Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU

Post by saturn8601 » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 10:31 PM UTC

snarf21 wrote: post #484

saturn8601 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then, in a country of 300 plus million people like the U.S., there is a demand for getting election results as soon as possible, because without quick results, it opens the window for bad actors to claim the election was rigged. That's part of the reason why there was a motivation for digital systems. Furthermore, the U.S. In particular does a lot more than just voting for candidates. Often the ballots have refer…

The issue is that the people claiming things are rigged are the same ones creating this opportunity and it has nothing to do with digital voting. I live in PA and the current law is that mail-in votes can't be even started to be counted until after the polls have closed. (This law had good intent so that a potential fraudster couldn't know exactly how many votes they needed.) During Covid, Democrats tried to get this…

All those ideas you suggested seem great. I'm sure they'd be better than the current status quo. Now, how difficult would it be to implement any of those ideas versus going state by state and convincing the local legislator to just swap out voting machines? The money is going to the same voting machine vendors anyway who probably have sway with the government and the local legislator wont get in trouble for going outside the norms(ex. No one ever got fired for buying IBM). Fortunately, some of these companies have had to deal with the pressure from the public and update the design of their voting machines to what I've described earlier.

The U.S., it should be clear by now, is just this patchwork of random laws and people blocking radical change at various levels. And everyone who wants to move forward is forced to find some other avenue to get some half baked solution in place just so they can get around the historical blocks. We see this in everything from zoning, to deploying Internet, to even fixing this system. There's just too much inertia to not change things.

Post by runarberg » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 1:08 AM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #498

runarberg wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this speaks volumes about how far right the Overton window has shifted in Europe, if my run-of-the-mill leftist critique of the EU sounds so novel. I actually blame Brexit for this. Before Brexit being anti-EU for anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist reason was kind of a litmus test for a left wing political candidate. Note this is also true of Iceland. The debate was mostly about nationalism and economy, and th…

I'd say that your critique of the EU would have been quite run-of-the-mill in the early 2000s, but nowadays, this corner of the left has mostly shrunk away and became somewhat marginal. As for the voters and their questioning: yeah, people will give inconsistent answers quite often, especially when you pry into the details. But the majority sentiment has been against more immigration for some time now, and that major…

Note that questions about immigration tend to be quite general and ideology based as well. People are usually asked, “do you support immigration from...” but if you ask them “do you want people from ... to be disproportionately deported” I am pretty sure you‘ll get different support numbers.

That aside, the public opinion about immigration are severely tainted, partially because of systemic racism at a government level inside Europe. There is a lot of room for cognitive dissonance if the cops keep arresting black people or Muslims and you know from experience cops have been nothing but kind and never wrong.

Re: Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU

Re: Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU