information is the ball, and our lives and the policy that governs us, is the sport.

How is this relevant? These long lines and the voter suppression that they cause are both very real. Shining a light on that isn't "sensationalism".

Its relevant - albeit a little out of the purview, because without the rise of sensationalist based media creating the distractions, none of this is possible.

The lies, the distractions, the propaganda, the amplification of issues that simply-do-not exist, allows the power brokers the opportunity to do these types of things without the oversight and regulation that the Constitution and history used to have in place to contain such acts.

Its no different than a magical or illusionist using distraction and human behaviors against the audience so that they can paint a picture of what ever they choose. Or the infinite number of psych tricks used to fool people into giving up their money....

If the media was still beholden to facts and held actual integrity, and were not instead chasing a false metric that benefited them, the power brokers could not get away with these types of acts.

It goes deeper but the checks and balances of our Republic are no longer in place because we whored out our Congress and allowed the Foxes to buy their way to the front of the henhouse...

What in this article, specifically, is a lie, distraction, propaganda or amplification of an issue that doesn't exist?

Voter suppression is real. It alters election results; look at the Georgia governor's race in 2018 for a recent egregious example. The US is continuing a proud tradition of disenfranchisement — from only giving voting rights to white men at the country's inception, to poll taxes, Jim Crow laws, felon disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, voter IDs.

This is an important issue, and I can't fathom dismissing an article about it as "sensationalism".

I am not. My point is that the reason we are here, that this repression even exists, is due to the media marketplace. Without it, this kind of blatant repression isn’t possible. It is here because of decades of propaganda and distraction by the right that has allowed then to take advantage of I’ll informed people who have become enemies of their neighbors and democracy itself.

I don't buy it. Like I said, the US has systemically disenfranchised voters from inception through the present. One of our two major political parties is explicitly invested in continuing that practice, and the other is only nominally opposed.

This is not a recent invention, and it's not due to the media. It's built right into the foundation of our country.

One has to understand the root of the cause if you wish to treat the illness. It is no secret that the removal of the Fairness Doctrine paired with the deregulation of media and the removal of Congress's oversight and license requirements helped fuel the right wing media rise over the last 15years. Pair that with the rise of internet based style ad measurement and audience feedback, and you create a media tailor made for propaganda where you reward sensationalism.

Attention is the currency of media.

You dont actually believe that the Right is able to thwart decades of decency and abidance to a common good based on solely on will do you?

They do it by lying and thus enraging people into believing that the other guy is coming for them...that the other guy is evil. That is how you control a so-called democracy, you divide and distract and create a sideshow while you do the dirty work, sometimes in the open (like this) or mostly in the back, like the judiciary packing.

I just ask that you dig deeper and look for the root cause, not he symptoms. Only when we realize the cause can we make the appropriate changes and restore health.

The root cause is that our country is a hegemony founded by rich slave owners. The “decades of decency and abidance to a common good” is a myth that erases the ongoing plight of marginalized people, spun by those who want to keep that status quo. We have always been a violent and oppressive nation — the caste system is enshrined in our national DNA, and we have never in our 250 year existence truly reckoned with it.

If only the issue were as shallow as the media dividing us! I’ll make the same request of you: that you direct your gaze a little further back to discover what’s truly going on here.

If you think the retraction of voting rights is due to the actions of men some 300 years ago, I dont really have much to say... You might as well go back a few thousand years. However, if you're interested in the actual cause and effects of real, tangible actions and real legislation by living souls. People whose goals were to repress votes to change outcomes, I suggest you study the last 30 years of American media and how the Right morphed the rules to their benefit.

"Retraction" is a weird word to use. The issue isn't that we're going backwards — voter turnout has generally increased over this country's lifetime [1] — but it's that we're enfranchising people at a relatively slow and demographically disproportionate rate. If you pick 30 years ago as your starting point, you'll miss the start of the war on drugs, white flight and redlining, Jim Crow — all "real, tangible actions and real legislation by living souls, people whose goals were to repress votes to change outcomes".

Right wing media constructing an alternate reality is worrying, of course. But it's myopic to intentionally ignore the mantle of disenfranchisement and oppression that recent politicians have picked up. Their ideas didn't come from nowhere, you know.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St...

Forest v Trees 2020...

In other words: The lines are a result of the Right using media to create distractions and issues that allow them to get away with these types of repressive acts. Without their propaganda machines working in sync, enraging their audiences with false fears, (non-existent voter fraud for example), they cannot do get away with these things. Its classic distraction, just played out over a decade, instead of a few minutes.

The lines are one example of this because they have leveraged their media to make people HATE the other side enough to literally cut of their noses to spite their faces.

From Mexico: We have a better system than the US when it comes to vote ballots and logistics, it's ironic that with all the resources they have, they are unable to do a better job than we do. It's really sad to see how the US politicians have used gerrymandering to drive the outcomes of the elections. It's really encouraging that the people, despite the current situation, are going to vote no matter the time.

Good luck, we hope you get Trump out of the WH.

Hanlon's razor applies here. Many people here and elsewhere on the net are quick to point out corruption or voter suppression, but I think a more realistic explanation is plain old incompetence from the people running these places.

