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Schadrach

@ Schadrach @lemmy.sdf.org

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2 yr. ago

  • Large Majority of Americans Want to End Electoral College

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  • rending toward moderation encourages extremism and obstructionism, because you get more leverage on the center from the edges.

    No, you don't. What you're thinking of is a consequence of runoff elections (including instant runoff) that doesn't apply to preference voting. Preference voting functionally works to blunt the extremes down, unless you have a sufficiently large base radicalized to be you or nothing but then if a majority is dead set on you or nothing that base was going to win regardless of the electoral system.

    Have you read Project 2025? As an American, that shit is terrifying, and the idea that we should find a middle ground with Christian nationalists is abhorrent.

    Except an approval vote wouldn't be a vote to find a middle ground on every issue in Project 2025. The idea that Trump or any other Heritage Foundation stooge is a moderate candidate that's likely to get enough votes to win in an approval vote system where they wouldn't also win under FPTP or ranked choice or STAR is frankly absurd.

  • Large Majority of Americans Want to End Electoral College

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  • Gore won. If we had completed counting the ballots in Florida, however they were counted, Gore won.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jan/29/uselections2000.usa

    (Published 8 days after the Bush inauguration)

    The problem there wasn’t popular vs. electoral college. The problem was Democrats are spineless and refuse to fight. “When they go low, we go high” and all that.

    There were recounts beforehand. Didn't change the result. The last recount, the one that got interrupted by the injunction and killed by SCOTUS was of a handful of specific counties and counted under a different standard for over- and under-votes than the rest of the state.

    If it had been completed, Bush would still have won. According to some media outlets doing research on the topic, had the entire state been recounted under the standard Gore wanted to use for that handful of places, Gore might have won. Some surveys done after the fact also suggested Gore could have won but surveys aren't votes, it's why we don't just let news media do a poll and decide the president that way.

    The SCOTUS decision leaned on two things: Election deadlines are enforceable and using different rules to count votes depending on which district you are in violates Equal Protection. They killed the last recount because it violated equal protection and a version of it that wouldn't could not possibly have been completed before the deadline (about 2 hours after they released the opinion).

    The logic behind Bush v Gore is why Trump switched from launching lawsuit after lawsuit in 2020 to bloviating and whining and hoping for a coup starting at about mid December. He'll do the same this year if he loses - he'll launch any lawsuit he thinks might have a ghost of a chance until we reach election deadlines then incessantly bloviate in a vain attempt to foment rebellion.

  • Large Majority of Americans Want to End Electoral College

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  • because it would do away with swing states, red voters stuck in blue states, and blue voters stuck in red states.

    ...and replace it with the election being won based primarily on turnout in California. Like seriously, the last few times a candidate won the electoral college but lost the popular vote it was a case where their margin in California was larger than their margin nationally. As in across the other 49 states more people voted for the person who won the electoral college, and California by itself was responsible for the swing to the other direction. Because California is just so ridiculously big compared to the other states.

  • Large Majority of Americans Want to End Electoral College

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  • Or the interstate voting compact which just needs a couple more states.

    Of course, it's already got every state that benefits from it being passed, and a few more that signed on but only benefit so long as their preferences are always in line with California. Which collectively isn't enough for it to go active.

    Now you've got to convince states that will both lose power and routinely get results out of line with their preferences to sign onto the thing that will do that.

    ...and once it goes active it will go to the courts where the argument will be whether as an interstate compact it has to be federally approved or if the state's right to assign their electors as they please trumps that.

  • Large Majority of Americans Want to End Electoral College

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  • how does approval voting allow for spoilers? The experts that study election systems consider it eliminated under approval voting. It’s literally impossible to be a spoiler, because there’s nothing to spoil.

    I suspect he's thinking of it's tendency to trend towards moderates. Like say 60% strongly prefer A, 30% strongly prefer C, but many supporters for either would also be OK with B. Under a lot of ranked choice and similar systems, B has no chance and A definitely wins but under approval if enough A and C voters also tick the box for B then B will win, even if B was only the top choice for a tiny minority because they were "good enough" for enough people.

  • Large Majority of Americans Want to End Electoral College

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  • The goal of approval voting isn't to pick the candidate the thinnest plurality are the most ecstatic about, but rather to pick the candidate the largest majority consider acceptable. It trends towards moderates by design.

  • Large Majority of Americans Want to End Electoral College

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  • You’re not going to like the people campaigning on it, though.

    Spoilers: It’s the Spoiler Candidates

    ...because the Dems and GOP benefit from the current system. Any move away from FPTP harms them, so they aren't going to support it and any other party is a "spoiler candidate" because of how FPTP works.

  • Large Majority of Americans Want to End Electoral College

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  • Approval voting, not ranked choice. Easier to explain, solves the same problems at least as well and most voting machines already support it.

