The Popular Vote... - Page 2 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15033241
Presvias wrote:I'm thinking you have no good response to my post and so go for the attempted dismissal.


Rarely is there a good response for nonsense...

Maybe it will surprise you to learn that just 5% of EU citizens - according to a poll - have faith in your country's direction and recent polls show that Trump's got record low levels of support...even multi fox news polls have confirmed such.


And maybe it will surprise you to learn that I couldn't give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut what EU citizens have faith in. If EU citizens don't support Trump, who fucking cares? If anything, it's a win...
By Presvias
#15033245
:lol:

(shrugs) Very well, if you think realclearpolitics, fox news, gallup, nbc and so many others are all wrong in showing awful awful results for Hump in the USA, while an average of 22% of people in the RoW and just 5% in the EU like Trump...you carry on unhindered mate, don't let me burst your bubble(!). Over & out. :lol:

PS: Trump's angry reaction to the Fox news polls and the latest ABC ones are a bit of a giveaway(!).
User avatar
By Hindsite
#15033253
Presvias wrote:PS: Trump's angry reaction to the Fox news polls and the latest ABC ones are a bit of a giveaway(!).

That is because Trump likes to win all the time, even when it does not count. I believe many Trump voters are like myself. I don't participate in news polls that don't count. I save my vote for when it does count, election day.
By Presvias
#15033260
Hindsite wrote:That is because Trump likes to win all the time, even when it does not count. I believe many Trump voters are like myself. I don't participate in news polls that don't count. I save my vote for when it does count, election day.


That's an opinion, an alternative opinion could be posited that a large no of Trumpers watch Fox News and submitted their thoughts to the polls they conducted, which were then analyzed. Of course, my opinion is vindicated by the fact that Fox news reported on what actual Trump & Republican voters were thinking.

Other polls did the same, they are very analytical these days.

Like you, I'd never take part in a poll but we may be the exception rather than the rule, and neither of us can prove which way the majority would go...

..Unless we run a poll asking how many Trump voters would vote in an opinion poll? :p
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By Hindsite
#15033261
Presvias wrote:That's an opinion, an alternative opinion could be posited that a large no of Trumpers watch Fox News and submitted their thoughts to the polls they conducted, which were then analyzed. Of course, my opinion is vindicated by the fact that Fox news reported on what actual Trump & Republican voters were thinking.

Other polls did the same, they are very analytical these days.

Like you, I'd never take part in a poll but we may be the exception rather than the rule, and neither of us can prove which way the majority would go...

..Unless we run a poll asking how many Trump voters would vote in an opinion poll? :p

I am content to just wait and see what happens on election day.
Praise the Lord.
User avatar
By Hindsite
#15033264
Presvias wrote:(shrugs) You may do so, but opinion polls do not exist in a vacuum. And unfortunately for many people, Trump is trailing in them.

I have seen many races in which the winner puts on a burst of speed at the end for the win.
By Presvias
#15033271
Or trips over and tries to pull others down as he goes. ;)

It seems John Notlob is gone. Maybe at least his security objectives will more closely match what he promised in 2016.

Time to get shot of Mike Pompous as well.
User avatar
By BigSteve
#15033303
Presvias wrote::lol:

(shrugs) Very well, if you think realclearpolitics, fox news, gallup, nbc and so many others are all wrong in showing awful awful results for Hump in the USA, while an average of 22% of people in the RoW and just 5% in the EU like Trump...you carry on unhindered mate, don't let me burst your bubble(!). Over & out. :lol:

PS: Trump's angry reaction to the Fox news polls and the latest ABC ones are a bit of a giveaway(!).


I never said I believed or didn't believe the polls.

I said I don't give a fuck.

There's a difference...
User avatar
By Wellsy
#15033334
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/abstract-general.htm
Universal Suffrage
Universal suffrage is the most important political institution of modern times. Universal suffrage has come to mean not just that every adult has a vote, but quite specifically that every adult has a vote in a large geographical electorate for posts up to the national government and no further. People do not vote on decisions by institutions such as the firms in which they work, and they do not vote in the elections of other countries or for transnational institutions. By and large, people vote for representatives, but plebiscites are the most essential and characteristic form of universal suffrage. The plebiscite was introduced as an instrument for social control in the referendum which confirmed Napoleon Bonaparte as dictator of France in February 1800, and is advocated to this day by reactionary groups such as the CEC (Citizens Electoral Council). Voting for representatives from meaningless geographical electorates is a compromise which maintains the illusion of popular sovereignty, whilst keeping the process firmly under the control of whoever has the power in civil society generally.

It is crucial to this kind of voting is that eligibility to vote has great symbolic significance, being tied up with the concept of citizenship and popular sovereignty, and there is no suggestion that the voter needs to be qualified to have an opinion, to be informed in some way or to have a specific interest in the matter being decided. The essence of universal suffrage is that the vote of the person who has weighed the matter deeply all her life, counts just the same as the vote of the person who has no idea at all of what the vote is about. It is a strikingly symbolic objectification of the notion of equality.

