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Comment by encryptluks2 | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see more choices come elections besides the lesser of two evils.

I wish we had a way to channel a lot of the electoral anger into electoral reform — e.g. how many people complain about Joe Manchin but never mention the odds of someone more to their taste getting elected in WV? — but it's hard to see that getting off the ground at the moment when we're fighting a rearguard campaign simply to preserve the existing level of access to voting. It's hard to convince people that the answer to disliking the available choices is to get more involved with things like local elections, propositions, etc. but we really need to figure out how to make that happen.

Most people dont vote in primaries. That is only time choice is really an option for same party candidates. Since CU basically makes bribery legal its that much harder to remove bad incumbants since they have more campaign funds.

CU?

Citizens United

Citizens United vs FEC [1] is a Supreme Court ruling, overturning limits on the amount of money corporations can spend supporting politicians' re-election attempts (i.e. bribes) because it's "freedom of speech"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

Citizens United was really determined by how badly the FEC f'd their argument: which was that there was no limiting principle on how far the FEC could use their power to limit non-candidate speech. They ruled the way the did because the alternative was worse.

If they'd decided the alternative, then any 501(c) organization could find itself muzzled during election season (which is roughly 90% of the year at this point). This include organizations like: EFF, ACLU, and Planned Parenthood. All of these are technically corporations.

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