I don't doubt that most folks at these agencies are hard-working Americans who believe they're doing what's best for our country. Having said that, this kind of unchecked power is dangerous.
The duopoly doesn't benefit from making a more fair and inclusive system that allows for a greater diversity of political involvement.
"It's a big club, and you're not in it." -- George Carlin
Established elites make a show of opposing IRV/AV/RCV because centering the debate on that focusses attention there rather than on real reform, which requires systems that produce proportional results.
What systems would you prefer?
I'm straight up against any methodology that blunts the sting of no confidence in the two big parties. They should absolutely have to react to shifting priorities. That means, no safety net. Otherwise, you're handing them the same election advantage they've always enjoyed and just handwaving the entire issue.
It sounds more to me like we need to start tracking negative votes (not this person) as well. It's bollocks that no confidence is treated as "I have no opinion".
FTA:
> The practical consequences of the theorem are debatable: Arrow has said "Most systems are not going to work badly all of the time. All I proved is that all can work badly at times
Followed by:
> Although Arrow's theorem is a mathematical result, it is often expressed in a non-mathematical way with a statement such as no voting method is fair, every ranked voting method is flawed, or the only voting method that isn't flawed is a dictatorship.[11] These statements are simplifications of Arrow's result which are not universally considered to be true.
Bottom line - this seems interesting, but is hardly as simple as "all ranked voting systems can be gamed".
It is almost that simple. Every deviation from the unattainable ideal in Arrow’s theorem corresponds to one or more ways that the system:
(1) can be gamed, or
(2) is insensitive to voter preferences, or
(3) changes outcomes in the opposite direction of changes in expressed voter preferences.
(And usually several from multiple categories.)
There are whole catalogs of these and enumerations of which ones apply to each voting system.
Arrow’s Theorem applies to unforced preference ranked voting systems (with or without limited numbers of preference ranks) the same way as it does to forced preference ranked systems.
This isn't necessarily intuitive, and our immediate impulse might be to object that 2^n-1 is less than n!, but as a quick informal illustration, note that the voting system where each voter assigns each candidate a score in [0,1] and selects the candidate who earns the highest sum from all voters fairly straightforwardly violates Arrow's theorem. Now, consider an approval vote where each voter rolls a single random number in the range [0,1) and vote for each candidate whose score exceeds their random number, and we get asymptotically the same result (but with some error bars). It turns out that scoring, even on a 2-point scale, is just a better primitive operation than ranking!
(Also, it helps that 2^n-1>n! for n=2,3, which covers a surprisingly large proportion of interesting elections.)
Single member districts are a disgusting thing for a society that claims to be a representative democracy. As a very simple example, rural liberals and urban conservatives effectively never get represented in our government, and that's still within the context of the false dichotomy of left/right.
But single winner ranked choice voting is still important for elected positions that necessarily must be one person, like executive seats.
Executives are neither necessarily single seat nor necessarily directly elected. When indirectly elected, the electoral body that is itself directly elected need not be elected with single-winner methods. The US, in fact, uses multiwinner elections for electing the electoral college now, though mostly using the specific method (multiseat plurality winner-take-all) whose manifest unfairness and utility in excluding minority voices is the specific reason for the existing statutory ban on multiwinner elections for Congress.
No, they wouldn't, as the problems (including duopoly) predate the changes you would reverse.
To the extent those are relevant, they magnify the problems now (with or without more districts), rather than mitigating them.
> It would be a lot harder for two parties to completely control an 8000 member congress or gerrymander that many districts.
More districts make gerrymandering easier, not harder. As does more information.
Sure, there'd be more independents (absolute count), and at least one more often, in an 8000 member House, but proportionate to the total, there'd probably be fewer, on average, than there have been with the 435 member House.
Given that, I still believe ranked choice voting is the first baby step toward more representative politics.
You could change my mind by showing that ranked choice voting systems can be taught to even the most common of midwits.
There are municipalities and states that have implemented both. Voters handle them fine.
