The Death of Competition in American Elections | Hacker News Reader

The Death of Competition in American Elections

nytimes.com

20 pointswhack20 comments

Australia has a solution for this: mandatory voting

How can they signal mistrust towards all of the candidates?

You can submit a blank ballot. Since the ballot is secret, compulsory voting merely verifies that you got a ballot and submitted it, not that you filled it out correctly/completely.

Which is, incidentally, the exact same way you do it in a non-compulsory voting system. Spoiled ballot is a signal that you cared enough to get off your arse and vote and deliberately chose none of the candidates, so you might be reachable with the right message. Not voting is just a signal of general apathy, not very tempting to engage with.

63.9% turnout is just business as usual, but - if you ask me - 36.1% of ballots being spoiled would precipitate a sea change in the political landscape.

There are other reasons for not voting besides apathy. Many people would like to vote but are deterred for a variety of reasons: they have to work, or take care of children, or they're afraid of being arrested. A common tactic is to put up posters telling people that they can't vote if they owe child support.

An alternative would be a national holiday rather than mandatory voting. Either way, I'd like to see voting made easier.

So if blank ballots win in a contest for a particular political office, does that mean that that office is a candidate for the chopping block ? I would hope so.

Does it also have the option to legally chose something like:

You're all insane! Go die in a fire!, so that the vote is counted, but not for any of the grifters?

Meaning 90% of people voting like that, leaving 10% so called "legitimated" candidates, government falls flat, just like that. Repeat until stability emerges...

You’re not required to submit a correctly filled out vote, so you can submit a spoiled ballot, and sometimes theres a candidate who is there to sweep in the ‘none of that’ votes

Most people do actually vote correctly though and it drowns-out the special interests

I love the idea actually.

It's that or sortition.

Unpopular opinion: Only those who truly care and spend the time to research issues and candidates should vote.

The problem with that is that there's x% of the voters that won't count, and parties would argue about the correct value of x interminably, especially if the value of x determines who is the winner of the election.

That can also end up like the "literacy tests" that were used to disenfranchise certain voters based on their skin color.

We're putting too much focus on popularity and celebrity candidates, and then masses of uneducated people (compared to the knowledge of average Europeans) pseudo-vetting clowns. Instead, we should have a large pool of vetted potential candidates (drawn from, say, all lawyers, architects, professional engineers, doctors, and similar professionals) who are chosen at random through sortition to fill the most contentious roles for 2 years, one and only one time. The roles then become functionary administrators like city managers, but on a larger scale. No more political parties, no more plutocracy, no more drama.

This is the exact opposite of what you should do.

More disenfranchisement means more focus on rage bait / single issues that will rile up your side and juice your participation a little more (see ‘guns’, ‘pro-life’, ‘her emails’, et al). This pushes the parties to extreme opposites.

If you have compulsory voting, as suggested down thread, then that rump of casual voters dampens the extreme views and ends up pulling the parties towards the middle. Lots of “well there’s hardly any difference” swing voters. Parties do still end up competing on differences (‘gay marriage’, ‘immigration crack downs’) but extreme or patently false views are punished (‘jan 6 was a peaceful protest’).

The argument against compulsory voting is it slows ‘political innovation’ and drives a degree of apathy (‘there’s no difference between the bastards’). Minor parties and things like Preferential Voting can help address.

Even more unpopular opinion: Require a neutral civics test be passed before allowing someone to vote.

Who decides what is neutral or what falls under the category civics? eg The pledge of allegiance. Is that part of (US) civics?

The history of it? Absolutely. The discussion of/against "under God" being part of it? Again, neutral from a historic sense (as in, knowing when it was added). It might not be super easy, but a neutral civics test is possible to create.

What is neutral? Knowledge of the actual mechanisms of governance. Knowledge of the history of it, without any pro or con moral arguments. The test wouldn't be the place to argue something should or shouldn't be the way it is. The test would just determine if you know what the mechanism of governance is, and why it is that way.

And yes, I realize this would probably knock a large amount of people out from the vote, probably myself included. I'd rather not be able to vote myself if people who don't understand the Constitution are also not able to vote.

> What is neutral? Knowledge of the actual mechanisms of governance.

As someone with a degree in political science specialized in the pragmatics of the American system of government, let me assure you that questions of the actual mechanisms of government are decidedly not neutral but both highly contentious and with positions highly correlated with political ideology.

If you mean, instead, things like “the text of the Constitution”, that's somewhat less contentious, but pretty distant from the actual mechanisms of government.

Civics isn't neutral. Selecting what is covered by a civics test is non-neutral, even before considering that the answers will often be contentious.

During the naturalization interview, a USCIS Officer will ask you up to 10 civics questions from the list of 100. You must correctly answer six (6) questions to pass the civics portion of the naturalization test. Questions include things like What do we show loyalty to when we say the Pledge of Allegiance? Name one American Indian tribe in the United States. Name one of the two longest rivers in the United States.

They seem fairly neutral to me. Are there any studies which show the civics portion of the naturalization test is biased?

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