USian Mid-term elections - Here we go again!

[Farm Boy]

I think he was saying they definitely get a vote and a choice on whether or not to use it, and this might be preferable to actively attempts to coerce everyone to vote? It makes a sort of sense, the political machines did make voting without consideration a practical aspect of life. They weren't great things.

Determining who is smart enough is something different and looks more like Jim Crow.

 

[schlaufuchs]

Voting isn’t about the smartest people picking the best outcome you dingdong.

I’ve never had to show id to vote here in the US either. You just walk to a polling place and give your name and they cross you off the roll. As is constantly noted, voter fraud basically never happens. Mainly because it’s a horsehockyload of effort for relatively low effect on outcomes. If you wanted to fudge with the outcomes then you’re better off tampering during counts, handoffs, certification, or with ballot design.

 

[Farm Boy]

No, but that also doesn't flow from the post. Illinois made voting day a holiday. I approve. I am, however, going to need to be sold on the concept that people who don't want to vote or don't care about voting are depriving us.

 

[Lexicus]

Likely controversial opinion but I do not think high voter turnout, taken on its own merits, is necessarily a good thing. Mathematically, half the population is of below average intelligence and I'm not convinced average intelligence is too impressive either. A lot of dumb people vote, often against their own interests. Too often it seems elections are decided by ignorant and/or uninformed voters. Not looking to cast aspersions at people on this forum who vote, just my take on high voter turnout.

For reference, I do not vote.

A lot of dumb people post too, and tell on themselves

 

[João III]

So as supposed to investing in education, deradicalising partisan or extremist rhetoric in mainstream parties (i.e. the Overton window), etc . . . your solution is "everyone I think isn't smart enough doesn't get a vote"?

What if you were deemed as not being smart enough, in the hypothetical scenario this were employed where you live?

"So as supposed to investing in education, deradicalising partisan or extremist rhetoric in mainstream parties (i.e. the Overton window), etc . . ."
Never said I was against any of this in my post.

"your solution is "everyone I think isn't smart enough doesn't get a vote"?"
Again, never said anything about not allowing people to vote in my post. Please don't hurt yourself from leaping to so many conclusions.

"What if you were deemed as not being smart enough, in the hypothetical scenario this were employed where you live?"
Well I already don't vote (something I did say in my post) as I believe voting legitimizes the oppression of the state. And I'm not even sure what scenario you're talking about considering it's one you've made up based on your own assumptions. Never said I was against the concept of voting or democracy, just that I don't necessarily agree with "high voter turnout=good".

Voting isn’t about the smartest people picking the best outcome you dingdong.

If this was directed at me, then again, it's not what I said in my post. Don't be a dingdong, you're not a dingdong.

A lot of dumb people post too, and tell on themselves

Some people are so dumb, they only know how to respond with insults

 

[Gori the Grey]

Not voting is a vote. It says, "I'd support either of the two." Any winning candidate can consider themself to have received all the votes they got, plus all the uncast votes.

 

[Gorbles]

Never said I was against any of this in my post.

If your issue is "too many people are voting and this leads to less desirable outcomes because people aren't smart enough to vote for the right things" (paraphrasing), then yes, you are. The suggestions I outlined can help lead to maximal voter engagement. They raise turnout (and the quality of voter decisions). It fixes the problems you were complaining about. Are you therefore saying you support these suggestions?

Again, never said anything about not allowing people to vote in my post. Please don't hurt yourself from leaping to so many conclusions.

Speaking of responding with insults. Bit unnecessary, don't you think? I don't think my post was at all unreasonable.

As for not allowing people to vote, this is implicit with "high turnout = good". Doubly so with "people can be dumb and vote against their own interests". If you're going to say something, don't immediately try and backtrack around the issue, even if you intentionally gave yourself semantic wiggle room to do so. It's not a good look. If you believe "mathematically half the population are below-average intelligence" and that "high turnout" is not necessarily "good", then at least one of your ideal scenarios involves people who are "dumb" not being allowed to vote, assuming the end goal is having better results from participating in democracy.

