181–190 of 268 posts
The people behind this would tell you it's a "feature": by making it incredibly undesirable for people in densely-populated areas to vote (which almost universally lean Democratic), you ensure that only the "right" people are able to vote.
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All of those methods for balancing the "madness of crowds" (which is a strange euphemism for abolitionism) have been written out of the constitution. Senators are elected by popular vote now. Almost all the day-to-day legislative actions of both houses require merely a simple majority. The Federalist Papers are centuries out of date. They do not comprehend how modern politics functions. Hamilton could not imagine a m…
I'd like to think we could agree that the Senate has become more politicized in the last few decades. I think where we disagree is what to do about it. There seems to be this prevailing cultural view that a democratic election is always good and always produces wise and just results. Where as people like me are fearful of what starts as the wise vox populi devolves into a crowd, transforms into an angry mob, and then…
The Senate has turned into a freezer :)
So, these lines are not representative of an actual election day. Actual election day is November 3, 2020. Some states are in early voting right now [0]. That typically means that there's a very limited number of polling stations open. For instance, in Pinellas County, FL there's only 5 early voting locations, compared to 301 poll locations during election day. That's a 60x discrepancy! This is for 713,000 registered…
Germany has 73,000 locations for 61,690,000 voters. Germany has roughly 4x the number of locations per voter.
In Australia we have two things the US system desperately needs: mandatory voting and preferential voting. Preferential voting allows you to vote for a third party without wasting your vote. The standard argument against mandatory voting is people not wanting the uninformed to vote (trust me, they're voting) and the usual US predilection against that infringing "freedom". I was sympathetic to this until I saw the US…
In the US, one can vote for any party (preferential voting). There are other parties in America but you seldom hear about them. Two examples are the Green Party and the Libertarian party.
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> So, these lines are not representative of an actual election day. So you claim. And yet we regularly see this kind of pictures on actual US election days. For example, a very quick DuckDuckGo image search for "us elections long lines" leads to this as the second hit: https://www.firstpost.com/photos/world-gallery/us-2012-elect...
Here's hard data showing that long lines like these aren't the norm: https://medium.com/mit-election-lab/insights-into-voting-wai...
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What in this article, specifically, is a lie, distraction, propaganda or amplification of an issue that doesn't exist? Voter suppression is real. It alters election results; look at the Georgia governor's race in 2018 for a recent egregious example. The US is continuing a proud tradition of disenfranchisement — from only giving voting rights to white men at the country's inception, to poll taxes, Jim Crow laws, felon…
I am not. My point is that the reason we are here, that this repression even exists, is due to the media marketplace. Without it, this kind of blatant repression isn’t possible. It is here because of decades of propaganda and distraction by the right that has allowed then to take advantage of I’ll informed people who have become enemies of their neighbors and democracy itself.
This is not a recent invention, and it's not due to the media. It's built right into the foundation of our country.
Over here voting takes one morning (population 11M), results are in by evening. I can't see why it wouldn't scale.
It does scale, however in the USA, the republican party directly benefits the less people vote, so in states where the republican party controls voting means, you'll see things like long lines, arbitrary voter ID requirements, etc. In the USA, voting is handled at a state level.
True, and they benefit even more when they can actually target the voters of the other party.
“Abbott in July acted to lengthen the early voting period and allow voters to deliver completed absentee ballots in person for longer than the normal period. But after large Democratic counties including Harris and Travis established several sites where voters could deliver their ballots, Abbott ordered Oct. 1 that they would be limited to one… Harris County — home to 2.4 million registered voters and spanning a greater distance than the state of Rhode Island — had designated a dozen before Abbott’s order forced them to close most sites.” [0]
[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/13/texas-election-ballo...
A lot of people outside the USA don’t realize we don’t have an election. We have 51 parallel elections, each with their own rules. For example, you’ll never see long lines like that in California or Oregon. For some reason people are super allergic to having federal standards on how federal elections should be run. Sure, run your state however you want. But it’s messed up that I, a Californian, have no say in how ele…
It's not messed up, and the Framers agreed, hence why every state is allowed to determine how to run its elections. The argument of federal power at that scale was lost long ago. If one doesn't like the way one's state exercises its power, one can move to another state. This is a feature, not a bug.
I've never voted for the POTUS and I expect I never will. From my POV I don't really care who wins but I think my preference leans to Trump. That has mostly to do with the Democrats being overly populistic about all the concerns, without offering any solutions. If you push through the endless barrage of misinformation from both sides, it does seem that the conservatives have a better understanding on how to progress…
Don't get me wrong, we absolutely should debate the climate policy in the US. And we can refer to such policies as the "Green New Deal". But in debates people often act like the Green New Deal is a literal set of laws and policies written down.
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https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/13/us/texas-election-ballot-drop... One ballot box per county in some counties means waiting hours in line for that too.
You can also mail them in. That whole thing was a fake controversy.
“They need that money in order to make the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting.” President Trump