I characterise as abstract general, popular suffrage of this kind, where great decisions are made by the casting of millions of votes, each to be counted equal as the opinions of one voter. The process by which the voters is arrived at their opinion is by no means abstract, but the reasoning process for combining the votes, which pretends to determine from the consciousness of each, what is general in the consciousness of all, is abstract and general. It simply says that in answer to the question, x number say Yes and y number say No. As shown by Condorcet over 300 years ago, nothing more than this can be concluded by counting votes. The concrete question of how voters arrived at the vote of Yes or No, is not taken into consideration, and nor is the question of what proposition should be put to the voters taken as relevant to the outcome.

That every adult can participate in this process is in itself a social binding fact, but the use of abstract general relationships is fraudulent and its ramifications are destructive of social solidarity.

We have to be absolutely clear that an individual’s vote has absolutely no impact on the result at all. To claim that an individual has, for example, 1/100,000th of the power over the result in an electorate in which there are 100,000 voters is nonsense. Elections in any one electorate are virtually never decided by one vote, so that 1/100,000th of power is never exercised; and even in the rare case of a near tie, only one member of parliament is affected and that has never had any impact on the formation of a government at least in the history of Australia. So we have here an almighty fraud. The outcome of the election is decided in the process of determining how the majority of voters will vote, and that happens in the newspapers, TV stations, public relations offices, occasionally in party headquarters, and to a certain small extent on the streets, but never in the polling booth. The players are a relatively small number of wealthy capitalists, professional numbers people and publicity experts, and social movements of various kinds who participate in forming and shifting public opinion. Universal suffrage is simply the process of realising the winner of a battle which has already been fought before people enter the polling booth. The opinion-makers, not the voters are the actors in the electoral drama – to think otherwise is to be deluded. – and these opinion-makers do not operate by casting votes. That the government will be chosen on the basis of the momentary opinions of the entire adult population is however a fact of extraordinary ramification. But it has nothing to do with ‘popular sovereignty’ or anything of the kind.

Although universal suffrage does not give power to individuals, it does give proportional weight to any opinion or relevant interest which is common to a number of individuals. It was the fact that the common interests of the majority of poor labouring people in England came together with bourgeois ideological commitments to political equality and individualism that gave strength to the Chartists’ demand for universal suffrage and their attacks on property limitations on the suffrage. Likewise, the Suffragettes. There was and continues to be solid reasons for ordinary people to demand that the major political questions be settled by universal suffrage, but in its abstract general form, universal suffrage only realises the balance of power in civil society as a whole.

It takes politics out of the political arena as such.
...
The individual and the universal

This kind of existence engenders a certain conception of the relation between the individual and the universal.

In the political system, no-one is denied the vote, and everyone is offered the information on which to decide their vote. In the economy, anyone can set up a business, banks will loan money to anyone and there is free trade. In the communications system, talk-back radio, public broadcasts, Big Brother and Idol and so on, make it seem that we can all have our say and take part in the national conversation. So, we have a manufactured appearance that modern society is like mega-version of the ancient Greek polis.

But this is an illusion. The more the system of universal suffrage has been developed, the less say people have in their own lives and that of the country. The more the communications systems have developed, the less people communicate with each other. This crying contradiction is papered over in various ways. On the one hand, the idea that every voter exercises a small proportion of the total power in an election, and various correlates of this idea. The government is elected by 10 million voters, so every voter has one ten-millionth of control over the government. On the other hand, the doctrine of individual autonomy, the idea that every person can pick their own identity off a very long menu of options, choose their own multiple-degree university education, decide when to have children and whether to look after them, negotiate their own employment contract and make a life of their own choosing. Gone are the days when little girls played with dolls and little boys with cars; now we play Sims and inhabit Second Life.

The abstract general conception of the relation between the individual and the universal is very simple. The universal is nothing other than the sum of the individuals, and the individual is nothing other than sum of the various attributes it carries, as reflected by the various universals under which it is subsumed. What is missing is the particular. But the particular is how the individual gets to know the universal, and how the universal realises itself through individuals. What is missing is any real connection between the individual and the univeraal/

The myth of abstract generality is that the individual directly participates in the universal, without any mediation, and that the individual is exhausted by its various attributes. But this cannot be believed.
User avatar
By Crantag
#15033526
I can't think of anything more democratic than a system in which some 5 or so states are the only ones with any voting power when it comes to the president.

Live in the three most populous states of California, New York or Texas (and also about 42 of the other states)? Sorry, your presidential vote doesn't count. You'd may as well write in Mickey Mouse.

Live in Ohio or Michigan or Pennsylvania? Great news! You have a voice!

A completely fucked system it is.
User avatar
By Rugoz
#15033562
BigSteve wrote:The American voters did that.

Even though Clinton got the votes from enough idiot leftists to give her the "popular vote", enough good Americans saw fit to remind those leftist idiots that majority doesn't always rule...


