Ranked choice.
Fix gerrymandering.
Popular vote.
If you don’t want this, you’re simply a sore loser. You dont want democracy, you want a boys club.
want a boys club.
*white, straight, christian, republican, cis, landowning boys club
How do you achieve this, when by and large neither party seems to want to move in this direction?
I do think it is entirely possible, it just requires money. There is a way to defeat our two-party system and it’s by running a third party that gets the popular vote.
If someone were running on the platforms of:
Corporations can’t own residential real estate.
Members of Congress are not allowed to own or trade stock in any capacity, private or public.
Socialized single payer healthcare. Not rocket science.
Comcast, Verizon, every other ISP gets absolved by the United States government and is no longer a for-profit competitive agency,
CEOs are forbidden by law to be paid more than 1,000 times more than their lowest paid employee.
Minimum wage is $30 an hour. Entry level IT roles, entry level teaching positions now pay about $85,000.
Taxes are now included in sales prices everywhere.
No merchant is allowed to change the price of any product for at least one fiscal quarter.
Buying or purchasing means owning. No company is allowed to tamper with what you own in any way shape or form. They will be held fully liable for the total cost of damages in the form of cash recompense. Damages can exceed the price of the goods themselves and include the luxuries provided by the service if terminated.
No government agency may have any say in an individual’s reproductive rights in any way shape or form.
Individuals earning more than $1 million per year will be taxed at 99.99% of every dollar they earn beyond 1 million.
Corporations are not people. They CAN be tried in the court of law, as people, for crimes that entity committed when it had personhood.
Wealthy individuals without an income will be taxed at a rate of 10% of their calculated net worth as per their assets, annually. These figures will be determined by an average of no fewer than 5 independent auditing firms. These auditors all most be able to show their lack of connection to the taxable entity being audited.
Elected officials are not allowed to have accounts in their own name on private or publicly traded platforms. There will be a government social media platform where these individuals may partake in social media. The public at large is also allowed to be on this platform, but they must register using a government provided email address, which will be provided from now on at birth.
End gerrymandering
End electoral college
Ranked choice for all elections…
What am I missing? Ticketmaster? Probably plenty more…
I guess what I’m saying is the two-party system can be fractured if a large enough amount of the population can wholly agree on policies not being put forth by the two party system. I’d say we’re getting fucking close to critical mass here.
The closest to this is PSL, the issue is that they have to fight against FPTP and moneyed interests.
The issue with gerrymandering is that there is basically no way around it because all borders are arbitrary.
They could be less arbitrary and more mathematical. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mathematicians-who-want-to-save-democracy/
My understanding is that’s just finding how “compact” a shape the districts are. There’s still plenty of gerrymandering to be done in the positioning and the shapes themselves. Furthermore, why does that necessarily make the most sense?
Ie, splitting a city(with a rural area in a crescent shape around it) into two equal districts down the middle each with a sizable urban and rural population(say this gave 45% rural, 55% urban in each of these districts which is pretty reasonable), vs giving the city its own district and the rural area its own district. The first option may be more “compact” but in my opinion would lead to unfair under representation of the rural voters- same as if the demographics were swapped. Districts are supposed to “represent a community” not just be compact.
And urban/rural divide is just an easy example.
We’ve had GIS for decades. This is an easy algorithmic solve.
The simplest is the shortest-straight-line method. Draw district boundaries with the shortest straight line that divides the population appropriately.
Funnily enough, one of the biggest hurdles to algorithmic districting is the Voting Rights Act, which actually requires some level of gerrymandering to ensure representation of minorities. A algorithm may randomly split a community of color into 4 districts in violation of the VRA.
Heres my example from another comment:
Ie, splitting a city(with a rural area in a crescent shape around it) into two equal districts down the middle each with a sizable urban and rural population(say this gave 45% rural, 55% urban in each of these districts which is pretty reasonable), vs giving the city its own district and the rural area its own district. The first option may be more “compact” but in my opinion would lead to unfair under representation of the rural voters- same as if the demographics were swapped. Districts are supposed to “represent a community” not just be compact.
I get that the Electoral College was originally designed to give smaller states an equal say. But, when Los Angeles county has more population than like 10 states combined, things are getting ridiculous.
California has like 67 times the population of Wyoming… yet they each have two senators. And that keeps increasing.
Our government is not a good representation of the populace.
The number of people was a political compromise between individual rights and States rights, but so was a Senate and House.
The electoral college was primarily designed to enable states to vote despite a communication delay that could take months.
It did great at that, actually. How would California have up to date info on what’s going on in Washington when the fastest mode of travel was a horse? It wouldn’t.
Instead of voting based on information that’s outdated and potentially inaccurate, best to pick some people you trust to vote in your interests, and send them to Washington. Let them get caught up, and vote how they will as your representative.
Then States can sort out their own voting time and method, with no real concern for it being simultaneous or consistent because news travels so slow anyway. The important thing was authorized people would show up by the expected federal voting time, and if that happened, everyone did well enough.
Of course, now they can cast their vote without leaving the state, and coordination is possible, but here we are holding the bag on a lack of accounting for technological progress.
I agree with your ultimate premise, that technological advances have all but eliminated the need for the Ec. But, my man, the telegraph predates CA as a state.
The EC was also for many reasons, but pertaining to the point were talking about, it was because they were afraid people would just campaign in cities because that would be the most efficient. The EC forces a wider appeal.
