Mastodawn

myrmepropagandist Jun 20, 2023

If you are a white leftist and you talk “both parties are the same they are both capitalist” you will loose most of your black audience. I think it ought to be obvious that this isn’t because blackfolks love Democrats (in most cases, there is always someone being simple in any group) —no. it’s because the difference between the parties is material and obvious and these are unstable times.

When I hear such talk I wonder if the speaker is working on voter suppression.

myrmepropagandist Jun 20, 2023

Voting brings me no joy — but I never miss an election out of a kind of stubborn spite. I’ve never heard anyone explain how having all the marginalized and left leaning people not vote would be more annoying to the Democrats and Republicans than if we all do vote— and for the Democrats especially in the primaries.

I also don’t think voting is real political engagement, but it’s kind of the bare minimum. Even if you do a write-in for every office.

stib Jun 20, 2023

@futurebird
So frustrating watching Americans and Poms talk like a two party duopoly is the only possible form of government. It doesn't have to be that way: if you had ranked choice voting (AKA, democracy) you could vote for minor parties first and the least objectionable major party second—without splitting the vote.

myrmepropagandist Jun 20, 2023

@stib That would be interesting. But it would also mean we’d inevitably have an openly fascist “america first” party — Then there would be the coalitions needed to get anything done. I used to think breaking up the two party system would help but I no longer really think it would be any better and in some ways it would be worse.

If we really did universal suffrage we could get pretty far. And make up the difference in local politics.

maco Jun 20, 2023

@futurebird @stib effectively we already _have_ coalitions. Each of the major parties is a coalition. The actual policy preferences within each one vary wildly.

H. Mantegazzi Jun 20, 2023

@maco @futurebird @stib from a place which recently made the switch from one set of rules to the other: what changes isn't the competition between two poles, but who can leader the coalitions.

Before proportionality, it was much harder to have anyone but the more radical centrists (or those who managed to look like it) being considered to the prime positions, and this effectively ended marginalising the more radical-looking voices.

Now, charismatic leadership throws all those regularities away

@hmantegazzi @futurebird @stib oh I support proportional representation and single transfer voting, but I think it’d really only be doable within the party primaries and in local races (at-large seats in county councils for instance) at the moment because we have congressional districts. If we elected a whole state’s reps all in one go and as a single pool, they could be proportioned out, but with the districts it’s one winner for each race.

maco Jun 20, 2023

@hmantegazzi @futurebird @stib

EDIT: I was wrong! Ignore below.

and it would take a *Constitutional amendment* to change from districts to proportional distribution of members.

We still haven’t finished ratifying a Constitutional amendment that was passed in 1972!

➡ [email protected]Jun 20, 2023

@maco @hmantegazzi @futurebird @stib
I think that it's legal to assign House seats in ways that aren't district based. like it should be possible to send half the reps based on geographical districts and the other half elected at-large, right? It would be really interesting to see a state try this out but they are so committed to gerrymandering I don't think they want to.

Dan Wentzel 🏳️‍🌈Jun 20, 2023

@smitten @stib @hmantegazzi @futurebird @maco Yes, states have had at-large seats in the past.

I would prefer to expand the house with 120 additional members from party lists based on their share of the national popular vote which “level” the number of seats won from districts to ensure proportionality.

Germany, New Zealand, and Scotland use this electoral system.
#USpol #USpolitics #politics #FairVote

➡ [email protected]Jun 20, 2023

@danwentzel @maco
I skeptical of any kind of national popular vote because I think it's an imaginary number. In Germany, New Zealand, and Scotland who administers the elections? I would think it's a national body but I'm not aware. Here there's not much of a national election administration, states run their own elections. So it seems misguided to me to just sum up the numbers that are reported by each state. They all have different error bars on how accurate they are, who was included, what kind of voter suppression they do.

I'm hugely in favor of increasing the size of the House though. I would love to see it closer to 2k members. I think it would help with gerrymandering too because it's harder to make distorted shaped districts when you need to create tons of districts, it becomes a higher-resolution map.

H. Mantegazzi Jun 20, 2023

@smitten @danwentzel @maco well, that would be a good first step: getting a national electoral authority.

I won't say that ours is perfect, but it functions really well, and even facing lots of pressures, it has proved itself as functionally impartial. I guess the key is that its board, instead of forcing it to be apolitical, is formed by election experts from all the political parties at once, so all attempts to bias the institution in one direction are caught and stopped right away.

➡ [email protected]Jun 20, 2023

@hmantegazzi @danwentzel @maco
I don't know if it's possible without a bunch of changes to the constitution. Aren't EU elections conducted similarly, where each country runs it their own way and has differences in how they choose MPs?

(edit - just to be clear I'm asking that in a generic sense. I know Chile isn't part of the EU but the EU Parliament seems like a similar setup to the US Congress)

H. Mantegazzi Jun 20, 2023

@smitten @danwentzel @maco the Europarliament is very very different from any kind of national legislative, because it has to deal with the full sovereignty of the member States and the practical lack of a politically determined Executive that could govern and enact their policies.

It's more like an overgrown and permanent international summit, crafting treaties instead of legislating in the proper sense.

➡ [email protected]Jun 20, 2023

@hmantegazzi @danwentzel @maco
this is butting up against my ignorance so I don't want to push too hard. to some degree though, it's the same in the US. member States have sovereignty that can't just be overridden.

maco Jun 20, 2023

@hmantegazzi @smitten @danwentzel now that idea I'm pretty darned sure is unconstitutional, because "running elections is the right of the state" is the basis on which SCOTUS overturned the VRA.

Remember: the 50 states relate to each other and to the federal government much more like how the 27 member states of the EU do, than like a single country. So that's like saying the EU should tell France how to run elections.

H. Mantegazzi Jun 20, 2023

@maco @smitten @danwentzel in my biased opinion as someone from a little country, if you want an union, you have to put up with uniting things.

But again, all of this is basically daydreaming because neither the institutional nor the political conditions exist for any of those changes.

And the original point of this thread stands: in absence of better rules, abstaining is helping the worst people out there.

➡ [email protected]Jun 20, 2023

@hmantegazzi @maco @danwentzel
yeah for sure, I didn't mean to disagree with @futurebird. I agree both-sidesism usually comes from a place of privilege and it ignores serious material consequences. I'm just always looking for some potential solutions that can be done without constitutional amendments. I get frustrated sometimes when people propose sweeping fixes that are nearly impossible, when pressuring state legislatures to make their elections more representative is actually doable (and there's historical examples of it being done).

H. Mantegazzi Jun 20, 2023

@smitten @futurebird @danwentzel @maco considering the experiences in other countries, I would say that the most credible avenue for this changes is if some electoral issue arises that makes both big parties need to reassert their control of the process, which could be rising third parties (like happened in most W. Europe) or an incapacity to control their own candidates (like it happened here in the 1870s).

H. Mantegazzi Jun 20, 2023

@smitten @futurebird @danwentzel @maco Trump could have been that impulse, but because he managed to run successfully from the inside and formed more permanent networks in there, it doesn't seem that the more mainstream Republicans might even attempt to strike a deal with their long-standing opponents, and if they were to do it, the current trial seems like a safer option.

➡ [email protected]Jun 20, 2023

@hmantegazzi @maco Yeah essentially that's the story of the Tea Party which later morphed in Trumpism. They took over the party through primaries mostly. The Dems work a lot harder to stamp out challenges from the left in their primaries.