Is that an Australian thing? I seem to recall Australia invented the secret ballot. In America, we started with voice votes and for the longest time used party ballots, which were general tickets with the party’s candidates already filled in, and intentionally brightly colored so everybody could see what party the voter supports as he walks to the box. And once the voter dropped off his ballot he’d go hang out with that political party, which would be throwing a literal party nearby for the occasion. It was only these last 100 years that we developed any sense of privacy in elections.
It’s a Canadian thing as well, in my experience. I don’t generally know how friends and neighbours vote. It’s rare in my neighbourhood to see a sign or a flag that indicates party. I’ve lived in this house for 20 years, same neighbours on either side; no idea how they vote. I can tell collectively how this riding votes, by the results in the elections, but not about individual party support.
(I do know how one neighbour down the street votes; they’re a member of the provincial assembly, so it’s pretty obvious. )
Dunno???
I would think the Kiwis are cut from the same cloth.
Here the notion of the 9pm news anchor referring to some government department Mandarin as being a GOP/DEM appointee as part of the introduction just doesn’t occur.
Here the guy is appointed, we assume they are suitably qualified for the role (else they get found out pretty quickly) and then expect they get on with the appointed task with all the energy they can muster and equanimity to the interests
Sure there are jobs for the boys and their actions are likely to be aligned with the government policy that appointed them, but there isn’t a particularly Liberal or Labor (Oz’s two main political parties) way of effectively running the Department of Health or Road or Agriculture. Assuming they do the job well there is every reason to expect they will retain their position if there is a government change, though this is trending away.
The Australian Federal government is (accurately IMHO) referred to as Washminister. A solid Westminister base with a Washington slice on top. We like to think the best of both.
… but there isn’t a particularly Liberal or Labor (Oz’s two main political parties) way of effectively ruining the Department of Health or Road or Agriculture …
Strangely, either one works for the sense you’re trying to convey.
Can it include making America “not America”? Locally, most of us are okay and we’re not out shooting our neighbors despite having Harris or Trump flags. We get into trouble nationally because we all want to force the superiority of our local notions on all of you horrible people that live somewhere else and don’t do things the right way. People like to pretend that we’re a single nation, and we’re not.
So, you know – stop doing that.
I don’t mean re-forming the country under a new Articles of Confederation with 50 states, but something both less radical and more radical based on our internal nations. For example, the nation that might be formed from Michigan, Wisconsin, maybe Minnesota, probably the part of NY that’s not NYC, maybe parts of New England… we’ve got a lot more in common than Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, which might form their own nation.
Seven to ten of these national regions become countries. And there’s no reason we can’t form a single currency a la Europe, have open borders, have shared product standards, etc. We simply stop trying to own each other.
I like federalism and see no compelling reason to redraw the map of State lines (which we can already do under the current Constitution, anyway).
Obviously the Electoral College needs to go. I see no reason why we need both a Senate and a House of Representatives.
On balance, I think a parliamentary system would probably be best for our hyper-polarized country. If parties can’t work together, and it takes the President plus both Houses of Congress to get anything done, and neither party is able to consistently win that trifecta, then nothing ever gets done and we have gridlock. Might be better to just let the party that won the last Congressional elections do whatever they want, and then take the credit/blame for it at the next election.
I’m a fan of federalism as well, and I’m not sure how we’d do federalism without an upper and lower legislative house. The Senate’s entire function is to give voice to the states as equals, while the House is there to represent the people.
The smaller states would get run over roughshod by the larger cities, never mind states. I mean, the top 23 metro areas in the country all individually have larger populations than the bottom four states (ND, AK, VT, WY) combined.
I maintain that getting rid of the House cap of 435 members and apportioning reps based on the population of the smallest state would go a long way, and so would something like either abolishing the Electoral College, or if not that, electing electors by district, rather than statewide all-or-nothing.
I really think the biggest challenges we face aren’t structural, but informational. Specifically the fact that in today’s America, the debate is about what the truth is, not about what to do about it. The other main one is that partisans have drawn the lines along very hard to budge lines- religion, race, urban/rural, and social class, and tied people’s identities in those things to their political identity.
If we’re dreaming, let’s dream big.
Man: I told you! We’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune! We’re taking
turns to act as a sort of executive-officer-for-the-week–
Arthur: (uninterested) Yes…
Man: But all the decisions of that officer 'ave to be ratified at a
special bi-weekly meeting–
Arthur: (perturbed) Yes I see!
Man: By a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs–
Slightly more seriously, the nation-state and empires have had their chance and can be written off as failed experiments. The collapse will likely be slow, like the collapse of the Roman empires, but if we survive, it will be in small, federated groupings
Do you mean the Congress members who represent single district states like Alaska or Wyoming? The people in those districts are still being assigned a district based on where they live. The only difference, which I see as a trivial one, is that they happen to live in a district which encompasses the entire state.
Are you saying that everyone would vote on a single Congressional ballot and the four hundred and thirty-five people who get the most votes get elected to Congress?
The first problem that occurs to me with such a plan is the number of names on that ballot. You’d have every person running for Congress anywhere in the country on the list. You’d need a minimum of four hundred and thirty-five people and you’d be more likely to end up with thousands of names on the ballot.
I also question how many people would end up on the final list of the top four hundred and thirty-five. You’d probably have the first hundred names or so being people that have national recognition. But by the time you got down to the guy who’s four hundredth on the list, he may have only received a few dozen votes. You’d end up electing people because they have big families.
Which points to another potential problem. The fact that every candidate is seeking votes from every voter in the country means that only candidates who have the means to run national campaigns would get the name recognition they need to gather votes. Congress would be filled with millionaires and lobbyist fronts. And Taylor Swift.
No, more like we’d vote for some number by district, and then there would be either at-large national congressmen (i.e. you’d have an election for Congress At-large #1 or something like that), or possibly state-level at-large seats.
That’s how a lot of cities do it- they’ll have X number of geographical districts for councilmen, and then Y number of at-large councilmen elected at-large (i.e. everyone in the city can vote for those seats).
The reason I asked how your plan differed is because at-large voting has been problematic in the past.
My plan would have the same amount of Congress members we have now and an equal amount of Congressional districts. Each district would have candidates running to represent that district. The voters would cast a ballot for the candidate of their choice. The candidate who receives the most votes gets elected as the representative.
In other words, this is how we’re doing it now.
The difference in my plan is that people are not assigned to a district based on where they live. People would be free to choose any one district and then cast their votes in that district.
Not to hijack, but that was true in eras marked by scarcity. We have, though admittedly may lose to environmental collapse, post-scarcity productive capacity. Thus empires and nations have lost that relevance. So dare to dream big, I say!
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