Why are we voting today? Because the system is riddled with antiquated garbage.
It gets far worse than that. The American political system was not designed to support a representative democracy — it’s a shell game to prop up oligarchs, in a way grossly distorted by 18th century slavery. It is a terrible system that is primed to be gamed, and produce contests like the current churning pit of slime. It continues because Americans are educated to believe that the founding fathers were like demigods, that our constitution is a religious document, and that everything about the establishment of our country was noble and well-meaning. None of that is true.
It’s a system that deserves to be burned to the ground and plowed with salt. It’s a false democracy; a special effect, a bad joke. A power-sharing arrangement between unscrupulous demagogues and slavers. The two party system “divide et impera” splits us amongst ourselves, so that we don’t wake up and build guillotines. That we haven’t, yet, is shame enough to bear. But we will, eventually, we will.
I don’t approve of that outcome, largely because I think it will just be an opportunity for a fresh set of oligarchs to wrench the system to their benefit.
I don’t even know how the election will turn out today, but when the process is so terrible, it doesn’t really matter much for the long term future of the United States. One result is definitely better than the other, but I dread the ongoing mess of the next election, which will probably begin in 2017 and drag on for years. Again.
Presidential systems around the world often turn to dictatorships when the president pushes through a new constitution. Belief in the founding myth of the US seems to help prevent that.
But, but… Scott Adams says it’s a great system! http://blog.dilbert.com/post/152811465446/i-dont-want-a-government-job
If Adams is for it, the system is even worse than I thought.
Adams is also an example of why I worry about the chaos of changing our lousy system. He’s a guy who ought to be among the first loaded onto the tumbrils, but you just know that with his money, he’d be driving it.
Same with colossal assholes like Peter Thiel. Upheaval would benefit those positioned to exploit it, and it ain’t us.
I won’t bother with all the spittle-flecked condemnations of the U.S. electoral system, but I will mention that many citizens can and do vote early, and it’s been a significant number this year.
The Most Important Number In This Election
FYI, more early votes have already been cast in Florida than were cast in the entire 2000 election. That’s as clear an indication as you can get that the system isn’t as rotten to the core as claimed.
PZ,
I suspect you are optimistic about when the 2020 race will start. You say it will wait until 2017. I expect it will start in the next week.
Yes, it is the worst system in the world, except for all the other ones X-)
I’m thinking the GOP back-channel folk have already started, so not 2017 but 2016. :(
The Germans are pretty efficient with their current model of democracy.
The number of parlamentarins re directly propotional to the percentage of votes.
There is a minimum treshod -I think it i currently 6% – a party must reach to ge into the Bundestag;
a safety feature to avoid another Weimar repulic with a huge number of mini-parties, making it almost impossible to buil a majority
(that is , ironically,the current Israeli system with tiny religious parties getting a disproportionate influence)
The German parliamentary model is the template for the Scandinavian countries, among others.
I’m not American, but I happen to know why you vote on Tuesday (well, I know how it originated, not so much why on Earth it’s still a thing). The fact that many Americans don’t, and never bothered to find out, scares me.
“antiquated garbage”
The “rotten boroughs” of 18-century Britain is the ideal for the politicians advocating keeping the current US system. :-)
The day after tomorrow is probably the start for the Republican campaign to introduce more voter ID rules.
Re @ 12, it has already started
“North Carolina Boasts Over Voter Suppression.” http://freethoughtblogs.com/affinity/2016/11/07/north-carolina-boasts-over-voter-suppression/
By odd coincidence I was thinking about the origin of voting on Tuesday. I assumed it was something like the video: not on Sunday because god, and a day when the plutocrats are free to vote. Of course, the people who could take a couple of days off work and had the horses and carriages to run into town to vote just happened to be the more affluent in the community.
The good news about voting on Tuesday, is that it’s relatively simple to change…you just need a majority in Congress to enact the legislation, and a president willing to sign. This change does not require changing the Constitution. In fact, the way we vote is already changing. Many states already support “no excuse” mail-in voting, and three hold mail-in only elections. A number of states (e.g. Florida and Georgia) have early in-person voting. So, it wouldn’t take more than an act of Congress to change all Federal elections to run from say Saturday to the following Tuesday. That would probably be enough to tip state and local elections.
Of course, that means getting the modern day plutocrats of both parties to agree to the change.
starfleetdude
I’d say that’s a symptom of the problem. People need early voting because the number of polling places is utterly inadequate, and has gone down for this election, leading to massive queues and waits of literally hours to vote. Oh, and these things disproportionately affect minority neighbourhoods, because they are part of a deliberate effort to suppress the votes of black people and others likely to vote Democrat.
