Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 267 posts

Re: Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees

#81

Post by colordrops »

jccalhoun wrote: post #38

I don't see a problem. They are the Republican and Democratic party candidates. The members of those parties can nominate whomever they want. There's nothing in the constitution that says anything about how political parties chose their candidates. Primaries didn't always exist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_pri...

Monopolies are considered to be very bad in business, as they use their leverage to prevent competition and stifle innovation, ending up with negative consequences for the public. Monopolies in politics are far worse for the public, especially when the system is set up to make it nearly impossible for any other parties to break through. The First Past the Post voting system leads to monopolies (or a duopoly in this case).

I don't understand how business monopolies are considered bad, but political monopolies, which strongly affect the lives of over 300 million people who have little choice, are OK.

Re: Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees

#82

Post by kiiski »

the_duke wrote: post #41

Personally, being more familiar with European parliamentary systems, I find it quite astounding that the canidate selection is such an open an public process. In many countries, the parties select candidates internally and then present them to the public. Letting non-party members vote or register just before voting would be unthinkable there. Then again, this is probably a necessary result of the US political system…

Edit (re: reply by dagss): I seem to have misunderstood the comment, but can't delete anymore.

Re: Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees

#83

Post by waterphone »

xlxlxlx wrote: post #72
matwood wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is quite an interesting time. My liberal friends are all irked because Bernie got hosed by the DNC. My conservative friends are irked because the RNC did not do more to stop Trump. Talk about a role reversal with the party of the people and the party of the establishment. Personally, I see so many problems with both candidates that it makes me sick that I have to vote for the least worst one.

Why do you feel you have to vote for one of the two?

Because in the U.S. electoral system, voting outside of the two primary candidates selected by the system is effectively a wasted vote, and if there is one candidate you especially don't want, it is usually more effective to vote against them rather than for a candidate who cannot win under the system in place.

Re: Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees

#84

Post by Retric »

matwood wrote: post #80
jjuel wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you though? There are more than 2 candidates...

Of all of the candidates only two have a chance of winning. If I vote for someone other than those two, the one that I think is the worst may get elected.

The odds of you vote changing that is tiny. IMO, convincing others to vote for a 3rd party is a bad idea, but voting for them is just as 'meaningless' as any other vote in terms of changing who win. However, the power of voting is in the message not just who wins.

Defacto third party's scare the primary party's so they are quick to gain the talking points as soon as those party gain any traction. Most recently Libertarian message was somewhat co opted by Tea Party Republicans. Though in a very mutated form that for example ignored their drug stance.

Re: Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees

#85

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

the_duke wrote: post #41

Personally, being more familiar with European parliamentary systems, I find it quite astounding that the canidate selection is such an open an public process. In many countries, the parties select candidates internally and then present them to the public. Letting non-party members vote or register just before voting would be unthinkable there. Then again, this is probably a necessary result of the US political system…

Looking at things from Canada, I feel the same way.

These primaries, from what I can gather, are roughly the equivalent of the leadership selection process that happens with the political parties here. There is media coverage of those, but not to the extent that the US has. They're also run by the parties themselves, whereas the voting process seems to be handled by the individual states' election authorities.

In Canada, Elections Canada doesn't really get involved in the process that the parties use to select their leader. It just does the general election, by-elections, etc.

Re: Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees

#86

Post by tanderson92 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #78
tanderson92 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, apart from how they used (abused) the legal system to ensure their monopoly on voters continued, no there is no legally enforced monopoly...

I think 'legal monopoly' implies that there is some legal ruling which enforces the monopoly. You said yourself that what they are doing is an abuse. Just because it involves lawyers doesn't make it 'legal'. But ultimately the fact that there are independents on ballot papers proves clearly that there is no monopoly, legal or otherwise, by any definition at all.

That may be clear to you, but to others the fact that the legal system was utilized to leverage the existing parties' power over smaller parties' ability to reach voters is what indicates a legal monopoly.

Besides all that, I don't understand how you say there wasn't a legal ruling which enforced the monopoly, when I just presented several examples in which there were.

Re: Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees

#87

Post by bluejekyll »

matwood wrote: post #80
jjuel wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you though? There are more than 2 candidates...

Of all of the candidates only two have a chance of winning. If I vote for someone other than those two, the one that I think is the worst may get elected.

This perspective is self-fulfilling. Vote for your best candidate, Dr. Jill Stein and Gary Johnson are real candidates, and could win, just like Bernie Sanders (which no one expected).

We need to force the two parties to loosen their grip on the political machine in the US. The only way we do that is by supporting third party candidates.

If you want to vote Green, go convince a conservative to vote Libertarian. I did this just last week in PA, a conservative that I don't agree with is completely upset about Trump and is going to vote for Gary Johnson.

Re: Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees

#88

Post by bluejekyll »

awesomerobot wrote: post #29

Our voting system really needs to change, it's completely absurd that it hasn't just moved to a weekend or received special treatment as holidays.

Almost every state allows for early voting, and some like CA allow permanent voting by mail selection.

Do this on some weekend. Before the election date, why wait for the actual Election Day at all?

Re: Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees

#89

Post by paradite »

the_duke wrote: post #35

On a side note: I think this page is really well done. It's rare that that much (programming) effort is put into a simple newspaper article. Anyone agree?

Definitely the best I've seen in any online news media websites.

Their election tracker and real-time update of votes in the primaries were very well done.

Even the summary after the vote looks neat:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/primary...

http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/california

After some digging, found out they have open-sourced this library:

https://github.com/sjwilliams/scrollstory

MIT license, so we can use it for ourselves!

Re: Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees

#90

Post by Someone1234 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #60
jpt1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people have chosen any Prime Minister of the UK? Its just their constituents that vote for them, so ~50000 people at most.

You don't need to be a member of the commons to be prime minister though, you could be a peer instead, so you don't need to have constituents.

Only in theory. No recent PM hasn't also been an MP (last one was 1830–1903, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil).

I cannot imagine in this day and age that someone would be selected as PM without also being an MP. Now, I can imagine them losing their MP seat during their term as PM and staying on.

The Tories and Labour know that the way the PM is selected isn't exactly Democratic, and they know that if they were to select someone who hasn't had a single vote that would be politically disastrous and likely result in a change to the way PMs are even selected.

The UK's whole political system only works because of mass voter apathy and ignorance (see the AV vote for examples).

Post reply on HN