The John Oliver show from last Sunday, November 6 focused on the topic of election subversion and the growing Republican enthusiasm for engaging in it, along with the truly inexplicably massive amount of support for the Big Lie about 2020 election fraud. Oliver was careful to not be excessively alarmist, but the number of politicians and election officials at all levels who have been swept up in this Trump-induced delusional paranoia is really disturbing.
Here’s that:
Not at all. Nothing in the Constitution requires single districts and first-past-the-post.
Single districts are mandated by a federal law:
Congress could change that it if wished. Multi-member districts did exist in the early years of the US, called plural districts. If Congress were to allow multi-member districts, then the states could elect their members by a PR system.
Nick Fuentes is saying the quiet part out loud.
What he said just explains what the Republicans are trying to accomplish. And he clearly hates America, he even called it “evil”.
The Constitution calls for first-past-the-post elections to the presidency, and as long as that exists, it create a polarized two-party system.
Pretty much the same idea as Musk and twitter. They hate it, so they want to control it, and they don’t care if that destroys it.
Elections to the presidency are not first-past-the-post, which is plurality voting, i.e. you can win with the single greatest number of votes cast, even if that’s less than a majority of the votes cast.
To be elected president, a candidate has to win a majority of the electoral votes. If no candidate receives a majority of the electoral votes, it goes to the House of Representatives, as set out in the Twelfth Amendment:
The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice.
Of course, that hasn’t happened since 1824, due to the strength of the party apparatus.
(And if you mean by the popular vote, not the electoral vote, that’s not plurality voting either, since the system allows for the candidate with the second-greatest number of popular votes to be beat the candidate with the greatest number of popular votes. That’s not first-past-the-post.)
You are correct, I had my terminology wrong, FPTP always seems as though it is a race to a particular mark, for instance 50%.
Yeah, that’s what I meant, and I do think that that is a significant part of the reason why a third party cannot be viable.
Yeah, and not only hasn’t that happened in nearly two centuries, it also goes to the House at one rep per state, which will heavily favor one side over the other.
Ah, then we’re in agreement. I think the electoral college is a far more significant factor supporting the US two party system than is FPTP.
The only threat to democracy is pirate equity companies breaking up usa corporations and confiscating all patents and copyrights of those corporations in holding companies they the private equity companies own.
That and the mercenaries(private contract armies they control/own).
Black Rock and Bruce Rose of Carrington mortgage have issued white papers stating the days of private home ownership are at an end and they envision a nation of renters.
GE Lighting was not sold to Savant, check and see if there is not an 89 year lease.
GE appliance wasn’t sold to Haier, check if there is not a 59 year lease.
Black Rock and others lobby to make it law that your 401k and IRA be mandatorily converted to an annuity at maturity. Maturity is likely age 59-1/2 yrs of age when one may begin to withdraw money without penalty.
Another plan afoot is that Social Security will confiscate all 401k and IRA moneys.
The crew of January 6 were rioters.
They should face more severe punishment than some have seen. They did murder and maim on that day but they never endangered democracy. VP Pence did not flee the scene. He returned to validate and certify the election. Nothing else was going to occur.
A positive of the riot is you not longer see at protests the automatic rifle on chest gun clubs who think themselves as militia.
That’s right, if you do not have a battalion and unit number from your state’s governor then you are a gun club. You are not state’s militia.
Hopefully the riot embarrassed the sensible folk caught up in these gun clubs to step away and return their rifles to safe storage. Good for them.
As to the rioters the should have been two investigations and two trials.
One for Joe Sixpack rioter.
A second for any persons involved in the riot who had raised his right hand and had sworn to guard this constitution of ours. These folk should one and all lose their right to vote for a minimum 12years and I would prefer 20 yrs.
Be well, Stay safe and Be good to yourselves.
I don’t know how your conspiracy theories have anything at all to do with this thread.
I don’t know… conspiracy theories, and the tendency to embrace them, seems to have quite a LOT to do with the ill health of American democracy. The fact that they are being embraced by people who are clearly not right-wing MAGA types as well as those who are is a data point.
I would say that the proper anti-gerrymandering metric is to get the most proportional respresentation possible. That’s how the House is supposed to work, after all. Then the Senate balances that out with a per-state setup.
Conspiracy theories get more popular the more corrupt a government becomes.
The death of American democracy has been predicted time and again over the centuries. I’m not worried.
I would argue that for much of the last two centuries democracy has been waiting for an actual birth. At this point we are on the lookout for an abortion, or infanticide as a best case.
That’s a fascinating thought: thanks.
I think democracy is in great danger, but the metaphor would be more like a time bomb or sword of Damocles, because it is not 100% certain but the end could come swiftly, rather than surely and on a predictable timetable.
As I’ve predicted, the latest elections prove that the vast majority of Republican voters do not take democracy seriously. If they did, they would have stayed home or not voted for Republicans who decided that the coup attempt culminating in (but consisting of more than just) 1/6 was not bad enough for Trump to face consequences for. If that doesn’t deserve impeachment, tell me, what does? If you’re not going to vote against someone who was fine with the coup attempt, what would make you change your mind? I’m not even sure if any more of them stayed home than usual, instead of being countered by a much stronger Democratic turnout. But in any event, at most a handful of Republicans were affected by the most serious threat to American democracy in over 100 years.
Even if that was enough to change the results of this election, that doesn’t say anything about future elections. Almost 50% of voters tried to vote against their own right to vote.
A critical bulwark was also shattered by the coup attempt. It’s one thing to vote for people who don’t care about democracy. It’s another thing to actively subvert it yourself, because you could face jail or other consequences. That’s one thing that was previously preventing people taking an active part in certain types of election rigging. So far, it doesn’t appear that the organizers of the various subversion attempts have faced any consequences (as opposed to the active traitors on 1/6).
So in short, there is still a huge number of people who are still voting for people who are okay with a dictatorship, and a large number of officials who now know that as long as you can keep the violence to a minimum, there are no downsides to meddling with election results. And the former support the latter. When you combine these, you cannot say that democracy is safe.
And there has always been a force seeking to prevent it from flourishing. After all this faction loves to tout how the “founders” were big on how you should have “republic, not democracy”; and most if us can figure that implicit in that is that to them it was/is supposed to be a republic of, by and for We The Right Kind Of People.
What is a bit disturbing more recently is that for most of this time, the various ruling elites had a certain sense of Playing By The Rules and that you win some, you lose some, but you preserve the stability of the system by everyone (of them) having had a fair shot at it. But now one of the factions is loudly announcing they will NOT accept “you lose some” any more and they will do whatever it takes.
I feel like a lot of it is because in the US, by the time reaches a level in society that they’d be appropriately experienced and qualified to serve on some kind of board like that, those people have generally already been tagged as affiliated with one party or the other.
Personally, I kind of like the idea of a bipartisan commission that would define an algorithm or other method to draw districts, along with legislation that the output of the algorithm would be absolutely legally binding. And maybe with either enough randomness required to be inherent in the algorithm, or that test/evaluation runs would be run on representative, but made-up data.
That way, the political fighting would be about HOW the districts should be drawn by the machine, not about the ACTUAL districts themselves. I think by moving everything back a step and taking the real world out of it, you might get a more honest approach to things than if it was about actual drawn boundaries.
Of course, this would never happen. Legislators and constituents are probably too dumb to understand what and why they’re doing what they’re doing, and the ones that aren’t, are probably too cynical to not try to subvert it.