Rigging the vote: how the American right is on the way to permanent minority rule

[Worffan101]

Hi! Third party voter here! Your failure to win an election and my vote is your fault, not mine.

Have a great day!

Totally fictitious election ballot:

[ ] I'd like to be tapped on the the head with a reflex hammer.
[ ] I'd like to be tapped on the head with a hydraulic rock breaker operated by Yuri, the drunk trackhoe operator.
[ ] I'm too pure to care.

Totally real election ballot:

[ ] A center-right government with principles in line with the liberal-democratic principles shared by the rest of the developed world.
[ ] A grasping, racist, oligarchy whose inaction on climate change will likely doom human civilization.
[ ] I'm too pure to care.

When there is a clear choice between the status quo and catastrophe, choosing not to choose has dire consequences.

I'm a believer in the principle of "own the consequences of your vote".

So if the choices were:
--Incarnation of racist tantrum-throwing
--Boring and somewhat skeevy but otherwise inoffensive centrist milquetoast
--Libertarian weirdo with no chance
--Aging hippie with no chance
and
--whatever fucking crazy person the Constitution Party ran

and you chose an option that wasn't the boring skeevy milquetoast centrist, you have to live with the fact that you COULD have voted for that boring skeevy centrist and instead we got a President who not only has open contempt for our allies and is in the pocket of our worst geopolitical enemy, but also has open contempt for the constitution.

If you really think that Hillary Clinton was equal to Trump (spoiler alert: She wasn't and isn't), and so voted for Hippie Stein or Aleppo Johnson, you have to live with that choice. Me, I sucked it up and voted for the person most likely to stop Donald Trump from reaching the White House. That was Clinton. I didn't like Clinton as a nominee or a candidate, I voted for Sanders in the primary since he actually gave a shit about the working class, but Clinton was objectively better than Trump simply because she isn't in the pocket of the Russians and doesn't hate the supreme law of the USA.

quite simply, Clinton ran a garbage campaign, wasted an obscene amount of campaign infrastructure, and generally humiliated herself with hubris. She was a weak candidate and a crap campaigner, and her positions are exactly the kind of "nobody wants to admit that Ronald Reagan was a complete monster" neoliberal crap that got us into this mess to begin with--the same positions, mind you, that are the main reason why the Clinton-like wing of the British Labour party is in death throes and an actual socialist is head of the Opposition in Britain.

But if you didn't vote for Clinton, that was de facto half a vote for Trump. And apparently, a hundred thousand or so votes in one state that Clinton was dumb-fuck enough to not campaign in despite the whole fucking rust belt being in an economic death spiral ever since Reagan decided the working class could go fuck themselves, were enough to flip the election towards the walking embodiment of every vice known to man and quite a few that aren't who currently pollutes the White House with his spray-tanned presence and cheap toupee.

[Madner Kami]

I tend to disagree. If the main reason to vote for someone is "Everyone else is worse", then the election is flat out broken and, specifically for an individual's vote, then that voter is not represented in any way, which is bad enough on it's own. Voting for the lesser evil is no choice.

[Yukaphile]

Sanders had that mysterious $10,000,000 dollar donation. He turned away anti-war protesters (how is that being in favor of the little guy, especially given his own past?). He has three homes. He eats like an upper class pig, especially when he boarded that jet to stalk the Pope. And he kept the $27-dollar donation going on long after the primaries and the convention had ended, yet he didn't share a dime with the DNC. He's far from a working class proletariat. He just steals ideas from other people. If you like the ideas, fine. But they're not his own. I don't own three homes. I don't fleece money from other people. Hell, he only released one year of his tax returns while Clinton released thirty. The very same thing people complained about Trump! What is he hiding? Investments in Russia, or that he's not paying all the taxes he should? Point being is that Sanders is worth millions of dollars, and he doesn't give a shit about workers. He pretends to be, but it's a facade. Hell, that slobbish suit. It's pandering. It's coming out in disgusting old clothes that parades around, "See, I'm one of you!" in a very arrogant kind of way. Yeah, that's what he thinks of the lower class peons. That they're bums. I can't stand him.

[CharlesPhipps]

I find it so ironic people think a strong woman President with liberal policies who was wicked smart and would have continued Obama's administration was somehow the "status quo candidate" over the four-plus decade career politician in bed with the NRA, getting nothing done, a beneficiary of white man privilege, etc...

The people who voted for Trump weren't the poor. The poor overwhelmingly voted for Hillary.

Trump just likes to pretend otherwise.

[Admiral X]

I tend to disagree. If the main reason to vote for someone is "Everyone else is worse", then the election is flat out broken and, specifically for an individual's vote, then that voter is not represented in any way, which is bad enough on it's own. Voting for the lesser evil is no choice.

Not to mention that if you vote for the "lesser of two evils" (as you see it), you're still voting for evil.

Personally, I voted for Ron Paul, because I didn't even care for Gary Johnson all that much (the language policing really put me off), so I voted for someone who wasn't even running. Amusingly, one of the electors voted for him, too, so it's almost like my vote counted.

[Yukaphile]

Um... the poor didn't vote for her. The poor voted for her. Missing a word there or two, bud?

[Cassandra]

Come up with strictly geometric methods of dividing up districts and I'll be happy.

Some form of proportional representation is probably the best approach here. Under proportional representation, the district boundaries don't matter too much because additional representatives are used to top up the seat totals of each party such that the numerical allocation of seats in the legislature matches the overall popular vote. PR is very hard to jerrymander but it is still, however, vulnerable to the rest of the gamut of GOP voter suppression tactics.

Also don't blame them for how the electoral college works. Want to get rid of the electoral college? Fine -- we can put an amendment up for a vote. Want to call the rules unfair after the race is over?

The point of the article I posted at the beginning of this thread isn't 2016 but rather that the US has entered a period of democratic crisis where the political system is producing results that are against the wishes of the majority of the population. It is entirely appropriate to point out where and how the system is falling apart--and the electoral college is one of those points.

And I think having two parties polarizes the voters more by more often making us choose between hard-left and hard-right candidates.

Two viable parties is an inherent limit in a first past the post democracy. Multiple viable party systems depend on other voting schemes, such as single transferable vote or proportional representation.

[Yukaphile]

It's ironic Darth Wedgius thinks Hillary Clinton was a hard-left candidate even though she pretty much ran on a centrist campaign. She was basically Obama's third term.

[Yukaphile]

That also assumes Democrats only lean left, Republicans only lean right. When there are conservative Democrats, and "fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republicans."

[Robovski]

Hi! Third party voter here! Your failure to win an election and my vote is your fault, not mine.

Have a great day!

[ ] A center-right government with principles in line with the liberal-democratic principles shared by the rest of the developed world.

LOL