Hacker News Reader

Comment by psychometry | Hacker News Reader

In the end, it doesn't really matter who inserted the language. All of the Republicans in the legislature are voting for it, so pick any one of them (without loss of generality) to serve as an example.

The way the accountability aspect is supposed to work is that voters are horrified and hold their elected representatives accountable by voting them out. As it turns out, though, most people are profoundly ignorant and have no idea who/what they're voting for and lack the intellectual curiosity to figure it out. These voters will just keep getting reamed by their ISPs and if the GOP tells them it's somehow Democrats' fault, they'll probably believe it.

View on HN

Representative democracy works when you remember who you voted for, and track whether they work on fulfilling their promises because of which you voted for them.

In the US, people mostly remember the president / vice-president names, because they are so widely publicized, some possibly remember the name of their Congress representatives, or can google them up in the rare case when they need to write to them about some issue. AFAICT very few people even remember who did they vote into the state legislature.

This is very sad, and certainly disfunctional.

This isn't true. Polling shows people dislike congress but like their congressional rep.

How does that make what he said not true?

It implies that they're sufficiently aware of their local representative to approve of them.

They may not "remember who did they vote into the state legislature", but they're not totally unaware of them.

I've thought of starting a social media website where people can upvote proposed legislation to draw attention to it, and people can indicate their own preference on legislation and track it. Then, come election time it could tell you something like "Mr Your Politician votes the way you would prefer 20% of the time" or such.

In Switzerland there's http://smartvote.ch. It's not exactly what you're describing but close.

I like it! Ping me if you want help. Draw the contrast between the popular policies and the reps that only pay lip service to them. Open API that might be a good place to start:

https://openstates.org/tx/bills/?query=&session=87&classific...

the problem with this is that I think few people care enough to enter their preferences, let alone to come back and check. not to mention that most people don't really expect politicians to follow through on their promises, and anyone who does will probably figure out how they want to vote via other methods. the only way I see this idea actually becoming useful is if it starts being displayed somewhere people already go, like in a google results page

We can't fix people not caring. It might help make it a little easier to care and keep track. Especially if there's some good flamewars happening on the site (half joking about the flamewars). Seriously, if you could make it a decent place for concrete discussion of the laws people would probably visit just to get in on the discussions, just like Reddit.

my point is that since people don't care it might be hard to get people to use the site. And you might have trouble getting enough people to use it in the first place to get these discussions going - why wouldn't they just do it on reddit or twitter where everyone already is?

> the problem with this is that I think few people care enough to enter their preferences, let alone to come back and check.

Game-ify the shit out of it? Farmville, but for electoral awareness? Somehow piggyback on the inexplicably-popular-and-viral "take this quiz to find out which X from Y you are" thing?

I think you'll struggle with a network effect issue. people aren't already on it - and already have plenty of places to discuss politics - so people won't come on the site and so people won't really care about the points they get on it

Promise resolution tracking for political choices could be a useful tool. With each promise tracked you could produce a percent which could be displayed with the candidates picture and a brief synopsis of their "score". The contact information and a tool to initiate communication would all be available (even if the communication is just email), and you could even have the politicians join so that they could have like an intern respond to messages or something.

This has probably been done, right?

There is one in Ukraine, see links below. Interested to know about such ones for western countries.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=uk&tl=en&u=https:/...

it's easy to game and those sorts of stats mean nothing to most people.

if it became effective enough that any politicians even heard of it, let alone started trying to game it, that would be great news.

Probably worth pointing out that the great hollowing out of journalism is a likely causal factor here. The chain of events went something like:

1. Web comes out and makes it trivial to distribute information for nearly free.

2. Users find enough "information" (in quotes because I mean "data that satisfies their instinctual desire to feel in the know" regardless of its actual value) on the web for free that they don't want to pay for their local newspaper anymore.

3. Dying paper subscriptions forces newspapers to go online. Even so and even with copious ads, their profit margins collapse.

4. The only news agencies that survive are national news because they can aggregate their journalism costs over a larger number of readers.

5. Bereft of money, local news agencies get bought up by conglomerations that produce "local" news which is a slurry of national stuff, press releases, and relatively low quality local reporting.

