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In this thread, let's talk about proportional representation, why it's superior to the alternative, and the ways it could be achieved in the USA. Also, we can also talk about various other types of electoral reform, like how to fix gerrymandering, what is "fair redistricting", and so on. Why do we need electoral reform? Basically, there's a big problem with the USA's "operating system". The First Past the Post system was essentially something the founders copied from the existing English model, and it virtually guarantees that a two party system evolves and that whoever we pick to represent us -- be that the President, Congress or local representatives -- is the choice that the fewest people actually like. It encourages strategic voting, to deny other people their candidate, and for people to choose "the lesser of two evils" rather than going with what they truly believe. For a great explanation of what this is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo (Actually CGP Grey's videos on this subject are all really interesting and worth a watch) Political scientists and mathematicians have gotten together and devised a number of algorithms that fix this problem. So far, the best solution, invented in the mid 19th century, and put into place in many European parliaments, is proportional representation. This is something we desperately need here in the USA; we can't keep running a 21st century society on an outdated operating system. What is Proportional Representation? I'll let this political scientist explain: quote:What is "proportional representation" and why do we need this reform? Is there any organization that is supporting this? Yes! Currently Fairvote.org is the leader in promoting this reform. There's a lot of other helpful and enlightening articles on the site that go into depth explaining how proportional representation works, and how it could be implemented. Problems There's a few problems that I'd like to throw open the floor to discuss:
News I was really excited when the ballot initiative in Maine to try to enact proportional representation passed. However, there's been an unfortunate, though not unpredictable, setback: http://www.pressherald.com/2017/05/23/maine-high-court-says-ranked-choice-voting-is-unconstitutional/ quote:Maine’s highest court rules ranked-choice voting is unconstitutional ---------------------------- I am by no means an expert on political science, or voting systems, just someone who's interested in this subject and wants to discuss and see what other people think about it! Let's talk about this effort. Is it a pie-in-the-sky dream that will never happen? What do you think?
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# ? Oct 7, 2017 21:45 |
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 07:33 |
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we should make sure people can vote op
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# ? Oct 7, 2017 21:49 |
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Comedy answer: Nothing is going to change until/unless Democrats start winning in waves as the GOP's whole strategy now is legislatively Jim Crowing the gently caress out of the electorate so that they don't get voted out.
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# ? Oct 7, 2017 21:57 |
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Neat thing is that multi-member districts have already passed constitutional muster. North Dakota had two at large members from 1903-1913 and from 1933 to 1963.
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# ? Oct 8, 2017 02:55 |
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Make it so anyone with over X amount of votes gets to go to Congress. Make the voting power of representatives proportional to the amount of votes they got. For example if candidate A got 25% of the votes, and candidate B got 75% of the votes, then candidate B's vote is worth 3x as much as candidate A.
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# ? Oct 8, 2017 03:18 |
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Party Plane Jones posted:Comedy answer: I definitely think that the big blue wave that may or may not appear in 2018 and 2020 will be helpful to steering the country in a much better direction. That being said, though, do you think the Democrats would be "okay" with instituting proportional representation once in power? I mean, there's no real alternative but to go with that, of course, but I'm just wondering, like, what sort of arguments we could put forth to convince Democrats on the fence that a multi-winner / proportional system would be in their favor? Also, how would we explain it to the average voter?
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# ? Oct 8, 2017 05:05 |
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the problem is the executive presidency not the voting system we need a parliament
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# ? Oct 8, 2017 05:45 |
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Would more extensive reforms than PR and removing FPTP be fine for this thread? Because I have a whole slate of ideas on how to fix elections, including some out there ideas.
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# ? Oct 8, 2017 23:36 |
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Communist Zombie posted:Would more extensive reforms than PR and removing FPTP be fine for this thread? Because I have a whole slate of ideas on how to fix elections, including some out there ideas. I mean... as long as it's not, like, "Full communism now". Which, I mean, is obvious, but not real helpful!