However, I didn't predict the next line, because it's not something I'd reasonably assume of anyone participating in a discussion about voting (considering you didn't lead with this, either):

Well I already don't vote (something I did say in my post) as I believe voting legitimizes the oppression of the state.

This explains a lot, actually. Would have been useful for you to say upfront. I don't agree in the slightest, but it at least explains why you'd wander into a thread about voter engagement and try to argue why high turnout is bad from an "intelligence" point of view. It also disproves your response where you claim you weren't against my suggestions, because my suggestions directly support said "oppression". So I'll be very interested in your answer to the question in my first paragraph at the top of this post.

Arguably, people who don't vote (in a system where voting impacts your quality of life, etc), are the ones acting against their own interests. I appreciate voting doesn't always materially map to some kind of result (I live in a constituency where my vote will literally never matter in terms of the local elections), but as a general principle, voting in a democracy is important for said democracy to, well, function.

edited a bit for clarify around voter engagement - education doesn't necessarily map to "ooh i must vote", but in general I'd imagine it correlates with seeing the need to do so

 

[Bamspeedy]

And what if the place doesn't have a barbecue onsite!!??

Mustn't be enough sausages for sale at polling places lol

I was going to say this is a completely foreign concept to Americans, but there are a few random times it happens:

The Long, Hungry Process of Voting

Pizza at the Polls is one of several efforts feeding voters at their polling places during early voting and Election Day

www.eater.com

Technically, efforts like World Central Kitchen’s aren’t specifically or exclusively for voters: Rewarding voters with discounts or food quid pro quo is illegal when federal candidates are on the ballot. Accordingly, generally, these kinds of freebies are advertised as being for everyone in the general vicinity, whether or not they cast a ballot.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Likely controversial opinion but I do not think high voter turnout, taken on its own merits, is necessarily a good thing. Mathematically, half the population is of below average intelligence and I'm not convinced average intelligence is too impressive either. A lot of dumb people vote, often against their own interests. Too often it seems elections are decided by ignorant and/or uninformed voters. Not looking to cast aspersions at people on this forum who vote, just my take on high voter turnout.

For reference, I do not vote.

I don't disagree with the observation, but I agree with @Gorbles and others that it's the education that's the factor there, and not the voting. Here in the U.S. the Republican Party has been taking a hammer to education for decades. I think it's partly because they recognize that their [stuff] stinks, and they need an uninformed and misinformed electorate. It's not an accident that American voters are so often poorly informed. It's deliberate. Americans aren't particularly dumb, we're just misled. And of course it's not peculiarly American. I'm sure I've noted before that attacking education and the press is just about mandatory for any authoritarian movement. Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, North Korea, take your pick. One constant is that they simply cannot have the people well-informed, educated, and knowledgeable. And merely withholding and suppressing information isn't enough; actively disseminating misinformation and propaganda is a requirement, because people aren't naturally dumb enough for these movements to succeed, they have to work at it.

Not voting is a vote. It says, "I'd support either of the two." Any winning candidate can consider themself to have received all the votes they got, plus all the uncast votes.

I agree. I've felt this way for years myself. A non-vote is a vote for whomever ends up winning.

 

[Lexicus]

Some people are so dumb, they only know how to respond with insults

Well, better to insult one person than half of all people. And better to be dumb than to be the sort of person who thinks IQ is intelligence, or that it's bad for people they consider beneath themselves to vote.

I'm reminded of William Buckley, one of the biggest *******s in modern American history, who in debate with James Baldwin said the problem is not that too few "Negroes" vote, but that too many whites do.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Well, better to insult one person than half of all people. And better to be dumb than the sort of person who thinks IQ is intelligence, or that it's bad for people they consider beneath themselves to vote.

I'm reminded of William Buckley, one of the biggest *******s in modern American history, who in debate with James Baldwin said the problem is not that too few "Negroes" vote, but that too many whites do.

