The Popular Vote... - Page 6 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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All general discussion about politics that doesn't belong in any of the other forums.

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User avatar
By Godstud
#15034501
annatar1914 wrote:There is a principle in all good government historically speaking, called ''Subsidarity'' where decisions are best made on the local level by people most familiar with local issues. If the people in lower population areas are outnumbered, those issues are disregarded and made secondary to the issues important in urban areas.
I agree, but isn't that why State laws are so strong in the USA? They already have that power to affect local issues.
#15034507
Godstud wrote:I agree, but isn't that why State laws are so strong in the USA? They already have that power to affect local issues.


They are not as strong as some people would like, the powers of the local states, but that issue was settled I think for good against a loose confederation of states in the American Civil War. States used to have a greater say still after the Civil War when their legislatures selected the US Senators, but that was abolished by Amendment a few decades later. In general, there has been a trend of concentrating power in the central government and acting as provinces of a unitary State instead of a Confederation, but this has always been an issue since ''day one'' of an independent USA.
#15034569
Various off-topic replies about who cares what who says on a forum and other discussion of PoFoers have been removed. Please keep on-topic, and avoid insults of members. If you're looking for posts about sport in Australia, they've been moved to the Sports and Hobbies section.
#15034571
BigSteve wrote:I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the founding fathers of the United States understood what's right for our country more than someone living on Thailand ever would...


The founding fathers were wrong in all sorts of wats about voting, and the modern USA does not even pretend to follow what those guys thought.

For example, blacks, women, and poor people can now vote and non-citizens cannot vote, which is not how those guys did it.

Also, this is basically an appeal to tradition or an appeal to authority. Something is not correct simply because some old white guys decided that a long time ago.
User avatar
By BigSteve
#15034617
Godstud wrote::O
USA is just another "great" country. Canada, Norway, Denmark, Australia, and many others also fit the bill.


No, we are THE greatest.

Everyone else is a wannabe...

Where I live is as relevant as where you live. Time to get over it. Why should it matter, and why do you CARE so much?


If we were talking about how many different ways to cook dog or prepare rice, I might value the opinion of someone living in a third world country. But on matters of American politics, not so much.

It seems upsetting to you that I might be dismissive of your opinions. Well, I can't help you with that. As you don't live under our system, and are wholly unaffected by it, nothing you have to say about it really resonates with me...

There would not be Amendments to the Constitution if the Founders always got it right, and that things don't change over time.


That's wonderful. If the American people want to change the Constitution there's a mechanism in place to do that. It hasn't happened in almost 30 years, though...
User avatar
By Godstud
#15034627
I am ignoring the majority of your post, as it is irrelevant and full of feelings, not facts,@BigSteve

BigSteve wrote:If the American people want to change the Constitution there's a mechanism in place to do that. It hasn't happened in almost 30 years, though...
Change is overdue, then.

I can see why most Conservatives don't want change when change would take away any unfair advantages that they are using to hold power.
User avatar
By BigSteve
#15034634
Godstud wrote:I am ignoring the majority of your post, as it is irrelevant and full of feelings, not facts,@BigSteve

Change is overdue, then.

I can see why most Conservatives don't want change when change would take away any unfair advantages that they are using to hold power.


No, conservatives don't want change because change isn't needed.

Change for the sake of change is stupid...
User avatar
By Godstud
#15034638
So in your opinion there is no need to change the electoral college, despite it being unfair and giving a huge advantage in voting power to certain states with very low populations. Why?

Why do you think this would be 'change for the sake of change', where there's a legitimate reason for a change?

Should We Abolish the Electoral College?
There are three basic arguments in favor of the system the framers of the Constitution gave us, with little sense of how it would actually work. The first is easily dismissed. Presidential electors are not more qualified than other citizens to determine who should head the government. They are simply party loyalists who do not deliberate about anything more than where to eat lunch.

A second argument holds less populous states deserve the further electoral weight they gain through the “senatorial bump” giving each state two electors, because their minority status entitles them to additional political protection. But the real interests of small-state voters are never determined by the relative size of the population of their states. If, say, environmental sustainability or abortion or the Second Amendment is your dominant concern, it does not matter whether you live in Wyoming or California, Pennsylvania or Delaware. The size of a state does not affect our real political preferences, even though the Electoral College system imagines that it does.

Third, defenders of the Electoral College also claim that it supports the underlying value of federalism. Having the states play an autonomous role in presidential elections, it is said, reinforces the division of governing authority between the nation and the states. But explaining exactly how it does this remains a mystery. Having a state-based system for electing both houses of Congress should be adequate to that task. Presidential elections have little if anything to do with the subject, even when some candidates claim to be “running against Washington.”

First, and most obviously, such a system would conform to the dominant democratic value that has prevailed in American politics ever since the one-person, one-vote reapportionment rulings of the early 1960s. Our votes would count the same wherever they were cast. No other mode of presidential elections would be fully consistent with our underlying commitment to the equality of all citizens.

Second, a national popular vote would eliminate the “battleground state” phenomenon that has now become the key feature of post-convention campaigning, leaving most Americans alienated from the decisive phase of presidential elections. “Swing” or “battleground” states are mere accidents of geography. They do not matter because they have any special civic characteristics. They simply happen to be states that become competitive because of their demography, and which are readily identifiable as such because of the increasing sophistication of political polling. In a truly national election, parties and candidates would have the incentive to turn out their votes wherever they were, fostering a deeper sense of engagement across the whole population.

