Comment on Cheeto devouring his nation
n1ck_n4m3@lemmy.world 1 week ago
If we ever have another elected president, I hope that one of their first acts after undoing literally everything that the orange menace has done is to replace every picture of trump in any government building with this.
Liz@midwest.social 1 week ago
Gonna need fundamental change to make the president less powerful and make it so that no one party ever holds a majority in Congress ever again. The first would follow the second, so we should be pushing for something like Sequential Proportional Approval Voting for every legislature we got.
Xande@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Start with reforming the ways your elections are held. To the rest of the world it seems like a 250 years old system to keep those with money in power. I thought the american revolution was held to get lost of a king and his henchmen?
Liz@midwest.social 1 week ago
You’re going to have to get more specific if you want a response beyond “yeah man, it is 250 years old.”
Xande@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
First, there is this pony express solution called the electoral college. Second, a prove of US citizenship should be all you need to vote. No registering, no voter lists… Going to the nearest ballot with your ID should suffice. Third. Of course you also should have a law that demands people register as a habitant of a village, city, township so they are in the respective “voters”-register. Forth. Make Gerrymandering impossible.
Seriously, there are so many countries that have a working system. Take a peek and ise what’s working for others. Don’t be like Germany, where working solutions are getting dismissed in favor of half baked shit some incompetent party friends suggest and that in the end take 5 times more time to work and cost 4 times more (a.k.a. filling those party friends coffers)
Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
He’s probably talking about the electoral college, and likely supports abolishing it in favor of a direct election which would mostly just shift the epmhasis away from the largest states that are close to flipping over to emphasizing a handful of the largest cities.
There’s actually a bill that’s made the rounds to several states that makes it so that once enough states (read a number equaling half plus 1 electoral votes) pass a similar law they will all switch over to assigning their electors based on the national popular vote rather than what they’re state does. Unsurprisingly, California and New York jumped on this, as did some smaller solid blue states that are willing to hitch their wagon to “whatever California wants” going forward, but it’s probably never going to actually take effect because if it could get to that point because if it could then we wouldn’t be worrying about the GOP winning another election for the foreseeable future.
Or they aren’t a fan of House apportionment. Or both. Though electoral college apportionment and house apportionment are related, so…
If they’re from the EU, I’d have a question for them: Do you feel like Germany isn’t given remotely enough power by the EU parliament, or that Malta has ridiculously too much to throw around? Because it’s literally the same problem - if you try to represent people with a fixed number of seats apportioned between territories, and you try to minimize the mean difference in voters/representative, and there are a couple of territories that just blow the curve on each end that’s what happens.
Still think merging the Dakotas and creating Montoming (merging Montana and Wyoming) is a good idea… Maybe go whole hog and if your state gets one House seat and is adjacent to a state with one House seat, you get merged to be one state from here on out. Where multiple options present, join the ones with the largest shared land border. Repeat until no examples remain, recalculate House seats and do it again if necessary. It probably won’t help California much just because of how much CA blows the population curve, but it would likely push the states with the worst population/representative ratio up by one. Should probably pull out the math and see.
Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
Not a fan of SPAV, in part for the same reasons I’m not a fan of STAR:
I get that the goal is apparently to make every state elect a split legislature/congressmen by making so that if any seats are even vaguely competitive the parties will essentially be forced to take turns.
Liz@midwest.social 1 week ago
While this complaint is technically true for SPAV, the likelihood that a popular candidate would fail to win a seat because everyone thought they were too popular is just… Not gonna happen. We already know from real-world AV elections that voters largely prefer to vote honestly, there’s no reason to think they would get more strategic when it gets harder to figure out the optimal strategy.
This is a problem inherit to nearly all systems designed to produce proportional results. I honestly can’t think of a worthwhile system that doesn’t have this problem. Anyway, the goal is not to make the parties take turns. It’s to make it possible for minor parties to win seats in the legislature. In the end, no single party would ever have a controlling majority, and they would be forced to form coalitions to pass legislation.
Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
In plain AV, voting honestly is the optimal strategy - there’s no incentive to vote any other way. It’s not for SPAV. And yes, strategic voting in SPAV is harder to figure out than strategic voting in FPTP, but it’s far from impossible - basically you don’t vote for a popular candidate you support so your vote for other candidates counts for more, relying on the assumption that enough other people will vote for the popular candidate you support to allow them to win anyways.