What's the actual antidote to this? 5calls.org?
Voting for the worse people makes things worse.
RCV also tends to work against polarization, since it rewards candidates who are at least acceptable to a broad swath of the electorate.
It may not be the “answer” for all that ails the American political system, but it would help.
ETA: Unlike many other reforms it's also doable within the constraints of the current constitutional order and is hard for SCOTUS to torpedo (though I suppose I shouldn't underestimate SCOTUS).
And that's electoral votes. Counting actual people has the most voted candidate lose all the time.
Approval voting would be an improvement over the status quo but it makes it a lot harder for me to influence the choice between candidates I like less. If I do check my third choice I risk helping them beat my top two. If I don't check my third choice then I risk them losing to even worse options.
And people complain about it. If you were trying to make a change from some other status quo to that, it would be a significant impediment.
> Approval voting would be an improvement over the status quo but it makes it a lot harder for me to influence the choice between candidates I like less. If I do check my third choice I risk helping them beat my top two.
Approval voting is the range compressed version of score voting. Instead of scoring each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10, it's score each candidate on a scale of 0 or 1. Use score voting and you can give your favorite candidate a different score than your second favorite without giving them the same score as your least favorite.
Both of them are still better than RCV.
I'm not thrilled with score voting to begin with, and compressing it down doesn't change much.
> Use score voting and you can give your favorite candidate a different score than your second favorite without giving them the same score as your least favorite.
That doesn't solve my problem. Take exactly what I said before, but replace "check" with "give the maximum score to".
> Both of them are still better than RCV.
I don't see how.
https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig
compressing it to approval voting doesn't hurt very much and makes the ballot extremely simple.
> I don't see how.
i just showed you how. better average voter satisfaction, better resistance to strategy, etc.
https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig
not to mention radically simpler:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190219005733/
https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/approval-votin...
IRV is a strategic mess that maintains a two party system.
wonk.blog/duopoly
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/later-no-harm-72c44e145510
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/star-voting-is-simpler-than-...
That comes across as weirdly aggressive when you're referring to earlier in the same post. Like I'm dumb for not somehow seeing that before I finished my own post.
Also what's the definition of honesty for approval voting? Where am I supposed to draw the line?
The chart is pretty but I'm not trusting that chart without a lot more info.
> IRV is a strategic mess
I didn't say I want instant runoff in particular.
here's lots of detail. you can run the code for yourself. https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegDum.html
here's a slightly different model from the late harvard stats phd, jameson quinn. https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/
don't "trust" anything. look at the data. you could also read the book "gaming the vote" by william poundstone.
Compressing it makes it slightly worse, but some people think it makes it easier to understand. I tend to think that's silly; people can understand "score each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10" perfectly well. But approval voting would still be a significant improvement over FPTP, and even over RCV.
> That doesn't solve my problem. Take exactly what I said before, but replace "check" with "give the maximum score to".
RCV doesn't solve that either, because it's subject to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. It's actually even worse, because it makes you give a lower rank (rather than an equal one) to your most favored candidate to prevent an even worse candidate from winning.
Suppose your favorite candidate is the first choice of 20% of the population, your second favorite is 25% and the two candidates you hate are at 25% and 30% respectively. RCV makes you give your top pick to the second candidate so they can beat one of the two candidates you hate and ensure the runoff isn't between both of the candidates you hate.
Meanwhile with score voting your favorite candidate might have won, because they were the first choice of only 20% but the second choice of everyone else, and then end up with an average score of e.g. 6 when all the others are at 4 and 5.
RCV tends to do the opposite of that. If you have two opposite extremists and a moderate, the moderate can get knocked out in the initial round and then you get a coin flip between the two opposite extremes, even if the moderate would win one-on-one against either of the extremes. Or, in a district that skews to one side, give the district to the other side, because the minority party makes it to the runoff with 40% of the vote, the majority party splits between two candidates each at ~30%, but then if the majority party's extremist goes to the runoff instead of its moderate, they could lose the runoff to the minority party's moderate and give the district to the minority party.
Let's call those candidates A B X Y.
I don't see the issue. I vote my actual ranking, A is eliminated. If this scenario isn't super weirdly convoluted, more of those votes shift to B than X, so X is eliminated next. Now it's B versus Y. If I vote for B instead, the same thing happens and we also get B versus Y.
And what happens here in score voting could be basically anything. Not enough specifics.
> If you have two opposite extremists and a moderate, the moderate can get knocked out in the initial round and then you get a coin flip between the two opposite extremes, even if the moderate would win one-on-one against either of the extremes.