Right, voter suppression is critical (for them) too. I remember being struck momentarily unconscious when I heard a guy on the radio this past Summer say that "voting is supposed to be hard. It's what our boys died for." This wasn't a politician or analyst, it was just a "man on the street" type of thing. Fortunately I was sitting down, so I didn't have far to fall when I passed out from the concussive blast of stupidity that came out of my radio.

 

[Farm Boy]

I don't disagree with the observation, but I agree with @Gorbles and others that it's the education that's the factor there, and not the voting. Here in the U.S. the Republican Party has been taking a hammer to education for decades. I think it's partly because they recognize that their [stuff] stinks, and they need an uninformed and misinformed electorate. It's not an accident that American voters are so often poorly informed. It's deliberate. Americans aren't particularly dumb, we're just misled. And of course it's not peculiarly American. I'm sure I've noted before that attacking education and the press is just about mandatory for any authoritarian movement. Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, North Korea, take your pick. One constant is that they simply cannot have the people well-informed, educated, and knowledgeable. And merely withholding and suppressing information isn't enough; actively disseminating misinformation and propaganda is a requirement, because people aren't naturally dumb enough for these movements to succeed, they have to work at it.

You should look at my education tax rates and tell me that again. It doesn't work on the same margins when you work in some bigass city with a huge economic base to tax from.

 

[EgonSpengler]

You should look at my education tax rates and tell me that again. It doesn't work on the same margins when you work in some bigass city with a huge economic base to tax from.

I don't know what that has to do with what I wrote. Sorry. If you're asking me to provide some evidence, I don't really have the time, but it's not hard to find. Open almost any newspaper on any given day and you can read about people on the American Right banning books from school libraries, getting riled up about teaching kids science & history, and literally starting fistfights in schoolboard meetings over what "the libs" are teaching children. It's just about every freakin' day. And it's been like that my entire life (though admittedly, it certainly feels like it's gotten worse lately). I think Justice Scalia actually wrote into a SCOTUS opinion that children aren't entitled to a good education. I can't remember the name of the case. iirc, it had to do with two schools in Texas that were just about next door to one another, one was well-funded and the other was not. I guess I'm not sure if any of that is germane to what you wrote, but there it is anyway. And fwiw, I think funding public education out of local property taxes is stupid.

EDIT: Actually, I think education being funded out of local taxes might have been the crux of the case of the two schools in Texas. Scalia's opinion, iirc, was basically, "kids aren't entitled to a good education. If you want your kids to be well-educated, stop being so poor, ya donkeys." I'm paraphasing, but I think that was the gist, as I remember it.

 

[E.man]

I'm actually on the side of asking for a bit more checks before voting compared to what the US is currently doing, but that can only be your position if you're also in favor of before doing that making election day a national holiday (or just putting it on a sunday like normal countries do), and adding thousands (tens of thousands ?) of polling stations across the US. Then you can expect people to vote on election day.

Yes, make it *accessable*.... and have a 'Democracy Sausage ' like we do in Oz

 

[Farm Boy]

I don't know what that has to do with what I wrote. Sorry. If you're asking me to provide some evidence, I don't really have the time, but it's not hard to find. Open almost any newspaper on any given day and you can read about people on the American Right banning books from school libraries, getting riled up about teaching kids science & history, and literally starting fistfights in schoolboard meetings over what "the libs" are teaching children. It's just about every freakin' day. And it's been like that my entire life (though admittedly, it certainly feels like it's gotten worse lately). I think Justice Scalia actually wrote into a SCOTUS opinion that children aren't entitled to a good education. I can't remember the name of the case. iirc, it had to do with two schools in Texas that were just about next door to one another, one was well-funded and the other was not. I guess I'm not sure if any of that is germane to what you wrote, but there it is anyway. And fwiw, I think funding public education out of local property taxes is stupid.

EDIT: Actually, I think education being funded out of local taxes might have been the crux of the case of the two schools in Texas. Scalia's opinion, iirc, was basically, "kids aren't entitled to a good education. If you want your kids to be well-educated, stop being so poor, ya donkeys." I'm paraphasing, but I think that was the gist, as I remember it.