More importantly, a large minority of people in the US who already believe the current voting system isn't fair, so why are you afraid RCV will make it worse? I think it will be the opposite, since it is likely to cool the political polarization and encourage the election of more moderate politicians that a larger majority are ok with.
Yes, I like this one a lot more.
> There are municipalities and states that have implemented both.
I think for low-stake elections that most people don't vote in anyway, experimentation is relatively safe. But I wouldn't want to try anything new with fiery federal elections, particularly not the presidential election. The risk of confusion resulting in costly civil unrest is too high.
> More importantly, a large minority of people in the US who already believe the current voting system isn't fair
Yes, but they tolerate it for the most part.
Arguable after the 2020 election.
Another important aspect: if the public isn't sufficiently intelligent, or isn't interested in such things, how did that state come about? Does the government play any role in setting educational curriculum? Does the media play in any role in what the public focuses on, considers important, etc?
A large minority of them are, yes. There's millions of people in this country that flunked their way through 12 years of math class and never retained anything more than basic arithmetic. 4% of Americans are classified as "functionally illiterate", that's 13 million people who effectively can't even read.
The point of democracy is to placate everybody, not just the smarter portion of society, so the mechanisms of democracy should be simple enough for somebody with a simple mind to understand. "Count votes and pick who got the most" is generally such a system.
For the US, districts with e.g. 5 seats would be very interesting. The effect would be two-fold: first, more distinctiveness between candidates of the same party. Extreme example: a prolife Democrat, a gun-regulation Republican running alongside more traditional candidates. Secondly, at least some candidates outside the 2 major parties will get a seat. This probably means no more majority in House/Senate, but a need to form a coalition. That means talking with each other and reaching agreement would no longer be the newsworthy exception it is today, but would be part of the very fabric of the House/Senate.
I don't see how a different counting mechanism could lead to the same effects.
Its as valid of a stance, for an individual, as a different individual choosing to privilege a way in which one party is different.
States, counties, for some - districts. Thirty years and I've met one representative.
America wasn't designed to operate at the current scale and it's causing considerable strife internally and externally. We're effectively the de facto world sovereign, and at the same time we the people and the collective will is so contrived as to be totally incomprehensible, largely, I would posit, as a product of federal overreach and inertia. We'd do well to refederate - California's America is not the same as Texas' nor is Florida's the same as Michigan's. It's kind of an absurdity to indicate we're a nation at this point, there are really no points of unity which bond us in this era, and that's what defines a nation. That is to say there are no more Americans.
I think we’ll come through it intact. Hopefully.
It's weird how this wasn't the case prior to 2016. Like, I distinctly recall there being a unified American culture and identity. Even between California and Texas, both considered themselves (and one another) Americans despite their differences.
Viola! Schismogenesis. Erstwhile we're competing inside of a relatively inert system with intractable inertia, and the pressure builds.
Of course the economics of the individual are poorer and poorer, as well, and at what appear to be increasing costs and that is a considerable portion of what the government ultimately does - enable commerce. And we're finding out, perhaps, that we're running on fumes.
I've never been one to put full trust in any politicians or bureaucracy but the balance of value is still overwhelmingly towards democrats. The odd botched investigation is a small price for supporting democracy, human rights and climate justice.
Really? Wouldn’t most people think a Department of Justice should be actively hunting down and prosecuting those who illegally spy on US Citizens?
I mean they’re supposed to work for us, uphold our laws and constitution etc. If employees of executive branch agencies conspire to defraud citizens of the United States of their most basic rights (4th amendment?) isn’t that a crime they should be pursuing?
Instead they seem far more interested in suppressing evidence of the crime.
There's no "unchecked" power here. The details are complicated because the meeting was international (so presumably there was some coordination with local police), but there's no court in the nation that wouldn't immediately stamp a warrant based on the straightforward facts alleged here.
Just like the saying that a "federal prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich" like wise the FBI could get a warrant for anything they desire at any time
The warrant requirement is a not a check on power, and has not been for decades, the courts and our legal system is no longer a protector of rights, or justice and has not been for a long long long time.