One party as a platform is always trying to make it more difficult to vote in ways that mostly affect people that tend to vote for the other party. There's no reason to pretend it's incompetence when there's clear evidence of voter suppression

What a coincidence that the party most often claiming that government is incompetent is also the one doing the most to make voting difficult. Removing mailboxes, closing DMVs, fighting against early and absentee voting...

I think you're not wrong, but more cynicism is warranted.

As a baseline makes sense that it's going to be easier for people to vote in some places than in others. Money spent in the right places could mitigate that imbalance by making voting safe and convenient for everyone. The United States certainly has the resources to make that happen, but it doesn't. This isn't so much active voter suppression as selective passive voter discouragement.

I've never voted for the POTUS and I expect I never will. From my POV I don't really care who wins but I think my preference leans to Trump. That has mostly to do with the Democrats being overly populistic about all the concerns, without offering any solutions. If you push through the endless barrage of misinformation from both sides, it does seem that the conservatives have a better understanding on how to progress the USA in a reasonable manner.

Unfortunately, in the online, and also in the educated world, this is an incredibly unpopular opinion. I've been labeled a racist, xenophobe, women-hater, and bigot so many times, it's a bit stale by now.

I'm pro-choice, I'm pro-guns, I love science, I think the Trump administration royally messed up the COVID-19 response, and I also think anyone in his stead would have done a terrible job (albeit slightly better from an advisory POV). Still, a Democratic POTUS wouldn't get any of the Republican voters to listen to them. So that would've ended in disaster as well.

Trump is a vile person. But from the two available options, he's the lesser of two evils. I've grown up being a left-wing ideologist and I consider myself a centrist today. It just took people like AOC to push me all the way over into the realm of, well, not falling victim to populist rhetoric that is based in the realm of fantasy.

By that I mean, of course, her ridiculous Green New Deal plan. Luckily a plan that Biden doesn't support, his one redeeming quality from the last debate.

On the Green New Deal front, I want to point out that people debating it are largely talking past one another. The actual Green New Deal is HR 109 and SRes 59, the text of which is here: https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/sites/ocasio-cortez.house.go... . It is a non-binding resolution, meaning it does not actually change any laws or implement any policies, it's simply a statement that the House would like something to happen. It's literally just a statement of intent that we should get to zero net emissions. You'll hear people tout numbers about it costing $100 trillion dollars or something ridiculous, but it's simply not possible to calculate the cost of a vague goal. You'll also hear people claiming things like that the Green New Deal will ban airplanes, but again this is a non-binding resolution, and it doesn't even describe anything as specific as solid policy proposals.

Don't get me wrong, we absolutely should debate the climate policy in the US. And we can refer to such policies as the "Green New Deal". But in debates people often act like the Green New Deal is a literal set of laws and policies written down.

This is a conversation I'd like to have, but I'm not sure the thread will survive long on HN. If you're left wanting for more discussion, please feel free to DM me.

It's hilarious how so many on the far-right label themselves as centrists and then blame the left on "forcing" them to vote right.

I'm not forced at all. I'm left in a lot of ways that the right would never agree with. I am in favour of cherry-picking from socialist traits like proper welfare, affordable health care and schooling, higher taxes.

But the left-wing people just go to the next extreme, that's where you'll hear populist rhetoric like "take it from the billionaires" and other such nonsense that will accomplish nothing for obvious reasons.

I don't assign loyalty to the Republicans nor the Democrats. I think both are terrible for the USA.

Truly incredible how much nonsense you managed to lack into such a brief comment.

What about the parent comment sounds "far right" to you? In a two-party system, everyone's vote is a combination of push and pull, which means that it's incredibly normal for a bad candidate to help determine your vote (or as you dishonestly framed it, "force" you to vote otherwise). Isn't that what all the "anyone but Trump" voters are saying? I happen to be fairly happy with Biden, so it doesn't directly apply to me, but I would have voted for any of the Dem primary candidates over Trump, and for the ones I didn't like, he would've "forced" me to vote for them.

I am curious about your opposition to the Green New Deal plan. Could you explain why you think it is ridiculous ? I am a Canadian Liberal .... I may not agree with you but I am looking to understand your position.

> That has mostly to do with the Democrats being overly populistic about all the concerns, without offering any solutions

> It just took people like AOC to push me all the way over into the realm of, well, not falling victim to populist rhetoric that is based in the realm of fantasy.

> By that I mean, of course, her ridiculous Green New Deal plan

Pick a lane, my friend. There's a big difference between "don't offer any solutions" and "I don't like their solutions." What specifically don't you like about the Green New Deal? What about one of the hundreds of bills that passed in the House but have not been allowed to come to the floor of the Senate?

Trump's GOP is worse than not offering any solutions. They are invested in pretending that racism, a shrinking middle class, and climate change do not exist.

> I've never voted for the POTUS and I expect I never will.

Assuming you are a US citizen eligible to vote, your willful self disenfranchisement renders the rest of your opinions moot to me.

> By that I mean, of course, her ridiculous Green New Deal plan. Luckily a plan that Biden doesn't support, his one redeeming quality from the last debate.

