Annoying Political Questions

Mundane & Pointless Stuff I Must Share: The Off Topic Forum

Moderator: Moderators

Post Reply
User avatar
Prak
Serious Badass
Posts: 17340
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Annoying Political Questions

Post by Prak »

So, I've taken a shitty American Government class in high school that consisted of worksheets, tests, and being bitched at by an asshole despite most of us not actually being old enough to vote, and a PoliSci 101 class for general education, so my political knowledge is... probably the bare minimum for sort of functioning as a voter in America.

The Electoral College strikes me as a draconian holdover from an era when rich plantation owners said to each other "holy crap, we cannot let shit-covered farmers actually influence how the country is run, even if we let them think they do." It seems staunchly anti-democratic, and optimistically, we have the technology to handle actual popular elections.

But is the Electoral College actually as bad as all that? Would it be "better" to abolish it? If you could change the way elections work in the US, how would you do so (realistically. I'd like conservatives to stop fucking voting too, but that's impractical and unfair...)
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Koumei
Serious Badass
Posts: 13872
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Location: South Ausfailia

Re: Annoying Political Questions

Post by Koumei »

Prak wrote:If you could change the way elections work in the US, how would you do so (realistically. I'd like conservatives to stop fucking voting too, but that's impractical and unfair...)
Bury "First Past the Post" and have some form of preferential representative system. It doesn't have to be Australia's, indeed it probably shouldn't be (I remind you that the conservative coalition holds power here with the slimmest of majorities, and both The Original Crazy Racist Party, Accept No Substitutes and the Too Bigoted For the Christian Bigots Party both have senators in the house of reps). But it's not hard to work out a system better than FPTP.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
DSMatticus
King
Posts: 5271
Joined: Thu Apr 14, 2011 5:32 am

Post by DSMatticus »

Abolishing the electoral college and shifting to a national popular vote would have flipped one election this century: Al Gore would have beaten George W. Bush in 2000. The electoral college usually follows the popular vote by sheer coincidence, but when it doesn't it really fucking sucks.
hyzmarca
Prince
Posts: 3909
Joined: Mon Mar 14, 2011 10:07 pm

Re: Annoying Political Questions

Post by hyzmarca »

Prak wrote:So, I've taken a shitty American Government class in high school that consisted of worksheets, tests, and being bitched at by an asshole despite most of us not actually being old enough to vote, and a PoliSci 101 class for general education, so my political knowledge is... probably the bare minimum for sort of functioning as a voter in America.

The Electoral College strikes me as a draconian holdover from an era when rich plantation owners said to each other "holy crap, we cannot let shit-covered farmers actually influence how the country is run, even if we let them think they do." It seems staunchly anti-democratic, and optimistically, we have the technology to handle actual popular elections.

But is the Electoral College actually as bad as all that? Would it be "better" to abolish it? If you could change the way elections work in the US, how would you do so (realistically. I'd like conservatives to stop fucking voting too, but that's impractical and unfair...)
No. The point of the electoral college is to buffer the voting power of large and heavily populated states.

In an national popular vote, Wyomingites don't matter. There are 586,107 of them and that's such a tiny drop in the bucket that they might as well just not let them vote at all. In the electoral college, Wyomingites barely matter. In the electoral college system Presidential candidates might actually campaign in Wyoming, if they think it could swing. In a national popular vote, no one is ever going to campaign in Wyoming because it would be a total waste of time, effort, and money.

The electoral college was a compromise between large states and small meant to give the people of the small states an actual voice in national politics. It's the same reason that each State has two Senators.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Sun Jul 24, 2016 12:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Koumei
Serious Badass
Posts: 13872
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Location: South Ausfailia

Post by Koumei »

Is it even a good thing that Buttfuckville, VI gets as much influence as places with a lot of people though? That means the people of those tiny bullshit states each have proportionally more power than people in other states (and that it's easier to get results by pandering to tiny states that are not representative of the main population).

A popular vote takes away the power of Wyoming, but each person in Wyoming still has just as much voting power as anyone else - the only problem is if one candidate runs on a platform of "Fuck Wyoming. I will personally extract every penny from it and reallocate it in big cities in the popular states". And if we look at a less ridiculous example, if someone runs on a platform of "I care about populous areas, not tiny regions, so my attention will be spent on fixing problems that affect people in cities and densely packed states and so on" then... good? It affects more people so obviously that's a better use of their time.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
hyzmarca
Prince
Posts: 3909
Joined: Mon Mar 14, 2011 10:07 pm

Post by hyzmarca »

Koumei wrote:Is it even a good thing that Buttfuckville, VI gets as much influence as places with a lot of people though? That means the people of those tiny bullshit states each have proportionally more power than people in other states (and that it's easier to get results by pandering to tiny states that are not representative of the main population).

A popular vote takes away the power of Wyoming, but each person in Wyoming still has just as much voting power as anyone else - the only problem is if one candidate runs on a platform of "Fuck Wyoming. I will personally extract every penny from it and reallocate it in big cities in the popular states". And if we look at a less ridiculous example, if someone runs on a platform of "I care about populous areas, not tiny regions, so my attention will be spent on fixing problems that affect people in cities and densely packed states and so on" then... good? It affects more people so obviously that's a better use of their time.
Democracy is four wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner.