Yeah that's a real issue, and I'd want to use condorcet methods to fix that.
> Or, in a district that skews to one side, give the district to the other side, because the minority party makes it to the runoff with 40% of the vote, the majority party splits between two candidates each at ~30%, but then if the majority party's extremist goes to the runoff instead of its moderate, they could lose the runoff to the minority party's moderate and give the district to the minority party.
Meanwhile with approval or score voting, a lot of people pretend not to like the other party's moderate because they're trying to get their side to win and it gets really messy. Is there a need to have multiple candidates per party? If there is, a two stage election that picks party first and then picks probably-the-moderate is probably better than anything.
no you don't. take a warren supporter who votes biden to stop trump. that person ranks:
biden 1st, warren 2nd, trump 3rd
they don't want warren to be a spoiler.
indeed, practically the only thing that matters in a voting method is the aggregate affect of what it achieves in light of other voters. YOUR vote will almost never make a difference. you could upgrade voting methods in exchange for giving up your right to vote, and you'd still be drastically better off.
When I said "I" I meant me. This one person. And I was talking about that specific scenario.
It wasn't a statement about "strategic voters" in other scenarios.
It doesn't have to be that convoluted, all it takes is for the eliminated candidate to be a moderate so their votes go in two different directions. But you're right that I messed up that example; the percentages are wrong.
The problem case is when your second most favored candidate would otherwise be eliminated first and you need to prevent that by causing your most favored candidate to be eliminated instead, because the second best candidate has a better chance in the next round.
Suppose the candidates you dislike, X and Y, are the first choice of 40% and 25% of people respectively, and then A and B split the remainder evenly. X and Y are the two extremists -- on opposite sides of each other, with the moderates A and B in the middle. You favor A but A leans in the direction of X and B leans in the direction of Y.
If B is eliminated first then half of B's support goes A but half goes to Y, Y is still ahead of A and then A is eliminated next. If A -- your preferred candidate -- is eliminated first, half their support goes to B and the other half to X but Y gets nothing. Y then loses to B and the final round is X vs. B rather than X vs. Y. And the elimination of Y puts all their support behind B since X is the opposite extreme. But only if you rank B above A even though that's not what you'd have preferred.
> Yeah that's a real issue, and I'd want to use condorcet methods to fix that.
But now you're no longer using RCV/IRV. Score voting is a Condorcet method.
> Meanwhile with approval or score voting, a lot of people pretend not to like the other party's moderate because they're trying to get their side to win and it gets really messy.
Except that doesn't really help them because doing that also makes it more likely that their least favorite candidate wins, which is a significant incentive not to do it. The only reason to do that is if you're confident your favored candidate could only lose to your second choice, in which case it was really a two candidate race to begin with.
> Is there a need to have multiple candidates per party? If there is, a two stage election that picks party first and then picks probably-the-moderate is probably better than anything.
It doesn't matter if they're in the same party or not. If you're using a voting system that allows more than two parties to be viable then you'll have similar candidates running from similar parties. "Force the election to be one candidate from each of two major parties" is FPTP and it's terrible.
It's very unlikely that the two candidates I hate are on opposite extremes and both popular.
> Score voting is a Condorcet method.
That gains it a point but there are much better methods. Ones where I don't feel the need to balance risk versus reward for candidates I moderately dislike. Then the guarantee of the pairwise winner coming out on top is actually using accurate information on what everyone wants.
> Except that doesn't really help them because doing that also makes it more likely that their least favorite candidate wins, which is a significant incentive not to do it. The only reason to do that is if you're confident your favored candidate could only lose to your second choice, in which case it was really a two candidate race to begin with.
If I'm moderately confident then I'm likely to do it despite the risk.
> It doesn't matter if they're in the same party or not.
The whole framing of the problem was that one of the candidates in the minority party wins. If there are four unrelated candidates that problem goes away. The more popular moderate won, not a big deal.
utterly false.
It's easy to hate the candidate on the opposite extreme from the way you lean, so all this really requires is for the extremist on your side to be a corrupt populist who gets support by telling people the lies they want to hear or is paying off the right people to get favorable media coverage or valuable endorsements. Or is just more extreme than you can accept but you're in a district with some people who want that.
Notice also that neither of these candidates are the first choice of the majority. They just have enough support in a >2 candidate race to not be the first knocked out.
> Ones where I don't feel the need to balance risk versus reward for candidates I moderately dislike.