I hate to break it to you, he does: https://joebiden.com/climate-plan/

> Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.

What does this have to do with long lines?

I'm not saying this is universally true, but in my area, a large portion of the people standing in these long lines are intentionally doing so to make a political statement (or more skeptically, are virtue signaling).

There has been one voting station open in the entire county which adequately supported early voting based on historical trends, while dozens more are opening soon and will reduce (if not entirely eliminate) the long lines.

Personally, I'm waiting until then to vote.

Isn’t the issue that it isn’t every county, but that it is specific counties that are targeted to suppress specific voter demographics? For a clear cut example, look at Texas.

[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/13/texas-election-ballo...

That's unacceptable in my opinion, but it's not the norm at all, even in traditionally democratic-voting areas.

This is the norm and has been happening for the last 8 years.

> Across the country, more than 2,000 polling places closed between the 2012 and 2016 general elections… for every 10 polling places that closed in the rest of the country, 13 closed within the jurisdictions once under oversight [of the Voting Rights Act]. Policies that introduce barriers to voting — like Texas’ strict voter ID requirements and North Carolina’s elimination of same-day registration and limits on early voting — have been widely criticized for discouraging minority voters, who disproportionately vote Democratic. The vast majority of the jurisdictions once under federal supervision are in states with GOP leadership.

> About a third of all counties that used to be subject to the Voting Rights Act reduced their per capita number of polling places from 2012 to 2016, compared to only a fifth of the rest of the jurisdictions… Some of the most egregious examples of counties closing a significant percentage of their polls are in Arizona. Phoenix-area Maricopa County initially slashed its polling places by 70 percent before the state’s 2016 primary election, spurring a DOJ investigation. [1]

[1] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/kz58qx/how-the-gutting-o...

Hours-long waits to vote are not the norm: https://medium.com/mit-election-lab/insights-into-voting-wai...

Having a single early voting location in an entire county that size isn't the norm either this year.

I do not in any way support the closure of polling places or other attempts at implicit voter suppression, but mischaracterising what is happening in the BBC article (which is describing early voting) isn't helpful.

Contextualizing the targeted actions taken towards early voting into the broader actions of widespread voter suppression by the republican part over the last 8 years is not mischaracterization. Saying this isn’t “the norm” because it doesn’t happen in the majority of counties misses the point, since the voter suppression is targeted at specific places. I could have been more clear on what I meant by “the norm”. Of course it isn’t happening everywhere or even a majority of places. I mean that targeted voter suppression i.e. either methods of voting or locations of voting with the highest impact on likely democratic voters, has been the norm.

Your linked article stated “Florida saw a scant 6-minute average wait time in 2016” but at that same time Florida had closed polling places in majority black and Latino areas and showed a statistical decline in their turnout. In Texas, if you can target just two counties, both with huge populations and huge numbers of democratic voters, you can affect overall outcome. You don’t have to slow down every single voter in the state for voter suppression to be the norm in that state.

My point is that the cause of the long lines shown in the BBC article isn't likely to be targeted voter suppression because they are happening all over the US, ranging from areas where generally democrat-voting minorities live and voter suppression has been (and still is) an issue, to republican strongholds, to areas mostly populated by upper income white people (many who vote democrat) who have never waited more than 10 minutes to vote in their lives.

Also, everything you're saying is true (voter suppression is an issue in the US), as is everything I'm saying (wait times like the ones shown in the article aren't normal).

A number of people, yourself included, have decided to take the discussion on a tangent, presumably because it's more important and/or interesting to you.

I'm continuing address the questions of "are lines like this normal for US elections" with "no, it's not" (and here's the data backing that up).

What political statement are they making aside from saying 'I would like to vote'?

Even the densest election board recognizes this year is not based on historical trends and that early voting (which has been touted on national news) is one way to solve the issue.

> What political statement are they making aside from saying 'I would like to vote'?

The comments I've heard are to the effect of: "I want Trump out of office so badly, I waited in line for 2 hours to vote against him!"

> Even the densest election board recognizes this year is not based on historical trends and that early voting (which has been touted on national news) is one way to solve the issue.

Agreed. In their defense, we are currently in the "early early voting" stage in most areas (meaning very few polling stations are open), with the "early voting" stage starting up in the near future (with more polling stations opening up), followed by orders of magnitude more on election day.

Are the officials administering the queue part of the conspiracy to create a long line to make a political statement (or more skeptically, are virtue signaling) as well?

In general, no. They assumed people would just wait until more polling stations opened up closer to election day (or on election day itself) to avoid waiting in these lines.

Of course they did. It's all just an honest misunderstanding on the part of election officials, and voters hacking the election procedures and inconveniencing themselves deliberately for... reasons. None of that sounds completely crazy.

Standing in line for hours to vote weeks before election day when all evidence indicates that lines will be significantly shorter in the weeks ahead does sound crazy to me. I provided the most rational explanation I've received in my original comment above.

I live in a high income area with a relatively high functioning local government run almost exclusively by liberal democrats, so I strongly question any claims that attempted voter suppression is the reason for the long lines in my area that have existed every day since early voting started.

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