Early voting is helping a lot.
By Tuesday, 40% of the voters had already voted.
Unfortunately this morning I’m not sick of the election but rather sick of people who bitch about the system and yet do nothing except – well – bitch about the system.
Feel free to propose an alternative. Come back with a solution rather than just bitching.
PZ, I love Pharyngula – come here every day. but this post hit a button.
Sorry
jefrir, widespread early voting is a recent phenomenon in U.S. election. Early voting was generally not allowed and it used to be that you were required to state a reason why you needed an absentee ballot to vote. In the past two decades, many states have made it easier to vote before Election Day and it has made it easier for many people to vote when it’s more convenient for them. In Minnesota I know people who have waited for over an hour to vote early, and there have been a record number of early voters in Minnesota this year (over 650,000!), and that’s a great thing for democracy as far as I’m concerned. Some Republican-controlled states like North Carolina and Ohio have made it harder for blacks to vote by closing some polling sites, but the response of many black voters has been to do whatever it takes to vote, and I expect that we’re going to see the courts rule that states cannot do things that amount to discriminating against voters that the GOP doesn’t like.
I see that as always Klein’s answer is that isn’t enough establishment control of the process.
there, there damn it.
It is a profoundly flawed system designed to work around 18th century issues that might have potentially fragmented the early US, and which really needs some major overhauls. Get rid of the two houses of Congress, swap the House for a real proportional representation parliament and the President for a Prime Minister out of that parliament, and give the federal government explicit supremacy over state level governments.
In the mean-time, we need automatic voter registration, vote-by-mail, and a guaranteed access and number of polling stations per number of people. If by some chance Democrats manage to win the House today as well as the Senate and Presidency, that needs to be at the top of their list to get done before the 2018 elections.
in regards to voting and the other important civil rights I would ask a question I once asked a conservative friend of mine.
What loyalty does anyone think someone who is not allowed to participate in society in any meaningful way would have. Why should they even care if they are forced into cycles of grounding poverty, subject to discriminatory law enforcement practices and systematic defacto voter disenfranchisement.
while the fact remains that their is a very sizable portion of the population that is true and the society depends on that population for stability.
He did not answer.
uncle frogy
The topmost question of this OP was “why is voting held on Tuesday”, got a reasonable answer, but never addressed the specification of that Tuesday, being “the first Tues of November, after the first Monday of November?”
WHA? Why does that clause get thrown in? Why not just “First Tuesday of November [full stop]”?
Sorry for not googling it myself, anyone may Google It For Me, thanks.
I suppose everything the government does has to be codified by forming a law stating it, and repealing laws is usually avoided, so setting it into law essentially made it permanent that would require a whole bill-into-law procedure to nullify it into something more reasonable. We know how our Congress gets paid to do Nothing, and what to keep it that way. So good luck.
Let me make a few corrections and add a few things
Really superior parts:
-no registering to vote. You’re automatically registered when you turn 18
-you get your voting cards automatically before any election you’re qualified to vote in.
-polling places. Lots and lots of polling places. 80.000 for roughly 62 million voters. Even with higher voter turn outs than in the USA you hardly ever wait more than a few minutes
-mail voting is easy and pain free (you are supposed to give a reason. “I’m not home” is enough)
Bundestag has a two-tier system: First is proportional representation, second one is direct candidate like British first past the post system. And then in a complicated process this gets balanced so the big parties don’t take it all. Threshold is 5% but not for direct votes.
All in all, people WANT you to vote.
starfleetdude
Did someone hurt your tender feelings by mentioning that your system might not be the most perfect one on planet earth as it befits the greatest nation on god’s earth?
Except for some 11 States that don’t have early voting. Tough luck, eh, especially if travelling to the polling place is almost as long as back in the 18 hundreds?
@ 23
All states allow people to vote early, but in eleven states you have to have an excuse to request an absentee ballot. As you might guess, it’s not that hard to come up with one. What’s more important is how easy it is to vote early, and the trend has been to make the early voting period longer and also make it easier to vote. Took me all of twelve minutes to vote early a week ago at my local city hall.
Three reasons
These days, voting should be a three-day event: Saturday to Monday, with polls open from, say, 6 AM to 10 PM.
Watched this vid recently: https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs
Really eye opening as to why politics is they way it is.
starfleetdude
Didn’t I hear reports about lots of places slashing early voting etc. with the explicit goal to stop the wrong kind of people from voting?
That’S 10 minutes too long.
Look what I found
re 28:
why am I not surprised. [rhetorical]
@23, Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
Why do you think that?