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# ? Oct 9, 2017 00:13 |
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I would like to point out a couple of things.quote:The United States, Canada, and Great Britain are the only Western democracies that continue to cling to winner-take-all arrangements. First, a point of pedantry. This is not strictly true; the French system has two rounds (to ensure that the winner in each district gets at least 50% of the vote) but is not proportional; En Marche and its ally the Democratic Movement secured a solid overall majority and 60% of the National Assembly with 49% of the national vote. On a wider level, please do not think that PR by itself will be a cure-all. You know what PR means? PR means hung legislatures with no absolute majorities and nobody in clear control. PR means that if you want to get anything done, you need coalitions. Lots and lots and lots of lovely coalitions. Coalitions require weeks and possibly months of negotiation and horse-trading and understanding between different parties to form compromise agreements that are never going to totally satisfy anyone who voted for the parties that form them. Sometimes it means that nobody can agree, and then you need either to accompany it by ditching the set-in-stone coordinated American election cycle, or else accept the very real possibility that you are baking four-year total gridlock periods into the foundations of the system. How's that going to go down in the current American political atmosphere, where a Republican is an evil RINO if they try to raise taxes on anyone ever, and a Democrat is a spineless traitor if they aren't passionate advocates of single-payer? If nobody is allowed to openly compromise, they can't form a coalition, nobody can govern, and you still have gridlock. At the start of this decade it took Belgium nearly two years to form a new government after elections. The King of Spain had to call for fresh elections in 2016 after six months of negotiating went nowhere (mostly because the new insurgent leftists and the old-guard centre-leftists hate each other worse than the Judean People's Front), and it then took another five months to form a minority right-wing government that's been trying to solve a secession crisis by hitting it with big sticks. Also, do not think that PR will automatically benefit the left. Consider the Germans. Germany had a federal election three weeks ago, and they're now settling in for a protracted negotiation period. The German left-wing voter in that election had an absolute bastard of a choice. The main left-wing party is the traditional option of the SPD. However, if you voted SPD in 2005 or 2013 in an effort to keep the centre-right CDU out, guess what? The SPD and CDU, as the two largest parties in the Bundestag, formed a grand coalition with the CDU's Angela Merkel as Chancellor. (In 2009 she was able to go into coalition with a smaller right-wing party.) So now what do you do? You could just be sensible and German and keep calm and vote for the Chancellor. To the apparent left of the SPD we find first the Greens, who may or may not care more about their green policies than their left-wing ones, and who might go into coalition with the CDU soon if they get over their hatred for the minor right party the FDP, who would also have to be a partner. Then there's Die Linke. They're the direct successors of the ruling party of East Germany whose representatives are mostly still old enough to be dogged by often-accurate accusations of having been Stasi informants, and the stink of this is continually dragging them down. Then there's a motley collection of oddballs and also-rans who can't get near the 5% threshold for representation, and by this point you might as well vote for the German version of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, which at least has a seat in the EU parliament. There is a very real possibility that introducing PR into American legislatures results in a bunch of unsatisfying grand coalitions led by people in the mould of Joe Manchin and Dick Durbin, while the Tea Party and the Bernie Party fulminate impotently in opposition, neither of them able to get near to 50% by themselves and neither of them able to compromise enough to work with the continuity Democrats or Republicans. (On the plus side, it also makes it much more likely that the RENT IS TOO drat HIGH guy might win an independent seat somewhere, and I'd pay a *lot* of money to see him as the kingmaker of any legislature you'd care to name.) I don't dislike PR, in whatever of the many forms it takes around the world. It's an empirically fairer way of deciding elections than FPTP. Just don't imagine that you can go down to IKEA and get the Swedish flat-pack electoral system. PR has its own issues and you need to figure out how to design them out, or deal with them.
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# ? Oct 9, 2017 02:45 |
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That's a really great point that you've brought up there, and was something I wondered along those lines as well -- would a PR Congress with ruling coalitions be, in the end, all that different from "Big Tent" party politics? Democrats and Republicans encompass a whole huge wide range of people all along the political spectrum, from left to right and authoritarian to libertarian (though probably no authoritarian leftists!) Just like coalition governments, even if the Democrats or Republicans win the House and Senate, they end up having to do plenty of horse-trading within the party to govern -- just look at the existence of the various caucuses like the Freedom Caucus or the Tea Party. I'm not sure about this myself! On another note, I read this interesting Daily Kos article. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/8/31/1416318/-What-if-the-US-had-a-parliament-with-proportional-representation It gives some breakdowns on a hypothetical what-if scenario. Pretty interesting stuff!