    Combine it with every state assigning their electors in the same fashion as Maine and you're most of the way to what people want without needing to get 38 states and 2/3 of Congress to agree to an amendment. Just simple majorities in individual state legislatures that can be done piecemeal.

  • Large Majority of Americans Want to End Electoral College

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  • This is because California just blows the curve. If California either didn't exist or was chopped into a few pieces the numbers would look dramatically better. Likewise for merging the Dakotas or Montana and Wyoming on the other end.

    The method used to apportion the House is designed to minimize the average difference in Representatives/capita between states.

    But yeah, any system in which California exists and states like Alaska or Wyoming have any meaningful power at all is going to result in California being under represented per capita.

    This is functionally the same as someone in the EU complaining that Germany doesn't have remotely enough power and Luxembourg and Malta have far too much, except that the EU parliament doesn't have as broad power as Congress and you can leave the EU.

  • Large Majority of Americans Want to End Electoral College

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  • Doesn't matter. Ending the electoral college would require an amendment, and amendments require 3/4 of states to approve them. Abolishing the electoral college benefits California and the smallest states that expect to always side with California no matter what, which doesn't get you to the 38 states required.

  • Large Majority of Americans Want to End Electoral College

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  • Which would be replaced with "Can the Democrat win California by a large enough margin?"

    Which was literally the case when people complain about Clinton winning the popular vote in 2016 - across the 49 states that aren't California more people voted for Trump, but she won California by such a large margin that she won the popular vote because of California alone. Same thing in 2000, where Gore's popular vote lead was smaller than his margin in CA.

  • Selective rage

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  • And also don't forget the very light-skinned black woman who couldn't play Cleopatra because Cleopatra wasn't black. (How do we know? We don't? Cool. Cool cool cool.)

    What's known of her ancestry is mostly Macedonia Greek with some Persian and Sogdian Iranian descent. What's left would probably either have been more of the same or north African, which still isn't black. Her coinage (which she would have approved her depiction on) and her busts that are considered most likely to be accurate (because they agree with the coinage) depict her as Greek, so she at least primarily thought of herself as a Greek.

    A very light skinned black woman is about the darkest she hypothetically might have been based on what we know of her lineage. Something closer to half Greek and half Arab is probably closer.

  • Selective rage

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  • Trace her back to her origins, and she's literally based on a Danish folktale. I can guarantee you no one in Denmark when the story first was told was thinking of her as black.

    But then I think all of those examples were bad and should never have been cast that way. A black Anne Boleyn is exactly as bad a choice as a white Mansa Musa, for example.

  • A dramatic rise in pregnant women dying in Texas after abortion ban

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  • For a more interesting question, why did it go down for everyone except white women, and increased for white women? That's weird enough that it feels like there's a reason, but I have no clue what it might be.

  • Wait a minute, we've been going about this all the wrong way!

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  • It's to point out that Isreal is capable of causing less collateral damage in Gaza but chooses not to.

    That comes down to how often Hamas orders things that can reasonably have small bombs put inside them on a large scale and that Hamas are expected to have on their person's most of the time, how secure their supply lines are, how paranoid they are about looking for that kind of thing, that sort of thing. It involves a lot more moving parts and rare opportunities than just dropping some bombs.

  • Wait a minute, we've been going about this all the wrong way!

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  • Yeah dude. "Only."' You're right though, I guess Israel really has raised the bar when it comes to indiscriminate murder of civilians. Those are rookie numbers.

    When your enemy disperses themselves among the civilian population?

    This killed way less civilians than a traditional bombing that would have got the same Hezbollah fighters would have.

  • Republicans love DEI

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  • We could break Texas up too.

    Texas can break Texas up any time it wants, into no more than 5 pieces. Part of the act making it a state uniquely gives it this power. It could be fought and argued that to do so would require approval of Congress, but the counter argument is that the bill granting it statehood including that is essentially pre-approval.

  • Sometimes the grass is greener

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  • In the same way a picture of a pilot taken before they got their pilots licence is still a picture of a pilot

    Except you don't do that unless you're talking about the person in the present context and comparing to the old one. Getting a pilots license or some other certification doesn't make you always have had been that. A picture of a three year old playing with blocks is not a picture of a pilot, even if twenty years later they would get a pilot's license. But it might be a picture of Bob, who later on would become a pilot.

  • Republicans love DEI

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  • It's not that land gets a votes, it's that the States get votes. The original notion was that the House represents the People and the Senate represents the States. It's why Senators were originally appointed by each state, but the House was always elected.

    Because the original vision under the Constitution was a much weaker federal government and states being mostly independent, but that ship long ago sailed and bolted on a rocket booster after the civil war.