This is Arrow's Impossibility Theorem again. All of them do that, because in the rock-paper-scissors triangle where no candidate can beat both of the others, you then need something equivalent to a score to choose the winner. At which point degrading your second choice hurts them against both your first and third choice and whether or not you should do that is influenced by how likely you regard it that other voters will favor your first choice over your third but not your second.
It's also a dangerous game because the error bars on polls are huge and it's more often than not that the final results are very different than anybody's wild guess from the day before they started counting the votes.
> If I'm moderately confident then I'm likely to do it despite the risk.
Suppose your true ratings would be 10 for your most preferred candidate, 7 for the second best and 1 for the inhuman monster the opposing tribe somehow supports for no explicable reason. Polls say your first choice is expected to score ~5, your second choice ~6 and your vile enemy ~4, but all of these are plus or minus 2 points or more because polls are practically random number generators. What are you going to do?
You have the option to try to tank your second choice to give your first choice a better chance, but it's still a very real possibility that your first choice ends up at 4 and the hated enemy at 5.
> The whole framing of the problem was that one of the candidates in the minority party wins. If there are four unrelated candidates that problem goes away. The more popular moderate won, not a big deal.
It's still the same, and the minority party candidate isn't necessarily that much of a moderate, they're just not a far extremist.
Suppose it's California and a Republican, a Democrat and a member of the Green Party are in the race. The district is 40% Republican and under the old system correspondingly 60% Democrat, but in a system with more than two viable parties, it's 40% Republican, 29.9% Democrat and 30.1% Green.
If you hold that election with RCV and the Democrat gets knocked out first, the moderate Democrats (which, with the Green candidate in the race, was all of them) have to choose between a California Republican and a Green Party candidate who proudly wants to raise the gas tax to $8/gallon and pull out of NATO. More than a third of the moderate Democrats choose the Republican over that and under RCV that becomes a Republican seat.
The same race with score voting only does that if people vote the way you seem to think they would, which is exactly their incentive not to.
They do not. There are voting methods where I feel they work well enough that I don't worry about strategy, and I don't worry about what threshold to use for approval, I just rank choices honestly and then I'm done.
> Suppose your true ratings would be 10 for your most preferred candidate, 7 for the second best and 1 for the inhuman monster the opposing tribe somehow supports for no explicable reason. Polls say your first choice is expected to score ~5, your second choice ~6 and your vile enemy ~4, but all of these are plus or minus 2 points or more because polls are practically random number generators. What are you going to do?
In this situation the strategy play is that I rate both of the first two at 10. I'm not risking #3 by being strategic, I'm risking that I get #2 when I could have gotten #1.
For the situation where I might strategically lower the score, it's when there's a 10, there's a 7, there's a 4, and there's a 1. Do I give the 4 an honest rating that might help them win over the candidates I like, or do I give them a 1 and pray really hard that neither of the two guys I hate win? It's a tough choice.
> Suppose it's California and a Republican, a Democrat and a member of the Green Party are in the race.
This is a totally different situation. In the last version there were two moderates and one of them won. It was fine. In this version there's one middle candidate and they lose. But we already did this scenario earlier. I said "Yeah that's a real issue, and I'd want to use condorcet methods to fix that." So not just an instant runoff, but keeping the ranking system.
https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig
https://electionscience.org/research-hub/tactical-voting-bas...
In the US there are already people who complain that any election they lose must been “rigged”, including the current occupant of the White House. Choosing Approval Voting over RCV is not going to bring such people around; it’s rhetorical advantages are inconsequential.
The 2022 Alaska special election is a great example of RCV failing where approval voting wouldn't. And FairVote had the nerve to say it showed Alaskans understood and could use the system.
> Choosing Approval Voting over RCV is not going to bring such people around
It's a lot easier to claim the system is rigged when the voting system is much more complex in a way that most voters will not understand.
http://rangevoting.net/CoreSuppPocket https://wonk.blog/duopoly
approval voting actually DOES and it is better in every other way too.
We've got MMP here in New Zealand, which is a fantastic improvement over what we had. However the list vote does give politicians some weird power.
Comment moderation is voting too.
As a non-US-American, it is hard to understand for me why this is so hard to explain: the amount of #1 votes is rather a measure for the number of "ultra-fans" that the candidate has.
I think it should be rather easy to find an example in US-American pop culture of some C-list celebrity who has a respectable base of very devoted ultra-fans, but is hated by basically everybody else.
This example should make the fallacy obvious to most people.