But with the ability to reach everyone, everywhere, instantly, this fear that they only campaign in cities is gone.
Instead of having a forever constitution that was great and new 200 years ago when the internet and modern transportation and communications didn’t exist … they should regularly overhaul the entire government every hundred years to keep up with the times.
I’m in Canada and they should do the same here.
We can’t possibly think that everything we see, think and believe today will be applicable to people living 100, 200 years from now.
We look at 200 year old laws about horses and we laugh at it. 200 years from now, our descendants will laugh at what we’re debating today.
The only reason to maintain the status quo is to protect the power and privilege of a few powerful and wealthy people. It never has anything to do with the goodwill of the people.
- Every fifty years. Jefferson for all his faults thought it should be that frequent.
California has like 67 times the population of Wyoming… yet they each have two senators. And that keeps increasing.
The worst part about the legislative branch is that Congress also acted to handicap the House of Representatives. It was supposed to be the body based on population. And you may say “Well California has 52 and Wyoming only 1 so that’s proportional.” But the original intent was no more than 30,000 constituents per representative. So based on a quick look at the 2020 population figures, Wyoming should have 19 while California should have ~1,317. (That would also be equivalent to California having 69 representatives to Wyoming’s current 1.)
California has like 67 times the population of Wyoming… yet they each have two senators.
But they have way more representatives. That was the point of separation of power, to limit federal power, while California does have a state legislature that can do most of what it wants.
The issue is that congress can regulate anything as “interstate commerce”
No it was designed by slave holding states to be sure that the free states up north didn’t have the power to end slavery.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/electoral-colleges-racist-origins
and it would come into effect only when it would guarantee that outcome
And it will never budge above that line. They should have just done it anyways. Most of the votes to decide is better than all of them.
They should do it anyway, but limit it to the winner of the popular vote within the states that are part of the pact.
Then there’d be several states that would realize they’d have more influence by contributing their popular votes to the pact than by sending their electors to the College independently (and in any case a candidate would still have to virtually sweep all the non-pact states to win the College without winning the pact).
I think enacting it early would just make it look like a Democratic party alliance. That’s roughly who the enacted states are currently and it would dissuade other states who might benefit or believe in the popular vote from joining.
Right now, it’s in the abstract interest of Texas to join the Compact, because a popular vote would increase their influence, but if the Compact involved just being forced to vote blue indefinitely without gaining any influence, then it’s a bad deal. “Doing what the majority of the people” want is a lot easier a concept to sell than “doing what the majority of blue states want”.
You could make the argument that if it was solely down to the popular vote, the last Republican president would have been George Bush in 1988.
The only Republican since then to win the popular vote was Bush II for his second term in 2004, but it’s arguable that since Gore would have been the incumbent he might not have won that one. Plus there are a lot of hypotheticals like whether 9/11 could have been prevented under Gore, or if it had happened if the response was less aggressive, or if Bush II would have even run again after losing the first time etc. So it’s impossible to say but certainly conceivable that Gore would have gone for two terms IMO.
I wonder who would have been the opponent in 2004 if Gore had won? This was back when losers didn’t try running for election again, so not Dubya. Maybe McCain since he did in 2008?
Maybe Mitt Romney? He was pretty popular for a while iirc. I think if 9/11 still happened in that timeline though, it probably would be McCain due to his military proximity. Hard to say if Gore’s presidency would have caught/prevented 9/11 or not. It’s possible flying alone would have been impacted by the climate portion of his platform.
I could make an argument that the conservatives could still be competitive in this alternate timeline, and would not necessarily need to fear the popular vote pact.
All they would need to do is change up their platform to capture more votes from outside their current demographic. But that might require them to stop being cartoon villains, and I’m not sure they’re capable of taking their party back from the Trump ideology.
It’s wild that if multiple things we implemented republicans would never win the presidency again.
Any anti voter suppression method, like universal mail in voting
Ranked choice voting
Removal of the electoral college
I am sure there are even more.
Remember that republicans are the minority, they just show up to vote more often (and aren’t actively suppressed)
I’ve been working with local groups trying to get it passed. It may be worth investigating if there are some near you. Donate money or time or support.
There are other options as well, approval voting has several advantages over ranked choice voting. It is simpler and it there is no spoiler effect (voting for your favorite candidate will never hurt your second choice)
Some more info: https://electionscience.org/#approval-voting-explained
I think it’s important to point out that strategies would change if the system changed so we can’t predict what the results would be.
They would still win, but they would have to shift their platform to capture the true political center rather than the center right.
The way elections are run Is mostly up to the states. The electoral college, though, is stipulated in the Constitution.
Unpopular Fanatics vs Apathetic Majority. Conservatives refuse to change their unpopular policies and with all the crap they pull to make elections favor them, they struggle to get 50/50. If elections were made fair and representative of the population…they would never win. The only way to win in that environment is to have the more popular policies, and that is antithetical to conservativisim.
Actually, it would be better for Republicans to try to convince the population their solutions are better instead of the BS we have now. It might help the Republican Party become somewhat normal again and then get more votes. I would love it if we could have real debates on real issues, instead of the BS we have now. I might even be a tad conservative in some areas… But right now, the choice is between Dems or Crazy Town. I think a popular vote would change politics and strategy so that you couldn’t have a Trump anymore.
