America III: Going Deutsche

[MartyG]

The only wasted vote is an unused one - the notion that if you don't vote for Labour or Tory is wasted is only true if everyone goes along with it - that idea definitely needs to be destroyed. If every voter next time said no, we're voting for the independent candidate this times around, they'd get elected - it's just wrong thinking.

Also, the gutter press has very little coverage at a local level - you might get it at national, i.e., party leaders or where there are (shadow)/cabinet members, but how often do you hear about the vast majority of the 650 MPs in the media? The majority barely get a mention, if ever - and maybe that's actually the problem, if alternative candidates got more coverage, perhaps more people would vote for them - perhaps when people turn up at the voting booth they're surprised to see more than two name :/

[Lebowski]

People would vote for a moldy lemon if it was standing for their party its all way too tribal.

[MartyG]

People would vote for a moldy lemon if it was standing for their party its all way too tribal.

If that were the case then Labour would not have lost 20% of its "red wall" votes, it's not that black and white (or red & blue if you prefer).

[Asura]

People would vote for a moldy lemon if it was standing for their party its all way too tribal.

Yeah... Part of me wonders if people should vote like that "Who should I vote for" website, where it asks you a series of questions, asks you to pick from a set of answers for each, and at the end, it tells you (1) which party is closest to your answers and (2) in which way that party doesn't match your answers, so you can decide if any of those issues are your "wedge issue".

Obviously this would be totally unworkable in practice, in a world where there was a year of argument over the exact wording of the question for the Brexit vote - but I love the concept.

[kryss]

Yeah... Part of me wonders if people should vote like that "Who should I vote for" website, where it asks you a series of questions, asks you to pick from a set of answers for each, and at the end, it tells you (1) which party is closest to your answers and (2) in which way that party doesn't match your answers, so you can decide if any of those issues are your "wedge issue".

Obviously this would be totally unworkable in practice, in a world where there was a year of argument over the exact wording of the question for the Brexit vote - but I love the concept.

I've sadly wondered something similar: you can vote for the candidate/party IF you know where they stand on certain issues. Oh wait, I'd be discriminating against the illiterate*. That is literally the argument that would be put forward.


*still a real problem, not something I'm joking about, put the outrage away.

[Dogg Thang]

Or you could have politicians take an empathy test.



Really though, I do think it's nuts that politicians can be put in charge of things they have absolutely no knowledge of. That has always seemed crazy to me.

[Golgo]

Really though, I do think it's nuts that politicians can be put in charge of things they have absolutely no knowledge of. That has always seemed crazy to me.

That's what the civil service is for: to keep this endless round of incompetents in check though "creative inertia", just like Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister. The alternative to this set-up is technocracy/government by all-powerful experts, aka the Cummings way.

[MartyG]

I've sadly wondered something similar: you can vote for the candidate/party IF you know where they stand on certain issues. Oh wait, I'd be discriminating against the illiterate*. That is literally the argument that would be put forward.


*still a real problem, not something I'm joking about, put the outrage away.

No,you'd be descriminating against people with different political priorities. Maybe some people don't care about certain political issues, or they only care about Brexit or they don't care about any policy issues for that matter - are you saying their vote is worth less because of this?

In an open democracy, for better or for worse, people of all intelligence are allowed to vote - preventing them from voting because they don't meet a certain threshold is really is no different than preventing people from voting because of their ethnicity it's just a different form of oligarchy.

[kryss]

It was never about intelligence, it is about making an informed vote.

[MartyG]

It's meritocracy - you're suggesting people are only allowed a vote if they meet certain criteria - that isn't democracy.

[Dogg Thang]

I love when we tell people what they are suggesting.

A democracy where everything is open to opinion that can fly against fact, science and knowledge and can be manipulated with unaccountable misinformation is, and I am suggesting this, a very poor democracy and one that would warrant serious examination. I do not believe it is impossible to have a form of democracy that embraces informed decisions.

[kryss]

I don't understand how families in the US can support one party or another, and then vehemently hate the other.
Voting for a party/candidate based solely on the fact that your family has voted for them before is utter bollocks, and closer to conditioned loyalty than it is democracy.

Republicans/Democrats? They're just the two biggest cults in the US.

And no, I didn't misspell ****.

[MartyG]

What Kryss described in his post is meritocracy - if you limit who can vote based on certain criteria it ceases to be a democracy by definition.

In principle it sounds like a fair thing to do, people should only vote if they know about political issues, but it's just a form of voter supression and elitism. It's another way to control power and something that can be subverted very easily.

Don't like a particular section of society? Well, keep them uninformed politically and you can preventing them from voting for the "wrong" people.

You might not agree with voting for Johnson simply because that voter likes his hair, but that's their democratic right. Would it be better that people are better informed on political issues? Absolutely, but you don't achieve that be removing people's right to vote - that simply disenfranchises people it doesn't educate them.

The very principle of democracy is that every vote is considered equal regardless of education, ethnicity, sexuality, religious beliefs, political principles or anything else.

Misinformation is an entirely different problem than the enacted political system - it is not the system that is the issue. Misinformation would exist regards of whether it were a communist, socialist, plutocracy, meritocracy or anarchic system - we cannot allow further manipulation by limiting who is allowed to vote based on a particular criteria - it's not perfect, but a democratic system is still better than the alternatives.

[Dogg Thang]

You know there is more than one form of democracy, right Marty? For example, we’re in the America thread. Is that a democracy? Because in the US, not every vote is considered equal due to the electoral college system where a vote in a packed city counts for less than one in a less populated state. Your very principal doesn’t apply there.

[kryss]

So we can agree that the problems right now are misinformation rather than the actual systems in place. The idea is solid, the people who promote/smear the candidates are not. It is an individual's choice who they vote for and how much they do their due diligence.

What I would like to see is an empirical measure of how much a vote has been researched before it is made, but without this affecting any change to the value of the vote. Preserve the idea of democracy, make the individual consider their opinion more deeply.