So if you're in a heavily red state but you're blue, then vote in the primaries for the more centered Republican. If you're in a heavily blue state but red, do the opposite. Either way this actually helps because more people are centered and we're getting wilder and wilder candidates because there's increased tribalism. They go to the extremes because they get more voters that way. They figured out that the mainstay voters will just end up voting left or right regardless, and that by catering to the extremes it actually pulls the mainstream voters too. (Both Reps and Dems are using this strategy)
Remember, you don't have to vote for the person you actually like.
And keep doing this until we get a sane voting system which can embed actual preference (any of the cardinal systems: i.e. Approval or STAR). This strategy still works with ordinal systems (i.e. Ranked Choice) because a weak spoiler is still really good at splitting the vote (happened in a pretty famous Alaska election).
I think of it this way: in a state where one party is clearly dominant, most offices will end up being held by members of that party. That means that the primaries for that party actually matter more than the general election.
I’ve not quite reached that threshold, but I avoid moving to DC due to the lack of voting rights.
In a nutshell, you have an issue where part of the information economy/market is captured. To the point that agenda can get set by theories or podcasts that have little truck with reality. Any checks or reviews of the claims, simply do not get surfaced within that ecosystem. This creates a more efficient system for political messaging.
You cannot have an effective democratic system when your consensus building mechanisms have been (intentionally) compromised and weakened.
And don't discount protests. It's crucially important to have big public and forceful displays of united opposition. The regime is unlikely to be toppled by protests, but they will weaken it.
That really matters.
In an authoritarian take-over institutions are the front-lines, not the masses. Think colleges, media, industry, courts, legal firms, local governments, etc. The dilemma those institutions will face is to follow rule-of-law or submit to authoritarian corruption. Authoritarians win when those institutions decide it's safer to submit than it is to follow the law. And when institutions (and the people within them) feel like they are twisting in the wind alone and nobody cares, they are more likely to buckle. Protest movements help reinforce the rule-of-law side of that calculation.
(The rise and fall of Orban is a great lesson on all of this)
Also see: https://essayx.substack.com/p/the-35-percent-rule-just-made-...
In a sense, this in itself is the issue. It's long-term _worse_ to vote for the "lesser of two serious evils". This extreme "long-term pain for short-term gain" attitude is what's gotten the US to where it is. If in 2016 of 2024 even 20% of the dems would've stayed home or voted third party, the DNC's continuous forcing of awful corpocrats with zero charisma would've become completely untenable and Trump would've been limited to one term. Yet instead they were rewarded for it, so you'll see Newsom get the candidacy and presidency in 2028 (if 2028 even happens at this point), and then in 2032 you'll get something like Hegseth or Thiel winning and it's all over.
There is an answer: relentlessly vote, but only for candidates who are actually slightly decent - including third-party - and otherwise stay at home. "Relentlessly" means "at every level", including locally from the very bottom, all the way up.
The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote. It shows the others that there's a voter there who can be convinced if catered to, if they select a better candidate. The powers that be have done a fantastic job of brainwashing the entire population of the myth that anyone who _doesn't_ go out and vote for either major candidate is a morally bankrupt person, because it directly benefits them.
The reply to this will be "well it's too late for that now!". It's wrong because the alternative doesn't help you one bit. You're just wishing for a miracle, that in 4 years something happens, kicking the can down the road making things worse long term. And that's actually what's got you here.
It's a symptom of the terminal disease which has infected all layers of American society and has gotten it to where it's at: short-termism. Everyone just looks at the next quarter, the next election. China's ascendency is 1:1 tied to doing the exact opposite. Some smartypants will now point "but zero Covid", great you found a potential exception, now look at the other 90% of policy.
Every time I've explained this I've gotten instantly downvoted without a single reply making an argument against it, because it's too painful for people to admit that they've been part of the road to where the US is at. And again, short-termism: rather feel the short-term tiny dopamine hit by slamming that downvote button than thinking about it. Let's see if this happens again.
Yes, but with a caveat, if you had a strong preference between the top two actually-likely-to-win candidates (assuming the third party wasn't competitive), it's at least not voting the most in your interests for the outcome. Which is why we really need approval voting, so we can actually vote for the candidates we like, rather than needing to "strategically" hold our noses.
But I agree with the rest of it, if none of the candidates represent you, the third-party vote at least allows you to send a signal of "I vote, but you need to make me want to vote for you, and this is what I want".
Fully agreed, I vaguely implied this by talking about the "lesser of two evils" scenario but good to make it explicit.
> Which is why we really need approval voting,
Agreed here too, but it's not happening so people better wake up and realize that even without it, continuously voting for the "lesser of two evils" is the opposite of strategic.
Approval voting would not end strategic voting.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Strategic_voti...