6. People stop reading the local stuff entirely since it's frankly just not good any more.

7. Now everyone is only clued in to national politics since national news sources rarely write about state or city politics.

Have you ever read the local rags from two, three decades back?

Think Buzzfeed with no spellcheck. You had colorful characters, but I wouldn't argue the informational content is all that more hollow today than in that time period.

There have been actual studies done showing a clear correlation between the decline of local news and an increase in municipal- and county-level corruption, so it's hard to argue they were entirely useless.

Yes, I have. :)

Sure the writing quality wasn't always great, but it was a functioning conduit of information about what local politicians were up to. And, more importantly it wasn't drowned about by other information sources so a greater fraction of people actually consumed it and were clued in to what was happening in their city and state.

I'm reminded of the 'Information Bubble' section in Wait But Why's 'A Sick Giant's essay. Essentially, once upon a time the big media outlets had an incentive to reach a broad audience. The biggest megaphone had to appeal across the political spectrum. Then, cable news, the Internet, etc. balkanized journalism. Everyone could easily shift themselves into whatever bubble they wanted to pretend was reality.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/01/sick-giant.html

I wonder is there any country that's not true.

This country is fucked without proportional representation. There's no accountability without alternatives, and this prohibition isn't going to make Ohio Republicans vote Democrat. Only PR can make enough shades of alternatives to break out of local maxima.

Proportional representation was a non-starter for rural states when the country was founded, and it's going to be one now.

There's no deal you can make with rural states where they give up their stranglehold on the Senate and Electoral College and get... nothing... in return.

It sucks, but that's the way it is.

This one is manageable. You could do proportional voting within each state without changing the balance between states. Say 5 instead of 2 senators from each state and proportional voting within each state.

I'm not saying this doesn't have other problems, it's just an example that the rural states problem is not a hard blocker for proportional voting.

Yes it is a hard blocker. You haven't described any negotiation so far as to why rural states would like to surrender power without corresponding wins.

5 senators proportionally represented or 2x-3x representatives proportionally represented does not weaken small state power at all. It simply ensures more views within each state get heard.

PR != no districting.

That means the state which normally would've been a solid block of red now turns purple. Surely that is a compromise of power for those who hold it?

What is the rational incentive to do so?

You're shifting the goal posts: is the issue small state power, or republican power via small states?

Small state power is unchanged. Full stop.

Republican power is also not necessarily worse for the reason you gave: blue big states will also be more purple. PR is certainly in the favor of moderate republicans, whoever they may be.

What Ericson2314 is referring to is the coordination + prisoner's dilemma problem. It appears that if every state enacted this at the same time, almost everyone would be better off. That being said, any state that is strongly one party or the other is incentivized not to do this.

California's legislature can choose between giving a high percentage (63.48%[1] in 2020) or 100% of it's electoral votes to the democratic candidate. Alabama's legislature can choose between giving a high percentage (62.03%[2] in 2020) or 100% of it's electoral votes to the republican candidate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

That is very true. This would best happen if the level of government above the elections in question requires they all work the same way. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Representation_Act_(Unite... would require that all the house districts go SVT PR at once. Likewise, a state could reform all their state legislature districts at once.

I can't wave any magic wand for gridlock at that level, but that bypasses the coordination failure by not requiring coordinated steps at all.

Any one state is incentivized not to do this alone. It only works if everyone does it at the same time. In addition, if every state did this, states could break away to increase its influence.

That doesn't mean that this is impossible. There seem to be two ways this coordination and prisoner's dilemma problem could be resolved. First, by a constitutional amendment (unlikely) or second in a similar way to the National Popular Vote.

National Popular Vote is a bill with the goal of making the winner of the popular vote the winner of the presidency. The way it works is that states pass a law to give their electoral votes to the winner of the popular votes ONLY until enough states with enough votes pass the same bill.

This bill currently has been enacted by 15 states (195 electoral votes) [1]

[1] https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/

The popular vote has been swinging in the direction of the national Democratic party for over a decade; Democrats would love proportional representation.