There are two extremes, either a system is 1) the most perfect, or 2) the most imperfect.
A third option is 3) somewhere in between most perfect and most imperfect.
Why do you think saying “maybe not option #1” is what is causing the hurt feelings?
Which of these three options do you think “rotten to the core” suggests? How about “a system that deserves to be burned to the ground and plowed with salt”?
Could it be that the actual cause of the hurt feelings is something more like: “option #2 is true, not #1 or #3”?
Might that be the case? As a logical possibility?
My recommendation as an Australian for you folks in the US:
1) Electoral Seats must not be gerrymandered. Create an independent boundary commission that uses a formula of population and “community of interest” data to set the seat boundaries between elections.
2) Preferential voting so multiple candidates can compete without “splltting tickets”.
3) Compulsory voting so no one can be tricked out of voting or disenfranchised.
4) And for goodness sake make sure the election is on a day off!
My humble opinion and basically just what we do here in Oz.
Brian Pansky
It may have been the words “spittle flecked”.
Man, that was easy
If anyone can read this out loud without getting spittle on their screen, they’re a zombie.
The fact that we’re seeing a huge Hispanic voting turnout shows that some people aren’t yet willing to trade a ballot box for a guillotine IRL. But on the internet, anyone can be a revolutionary!
Me zombie, eats brains.
Don’t worry, you’re safe.
+++
Hey, looks like Trump’s contesting already, claiming Republican votes went to the Dems (source: Tagesschau)
*at the core, not “to” the core.
@32
Huh?
Brian Pansky
Try again when you’re sober and awake. You asked a question, I gave an answer
The talk of guillotines and tumbrils is more than just spittle-flecked. And it’s definitely fucked up.
DanDare:
I don’t know what community of interest data means. It may be a decent idea for elections in which there are districts smaller than the state/national scale, but will probably be translated as gerrymandering.
But that’s not how the presidential elections works anyway. We could have no electoral college and simply have the right to vote. Unless someone’s going to gerrymander parts of the country into Canada or Mexico, that would work just fine. I guess it might work out for those parts even if they did, but I don’t know if Canada or Mexico would take them. We might have to ask first.
No chance of that happening.
Just have more polling stations. Here in the UK, I think I was once 3rd in line; that’s terrible… It takes maybe 30 seconds to obtain your polling card, and another 30 seconds to vote, using a pencil, not a computer. Oh, and we always vote on Thursdays. Count the vote on Friday, ready for Monday morning bright and early for the new Parliament. So simple, so obvious.
Usually it refers to geography. Sometimes a river, a road, a range of hills or a railway line marks a significant boundary between groups. Other times the people who live close to but either side of such a feature have more in common with each other than they do with people who live on the same side as them but further away. There are some towns or other areas where there’s a definite grouping that either wants to be together or would be seriously inconvenienced by being split into what looks like, to an outsider, a more “logical” grouping.
There’s a whole heap of precedent law in Australia where political parties or others have challenged a boundary proposal to redraw. Anyone who wants a list so they can access some of the dreariest legal arguments ever advanced just needs to ask.
@davem #38:
When I was a kid and first realised that elections were all on a Thursday, I thought it was because Thursday was half-day closing*. Then I saw that other towns had half-day closing on Tuesdays or Wednesdays instead. So much for that hypothesis.
* I may be showing my age here.
slithey tove @22
Look at November 2022, for example. The first Tuesday is on the 1st but the first Monday is the 7th.
[sigh]
>40 comments on US election problems in a concentration of so-called progressives, and so far not a peep on campaign financing. Fellow frogs, have you noticed our ambient water temperature lately?
Pierce @42
Indeed. When talk is in regards to a complete system overhaul, I would think campaign finance would, by necessity, be overhauled as well.
In regards to improving the existing system, finance reform would be a first step. In my not a very smart guys opinion, restricting donations to actual people (not corporate entities) would change the game quite a lot.
I agree with #6 Stevendorst and Dan Dare, there are alternatives within democracy to “first past the post’ including what we have in NZ, Mixed Member Proportional which means that local m.p.s can get elected in the old school way, but if any party gets over 5% of the popular vote they get representatives in parliament in that proportion. Therefoe the Alt-Right, the Greens, the Maori all get their voice in parliament. (We don’t have preferential voting in NZ but it wouldn’t be a bad way to go). It has meant I have not had to vote tactically nearly as much.