The strategy of this is no simpler than the strategy of a single vote system.
> Yes, but it specifically ends the "vote for a candidate you dislike instead of the one you do like" type.
> Your favorite is always included in your vote (assuming you like at least one candidate).
Ranking candidates would express preferences more than approval voting. But you advocated approval voting solely.
Yes, because RCV has issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_squeeze . Voting for your favorite candidate in RCV can help cause them to lose!
STAR is okay, but approval voting solves most of the issues with elections without being more complex.
You mean the 2024 election cycle where incumbents all around the globe were beaten because the economic situation was strongly anti-incumbent? Are you positing that the US election was somehow a unique outlier and solely down to Harris being the Democrat candidate? Even though a swing of 115k votes would have handed the presidency to Harris instead?
It sounds like you have a particular issue with the 2016 and 2024 elections and I'm wondering if there's something in common that might explain it...
There is never a sole factor. The problem by talking about 115k votes is, once again, not taking into account the strength of the opposition. The US losing in hockey to Canada by a tiny margin is not the same as losing to Spain by the same margin.
Ironically, in a sense you're only strengthening the point that an even moderately better candidate would've won.
> It sounds like you have a particular issue with the 2016 and 2024 elections and I'm wondering if there's something in common that might explain it...
What a vile implication. Selectively ignoring my mention of Newsom in the exact same bucket. I'm wondering if you're a state-backed operator, that might explain the trying to rile things up through FUD.
I mentioned 2016 and 2024 because they lost, and the candidates were indeed awful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_%28epithet%29?w...
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. People didn't want Trump in 2016, they wanted her. But he won the electoral college,
He won the popular vote in 2024, but the tight margin in the electoral college suggests a democratically elected Democratic candidate (i.e. one selected by a primary, not one appointed by the sitting president) could have won instead. Other potential candidates were polling better than Harriss. I personally think Gretchen Whitmer could have successfully distanced herself from the Biden administration and defeated Trump.
Ok I'll break it down for you.
> If in 2016 of 2024 even 20% of the dems would've stayed home or voted third party
Parties cater to their bases, and putting yourself out there as an unreliable voting bloc is exactly how you get your demands ignored.
> The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb
It's not incredibly dumb, it's simple mathematical reality. This doesn't change unless the first past the post system changes. Why do you think the GOP backs the Green Party?
Reality shows the exact opposite. Why do campaigns and candidates put an incredibly outsized effort into swing states? Those are the exact "unreliable voters". Yet they get the most attenton. In policies too, it's all about convincing those who otherwise might stay home or might swing. What you're saying doesn't reflect reality whatsoever.
> It's not incredibly dumb, it's simple mathematical reality.
This isn't an argument, or you struggled to read. It's not a wasted vote because of its secondary effects, as explained. Voting on someone who loses isn't a wasted vote.
I wish more people understood this. Instead, there's this mistaken notion that you give away leverage by supplying votes. It's literally the opposite.
Your coalition will have more influence and leverage within a party by supplying votes, not withholding them.
NYC has a DSA mayor because people used that one weird trick.
The other important one is showing up in local elections.
Tried that in 2000, voting for Nader as a protest vote against Clinton/Gore third way neoliberalism. I did that in a state where the electoral votes for Dems were 100% safe. Still just got blamed for Bush and there was zero self-reflection on the part of the Democratic Party.
...
I would urge everyone to stop fixating on the Presidential vote as the only fight to win and everything being win/lose based on that outcome. If the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the House exceeds 50% of Democrats in the House, then we can start thinking about a world where e.g. AOC might be the speaker of the House rather than Nancy Pelosi.
> It's a symptom of the terminal disease which has infected all layers of American society and has gotten it to where it's at: short-termism. Everyone just looks at the next quarter, the next election.
Yeah, and the Office of the President is 4-8 years and is just more short-termism, along with individualism / cult of personality / CEO-leadership. If you want to make lasting change in the DNC, start by flipping more and more House seats to progressive from neoliberal.
I have zero faith in this system to execute anything other than purchased policy agendas, or empower any more than a tiny symbolic collection of people who oppose them… just enough to give the illusion of agency and stop any real organizing. I have no idea what could possibly break this pattern.
Arguing against that, probably comes from a cynical neoliberal perspective where the Democratic Party can't change because the argument assumes that the Democratic Party can't change.
And the alternative is definitely outright fascism and the suspension of Democracy. They've told us what they're planning on doing, just like we knew they wanted to get rid of Roe vs. Wade, we just accepted the lies about it being settled law and a political football.
