679
Majority of Americans continue to favor moving away from Electoral College
(www.pewresearch.org)
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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politics
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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.
Voting holiday and mandatory voting. The second one is a bit much, but it could be heavily incentivised (tax break?).
The issue with gerrymandering is that there is basically no way around it because all borders are arbitrary.
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:
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.
This is one of the reasons multi-member, proportional districts make sense. Unfortunately, I think that would take a constitutional amendment for the house of representatives.
Actually, seeing you're talking about the House elections, yeah I agree that would probably make sense, though it could over-double the size of the House. (And I don't know that I agree that's a good thing)
~~Yeah I agree. The issue I have with that is just I don't think it would be very practical, especially for smaller states. The Kentucky legislature now only has 138 members, and as far as I know nobody knows any of them.~~
The main drawback of the scheme is that you're usually voting for a party rather than a person. So, not knowing who any of the people actually fits in pretty well into it.
Eh, if you had like a "top 3" system then you would be voting for a person. But I agree- voting solely being voting for a party is something I oppose(and why I prefer the US system to parliamentary systems)
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.
Yeah, that's why I opened with saying it just takes money.
The quantity of money owned by the Bourgeoisie is far in excess of the money owned by the Proletariat, unfortunately, and the State won't willingly concede power
It does not take equal money to spread a message.
The quality of the message carries a lot of weight. How well it resonates with the populace, and how well you can spread it.
By all means, join PSL and try to build that up, then. The good thing about PSL is that they don't believe Electoralism is the answer, and do other forms of praxis as well.
I did at no point indicate I am the person for the job. Just that the job can be done.
I didn't say you should spearhead it, just help out the org. Nobody is asking you to become the next Revolutionary Leader.
*white, straight, christian, republican, cis, landowning boys club
Shit. That's why I can't buy a home/land. Not a Repugnacan.
See: Jackson Wyoming
Well, and I mean this in the nicest way, duh.
I don't think there is anything obvious about this, but ok.