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# ? Oct 9, 2017 03:17 |
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There's no way on god's green earth (pun intended) the Green party would hold that many seats. To call them wingnuts would be an insult to the fastener industry.
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# ? Oct 9, 2017 03:20 |
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Party Plane Jones posted:There's no way on god's green earth (pun intended) the Green party would hold that many seats. To call them wingnuts would be an insult to the fastener industry. Yeah, Stein was a goddamn nutjob. Given her level of education, the amount of conspiracy type drivel she pushed was amazing.
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# ? Oct 9, 2017 03:42 |
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Party Plane Jones posted:There's no way on god's green earth (pun intended) the Green party would hold that many seats. To call them wingnuts would be an insult to the fastener industry. Also, given the experience of European countries with Green parties, they probably should not be considered as to the left of the mainstream Democrats. Greens in Germany are about to go into coalition with the conservatives, etc.
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# ? Oct 9, 2017 05:58 |
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Trin Tragula posted:How's that going to go down in the current American political atmosphere, where a Republican is an evil RINO if they try to raise taxes on anyone ever, and a Democrat is a spineless traitor if they aren't passionate advocates of single-payer? ShadowHawk fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Oct 10, 2017 |
# ? Oct 9, 2017 08:29 |
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Include seats for the Native American tribes where tribal members vote for representation in Congress.
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# ? Oct 9, 2017 10:25 |
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Heres my wide ranging slate of reforms which range from realistic to fantastical. And i would appreciate explanations for why my more radical reforms are actually bad ideas. Election Reforms
Legislative Reforms
Judicial Reforms
Also I think an effort post summing up the different ways to vote and have assign representatives would be useful. I know CPGrey has his videos but he doesnt cover all options.
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# ? Oct 9, 2017 13:53 |
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Communist Zombie posted:Heres my wide ranging slate of reforms which range from realistic to fantastical. And i would appreciate explanations for why my more radical reforms are actually bad ideas. I think it might be easier if we had an election three day weekend rather than a single election day, with all employees needing to have at least one of the election days off. Maybe businesses could also be forced to give poll locations and voting hours to their employees ahead of the voting weekend. I don't know much of anything about election organizing, so if there's any reasons we couldn't hold elections over multiple days I'd like to know about them. e: oh nooooo the new newbie av
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# ? Oct 9, 2017 20:46 |
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Congress has the power to mandate the voting method for senate and house seats, including the power to ban single-district winner-take-all elections, under Article I, Section 4, which is a power that has been nearly forgotten but is extremely powerful and gives a basis for a lot of these proposals. Congress has the power, for example, to ban gerrymandering by states but has not done so for decades.
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# ? Oct 9, 2017 20:54 |
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Communist Zombie posted:Heres my wide ranging slate of reforms which range from realistic to fantastical. And i would appreciate explanations for why my more radical reforms are actually bad ideas. I think I'd be down for everything you posted except for the 16 year old voting and the none of the above thing. Our brains -- our logic centers -- are not even fully developed until around 25 or so, so a 16 year old voting would just be getting a completely uninformed vote. Of course, even with adult brains, you get tons of stupid people wasting their votes with throwaway votes, so I guess it wouldn't change things significantly. California already has a couple of these too, like mail-in ballots, and being able to drop off mail in ballots at polling places on the day of. Mail-in ballots should just be standard everywhere. I can't remember the last time I actually voted in an in-person polling place. ShadowHawk posted:These sort of incentives completely change under PR systems. Winning the a gerrymandered primary election no longer becomes the most important thing for securing a seat. Incidentally, this brings up the issue of gerrymandering, which is a separate one from PR. It's also a worthy electoral reform goal and there's a lot of ways to handle redistricting that we can discuss too!
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# ? Oct 10, 2017 04:03 |
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evilweasel posted:Congress has the power to mandate the voting method for senate and house seats, including the power to ban single-district winner-take-all elections, under Article I, Section 4, which is a power that has been nearly forgotten but is extremely powerful and gives a basis for a lot of these proposals. Congress has the power, for example, to ban gerrymandering by states but has not done so for decades. That's a very broad interpretation of the what constitutes power to regulate elections vice interfering with time, place, and manner. I think if you were to go to a court, especially the current Supreme Court, you'd find a drastically different interpretation would hold. I agree on the gerrymandering but as to a voting method or direct interference with the process? I doubt that would hold up even in a polar opposite court to what we've got.