Why would the GOP want to give middling members the room to break rank when the margins of power are so razor-thin? What is the selling pitch?

Approval voting would allow third parties to win without having to change the number of seats.

But would they actually win enough and consistently, to allow for a proper third party with a healthy organization to form and stay alive?

Almost certainly, though not necessarily right away. In two-party first-past-the-post, you never vote for the people you like the most. Approval gives you the chance to vote for who you like the most /and/ the one you think is most likely to win amongst people basically on your side.

https://asitoughttobemagazine.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/

I'm not sure about this. There are a bunch of "rural" states that still have large populations in pretty urban areas (eg Nevada, Vermont). It seems totally plausible that the urban parts of enough rural states are more than happy to give up their electoral power to shift the political balance.

I'm assuming a Constitutional Convention would be required to change the way the Senate and EC work, though. That's impossible now and perhaps forever.

Not really. States can choose their electors however they want, including following the National Popular Vote. At least, that’s the theory behind the NaPoVoInterCo [1].

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

It's a bit more complex than that, in that the constitution guarantees a republican form of government. In reality, those who oppose republican forms of government will push for these compacts and they are in a minority, so there aren't enough electoral votes to make this relevant and actually trigger the compact, but if it were to be triggered, you'd bet that there would be some constitutional challenges.

We could abolish states. Gigantic unilaterally-voting political bodies are a bad design. Accepting legislation purely because some group is in the majority is a bad design.

Say you have two very large groups of junior developers and a handful of senior devs. Both groups of juniors propose conflicting pull requests using diametrically opposed designs. Then everyone votes on a PR. The group with more juniors ends up getting their PR merged. Even though both designs might be total crap, and in fact the groups might intentionally avoid good code just because it looks like the other group's code.

The solution is to disband the two gigantic groups and either A) create one mega-group, or B) create small "two-pizza" groups. Enable peer review, and empower the seniors to provide the necessary guidance and control to prevent a group of incompetents from merging shitty code just because they didn't like some other group's code. Oh, and mandate validation testing, and metrics to show whether the code should be kept or reverted.

Political power is never given freely. It must be taken. If they do t like it, too bad.

So just a second Civil War then? That's how you think we should resolve it?

Presidential systems are unstable are known to be unstable. It's high-time the US stopped thinking it is exceptional.

I don't want war, but I think taking the threat of war, mass unrest, etc. seriously is the only way we're going to be able to muscle-through the reforms needing to avoid it.

Our current institutions are massively politically unsustainable, and doing nothing about it is not going to maintain the peace in the long term.

Couldn't it cause them to vote for different republican candidates? I have a sense that these one-party states must have some internal division within that party, don't they? It seems to be the natural way of humans to always subdivide their homogeneous beliefs and create disagreement.

Yes, and that would be a significant improvement as it has the potential to break the cycle of needing to hold ever more extreme positions in order to get elected; downballot votes can flow towards the center.

The "wings" of each party --- which is currently an insider baseball phenomenon very hard for voters to follow --- would just have their own parties. So Ohio Republicans would probably continue voting for former republicans, but the menu would be way clearer.

> This country is fucked without proportional representation.

US has 13 states that send only 1 or 2 representatives to the House (6 states: 1, 7 states: 2). Then 2 states with 3, and 6 states with 4. At these 21 states, proportional representation would not differ (much) from the current two-party system.

Then again, those 21 states contribute only 50 out of the 435 House representatives, so maybe that wouldn't matter much. Maybe it could work, if the rest 39 states went properly proportional.

> Then again, those 21 states contribute only 50 out of the 435 House representatives, so maybe that wouldn't matter much. Maybe it could work, if the rest 39 states went properly proportional.

Yup.

I also have no problem increasing the number of House representatives or making multi-state districts.

Proportional representation in the state level will solve state problems. National Proportional representation instead of state wise proportional split as common now is needed.

If the national legislatures determine national policies, there should be no reason to split representation by state at all. There is every reason to split by actual interests evenly, this is only way minorites views get a voice like californian republicans or Texas democrats

It will also break the two party system eventually, people are not binary, neither are their beliefs there won't be need to compromise and go with a dominant party

This article is about a within-Ohio state issue. (It’s the Ohio state Senate, not the Ohio Senators in the US Senate.)

