For weeks we’ve been dictated to as to what is about to happen tomorrow.
Ad nauseum.
There is all this crap about the government spending too much. Why not turn it over to the private sector and let the pollsters tell us who is the winner? Shut down the polling booths, save a lot of taxpayer’s dollars and let us get told who we want. It works for college football. Yea, there’s always a controversy but it’s probably better than letting the Supreme Court decide.
Because elections keep the government answerable to the population. So the government can’t afford to go too far off track. Elections may seem like they’re rubber stamping mediocre choices but that’s just a sign that they’re working. The electoral process keeps the real crazies from even getting close to power and ensures we have nice safe bland leaders.
I wish I could be as optimistic like you Little Nemo but the current crop of Republicans candidates comes with several crazies that are very likely to win.
That worked when 1/4 of one party’s candidates weren’t crazies.
ETA: As for the OP, we don’t just hand it over to the professional pollsters for the same reason we don’t have police sketch artists make presidential portraits from a dictated description.
Because pollsters can be wrong. In 2006, they predicted that the Republicans would hold the Senate. Instead, the Democrats picked up six seats and got a 1-seat majority. Not a trivial difference.
No, we haven’t. We’ve been given various projections, many of which are quite different.
When you start with a faulty premise, you are like to get a faulty conclusion.
That there is an election coming up?
Ad astra per aspera. What?
I’m pretty sure not having elections would not reduce the federal deficit by any significant amount, and what about all those polticial pundits who would be out of work if there were no elections to try and influence the outcome of? Why do you want to increase an already high unemployment rate?
Yes, because the political affairs of a nation of 330 million people is exactly like the BCS. Hey, wait a minute. I thought everyone was always bitching about how stupid the BCS system is.
Decide what? Who won an election when the outcome is in doubt? Seems like that’s exactly the sort of thing a Supreme Court should be deciding.
Let’s pull back to reality for a second. George W. Bush was not a Nazi. Barack Obama is not a Communist. But according to a lot of people, these are the most extreme off-the-reservation leaders we’ve ever had.
Hitler was an actual Nazi. Stalin was an actual Communist. And those guys ran countries. That’s what real crazy is like. Nothing in the United States has ever come close.
So are you saying that none of this really makes a difference? So why have elections to see which flavor of vanilla we get to eat for the next couple of years?
I’ll save my time and just stay home this time around. Obama has simply been too timid.
He had a majority in the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the senate and he let things proceed at a leisurely pace and kept looking for way to appease Republicans that were never going to support him no matter what he did.
He ended up proposing a health care bill that is somewhere to the right of the one proposed by Republicans in 1993.
He ended up proposing a stimulus package that was about half as big as it should have been and then devoting half of THAT to tax cuts.
The government has not been noticably more transparent under Obama than it was under Bush. Sutre its an imporvement but I think tis time we started holding him to a standard higher than “well he’s better than Bush” because my 22 year old nephew would have been better than bush.
If he had been half as transformative as he promised to be, I’d be passing manning phone banks and passing out fliers but it would be unecessary because the entire country would be blue anyways. As it is, I think this country needs another dose of Republican rule and maybe our country will produce suppport for REAL fiscally responsible progressives, and who knows, maybe the teabaggers will surprise us and lead us into a Galtian paradise, maybe Ayn Rand was right all along.
Remember all the people ten years ago who said it didn’t make any difference? That Bush and Gore were essentially the same?
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that if you can’t fix everything, there’s no sense in trying to fix anything. If you can’t have a revolution, try to at least get some reform.
No, that’s not what the OP is saying at all. The proposal is to replace the elections with opinion polls. The idea is that the actual voting process is a waste of time because we already know the outcome, so let’s just proclaim the winners based on these opinion polls.
Now, I don’t agree with that thesis, but you’ve mischaracterized it.
The system works fine, but the system could stand a little modernization. Elections are far too expensive. They’ve not kept up with technology. This is hurting America in the sense that all we get is mediocre candidates. Or those who promise things then break them with the usual, “well I tired” speech.
As Homer Simpson said “Try? Anyone can try.”
Most Americans don’t understand how government works in reality. They only understand the textbook cases which only outline, and neglect to tell you how the system is set up to promote checks and stalemates, so the only way to accomplish things are with deals.
Compromise is the key and that means a lukewarm version of what was said.
I assume the OP is asking for election-by-polls, not an end to democracy. IOW, you want to take an official poll, not a vote?
Polling is not the same as a dictatorship, but there are three terminal problems with your plan.
First, it’s actually pretty difficult to change the outcome of an election through fraud —you either need to come up with a bunch of fake ballots or screw up the counting; the latter is very easy to check (you just recount) and the former takes a pretty substantial breach in security to change outcomes. (Or fake machines.) By contrast, it’s pretty easy to fraudulently change poll results —just introduce sample bias or survey bias. It’s also harder to catch people doing that sort of thing.
Second, polls aren’t perfect. Since you take a sample instead of the population, it’s common to have a margin of error around 4% —which would change the outcome of many close races. Sampling error doesn’t happen when you count the entire voting population.
Third, accurate polling requires a lot of resources. To test an adequate sample for every race at every level in the country… honestly, straight-up voting would probably be cheaper.
Okay, I can see that. The part about “let us get told who we want” seemed more about manipulation than predestination.
But if the issue is electing candidates via sampling polls rather than voting, I think straight man covered the objections to that. And I’d add the issue of legitimacy - people would always be arguing that somebody wasn’t really President or Governor or Congressman - they were just appointed by some sampling group not elected by the people.
Wait, really? Admittedly I was living in a village in the middle of nowhere in Eastern Europe at the time, but I did have a subscription to the Economist (it arrived four days after publication, like clockwork - not too bad!) and they, at least, were certain that the Republicans were going to lose big in that election, which is exactly what happened.
This reminds me of an Isaac Asimov short story, where the presidential election is decided by a supercomputer, who chooses one person who is the exact average of the entire country, and base the results on how that person answers. One man one vote.
He didn’t say that the polls didn’t get the big picture right, but the Republicans could still have lost “big” and still kept control of the Senate. That was one of the details that not all polls got right.
We were not talking that kind of crazy, but nice Godwin straw man.
Yes, YMMV, the crazy levels are not at Nazi ones, however what you are implying is that we should not worry about the current level of crazy, not gonna happen.
Just for theanti science positions that virtually all Republican candidates have the term Lysenkoism comes to mind.
And the followers of that caused famine in Russia, just about what I expect the current crop of Republicans to similarly cause, but this time on a global scale in the future thanks to what they will very likely do with their legislative power.
We’re talking about crazy people running modern countries. That means a reference to Hitler is on topic not Godwinizing.
I said that the American electoral system keeps crazy people out of power. Now you’re saying that the American standard for craziness in politics is different than the standard for craziness in other countries. Yes, exactly. And why is the American standard less than the standard in other countries? Because of the American electoral system.
And?
Does that make the current crop of republicans then good? (and you avoided dealing with the sorry anti-science platform that they have)
Really, the levels of crazy are not at Nazi levels, and once again, that is not what we said. Insisting that we are referring to Hitler crazy levels is still silly.
Nowadays the “crazy” that me and others here are talking about is mostly consisting of willful ignoramuses (that includes truly oddballs like Rand Paul) that will be elected in this environment. It is what one gets by voting in anger.