If you're not willing to vote against that, then you're comfortably middle class and don't think you'll be one of the ones that are going to be hurt.
I've voted against Trump 3 times and threw money behind trying to get Sanders the nomination in 2020 instead of Biden, so when all the horrible stuff has been going down this term I don't have to tie myself in knots with rationalizations about my actions.
Because it's dumb. People don't want to hear dumb ideas, or take the time to try and convince someone that would spend however long it took to type that, apparently multiple times, without realizing it. Throwing away votes will never be the reasonable thing to do. I know you don't want to hear that, because it's too painful for you to admit there's no simple answer.
But in normal years candidates are successful because of the amount of money they can raise. The more they can raise the more brainwashing ads they can buy. The non so secret cabal is the donor class.
Anyone can run? You must meet requirements on age and how long you have lived in the US. You must pay fees and provide signatures for each state. If doing it through a party you have to meet their rules.
Cost to get on most states ballots at a basic level is a million. You could do it for free if you dont want to appear on any ballots.
"In May 2016, MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski accused the DNC of bias against the Sanders campaign and called on Wasserman Schultz to step down. Wasserman Schultz was upset at the negative media coverage of her actions, and she emailed the political director of NBC News, Chuck Todd, that such coverage of her "must stop". Describing the coverage as the "LAST straw", she ordered the DNC's communications director to call MSNBC president Phil Griffin to demand an apology from Brzezinski."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...
So for instance Sanders would almost certainly have beaten Trump in 2016 - the polls showed him ahead by double digit margins, whereas they had Clinton in for a very close election. Had the DNC listened to their own voters, the country would likely look very different today, and in a way far more favorable to DNC interests, at least if they even believe in their own platform.
Sanders wasn't even a Democrat. He switched solely to run in the primary. It's neither scandalous nor surprising that the DNC would try to put up barriers between him and the nomination.
If the RNC had done it's job, Trump would never have been allowed into the primary in the first place.
Yes, that's exactly why they shouldn't exist.
The introduction of the partisan primary has been an unmitigated disaster for our politics, by massively empowering the most zealous fringes within parties
Always funny when Trumpers try to this out as a gotcha lmao.
As a believer in democracy, I think it's better that our government is more responsive rather than less responsive to the public.
I doubt the top 10-20% of either side wants a democracy. The difference is in where we want the filtering to happen. I want it to happen up front at the voting stage, but have the government be highly responsive to the people that do vote. The “Mayor Pete” neoliberal democrats favor mass voting, but that the actual governance is done by highly credentialed career bureaucrats that aren’t directly answerable to voters.
I’d argue the Mayor Pete model is even less democratic than mine. Because although everyone votes, the effect of that vote is filtered through a fairly narrow class of credentialed bureaucrats, entry into which is gatekept by elite universities and professional organizations.
Now take the next step: Explicitly state, and then defend, your implied premise, namely that it's bad to be governed by people who, from education and experience, have come to know something about their subject areas — and that we should be happy to invite the ignorant, the misguided, and the charlatan to exercise power and authority.
> The “Mayor Pete” neoliberal democrats
are, but yes, you want career bureaucrats running the show that follow the rules as set forth by Congress, with appointed officials that pass vetting at the top. Otherwise every position becomes political and the laws themselves go further out the window.
There is no such thing as “following the rules” in an apolitical way. Congress writes very broad laws, and the executive branch exercises a tremendous amount of discretion in enforcing and executing those laws. The founders understood that, and their solution to the problem was frequent elections, not the fiction of neutral, apolitical credentialed bureaucrats.
[1] A good example of this is the bank bailouts in the first Obama administration. Even though the voters were outraged at Wall Street, Obama followed the bailout strategy developed by Wall Street. He replaced Hank Paulson (Goldman Sachs) with Tim Geithner (NY Fed then private equity), but everyone underneath stayed the same and the bailout strategy stayed the same.
Take the executive assistant to the American diplomat to, say, Sweden. They file paperwork and schedule appointments for the diplomat. Their role is operational. Logistics stuff. Coordinating what goes where. Setup a meeting between three very important busy people and juggle their calendars. Does that position really need to be someone we vote for? They do operations, not make policy.
In law school I was an intern for a Commissioner at the FCC. The Bureaus, which were staffed by career civil servants, would send entire rules and orders (hundreds of pages) fully formed up for the political appointees to vote on. Now, I think the career folks at the FCC are fantastic and very responsive to policy changes between administrations.[1] But that’s not true for many agencies. And in those agencies, the career civil servants wield tremendous power and make it very hard for appointees to implement policy the careers disagree with.