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# ? Oct 10, 2017 06:02 |
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nessin posted:That's a very broad interpretation of the what constitutes power to regulate elections vice interfering with time, place, and manner. I think if you were to go to a court, especially the current Supreme Court, you'd find a drastically different interpretation would hold. I agree on the gerrymandering but as to a voting method or direct interference with the process? I doubt that would hold up even in a polar opposite court to what we've got. There are existing laws on the books to ban multi-member districts which were permitted before that law and nobody has ever raised a peep about them, plus past laws have banned gerrymandering but those expired and were not renewed. Plus, the reference to banning altering the "place of choosing senators" makes it clear that's a very broad power, one that without that restriction would allow Congress to mandate Senate direct elections instead of legislatures selecting Senators (until the 17th amendment was passed requiring direct election). Sure, a lawless court could ignore two centuries of precedent but they can do that no matter what hook you use.
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# ? Oct 10, 2017 14:21 |
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it might not be ethical to let some populations (eg: rural poor) vote. they're addled by opiates and failing schools, unable to give informed consent. we may need to move to a more parlimentary type system where you vote in a PM whose party elects other people who then go make decisions for the poors
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# ? Dec 29, 2017 03:13 |
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maskenfreiheit posted:it might not be ethical to let some populations (eg: rural poor) vote. they're addled by opiates and failing schools, unable to give informed consent. we may need to move to a more parlimentary type system where you vote in a PM whose party elects other people who then go make decisions for the poors Insanely classist tirades aside, so, actually the urban-rural divide is really kind of a myth. Regions matter more -- certain regions whether they be urban and rich or rural and poor tend to vote reliably for one side or another. Proportional representation would more fairly represent everyone, the true diversity of a country, without the need to resort to something as terrifying as mass disenfranchisement based on one's geographic location.
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# ? Dec 29, 2017 04:42 |
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DrSunshine posted:
Pretty sure they were mocking your opposition to letting 16+ year olds vote due to their brains not being properly functioning yet.
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# ? Dec 29, 2017 18:52 |
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evilweasel posted:There are existing laws on the books to ban multi-member districts which were permitted before that law and nobody has ever raised a peep about them, plus past laws have banned gerrymandering but those expired and were not renewed. Plus, the reference to banning altering the "place of choosing senators" makes it clear that's a very broad power, one that without that restriction would allow Congress to mandate Senate direct elections instead of legislatures selecting Senators (until the 17th amendment was passed requiring direct election). Can you say more about the expired gerrymandering laws?
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# ? Dec 29, 2017 20:31 |
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Clochette posted:Pretty sure they were mocking your opposition to letting 16+ year olds vote due to their brains not being properly functioning yet. I don't see how that's a fair comparison. I mean, statutory rape laws exist because teenage children can't consent or make decisions informed at adult levels. 16 year old children can't legally serve on juries, or in the army, or work full-time. Voting should work the same way. It's that or lower the age of majority for everything to 16. 16 year olds should absolutely get the chance to participate in government in other ways, like through internships at the local level, volunteering, student government, and so on, but I am not sold on voting.
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# ? Dec 29, 2017 21:51 |
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 07:33 |
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Kobayashi posted:Can you say more about the expired gerrymandering laws? It's mentioned in the last Supreme Court decision on partisan gerrymandering (which goes so far as to say that Congress has the power to write its own drat districts, apparently). quote:The power bestowed on Congress to regulate elections, and in particular to restrain the practice of political gerrymandering, has not lain dormant. In the Apportionment Act of 1842, 5 Stat. 491, Congress provided that Representatives must be elected from single-member districts “composed of contiguous territory.” See Griffith 12 (noting that the law was “an attempt to forbid the practice of the gerrymander”). Congress again imposed these requirements in the Apportionment Act of 1862, 12 Stat. 572, and in 1872 further required that districts “contai[n] as nearly as practicable an equal number of inhabitants,” 17 Stat. 28, §2. In the Apportionment Act of 1901, Congress imposed a compactness requirement. 31 Stat. 733. The requirements of contiguity, compactness, and equality of population were repeated in the 1911 apportionment legislation, 37 Stat. 13, but were not thereafter continued. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/03pdf/02-1580.pdf
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# ? Dec 29, 2017 22:29 |