Claincy Posted November 16, 2016 Report Share Posted November 16, 2016 Just to make sure my I'm not giving the wrong impression of my overall view of America's political system based on a couple of aspects of it: I do think America has one of the better systems around, I also think there are a couple of problems it has that are done better in some other versions of democracy. But I by no means think any of these other systems are perfect either I personally think that given all our flaws a benevolent dictatorship is theoretically the best form of government, but there is no way to consistently get the 1 in a million (or 1 in a billion) person you need sitting on the throne for that to work well. So I definitely agree that given the world and culture we live in democracy is the best option we have 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkness Ascendant Posted November 16, 2016 Report Share Posted November 16, 2016 3 hours ago, Claincy said: Just to make sure my I'm not giving the wrong impression of my overall view of America's political system based on a couple of aspects of it: I do think America has one of the better systems around, I also think there are a couple of problems it has that are done better in some other versions of democracy. But I by no means think any of these other systems are perfect either I personally think that given all our flaws a benevolent dictatorship is theoretically the best form of government, but there is no way to consistently get the 1 in a million (or 1 in a billion) person you need sitting on the throne for that to work well. So I definitely agree that given the world and culture we live in democracy is the best option we have I will rule the world one day. For the benefit of humanity of course. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kaymyth Posted November 16, 2016 Author Report Share Posted November 16, 2016 18 hours ago, Claincy said: Just to make sure my I'm not giving the wrong impression of my overall view of America's political system based on a couple of aspects of it: I do think America has one of the better systems around, I also think there are a couple of problems it has that are done better in some other versions of democracy. But I by no means think any of these other systems are perfect either I personally think that given all our flaws a benevolent dictatorship is theoretically the best form of government, but there is no way to consistently get the 1 in a million (or 1 in a billion) person you need sitting on the throne for that to work well. So I definitely agree that given the world and culture we live in democracy is the best option we have Vote Havelock Vetinari! 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aeromancer Posted November 16, 2016 Report Share Posted November 16, 2016 That I can actually agree with. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Erunion Posted November 16, 2016 Report Share Posted November 16, 2016 @aeromancer - I actually think the electoral college is a good thing! It gives the whole country a voice! I just think first past the post is a bad method of choosing the electoral college. The fact that the whole state goes one way or another (seriously! If there's 50 electoral votes in a state, why can't 20 go to one candidate and 30 to another? Why should all 50 go to the same candidate?) is a problem. Furthermore, first past the post means that any third party or independent vote is wasted. Single transferable vote, or any voting system that gives multiple options (as detailed in the seriously fantastic video series @Claincy posted) would be a FAR better way of choosing the electoral college. In the same way, I'm a Canadian who typically votes for one of the two big parties in Canadian parliamentary politics. Having said that, I also acknowledged that FPTP (feep-teep?) is a terrible system. It marginalizes any party save the big two, squelches out independents and makes it so that the big two don't need to work to earn our votes. FPTP marginalized third party voters (i makes it so that someone who doesn't line up with either party has to choose the lesser of two evils, or not vote), and stifles political innovation. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kaymyth Posted November 17, 2016 Author Report Share Posted November 17, 2016 (edited) 3 hours ago, Erunion said: @aeromancer - I actually think the electoral college is a good thing! It gives the whole country a voice! I just think first past the post is a bad method of choosing the electoral college. The fact that the whole state goes one way or another (seriously! If there's 50 electoral votes in a state, why can't 20 go to one candidate and 30 to another? Why should all 50 go to the same candidate?) is a problem. Furthermore, first past the post means that any third party or independent vote is wasted. Single transferable vote, or any voting system that gives multiple options (as detailed in the seriously fantastic video series @Claincy posted) would be a FAR better way of choosing the electoral college. See, this is my problem right here. I tend to vote one way, but my state consistently goes to the majority of the other. Right now, my presidential* vote literally counts for nothing. It's extremely frustrating. While I'd prefer a change to a straight-up popular vote, I'd take a consistent proportional allocation of Electoral College votes as a reasonable compromise. *Downticket, at least, counts for something. Which, don't get me wrong, is really, really important. But in presidential elections I might as well be writing my vote on a napkin and tossing into the nearest beer glass. Edited November 17, 2016 by Kaymyth 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jondesu Posted November 17, 2016 Report Share Posted November 17, 2016 @Erunion, yeah, I can agree with that, I think. Incidentally, my impression is that Trump might actually have won by more this time if that was the case. He wouldn't have lost votes in many states (the swing states, but it wouldn't have been all of them), and he'd have gained a bunch in states like California and New York that just sent all theirs to Clinton. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aeromancer Posted November 17, 2016 Report Share Posted November 17, 2016 (edited) 47 minutes ago, Jondesu said: yeah, I can agree with that, I think. Incidentally, my impression is that Trump might actually have won by more this time if that was the case. He wouldn't have lost votes in many states (the swing states, but it wouldn't have been all of them), and he'd have gained a bunch in states like California and New York that just sent all theirs to Clinton. Um, actually, if you directly converted the Electoral College votes to popular votes percentages, it ends up with no clear majority and then the election gets thrown to the House of Reps. (I have a longer bit about this in the Rogue Admins thread somewhere around page 216, but you'd have to go into the black zone of the election aftermath to find that.) Edited November 17, 2016 by aeromancer Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mashadar Mistborn Posted November 17, 2016 Report Share Posted November 17, 2016 8 hours ago, Kaymyth said: Vote Havelock Vetinari! Why can I only upvote once? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jondesu Posted November 17, 2016 Report Share Posted November 17, 2016 (edited) 1 hour ago, aeromancer said: Um, actually, if you directly converted the Electoral College votes to popular votes percentages, it ends up with no clear majority and then the election gets thrown to the House of Reps. (I have a longer bit about this in the Rogue Admins thread somewhere around page 216, but you'd have to go into the black zone of the election aftermath to find that.) Except it doesn't when it's still being converted within the states to electoral votes. It might not work out like I'm saying, but there are very few states that are all blue, and a number that are almost all red. If the popular votes cast for Clinton had all come from a few states, she'd only get the portions of those states' electoral votes, but the ones that are almost always completely red would go to Trump. It's a matter of where the votes are coming from, not strictly the popular vote numbers, even when it would seem to be translated directly into the electors. Edit: I'm thinking of this map. That system should actually still help account for the population compressed into the cities that tends to vote for the Democrats, and provide representation for the counties/states that usually vote Republican. Edited November 17, 2016 by Jondesu 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Erunion Posted November 17, 2016 Report Share Posted November 17, 2016 55 minutes ago, Jondesu said: Except it doesn't when it's still being converted within the states to electoral votes. It might not work out like I'm saying, but there are very few states that are all blue, and a number that are almost all red. If the popular votes cast for Clinton had all come from a few states, she'd only get the portions of those states' electoral votes, but the ones that are almost always completely red would go to Trump. It's a matter of where the votes are coming from, not strictly the popular vote numbers, even when it would seem to be translated directly into the electors. Edit: I'm thinking of this map. That system should actually still help account for the population compressed into the cities that tends to vote for the Democrats, and provide representation for the counties/states that usually vote Republican. That looks to be closer to a Westminster style parliamentary map (what Canada/Britain have), where each small region votes for their local representative (in our case, a member of parliament. In your case, it would be a member of the electoral college). That system, while good, still suffers from problems with FPTP. Switching to a single transferable vote system or to multi member representation would both greatly help, while still giving the local regions a chance to choose their own representative! I do want to make this clear though: the USA has had a recent controversial election. That has brought this issue to the forefront of our minds. HOWEVER, this is an ongoing issue in Canada, the USA, and most any other FPTP based electoral system. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
little wilson Posted November 17, 2016 Report Share Posted November 17, 2016 I completely agree with @Erunion. The Electoral College is a good idea. I'm in full support of keeping the EC (though I want to comment that the United States is not a democracy. It's a democratic republic. Democracy is very much about majority rule, and therefore, the EC doesn't work with a democracy. Popular vote would be what a democracy would actually use. But as people already stated, popular vote would mean that a few areas (like California and New York) would rule over everyone else). The problem is First Past the Post. FPTP is a terrible way of divvying it out. Care to know why? Let me demonstrate. For this example, we will use Florida's election results: Let's say that every single person who voted third party would prefer Clinton to Trump, but they don't really like Clinton, either, so they voted third party. (Please note that I am not saying that voting third party is a wasted vote or that voting third party means that they voted for Trump or anything of that ridiculous nature.) In FPTP, their preference doesn't matter. All that matters is the one single vote they placed on the one single candidate they could vote for. So because Trump took a higher percentage of the population than Clinton did, Trump wins all 29 electoral votes. But in STV (single transferable vote), all of those voters would be able to rank their choices, and as their preferred candidate loses, their vote can at least go somewhere else that is working against their least preferred option. In this case, Trump. In STV, the 3.2% of the vote that voted third party eventually ends up on Clinton, bumping her over 50%, and she takes the state. Why should the state go to Trump when over 50% of the state didn't actually want him? Just because they split their vote out among other candidates doesn't change the fact that they still don't