Yes and? Everyone assumed I was talking about congress but what I wrote equally applies to Ohio and other state legislatures.

I everyone assumes something other than what you meant to communicate, it seems fair to conclude the communication wasn't clearly understood the way you intended.

Sure, I'll happily admit saying "this country" was bad/unclear because it led everyone to think only about the federal level.

I thought you might have substantive point about PR not working within Ohio to follow up.

I am a big fan of the idea of using citizen assemblies as you can end up with not just proportional ideological representation but alse proportional geographic representation.

> In the end, it doesn't really matter who inserted the language. All of the Republicans in the legislature are voting for it...

Are they? From the article:

> Last week's vote to restrict municipal broadband "was along party lines, with 25 GOP State Senators voting in favor of the Senate budget bill and the chamber's eight Democrats voting against it."

(The quote was from the Institute for Local Self Reliance (ILSR)).

But what the quote says was that the Republicans voted for the bill, and the Democrats voted against the bill. They aren't (at least on the evidence presented) voting for or against the broadband limitations, but for or against the budget as a whole. Are the broadband limits why the Democrats are voting against? From the evidence given, we can't tell.

What we need are the voting records on the amendment that added this stupid ban to the budget. That's probably down in a committee somewhere, but it might be on the state Senate floor. What we need is the breakdown on that vote, not on the vote on the overall budget.

But Ars is taking evidence of votes on the budget as a whole, and trying to make them say that Republicans are against municipal broadband. They may in fact be against it, but Ars needs to show that, not just claim it on somewhat-tangentially-related evidence. As it is, one could reasonably wonder if Ars is just trying to spin an anti-Republican narrative.

Simone Biles would be hard pressed to match these gymnastics. And if you think I’m saying that because of partisan reasons, read my history: I am well downvoted in defence of banning municipal broadband in my previous comment.

In any meaningful sense, they’re voting to ban muni broadband.

> But Ars is taking evidence of votes on the budget as a whole, and trying to make them say that Republicans are against municipal broadband.

If you voted for a bill containing a specific provision, it is entirely reasonable to supose that you support that provision, especially when you don't make a public protestation against the inclusion of that provision.

The counter claim is not as reasonable. Just because you vote against a bill containing a provision, that doesn't mean it is reasonable to supoose you oppose that provision (at leat without additional context.)

> What we need are the voting records on the amendment that added this stupid ban to the budget.

That would might give us additional information on who takes a strong stance against municipal broadband (or possibly who got their palms greased.)

> If you voted for a bill containing a specific provision, it is entirely reasonable to supose that you support that provision...

No, that's not reasonable. You support the bill as a whole, not every sentence in it. The strongest that can be said is that you don't disagree with that provision strongly enough to reject the whole bill over it.

It's not definitive proof, but without any statements against the provision, it is a reasonable conclusion to draw.

Why would Ohio Republicans include an amendment that they don't support in a bill that they already have enough votes to pass? If they were against this amendment, it wouldn't be in the bill. It is therefore safe to assume Republicans are in support of the amendment.

> The way the accountability aspect is supposed to work is that voters are horrified and hold their elected representatives accountable by voting them out. As it turns out, though, most people are profoundly ignorant and have no idea who/what they're voting for and lack the intellectual curiosity to figure it out.

It's unfortunately more than ignorance. These budget bills have to be balanced so they include hundreds of items in them. It's a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. With that large amount of provisions, it's easy to slide in things that only peripherally pertain to budget.

I wish this were broken up in such a way that any changes to how things work and to laws need to be done BEFORE if required by the budget, such that the budget vote stops being this monstrosity.

> profoundly ignorant and have no idea who/what they're voting for and lack the intellectual curiosity to figure it out.

This strikes me as unkind. It's true of some, surely. But people are just busy. The whole theory of representative democracy is that direct democracy is impractical, so we delegate most of the work to people who focus on governing. You also ignore the extent to which the average voter is energetically manipulated and actively discouraged from participation. In the 2020 election cycle alone, There was $14.4 billion in direct spending alone. That's ~$90 per voter.