[1] Part of this is that, some high-profile stuff aside, there is a consistent ideology between the parties at the FCC. The republicans completely won in the 1980s and almost everyone takes a “law and economics” approach to communications regulations. So the careers are operating from the same analytical framework as the political appointees regardless of who is in power.
what I don't understand is the remedy you seem to support makes these decisions autocratically, with more external steering by the ostensibly regulated parties. instead of a bunch of little independent fiefdoms with hysteresis and oversight, now we have a giant unitary federal fiefdom, and the only democratic input is a red or blue ever 4 years, if that.
maybe you could put some framing about how you think federal enivironmental/financial/communications/health/housing policy should be managed? because I don't see this shift as being in any way more empowering to the taxpayers.
But I also think that, whatever discretion has been allocated to the executive, it should be exercised by the President and political appointees who are directly accountable to voters. I want Democrats to emulate what Trump did in 2024: get on stage with their proposed appointees to key positions, who can speak about what they want to do in particular areas. The executive runs a huge fraction of the government, and voters should get to see who is going to be in charge. And once they vote, their vote should be effective. These appointees should actually be able to make the big changes they promise.
I think bureaucrats that can’t be voted out are a bigger risk than anything else. You raise the concern about steering by regulated entities, but that happens with bureaucrats too. The department heads of these agencies have a revolving door relationship with the regulated agencies. It’s just not out in the open.
If what you believe to be true is in fact true, then you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it. Either way, I hope that you desire to find the correct answer rather than the one that would be convenient for your political position, and that whatever hypothesis you have has not set itself up to be unfalsifiable.
The system is confidentially designed to provide little to no evidence of the fraud it allows. Even simple signature and ID checking is banned in California.
The system itself is the evidence of the fraud. It is purposefully designed to hide evidence and prevent detection.
You are obviously an intelligent person but you've allowed your curiosity to be subjugated by propaganda.
Why do you believe what you believe? What would be true if it were false? Is that a thinkable alternative? If not, do you really have a hypothesis, or do you have a political belief being presented in the guise of a claim of fact?
If you don't check ID then anyone with a list of registered-but-unlikely voters (or who registers unlikely voters ahead of time without their knowledge) could be voting multiple times and there is nothing to detect it. If you check ID then that doesn't happen as easily, but you still have no way to know if it would have happened in the alternative.
The closest thing to knowing would be if apparent turnout declines in response to checking ID, but a) different elections have different turnout anyway and b) even if you could detect a significant change, one party would then argue that it's a reduction in fraud and the other would argue that checking ID is reducing legitimate turnout, and you still don't know which one it is -- it could even be both.
In fact this is done regularly.
We know for a statistical fact that there is no meaningful amount of this type of fraud (unless you're also supposing that these people somehow also acquire a copy of each person's signature).
Illegal voting is so rare that almost every time folks go looking for it they come up empty handed. Examples of voter suppression, on the other hand, are trivial to fine. (And both parties do it, particularly around primaries.)
In my state, we’re trying to enact a citizenship-proof requirement which penalizes women who change their name on getting married and those who can’t afford a passport. In effect, a marriage and poll tax. Ironically, this will disenfranchise the MAGA voters who are themselves pushing for it, but I’m not really going to point that out aggressively.
(That said, a legitimate fraction of American politics right now is in convincing the other side’s likely voters that elections are rigged, the oligarchs are in charge, why even bother calling your electeds or voting, eat an ice-cream sundae and talk to your AI girlfriend.)
Or if someone knows their friend is sick and votes without an id, how do you detect that?
It seems like there are currently many ways to vote illegally that don’t get detected.
Doing this even 10 times seems unbelievably hard.
Not that I think the election was rigged, but if you think it's "unbelievably hard", I think that's a failure of imagination.
You get followed up in an audit, if anyone asks. This happened like three million times in Arizona.
> there are currently many ways to vote illegally that don’t get detected
There are. None of the proposed plans limit them. (No county requires scanning and biometrically verifying passports. You could buy a wrapper on eBay and inkjet the pages in most counties.)
There are also lots of ways to blow up public buildings. We don’t require ID to enter DC because the frequency of the harm isn’t matched by the cost of enforcement.
Our documented examples of voter fraud come from a time when in-person voting was the only option, again something we teach in school, while the modern concerns from security professionals focus almost entirely on electronic voting machines.
Surely if you can confidently state the system not only is this way, but is purposely designed this way, you should have zero problem describing it exactly step by step.
Extra credit if you can describe a method that can produce 10, 100, or 1000 votes.
