There is really any mystery as to why half the voters don't vote?
Unless you live in one of the half dozen "swing states", your vote is just a symbolic gesture with little chance of impacting the overall outcome.
Unless you live in one of the half dozen "swing states", your vote is just a symbolic gesture with little chance of impacting the overall outcome.
If we build a system where everyone's votes count the same (radical and extreme idea, I know), then each person will have the same fundamental incentive to vote.
More contested down-ballot races would help. No excuse for the parties to not have strong organization and candidate recruitment at that level. No changes to laws needed for this.
Correct, and that’s a good thing! Intelligence is not evenly distributed among individuals, and susceptibility to psyops and propaganda is a huge issue. The plain truth of the matter is that a majority of people simply aren’t qualified to weigh in on national issues. True democracy works when you’ve got a small group of like-minded individuals of roughly equal stature (13 original colonies) but not when you’ve got an entire empire (Roman republic)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
It would give every human, who has the right to representation, exactly proportionate influence. The weird fashy retired cops in Idaho will have to settle for having the same number of senators as Californians have.
A president of a federation such as the US must represent the individual states equally, because there can only be one president and that seat has disproportionate power. I really think people flip flop on the popular vote issue based on whether they think it helps their particular party or not, which is unbelievably short-sighted.
On this specific point- do you contend that unitary republics, such as France, are inherently less free than federal entities? How are provinces less free than states? Is Canada less free than the U.S.?
>Regionalist tensions between the northern and the southern parts of the territory were present since the beginning.
So, the split was not likely about senate seats. It was about people getting along within each state.
States are given representation proportional to their populations, and also equal representation (in the Senate). The EC and House seats aren't just based on voter turnout, voter population, or even the actual number of citizens in the state (which is rather problematic). So this whole push for direct democracy in the presidential election is stupid. Yes, swing states are a thing, but only because the other states vote consistently in a particular way.
Another problem with using the popular vote to decide the presidential election is that it inventivizes fraud. If someone managed to corrupt a few populous states, they could generate extremely high numbers of fake votes to drown out every other state.
What do you mean here by "incentivizes fraud"? Lying on the campaign trail is not fraud. In any case, the same argument about fraud still applies, you just need to target swing states.
I think it's obvious what fraud I'm talking about: fraudulent votes. It stands to reason that a large state can generate more fraudulent votes than a small state can generate legitimately. Fraud is always an issue but it is more of an issue with popular vote because who can question extremely high voter turnout?
You do realize that just because the popular vote is national does not mean that all the votes would be dumped at a desert in New Mexico and then tallied? Vote tally would still happen at the level of polling places and then aggregated - exactly how it's done in the electoral college system now. The only difference would be an introduction of one more level of aggregation (from state to nationwide). You could still detect fraud at earlier stages.
>You do realize that just because the popular vote is national does not mean that all the votes would be dumped at a desert in New Mexico and then tallied? Vote tally would still happen at the level of polling places and then aggregated - exactly how it's done in the electoral college system now.
I don't trust the vote counting systems we have now. We have unverified ballots by mail, voting without ID, and unaccountable voting machines. If you look into it you'll find that it is surprisingly easy to harvest votes from invalids at nursing homes, homeless people, and dead people. There is no way for me to to make sure my own vote is counted and no illegitimate ones are counted. Compare our elections that are increasingly uncertain for weeks or months to other countries like Argentina where everyone is required to vote and the result is known the next day.
Your entire point about fraud does not get worse with popular vote system so it's irrelevant here.
Does Argentina get automatic recounts? How many people are covered by a single polling station in Argentina? How many people count the votes within a single polling station? Those are all the things that'll affect how quickly the results are known, not how the votes get aggregated later. And EC can slow things down significantly more than popular vote (one slower state could be deciding factor for EC even though nationwide results would already be known because the uncertainty is too small to matter on national scale; Bush v. Gore).
What you are describing would be a problem regardless of the presence of the electoral college.
Slavers who designed and oversaw slaver states.
The formula is this: YOU learn all by yourself what all electable candidates say they want to do. YOU figure out all by yourself which ones LIE. One lie is enough, if they do it they keep doing it.
And then YOU chose which election program you want to vote for.
Ideally you chose what is best for the country but this is rather challenging for people. We can forgive them for being stuck thinking only of themselves.
Why would it be perfectly obvious if one is ordering food but not for elections???
Food might taste bad and you might get food poisoning. A bad choice doesn't mean years of suffering.
Does one not look at the menu card? Or do you ask your mum what to order? Do you roam around the restaurant looking what other people are eating? Do you order what CNN is screaming at you?
If people scream at you from all directions that you should order the snails in garlic butter, does that mean you will never have to look at the menu the rest of your life? You can just eat snails every day, everyone else is eating snails every day???? Why are you not eating snails?? It is the nr 1 most sold food! Don't you want snails to be the nr 1 food?
Then the restaurant switches to the cheapest worse possible snails because people will order it anyway because other people will order it.
Is this a display of good taste?
I hate apple but I buy iphone because they are good enough for what I need. I might get an android phone some day. They are good enough too.
I did actually look.
With elections no one is looking. People have no idea. Non of them! There is not one journalist who knows anything.
For each million voters one or two have watched a single video from a candidate other than the top 2. A video by a 5 year old on tiktok gets more attention online than the entire list of election programs.
I could see logic in getting advice from an expert on something or from your mum but if they know absolutely nothing about the topic?!?!
The voter is therefore brainwashed into irrelevance, she won't influence elections in any way.
This seems like a brazenly false statement. Also genuinely worrying, as you're discrediting all journalists based on... your feelings? Something that has been pushed for over the last 8 years by one party under the guise of labels such as "fake news" and "mainstream media".
Maybe you meant to say "everything", but parroting anti-news propaganda is only making everyone less informed and only benefits the side that isn't campaigning in good faith.
If the article exists it doesn't really get into their program.
You can see how many facebook likes and youtube views they have.
Jill Stein has 10k views on her most popular video. The nr 1 video in google about afroman running has 1k views. He is a famous person. There are countless other candidates.
https://ballotpedia.org/List_of_registered_2024_presidential...
The traffic isn't enough to account for global journalism.
Perhaps you want to entertain the chicken and ego concept where candidates need to be famous enough before anyone should ask what they are about.
Show me the informed journalist. I would love to read everything they ever wrote.
And if you ask people who don't vote why not, very few of them are going to mention the electoral college. I would wager most people who don't vote couldn't even explain what the electoral college is.
Senate seats are elected state-wide, so they largely go the same way as the presidential vote. If you're in a deep-red or deep-blue state (i.e., nearly all of them), your individual vote isn't going to make a difference.
House seats are district-specific, but:
a) the re-election rate of incumbents is over 90%
b) districts are often drawn to lock-in control for a specific party
However, much to the credit of the sibling response, there are all kinds of local and regional races as well as ballot initiatives that are important.
Or if we analyze this from an opportunity cost perspective, IMO voting is always the right choice. Maybe there's an 80% chance your vote "doesn't matter", but the cost is only 15 minutes of your time every 2 years. Isn't the 20% worth the risk? (OK, I am lucky enough to live in a state where voting lines are short. I understand it takes more than 15 mins for some people.)
In most races, there is little doubt (more than 80% odds) as to who will win. And this extends all the way down to the local level. And voters, candidates and political parties all know this.
There are very few such areas. Voters, candidates and the political parties know this.