Why should some states participate in those elimination rounds and not others?
The point isn’t that California and other late-primary states would make better decisions than the earlier states, or even that those decisions would be different. It’s entirely possible that the result would have been the same. The point is that late-voting been excluded from an important part of the process that many other states get to participate in.
It’s not just about the outcome. I was second-guessing this system long before Trump was elected. Even if the outcome is a good one it doesn’t excuse an undemocratic process.
I don’t mean to trivialize the importance of women’s suffrage, but your question “how would the results be different if voters from all states had equal participation in the primary process?” is kind of like asking “how would the results of the 1916 election be different if American women had the vote?” The point isn’t whether or not the results would have been different. The point is that everyone should have had an equal say in the process.
[quote=“Brainspore, post:63, topic:89872, full:true”]
The point is that late-voting been excluded from an important part of the process that many other states get to participate in.[/quote]
But they’re not. They get to vote, the slate of candidates is the same, and the power of their vote on the whole election is proportional to their population.
I don’t mean to trivialize the importance of women’s suffrage, but your question “how would the results be different if voters from all states had equal participation in the primary process?” is kind of like asking “how would the results of the 1916 election be different if American women had the vote?”
Except that before women’s suffrage women didn’t have the vote. The difference here, and it is the important difference, is that the group of voters complaining about being excluded are not actually excluded, they have the vote, and their vote counts more than the states they’re complaining about. If anything, California is the men complaining that the women should go last because they’re small.
Just because some Californians feel that their vote doesn’t count doesn’t mean that their vote doesn’t actually count.
anybody who is on the federal ballot in any state is on the federal ballot in all states.
nobody gets to drop out. Ron Paul and Denis Kucinich all the way, baby, screw Iowa.
national holiday for voting, excepting emergency workers who’ll do half days at a full day’s pay.
all votes hand counted and verified, no unauditable voting machines permitted, full stop. No bullshit whining about this being impossible or too expensive. Voting officials selected similarly to jury duty, and people who refuse duty lose their right to vote for five years and get their names published in a shame list.
This is probably true, at least on a per-person basis, but that doesn’t really have much to do with anything; it doesn’t mean that Californians have less power or influence on things like who is the candidate or what is in their platform than Iowans or New Hampshironians.
California used to have a February primary; the only difference was that it cost California taxpayers a bundle because they still had to have their June primary for state offices, and it didn’t really affect their power over anything. Back earlier when all the states were racing to be first, ('96 through 2004) it was a disaster, the race was enormously expensive and we didn’t have a proper vetting or winnowing of candidates, and we ended up with even crappier candidates than we had this year.
However, I believe that while Party rules would prevent CA from being first in the US, the rather late June primary is CA state law, not a Party rule. If you want your primary earlier you should be working on your Governor. You could probably move yourselves at least to Super Tuesday if not further forward. I personally think it would be bad for the system, but if it makes some Californians feel more beloved by the candidates than that’s all that really matters.
With a law like that, they might do things like require voter ID, shut down DMVs and polling stations, require registration months in advance, forbid voting by mail unless you’re outside the country, etc. Well, they already do all of those things and they don’t even get to collect fines or arrest people yet.
That is effectively punishing people for the ‘crimes’ of being poor, disabled, sick, non-mobile, employed, or living in a district that normally votes against the incumbent party. Mandatory voting is treating a symptom, not the disease, and establishing penalties goes a step further by beating the patient for being sick. Moreover, given that the goal is to select the best leaders/representatives, not just to get the high score for number of voters, it’s focusing on the wrong thing.
That’s a very good point. 250 years ago, the colonies/territories/states were likely much more homogenous in terms of local culture (settlers from this group settled here, those from that group settled there) and most people lived out their lives within their local community with nowhere near the amount of exposure to outside ideas that we have now. So at the time, things like origin, culture, religion were very closely related to where people resided. Nowadays not so much. So how do we progress to a system that is representative of groups of people based upon values regardless of their location?
If you are willing to consider compulsory voting, how about compulsory government service? Filling offices by lottery instead of vote is one way to get rid of entrenched power structures. On the average it is less ideal than voting for real experts, but perhaps better than relying upon career politicians.
Australian voting isn’t actually compulsory; attendance at the polling booth (where you can abstain if desired) is encouraged by a token fine that is easily evaded with minimal effort. It’s designed to be just enough that not-voting is more hassle than voting.
I have major issues with compulsory service of any kind. I was a messy kid; I would not have survived an early-adult national service system of the sort found in Sweden/Israel/etc.
If you treat voting like jury duty then you would not be able to cut polls or limit options, remove voter registration, and you would have to recuse yourself. 100% of the population is not a potential juror, but a lot more people are potential jurors than are current voters. It would require a change to identification laws to make them freely available, but that’s covered by removing voter registration and the current laws already saying voting must be free (and yes states will step on that - like they already do, but it is a single court case from being fixed). I also explicitly said to make voting a tax break instead of a penalty. Deductions are popular and sought out even when they are not worth a lot.
Also, treating a symptom is typically a cure. When everyone has to put their opinion down suddenly things must change. It’s a forcing function for greater reforms.
That would likely result in terrible environmental damage. A “right to water” or something equally horrific. Dominance by urban interests even worse than now.
Of course I’m in a tiny riparian state with 3 electoral votes, so I can be expected to have several biases, I guess.
This reminds me that our jury duty in Chicago (all of Illinois?) used to be based on voter registration. They switched to drivers license registration instead, because that opened up a much larger pool of potential jurors.
It’s also a potential deterrent to people who want to avoid jury duty, even though both voting and jury duty, imperfect thought they be, are both responsibilities people are fortunate to have.
I’ve been summoned twice and served once. The first summons I was dismissed in the first round of selection for whatever reason. The second time I was selected. I was pretty excited, being young and eager to do my duty. Holy fuckballs was the trial boring. I’d do it again, but with none of the enthusiasm.
That has been a project of mine over the past few years, although more based upon methods than values. One reason why is because most “wealth” now is virtual, so on an institutional level already divorced from geography. Another because modern communications have destroyed the illusion that you and your neighbor share the same values or goals about anything, which makes most borders look more like hostages than citizens. Online social networking sites get part way there in grouping by affinity or interest, but don’t facilitate users creating and administrating actual social structures.
So what I am working on is a kind of meta-country which offers support to anyone who prefers to secede from their current country and start new ones, and to network with other people’s countries. To replaced the “imagined community” of an abstract de-facto state with actual community of people who choose to work together. And to update the concept of nation-states from the Westphalian model of violent control of populace and territory to something more modern, civilized, and network/relationship-based.
True, but even now most people seem to have no policies or negotiations with their neighbors. Instead they seem to hope that they can trust third-parties to handle this - despite often not having any trusted third-parties.
Around here, for instance, what neighbors share is just proximity. So it’s not really a community in any meaningful sense.
I suspect this is, to varying degrees, true in all densely populated areas, and is an unintended consequence of increased reliance on corporations and centralized politics such as nationalism tends to promote.
It’s intentional in the sense that it’s exacerbated by the simple short-sighted selfish self-interest of defining status by disdain for the less powerful and the worship of power and violence for their own sake (basically the closest thing the Alt Right has to a core value). But I don’t believe there was a global conspiracy behind it. Call it Gully’s Razor: Never attribute to vast disciplined organization what can be explained by parasitism and human nature.