want him as president, and they would prefer any other candidate on the field to him. Heck, get enough of a split with third parties, and you could have someone win a state with less that 30 or 40% of the vote. As it is, this election, Trump had a higher percentage of votes in New Hampshire, a state he lost, than he did in Utah, a state he won. 47.2% of the population in NH voted for Trump while only 45.9% of Utah voted for him. Yet he won in Utah because he had the highest percentage. Even though over half the state really didn't want him. And trust me, they really didn't want him. Utah is historically the reddest state in the nation. If Utahns had wanted a President Trump, he would've taken far more than 45.9% of the vote. But he didn't, because that's how much Utahns didn't want to vote for him. Don't believe me? Here's the margin shift from the 2012 election to this one (NY Times): Ignore the red shift back east and look at that blue shift from within Utah (and eastern Idaho, for that matter). The areas with the largest shift are those with the highest concentration of LDS voters. But LDS people are historically very conservative and therefore vote red. But that's not what happened this election, and it wasn't entirely because of McMullin, though he had a large hand in it (since I'm pretty sure most of the LDS population breathed a sigh of relief when he entered and they could vote with their conscience). It was because they really, really didn't want a person who discriminates and persecutes based on religion as the president of the country. LDS people know all about persecution (read up on the Mormon Extermination Order, which is every bit as bad as it sounds), and they don't really like to support people who will persecute others for similar reasons, regardless of religion. So no, Utah didn't want Trump. But he still won the state. I don't support a switch to the popular vote, because I completely understand what the electoral college is for. I find it ironic that so many people who are supposedly all for inclusivity and listening to the minorities are now the very people trying to get rid of the electoral college, which is there to make sure minorities have their voices heard and prevent majority rule. I don't mind if the electorates are split up on proportional basis either--though I think I would prefer if they were still allotted in a bulk sum. What I do care about is that the candidate who wins a state was the candidate that the majority of that state wanted/supported. Meaning that they had over 50% of the vote. Because if it's less than 50%, you have no idea what those who voted third party would prefer in FPTP, and their votes and their opinions matter as well. And don't say that they shouldn't be voting third party then, because that's not a solution. The two party system is screwed up beyond belief and is a major contributing factor to how much hate there is based on ideological differences. You get two people of differing political opinions together, and they're highly unlikely to talk civilly to each other. Worse, if you apply for a job and the hiring agent is of a differing political party than you and they know yours, that hiring agent (regardless of party) is more likely to discriminate and chose someone of their own political party. Just because of politics. The only way to fix that is to get other ideologies involved. And that's through third parties. You can't get third parties elected if you're not going to vote for them, so no: a third party vote is not a wasted vote. We just need to put a system in place that allows third party voters to rank the candidates so they can continue to vote third party and not have to worry about someone they hate getting elected when they could've prevented it. Or for people who would prefer to vote third party but feel they can't right now to be able to do so and not feel like they're just throwing away their vote. FPTP is outdated and terrible. But as Kaymyth already mentioned (in a different thread), a change in the voting process isn't going to happen until we get more third parties into Congress, which means getting more states to switch to a preferential voting system on the downticket. FPTP is in the Constitution and it would take an Amendment to change to something far more practical, and an Amendment like that is never going to pass Congress right now. It might pass a vote by the people. But not Congress. For the same reason term limits will also never pass in Congress, even though I'm nearly certain most people in the country would prefer term limits on Congressmen. But that's another can of worms. 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Erunion Posted November 17, 2016 Report Share Posted November 17, 2016 @little wilson thanks! And very well put! First past the post is fundamentally broken, and needs to be changed. It removes third party voices, forces us into a two party system. This shuts a lot of people out of having a voice, and leads to a harsh, bitter political divide. However, I think we've hijacked this thread. Could the political discussion be moved to a different thread? Mods? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Magestar Posted November 17, 2016 Report Share Posted November 17, 2016 Oooo. Is that a thing? Can you split topics? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
little wilson Posted November 18, 2016 Report Share Posted November 18, 2016 Yes, but I'm not sure how wise it would be to start a political thread right after this election. The political discussion in Rogue Admins got a little heated there and while we're usually pretty good about controversial topics, I think it would be better to wait until this all dies down to create a dedicated politics thread. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Magestar Posted November 18, 2016 Report Share Posted November 18, 2016 (edited) That's probably a good idea. I was just wondering. Truly, the Mods have unlimited wisdom to go with their unlimited power. Edited November 18, 2016 by Magestar Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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