Third, a national election might provide a cure for the delegitimation of presidential authority that has afflicted the last three presidencies. It is no secret that the administrations of Bill Clinton,George W. Bush and Barack Obama all suffered, from the outset, from efforts to imply that there was something improper and unworthy or even suspicious in their elections. That same view will doubtless color the 2016 election as well. This perception is reinforced by the red- and blue-state imagery that controls our view of the electoral process. Having an election in which victory went to a candidate carrying a single national constituency might not wholly cure this problem, but it might well work to mitigate it.

https://stanfordmag.org/contents/should ... al-college

As you can see, there are some real reasons, and this is not a recent article.
User avatar
By Rancid
#15034702
Ranked Choice voting would be a wonderful thing in America. It would help combat gerrymandering for sure.
User avatar
By BigSteve
#15034704
Godstud wrote:So in your opinion there is no need to change the electoral college, despite it being unfair and giving a huge advantage in voting power to certain states with very low populations. Why?


Because a state like California or New York should never be in a position to decide what is best for states like Wyoming or Kansas. These states don't enjoy a "huge advantage" in voting power. They enjoy an equal one.

Which is how it should be...

Should We Abolish the Electoral College?


I think it's cute how you use the word "we"...
#15034708
Rancid wrote:Ranked Choice voting would be a wonderful thing in America. It would help combat gerrymandering for sure.

What kind of ranked choice voting are you thinking of? Multiple-member districts? If so, how big? The bigger they are, the less chance of effective gerrymandering, but the more unwieldy an election choice can be (if you have 10 seats to fill, the main parties would probably put up at least 15 between them, and maybe even 20, plus you'd get the small parties and individuals - some with a chance, some not).
#15034712
I think the US should allow non-citizens to vote. Any person in the world with a reasonable claim that they are impacted by US policy should be allowed to elect US government personnel.
User avatar
By Rancid
#15034754
Prosthetic Conscience wrote:What kind of ranked choice voting are you thinking of?


To start, the real basic kind. Like what the State of Maine does.
User avatar
By Rancid
#15034830
Prosthetic Conscience wrote:@Rancid , how would that guard against gerrymandering? It seems to be one-seat-one district, which means it helps against splitting the vote, but doesn't affect the size of shape of constituencies.


I'll admit it is a half baked idea, but I figure it would encourage more people to run for office and increase the chances of run-offs and what not.
#15034858
Presvias wrote:The system ain't working mate. The US is in serious danger of fracturing into civil war.

Or are you disputing that as well?

Look, the indices on the HDI; Happiness, GDP per capita and so much else are so much higher in the most Nordic and vikingy northern European countries. And they tend to rate highest on the democracy indices and lowest on corruption ones.

Your country should really try to learn a thing or two about how they do things.

And part of the problem is your completely unreliable, billionaire owned press. They've really fed you some complete hokum.




You're focusing singularly on the term limit issue when that's just one tiny portion of what's under debate here.

The system I proposed ensures that everyone gets equal representation. A minority of farmers should NOT dictate govt for the majority, nor should tyranny of the majority mean that the minority get drowned out.

Your system is tyranny of the minority.


We are all going to die within 12 years because of climate change anyway.
#15034869
Finfinder wrote:We are all going to die within 12 years because of climate change anyway.


    We've been hearing variations of the phrase "the world only has 12 years to deal with climate change" a lot lately.

    Sen. Bernie Sanders put a version of it front and center of his presidential campaign last week, saying we now have "less than 11 years left to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy, if we are going to leave this planet healthy and habitable."

    But where does the idea of having 11 or 12 years come from, and what does it actually mean?

    The number began drawing attention in 2018, when the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report describing what it would take to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal of the Paris climate agreement. The report explained that countries would have to cut their anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, such as from power plants and vehicles, to net zero by around 2050. To reach that goal, it said, CO2 emissions would have to start dropping "well before 2030" and be on a path to fall by about 45 percent by around 2030 (12 years away at that time).

    Mid-century is actually the more significant target date in the report, but acting now is crucial to being able to meet that goal, said Duke University climate researcher Drew Shindell, a lead author on the mitigation chapter of the IPCC report.

    "We need to get the world on a path to net zero CO2 emissions by mid-century," Shindell said. "That's a huge transformation, so that if we don't make a good start on it during the 2020s, we won't be able to get there at a reasonable cost."

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/2708 ... -solutions

So we have about 12 years (11, now) to reduce CO2 emissions by about 45%, so that we can have net zero emissions by 2050, which would reduce global warming to something far more manageable.

Also, and to try to keep it somewhat on topic, a majority of US residents think something should be done about climate change.
User avatar
By Hindsite
#15034909
Pants-of-dog wrote:Also, and to try to keep it somewhat on topic, a majority of US residents think something should be done about climate change.

Tell those ignorant residents that the U.S. has been doing something about climate change and more than any other nation. It is not reasonable to drive our country into a great depression in an attempt to do the impossible.
#15034944
Regardless of what the people want, the USA has done nothing meaningful and will do nothing meaningful about climate change. Because the people who do what it takes to get elected will invariably sell out to fossil fuel interests.
User avatar
By BigSteve
#15035004
Pants-of-dog wrote:I think the US should allow non-citizens to vote. Any person in the world with a reasonable claim that they are impacted by US policy should be allowed to elect US government personnel.


What you "think" could not be more meaningless.

Besides, you've got your hands full with a white French Canadian pretending to be a black man as your prime minister.

What a fuck up your country is...
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