They did not. American voters are subject to a system that was designed 200+ years ago, they cannot change it or only with great difficulty.

Crantag wrote:I can't think of anything more democratic than a system in which some 5 or so states are the only ones with any voting power when it comes to the president.

Live in the three most populous states of California, New York or Texas (and also about 42 of the other states)? Sorry, your presidential vote doesn't count. You'd may as well write in Mickey Mouse.

Live in Ohio or Michigan or Pennsylvania? Great news! You have a voice!

A completely fucked system it is.


Giving less populous states more electors per capita was probably a necessity when establishing the United States. IMO the main issue are the winner-takes-all systems in the states. Naturally no state has an incentive to change its system without the others doing the same. Kind of a prisoner's dilemma.
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By BigSteve
#15033563
Rugoz wrote:They did not. American voters are subject to a system that was designed 200+ years ago, they cannot change it or only with great difficulty.


Right.

And, again, that's exactly the way it's supposed to work...

Giving less populous states more electors per capita was probably a necessity when establishing the United States.


Why? Because there were more people living in New York and Pennsylvania than there were people out in what would become the plains states?

Naturally no state has an incentive to change its system without the others doing the same. Kind of a prisoner's dilemma.


Our system works, and it works well. It was designed the way it is for very good reasons, and those reasons are as sound today as they were 243 years ago...
User avatar
By Rugoz
#15033592
BigSteve wrote:Why? Because there were more people living in New York and Pennsylvania than there were people out in what would become the plains states?


For the same reason there's a senate in addition to the house. To give smaller states better representation. They don't want to be dominated by the larger states.

BigSteve wrote:Our system works, and it works well. It was designed the way it is for very good reasons, and those reasons are as sound today as they were 243 years ago...


How's that even an argument? The winner-takes-all system in the states sucks, because it limits presidential campaigns to a few states where the winner is uncertain. If 70% of Californians vote for a Democrat and 30% for a Republican, why should all electoral votes go to the Democrat, instead of 70%/30%?
User avatar
By Rugoz
#15033593
Crantag wrote:I'm pleased we've established the United States is not a democracy.


The hurdles for changing the constitution are very high in almost all democracies. Hardest to change are probably EU treaties, where voters first have to convince their own government and then all the other EU member state governments.
User avatar
By BigSteve
#15033606
Rugoz wrote:For the same reason there's a senate in addition to the house. To give smaller states better representation. They don't want to be dominated by the larger states.


How is that any different than not wanting a handful of States to determine who should be President?

How's that even an argument? The winner-takes-all system in the states sucks, because it limits presidential campaigns to a few states where the winner is uncertain. If 70% of Californians vote for a Democrat and 30% for a Republican, why should all electoral votes go to the Democrat, instead of 70%/30%?


I'm not going to argue your point, other than to say that's not how the system was developed. The system is what it is. It can be changed, but it cannot be changed easily, nor should it be...
User avatar
By Rugoz
#15033619
BigSteve wrote:How is that any different than not wanting a handful of States to determine who should be President?


There's a difference between weighting votes differently to achieve an important political goal and throwing away votes randomly for no reason.

BigSteve wrote:I'm not going to argue your point, other than to say that's not how the system was developed. The system is what it is. It can be changed, but it cannot be changed easily, nor should it be...


The system lets states decide on how they want to allocate their electoral votes. Naturally no state has an interest in changing it alone, but together they have, or at least they should have.

Also, if you don't argue my point, spare me your braindead conservatism please. :roll:
User avatar
By BigSteve
#15033626
Rugoz wrote:There's a difference between weighting votes differently to achieve an important political goal and throwing away votes randomly for no reason.


Who's throwing votes away?

The system lets states decide on how they want to allocate their electoral votes. Naturally no state has an interest in changing it alone, but together they have, or at least they should have.


Why?

Why on earth would a state like, say, Wyoming want to change the system?

Also, if you don't argue my point, spare me your braindead conservatism please. :roll:


Conservatism has nothing to do with how our system was developed, and it's stupid of you to suggest that. If you want to see the system changed, change it. Roll up your sleeves and get ready for some hard work, though. Changing the Constitution ain't easy.

Then again, being a lib, my guess is that hard work would probably kill you...
User avatar
By Crantag
#15033760
Rugoz wrote:
Giving less populous states more electors per capita was probably a necessity when establishing the United States. IMO the main issue are the winner-takes-all systems in the states. Naturally no state has an incentive to change its system without the others doing the same. Kind of a prisoner's dilemma.

Yeah of course the problem is the winner take all system. That was basically my point.

The way it is now is about 5 states choose the president and every other state doesn't have a voice at all.

Live in the most populous state California? You'd might as well not even bother to vote for president. The Democrats are guaranteed to win. Live in Texas? Same thing, but the Republicans are guaranteed to win. Live in any other state but the few like Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania? You have no reason to vote for the president at all.
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