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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

They are a reflection of the electorate. If you don’t want crazy and incompetent, don’t vote for it. If you get what you voted for, don’t be sad about it, it’s what you voted for. Regime change will come with time, but it’s going to suck for a while because of this governance failure mode.

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> If you don’t want crazy and incompetent, don’t vote for it

We have less of a problem with crazies voting for crazies than non-crazies not voting. Because if the crazies can find compromise with someone approximately as crazy as them while the non-crazies are either too lazy to turn out or unable to get out of stitches because the less-crazy candidate disagrees with them on two issues, the crazies win.

Was arming genocide in Gaza sane?

Even if you have no moral red line whatsoever, that decision was still certain to lose millions of votes in swing states... Because millions of voters do have morality, even in America.

America's problems are far bigger than whether people vote or not. The insanity is thoroughly bipartisan. Look at the Democrats giving Trump standing ovations while he talked about military action in Iran last week!

It's just a matter of degree: Genocide, or genocide+. ICE, or ICE+. Do you want your fossil fuel subsidies massive or ginormous. Techno-feudalism, or turbo techno-feudalism.

Those aren't sane options. It's not sane to accept them.

The idea that we could elect Democrats and "push them left" "once the fire was out" was thoroughly disproved shortly after October 7th - if not before then, when Trump's insurrection prosecution for was slow-rolled; or when we decided that the correct legal procedure was to let Garland sit on the Epstein files for 4 years.

So... Maybe diminishing one half of the problem as 'insane', but not the other half because it's slightly better, is doomed to failure. Either way the crazies win.

"I refuse to wear glasses, they don't give me perfect vision and they don't fix my underlying eyesight problem"

A fair position if the electoral system weren't a complete shambles. When gerrymandering is openly used as a weapon by the only two parties, it's pretty clearly not working.

Of course, change is impossible without a complete dissolution of governance in the US.

~89 million eligible voters did not vote in the last presidential election. “Fuck around find out”, and we are at the “find out” stage. This was a collective choice.

So if you didn’t vote, or you voted for this, you voted for this. Enjoy the ride.

https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-11-1...

What percentage of those eligible voters do you think would've mattered? For example I lived in WA and voted, how much do you think my vote mattered over an entire red county of 100 people voting for Trump?

Our electoral system is designed to disenfranchise the most populated areas.

Trump got less than 50% of the vote, and less than a third of eligible voters voted for him. The real issue is that the two parties have created a situation where you cannot vote for a viable candidate. Case in point: approximately a dozen democratic senators have come out in support of the war. Like, if you don’t want to intentionally bring about the apocalypse/nuclear holocaust, and you live in those states, the only way to avoid voting for those things is to not vote.

You can try getting your incumbent kicked out in the primaries, but that’s a dangerous game in swing states. In your case (WA) you absolutely should vote in the primary for the farthest left democrat possible.

We probably should switch to multi-party proportional representation at some point.

This is the right idea. Under-appreciated is that voting in the federal general elections is the point at which you have the least effect on anything. Earlier (primaries) and more local (all those elections way fewer people go to because there are no nationally-covered races on it) is far more effective at actually affecting the world. Someone who votes in all of those and skips the federal general bubbles is a more-effective voter than someone who does the opposite and only votes for the big federal offices (and those are the only ones people will commonly shame you for skipping, which is really backwards)

More voters 55+ will have died in a year (~2M/year) since he was elected to office than was the margin of victory. High single digit percentage points of eligible voters who did not vote. Ahh, well, it is what it is. We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.

I can understand why someone would choose not to participate in an unrepresentative electoral process.

Here in the authoritarian hellhole that is the Commonwealth of Australia, showing up to the voting booth is mandatory. We also have preferential voting, and in a few jurisdictions we even have proportional representation.

"authoritarian hellhole" as in Jon Kudelka's "Tasmania is awful don't come here" hellhole.

In these times, I think humour does not work well in written communications without a flag.

It's not a hellhole, and it's no more authoritarian now, than it was when I came here in 1988.

Sorry you got downvoted for explaining my sarcasm :| No idea why, you’re exactly right

The downvoters thought you were dog-whistlin' for them.

Yea...forgive me for doubting that Genocide Joe's MK-Ultra'd lieutenant would not have us similarly murderous.

But only around a quarter of Americans support the war?

*special Judeo-Christian operation

I wouldn't say it's a reflection of the electorate. There's a lot of states that have been gerrymandered for years and Christians in extremely red areas have outsized voting power compared to everywhere else. Combined with the complete media capture by billionaires, the dumbest rule by fiat.

Unfortunately Christian nationalists happen to be extremely wealthy and extremely stupid.

>There's a lot of states that have been gerrymandered for years and Christians in extremely red areas have outsized voting power compared to everywhere else. Combined with the complete media capture by billionaires, the dumbest rule by fiat.

It's happening on both sides. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/14/nx-s1-5647442/midterm-electio...

We the public should be rejecting it, but we're idiots and keep falling for 'but they're doing it!' and then undermine our own political power to 'own' the other side. We're being played for fools.

It's happening on both sides now because the Supreme Court has signed off on it for years and given all the power to gerrymandering efforts from the right. The public can't reject what is unaccountable to said public.

That's a ridiculous comparison. The California special redistricting was done via a voter initiative that was approved by a majority of California voters, and imposes a temporary change on the rules for drawing districts that reverts to the neutral rules when after the next census.

It was specifically proposed to counter the Texas special redistricting which was done by the Texas legislature and government with no concern over whether or not Texas voters approved (and polls show that more Texas voters disapprove than approve).

If Americans didn't like their system then they would change it. Isn’t that their whole founding mythos?

I don’t think hundreds of millions of Americans are continually being duped. I think they actually like the system they’ve built, and the outcomes that system produces.

So much easier said than done. We have to get our elected representatives to make the change, but it is against their self interest. If this was the only thing people considered when voting _maybe_ it would stand a chance. And honestly, I suspect less than 20% understand how other voting systems could lead to better out comes. Heck, we can’t even use the metric system!

"If the prisoners did not like their prison, they would change it"

I don’t think that the richest and most powerful people on the planet are prisoners. That seems like a ridiculous take.

Calling people stupid who are voting for what they want feels counter-productive.

I don't know them, and I don't see a reason to call anyone stupid. Turkeys voting for thanksgiving is not "stupid" it's normal. Turkeys do what turkeys do.

I would have said "Unfortunately Christian Nationalists want what is being offered them by this administration, are extremely wealthy and fund PAC accordingly." but even "unfortunately" is argumentative. Of course to ME it's unfortunate, but thats me.

It’s not just gerrymandering (though that is indeed pervasive and pernicious. It’s structural. The apportionment between states gives small right-leaning states outsized representation in both the house and senate relative to their proportion of the national population.

> The apportionment between states gives small right-leaning states outsized representation in both the house and senate relative to their proportion of the national population.

That's not a bad thing. The bad thing happened when the Democrats decided to alienate those areas and lost them. You may forget, but a lot of those "small right-leaning states" were solid blue until relatively recently. For instance 100% of North Dakota's congressional delegation was Democratic until ~2010, Iowa was the quintessential purple state, the Senate majority leader was from South Dakota (but unlike today he was a Democrat), and I could go on.

I mean, when I was younger, Utah had a Democratic senator and several Democratic governors.

Among the small states, we have New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Vermont. They also have outsized influence.

I will grant you that more of the small states lean right than lean left, but it's not completely one-sided.

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