Really, the people who wrote the Constitution decided on proportional group representation, where each defined group gets a certain number of seats, in order to give minority groups some franchise. This isn't a bad thing, and a lot of countries do it. The Iranian Parliament does this according to religion, with Jews getting a reserved seat along with Assyrians and Zoroastrians, since these groups would not get any representation otherwise and one vote is better than zero votes.

For political reasons, the guys who wrote the constitution chose the States as their defining group for proportional representation. There was a good reason for this. The States at the time were fully sovereign, bound together only by the very weak articles of Confederation. The Federalists were asking the States to give up a lot of power, and the smaller ones just wouldn't sign on if they weren't guaranteed a reasonable level of representation.
DSMatticus
King
Posts: 5271
Joined: Thu Apr 14, 2011 5:32 am

Post by DSMatticus »

hyzmarca wrote:Democracy is four wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner.
And obviously that's a situation improved by arbitrarily giving one of the wolves an extra vote. Obviously.

"People can vote to fuck eachother over" is really not an argument against proportional representation. It's just an argument against representation, at all, period - and a pretty weak one, when you remember what the alternatives are.
User avatar
OgreBattle
King
Posts: 6820
Joined: Sat Sep 03, 2011 9:33 am

Post by OgreBattle »

What kind of election system lets me vote for not bombing foreigners and not advancing an international banking network that fucks the worlds proletariat over
hyzmarca
Prince
Posts: 3909
Joined: Mon Mar 14, 2011 10:07 pm

Post by hyzmarca »

OgreBattle wrote:What kind of election system lets me vote for not bombing foreigners and not advancing an international banking network that fucks the worlds proletariat over
That would be Anarchist Revolution, an election system in which you vote by throwing homemade bombs at the candidates you don't want to win.

However, it is a shitty election system for a wide variety of reasons and you really shouldn't try it.
Hadanelith
Master
Posts: 206
Joined: Sat Aug 27, 2011 3:26 pm

Post by Hadanelith »

Prak: Have a general rundown on how we could make voting better, explained by a man who is good at explaining things:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... ACE93A5638

Watch the whole list.
Mechalich
Knight-Baron
Posts: 696
Joined: Wed Nov 04, 2015 3:16 am

Post by Mechalich »

Some election reforms that would be useful in the US:

National Voting Holiday: right now most elections happen on a random Tuesday, when most people have to work and with lousy polling hours. This reduces turnout and imposes severe burdens on poor working people, especially in high density areas where voting lines can be hours long. This reform wouldn't be particularly difficult to arrange either - Columbus Day could be eliminated and thereby the number of national holidays held constant (and this would have the added benefit of taking the holiday away from Columbus, who really doesn't deserve one).

Mandated Election Coordination: right now each jurisdiction has immense power to set their own election dates. As a result various groups, liberal and conservative, take the step of holding elections at ridiculous times, like Wednesday in March in an odd-numbered year and other BS. This suppresses turnout to ridiculously low-levels and allows tiny groups of well-organized loyalists to control things. Some sort of nation-wide election calendar that put all the elections on the same schedule - the majority in November on even-numbered years as normal, special or more frequent elections on specific dates maybe once each quarter that are always the same - would greatly increase turnout and help make many small-office elections much more representative.

Increased Numbers of Representatives: The US House, and many state houses and state senates, have capped membership. The US house has been capped at 435 since 1963. In 1963 the population of the US was 189 million (so 1 rep per 430,000 people). The current US population is 320 million (meaning one rep per 730,000). So in raw numbers the House is 40% less representative than it was in 1963. Adding more members would make the House more representative, and it would decrease the advantages of gerrymandering.

There's a bunch of others, but those are useful ones off the top of my head.
Fwib
Knight-Baron
Posts: 755
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by Fwib »

Apparently, the US Electoral College is embedded in difficult-to-change laws (Constitution, or something, also state laws...?)

Here is a workaround that is being attempted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_ ... te_Compact
User avatar
Prak
Serious Badass
Posts: 17340
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Post by Prak »

Hrm. Ok.

CGPGrey is always good. I do like his suggestions.

New question- suppose Hillary and Trump both had to drop out of the race for whatever reason (Trump gets convicted of one of his many crimes and goes to jail/GOP instigators manage to get Hillary imprisoned for an instance of poor judgement or whatever, maybe)

What happens if both the Dem and GOP candidate have to drop out?
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
sendaz
Journeyman
Posts: 128
Joined: Sun Dec 27, 2015 10:22 pm

Post by sendaz »

Depends on how close to election time such an event happened.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/senior-g ... d=41089609

http://teachinghistory.org/history-cont ... rian/20431

If it happened in say early September, both parties could probably follow Rule 9 and still figure out new candidates.

If this happened on Nov 1st following a bizarre series of events, while Congress can designate the date of the election, technically they would have to pass a law to give themselves the power to postpone it due to extenuating circumstances.
Most likely an emergency measure would be passed to postpone it long enough for both parties to reconvene their conventions to put forward the new candidates.
Post Reply