And the trade off here is this person gets 10, 30, 100, or 1000 votes in a single county and at the minuscule risk of the rest of her life in prison?
(To be clear, this isn’t what DOJ is alleging, they alleged she was just collecting petition signatures, but I’m extrapolating out your proposed mechanism for actual voting)
So what? If it was illegal to register multiple voters at the same address then it could have been detected at the registration time.
>And the trade off here is this person gets 10, 30, 100, or 1000 votes in a single county and at the minuscule risk of the rest of her life in prison?
Did not you notice that this person has not been charged with voting with other people ballots (even though she was able and most likely did that) and only with paying to register? Such a charge would be very hard to stick.
Huh? There is literally no evidence or even allegation of that. The person was paid to collect petition signatures, so she fraudulently obtained petition signatures. Which obviously are way less closely tracked than actual votes.
> So what? If it was illegal to register multiple voters at the same address then it could have been detected at the registration time.
Well it's not illegal to register multiple voters at the same address, obviously. It's illegal to vote under someone else's name. A bunch of votes coming in from a single residence would be flagged. Should voter registrations from a single address get flagged? Sure! And they probably do! But as you say, that's not a crime. Voting fraudulently is, which is not even alleged here.
> Can you describe the specific chain of events required to create a fraudulent vote that is "impossible" to detect?
You literally just described a scheme that is possible to detect in any meaningful amount. 10, 100, or 1000 ballots coming from a single address is, obviously, trivially detectable.
Virtually every type of fraud is first detected by detection of a nominally legal but abnormal behavior, then it's investigated to figure out whether fraud actually occurred. That would – obviously – be exactly how any voter fraud detection scheme works, but I guess you're saying that because the initially detected abnormality is not itself illegal, it wouldn't be investigated?
This is like saying "it's not illegal for all the numbers on your tax return to end in $xxxx.00 and $xxxx.50, so therefore tax fraud is undetectable by means of analyzing numerical patterns."
Here's how it's detected: "There are 1000 ballots from this one address that has never had more than 3 ballots sent from it. We should look it up in our GIS and tax records and see how many people reside there. We should also make sure that the affiliated registrations are fully documented as having individual residencies there from e.g. their drivers licenses or utility bills at time of registration."
Sorry but you are naive beyond words if you think voting systems don't flag even a dozen ballots sent to a single residential address, or you don't think there's any investigative capability to look further into flagged cases.
Which do you believe? There are only three options:
1. You believe that 1000 ballots sent to a single address will not be flagged
2. You believe that it would be flagged but not investigated
3. You believe it would be flagged and investigated, but not actually result in any prosecutable offense
Talk about projection, lmfao! Not even here long enough to prevent your weird writing quirks from revealing that you're a foreigner, and yet comfortable implying some strange nationalist superiority to a native-born American. Beyond parody.
Are people from your country unable to answer simple multiple-choice questions like "which of these three options do you believe?"
How is it that you're immediately detectable as not-American on a messaging board then?
Hint: It's the low-trust third-worlder attitude, which unfortunately the legal process of naturalization doesn't always solve.
Hilariously, your allegation of me being a foreigner was the nail in the coffin, as any actual American would know they can have disagreements on stuff like this without accusing the other of being a foreigner. But, being what... Russian? Georgian? Israeli? Obviously everything must be infused with an (unearned) nationalistic superiority haha.
Didn't you cite a charging document upthread?
Right or wrong, this is how many of feel. Voting is silly and futile.
Fuck the Republicans. Fuck the Democrats. Rally behind a third-party candidate and blow up the establishment with your vote
Edit: "civic religion" aha. Sorry, I should have guessed you were trolling. Can't wait to see what kind of revolution you cook up.
Reform is preferable to revolution which is preferable to oppression.
“Less bad doesn’t have to mean good” is a mantra with a current 67% loss rate, soon to be 75%, and then 80% four years after that if they keep trying it. And they’ll keep blaming the voters that they failed every time.
The fact that the current president has such a stranglehold over their party is pretty unprecedented; normally, the big tent parties have lots of little camps with power bases that somewhat insulate independence, whether that be on an issue or regional level. It's kind of odd that the disenfranchised members of that party have not started up their own party.
Also, I think the current gerrymandering race to the bottom has pretty clearly demonstrated the need for a better system of voting and district mapping. The House elections are already regulated by congressional act, not by the constitution.
* repealing the cap on house seats, which has been stuck at 435 arbitrarily * requiring that metropolitan areas consist of multimember districts that get allocated by proportional voting