Ooops meant to say, not #6, but #9, the person explaining German voting, birgerjohannson. Please forgive me, don’t know what I was thinking of
It seems to me that a lot of the problems in the US political system stem from attempts to appease vastly different interests in vastly different states. Indeed, given that your states tend, with a few exceptions, towards firmly Democratic or firmly Republican, the solution strikes me as being to split the country up into several more manageable countries instead.
Why does the United States have to remain united? What benefits does it derive from being huge and unwieldy and stuck having to make so many compromises that it takes an age to get anything done? Apart from being able to gang up, pay out ludicrously high percentages of national revenue on the military and bully foreign powers for their oil, what benefits does being one country get you? Or is this just about tubthumping jingoism and national mythmaking?
I mean, I can see what benefits minorities living in regressive states get. They get some attempt at social progress from their association with less regressive states. Though it drips back the other way too, and vested interests in regressive states can poison the progress made by their more enlightened neighbours (Mormons interfering with California’s equal marriage debate anyone?).
@Gilliel
First, not very cool insincerely speculating over the internet that I am either drunk or not awake.
Yes I know, that is obvious. But I can’t make much sense of your answer, given what I was trying to ask. (Plus, I asked more than one question)
You implied that the person would be upset even if minor little imperfections were mentioned.
And I don’t see how “spittle flecked” made you think that, instead of the alternative:
It seems more likely (to me) that the person was only upset (and used the words “spittle flecked”) because people were saying the system is really really really super awfully flawed (to the point that it needs to be torn down etc.).
Things which might help the US electoral system:
[Context: Australian, and very fond of the Australian system]
1) Bring in preferential counting rather than “first past the post”. Preferential counting, or “instant run-off” as it’s known over there, allows people to register genuine protest votes AND still have a say in the outcome of an electoral race. By numbering your candidates in order of preference (or lack-of-preference – never rule out the positive power of “put the least liked candidate/party last” as a starting point) you get to have your vote count in the election even if you voted for Joe X Nutbar, who happened to get eliminated in the first round of counting.
2) Get your political parties out of the business of controlling the electoral rolls, setting electoral district boundaries, handling voter registration, placing polling places, running the polling places, and counting the votes. Honestly, can you not see how this is open to exploitation? Hand the job over to a government agency where all the staff are required by the terms of their employment contract to be registered as independent voters (if you must have party registration for voters… I mean, seriously?) and where their whole job is basically to run elections fairly and without prejudice toward any of the various sides. (Or if you like, outsource the first few runs of the whole business to the Australian AEC, so we can show you how the job is done…). Yes, you can keep the party scrutineers for the counting side of things, and if necessary, you can have party scrutineers ensuring fairness on other matters (although with that, I’d suggest the classic “X cuts, Y chooses first” system for making decisions).
3) Polling day either becomes a public holiday (if you MUST stick with a Tuesday) or shifts to a Saturday. Allow early voting for people who have commitments which mean they aren’t able to get to the polls while they’re open.
4) People who are imprisoned lose their political franchise while they are imprisoned, but get it back when they’ve completed their sentence. If their sentence is for three years or less, they don’t lose their franchise – and the election management body is required to ensure there’s a polling booth open in each prison where there are eligible voters. This business of “one prison sentence means you never vote again” is seriously discriminatory toward minority voters.
5) Require polling places to be distributed by voter numbers – as in one polling place per X voters, where X is a number over 100 but lower than 100,000. The more voters in a district, the more polling places there should be available for them to visit. This should have the effect of either reducing wait times, or at least making the wait times more consistent. (Oh, and again, the system for decision making should be “X gives the number, Y chooses the number of polling places” – because that way the party which is primarily rural can’t attempt to disenfranchise urban voters by choosing a low number of polling places, and the party which is primarily urban can’t attempt to disenfranchise rural voters by choosing a high number of voters. Or they can each do both, and cut off their own noses to spite their faces).
6) Campaigning limited to 8 weeks, maximum, from “no candidates” to “election day today!”. In the era of television, instantaneous communication and the internet, there is NO FUCKING NEED WHATSOEVER for a US Presidential campaign to be stretched out over the course of THE BETTER PART OF TWO GODSDAMNED YEARS. For the sake of all you hold holy, will you kindly stop boring the pants off everyone on the planet, drop the traditional codswallop, and take advantage of the technology you folks largely invented!
PZ,
So apropos guillotines, you’re talking about how people “ought to be loaded onto tumbrils” …
What the fuck?
People who are imprisoned lose their political franchise while they are imprisoned, but get it back when they’ve completed their sentence
Canada and lots of other countries have suffrage be an inalienable right, no matter what, even for murderers and convicted rapists. It’s much simpler that way.
*Giliell
I meant to check the spelling, but apparently never did.