But the crime is "release of classified material". That's not a rubber stamp, it's a clear allegation of criminal activity. I think your real feeling is that this material "shouldn't" have been classified (based on what you believe it contained -- the reporter never got it). And maybe that's true!
But the facts in this article are just OBVIOUSLY probable cause for a warrant, nonetheless.
The fact of the matter is the warrant system, a non-adversarial system based on flimsy assertions and often out right lies by police and agents is not now, and likely never has been a check on government power
But in this case, as I mentioned, the fourth amendment is silent. This arrest was totally OK (or would have been, had it not been spoiled) and doesn't represent any kind of government overreach at all.
Your belief that we have powerful checks on government power is clear you support a much larger and more intrusive government than I ever would, I see the government today as an unchecked dystopia novel, you think it is perfectly fine and balanced, that is more scary to me than government power. That we as a society have lost the very notion of what freedom actually is, that we has a society have come to accept the gilded cage as "freedom"
Beyond that, It comes down to the question of constitution interpretation as well. You believe the 4th amendment is silent here, you believe the FBI is operating under authorization of the 4th amendment because a law was violated, a law that seems to be protecting people that are violating the 4th amendment wholesale (the nsa), and ironic twist if I ever saw one.
You believe this because our Supreme Court has been derelict in the duty at uploading the plain and true meaning of the US Constitution for decades, you like many look to the Supreme Court for the meaning of the constitution, you have outsourced your thinking to this body, these people for whom we in society have placed on pedestal, and ironically in practice have given a title of nobility, something forbidden in the constitution.
“You seem to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.... Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.”
― Thomas Jefferson
Uh... yes? If a law was violated, that's probable cause. It's sort of a definitional thing. What legal regime do you desire that manages to pre-decide on which laws are OK to violate before the collection of evidence occurs?
This sounds like an argument against the whole idea of law enforcement, I guess? You don't think that police should have the power to seize evidence or arrest people at all? (Because before they do that, we need to decide whether the laws they're trying to enforce are acceptable to the target of the investigation, right?) I mean, that's a position. Libertarians and anarchists occasionally say stuff like that. But it's absolutely not the legal framework we live under, and I doubt you'll find much support for it among the broader electorate.
If you don't like the laws we have, then the remedy available to you is to elect a government to change the laws. You don't get to demand that we enforce them differently for the laws you don't like.
This is a specious appeal to an abstract concept, that in this case justifies autocratic power. The entire run-amok surveillance industrial complex exists precisely due to such selective enforcement. If the FBI were actually interested in achieving justice, they would be going after the highly organized traitors systematically undermining our freedoms rather than small isolated cases of individuals committing a crime while trying to expose those larger crimes. Instead we see this exact "different enforcement", but with the opposite prioritization.
And yes, the people deciding en masse to elect different representatives would be one way to fix the problem. But there are many such ways, and general normative condemnation is the way to maintain and build support for any/all of them rather than getting focused on a specific approach which may or may not work.
Using "State Secrets" laws to cover up constitutional violations is also somewhat dubious so then one has to ask what law is more important, a Federal Statute of Secrecy or the Constitution, clearly you think Federal Statute over rides the Constitution, I dont.
>>You don't think that police should have the power to seize evidence or arrest people at all?
Seize Evidence... Sure
Pre-trial confinement should be exclusively reserved for cases where there is clear and convincing evidence of a danger the individual poses to the wider public, i.e a rapist or murder...
Innocent until proven guilty right? Or do you reject that fundamental provision of the law as well, I am not sure because you seem to have a very cozy relationship with structures of authority.
We're not talking about a jury trial here! It's an arrest (attempt). The ability to detain people suspected of crimes and search their papers and persons is a core part of law enforcement. So much so, in fact, that the fourth amendment specifically calls it out and places limits on the ability. And to say it again: it is abundantly clear that those limits were not crossed in this case.