If we want more people to engage, wishing for better humans won't get us anywhere. We should do just like we do for tech products: figure out how to make useful behaviors easier.

Agreed. I'm obsessed about policy and legislation. Books, a lot of participation, lobbying, comparing notes with others. I feel like I barely understand what's going on.

Thanks to gerrymandering, most people can have their shit together and awful stuff will still happen.

We don't have municipal broadband in Washington State, either, despite the DNC holding a monopoly in the State, County, and City level around here. And by monopoly, at the city and county level in the Seattle area, 100% of the elected are Democrats. At the state level, they hold the governorship and both houses.

Somehow, it certainly is the Democrats' fault.

Washington state law has recently been changed (rather, is in the process of changing) to explicitly allow municipal broadband. In the case of the Senate bill, we see all but one Republican opposing it, and all but 3 Democrats supporting it.

Did the Democrats make it illegal for your city to offer it, though? I think not.

There are many ways to make it illegal. A popular one is to make it so difficult for a competitor, that they just give up. I recall a story a while back of one giving up because the existing ISP successfully prevented them from running wires.

Sorry, don't have a reference for that, as I don't recall specific details.

But the point remains. Their lack of any opposition at all at the county and city level means they can, and do, whatever they want. They can also count on a judiciary that approves the illegal laws they pass (such as a city income tax. The judge's dubious rationale was the employer was paying it, not the employee, although both are at the expense of the employee).

A state income tax is unconstitutional in Washington, so the city just required the employer to pay it.

Sadly, the Democrats simultaneously argue that capital gains should be taxed as ordinary income, and yet passed a state capital gains tax arguing the capital gains are not income.

So, yeah, blaming the GOP in Washington State isn't going to work.

Democrats like money, too.

And ISPs have a lot of it.

Not having municipal broadband is different issue than having municipal broadband outlawed state-wide.

https://ilsr.org/washington-state-removes-all-barriers-to-mu...

Seems to me the Democrats in WA have worked to allow municipal broadband to exist whereas the Republicans in OH are trying for the opposite outcome.

> The way the accountability aspect is supposed to work is that voters are horrified and hold their elected representatives accountable by voting them out.

It's always too late by this point. It's a flaw. The elected official get's to screw over their constituents for the duration of their term..

The lack of accountability isn't helped by the fact that terms can be 1, 2, 4, 6 years and it's incredibly difficult to remove someone once they've been elected. Many voters often have short-term memories and are so pre-occupied with life trying to stay afloat they can't keep track of politicians to hold them accountable during th next election. They end up forgetting the issues they had after the past election, eat up empty promises yet again, and re-elect the same people or new faces and names with the same platform of lies and lack of representation of their constituents, over-and-over again.

Said politician is then free to step on the backs of their voters for some period before the next campaign for election starts without fear of being removed from office.

> As it turns out, though, most people are profoundly ignorant and have no idea who/what they're voting for and lack the intellectual curiosity to figure it out.

Next to the good points by the sister comments, there is usually the problem that you won't find somebody who fits you 100%. Are you going to vote someone who, for example, proposes widespread surveillance, just to get someone out who doesn't deny a bill that bans municipal broadband?

As Southpark eloquently put it, sometimes you have to decide between a douche and a turd [0]. No ignorance needed (except, maybe, to stay sane).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douche_and_Turd

As someone from Ohio, it's partly due to partisan voting but mostly due to gerrymandering that Republicans control the state.

Trump won the state by 8 points in 2020. It's mostly due to voting, and partly to gerrymandering.

Are you from Ohio?

Trump isn't imposing a ban on municipal broadband, state lawmakers are which are in power due to gerrymandering.

That is one group. There is another that, while they may be informed of the ill their particular group supports, believes the group across the partisan chasm to be literal evil incarnate.

Let's get rid of first-past-the-post already.

>In the end, it doesn't really matter who inserted the language. All of the Republicans in the legislature are voting for it, so pick any one of them (without loss of generality) to serve as an example.

It's not impossible that one of the Democrats did it, so they could pretend to oppose it. Controlled opposition isn't a new thing.

If one of the Republicans did it, can they have the numbers to pass it, why wouldn't one of them take credit for it?

A bit cynical take here? What if people vote for GOP for other reasons and because there is a two party system they have to weight this issue amongst others.

How is it cynical? They are all voting for it and so they all support it.

In every case I can think of in life, there are things I care about and things that get swept along with that.

I have one electric distribution utility provider. They use service trucks that have internal combustion engines. Suppose I was passionately pro-EV and against ICE vehicles; it would still not be a contradiction that I purchase my electricity distribution from that one available grid provider. "He's buying from them, so clearly he must support their use of ICE vehicles."

I can virtually guarantee that you disagree with at least one position that the candidate you voted for has taken. They're your representative, not your agent.

How is your view any less cynical? Implicit in yours is that the party knows that and does as much bad stuff (like this) because they know they have unwavering support on a few issues.

Ideally, bad representation for issues that aren't intrinsically GOP should be corrected in a primary. I don't know much about primaries (I'm an independent in a state where I can't vote in primaries), but I have a funny feeling primaries don't see much fair competition.

Playing "teams" with zero regard for individual legislators contributions is a large part of how we got here.

You don't think it's fair to consider the Ohio GOP representatives who unanimously voted for this a "team"? Tell me how considering them as individuals is even remotely illuminating.

Half America hands it’s brain to one party, the other half to the other party. Many problems stem from this.

Both parties have internal diversity.

Dems span all the way from Sinema to AOC. GOP goes from Collins to Taylor Greene.

People can express their individuality in the primary process fairly well, especially for national elections with lots of candidates.

But at the end of the day, every election is between the #1 and #2 candidates, and those candidates are going to be a hard compromise for lots of people.

We should ask Duck Cheney’s daughter about the diversity of her party, she seems like a poster child for that.

Sure, Collins is vastly different from MTG in style/demeanor, but are their voting records really that different?

That’s the mistake people keep making about Collins: she says things that sound reasonable and sensible, but at the end of the day, she votes with the rest of the party almost all the time.

Lisa Murkowski has been more independent and she may well lose her seat because of it.

> Lisa Murkowski has been more independent and she may well lose her seat because of it.

Luckily, Alaska passed a ranked choice voting / open primary proposition in the last election cycle so it won't be possible to primary her out of the election (as was done in the past, forcing her to run and win a write-in campaign.) Still, We will have to see how much the administration drags it's heels on implementation...

Ironically, Lisa has been one of the better state representatives from Alaska (many others have been very corrupt). This is despite her father literally giving her his senate seat when he was elected governor.

It is naïve in the extreme to pretend that Susan Collins is any kind of moderate. She never takes a stand for her supposed principles and never casts a vote that makes a difference. The GOP allows her to occasionally vote with the Dems on symbolic gestures, or in cases where her vote would not be decisive anyway, so she can better present a façade of comity, moderation, and political independence to her constituents despite years of shattered promises. In practice, she takes marching orders from Mitch McConnell and always falls into line when it matters.

The only single time within my memory that she was part of a 1-vote margin against the GOP was when John McCain faked out McConnell and at the last minute rejected the ACA repeal in 2017. Collins had been told she was allowed to vote against because her vote would not matter, she did so, and McCain’s No vote came afterward.

I didn't say she's a moderate. I just said she's a far cry from Taylor Greene.

Can you blame them? Everyone on the left has been calling them stupid and ignorant for decades. How are you supposed to trust those same people?

Both sides are guilty of this. We can discuss a myriad of ways to fix our political system, but the root issue is a low trust and highly divided society. No system will fix that.

Everyone on the left.....

You’re right! I’m sorry - I made the same mistake I’m criticizing for.

I know it’s not everyone. Reading this thread is hard - even if one side is objectively right, it doesn’t matter. Compromise is the only way forward. I don’t like considering the alternatives.

I am all about compromise the same way Mitch McConnell is all about compromise. As long as you come over 90% of the way to my point of view, I'll give 10%.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com