I pay quadruple the rate for education that my friend up in the People's Republic of Minnesota pays, in a blue district, in a state with notoriously high property taxes so that there isn't a state income tax. Which we definitely also have. It's a country of how many millions? Do you sit through school board meetings? They're boring. They're petty. Like most local government. But you do want them that way. The alternative is nobody shows up and nobody cares. If there wasn't some story about some idiot doing something in a school board meeting every day, then journalism would be failing hard. I read a lot of stupid crap out of Chicago and see it in the news too. "Teachers are underpaid" for one, that's simpleminded(from that area). About on level for somebody that surrounds themselves with 8 year olds. Some definitely are, and I'm certain that if you look around Nebraska it probably won't take long to find some places where they're underpaid. Or Washington DC, or St. Louis, or wherever. Largely a product of tax base, like you mentioned. Is the Supreme Court the governing body that should be determining the details of school funding? Is that a comparable situation to Brown v Board of Education?

 

[E.man]

We don't have a national ID in Australia either (we are also a federation so the main photo ID, drivers licenses, are state IDs). When I go and vote I just tell them my name and address and they cross me off. In between elections the electoral commission works constantly to keep the roll updated with everyone's name and address.

At elections we have postal voting and all day early in-person voting for multiple weeks. On election day there's provisional/declaration votes if you're not able to be confirmed on the roll, there's interstate voting on election day at many booths if you're outside your state. If you're outside your electorate but inside your state there's absent voting at every polling place on election day.

You also don't need to go to a particular assigned polling station to do ordinary voting, you can ordinary vote any polling place in your district on the day. I don't know why so many countries assign people an exact place they have to vote, that seems constricting. (And what if the place doesn't have a barbecue onsite!!??)

It's an administrative capacity thing. Get a single national electoral roll that is easy to enroll in, and is automatically updated from tax, drivers licence, medicare etc data. Whatever's available. Letting every state and county run things themselves is seemingly terrible for good access to enrollment and ballots.

If everyone accessing the franchise is genuinely an administrative priority, voting can be made something the government bureaucracy works hard to ensure is accessible by every means possible, as easily as possible.

As opposed to enrollment and voting being something blocked by red tape, hostile laws and bad databases. A key problem in the US is passive and active voting and enrollment barriers are so frequently treated as a legitimate political tactic, seemingly to help achieve and maintain minority rule.

Independent electoral commission (AEC) seems so obvious to us but the poor yanks can't seem to work it out.

It might be the 'independent ' part, that means they can't continue gerrymandering and manipulating.

 

[Hygro]

No, but that also doesn't flow from the post. Illinois made voting day a holiday. I approve. I am, however, going to need to be sold on the concept that people who don't want to vote or don't care about voting are depriving us.

It improves crowd wisdom derived outcomes to have more people vote.

 

[E.man]

US educaction is funded out of local property taxes !?
Oh Em Gee.
What a great way to promote and sustain elites. And look at the concentration of wealth and power. No wonder people are pissed off and stuff like vote for trump.

 

[Farm Boy]

It improves crowd wisdom derived outcomes to have more people vote.

We aren't owed it. Gets closer to the feel.

 

[El_Machinae]

EDIT: Actually, I think education being funded out of local taxes might have been the crux of the case of the two schools in Texas. Scalia's opinion, iirc, was basically, "kids aren't entitled to a good education. If you want your kids to be well-educated, stop being so poor, ya donkeys." I'm paraphasing, but I think that was the gist, as I remember it.

My suspicion is that he said that they don't have a constitutional right to equal education, which makes it a legislative problem not a court problem. It's not easy, because we've started seeing the courts as a mechanism by which Our Betters descend from On High to correct legislators and force them to actually behave like well-intentioned adults. But the actual intention of the courts is to clarify laws that can't possibly be clarified sufficiently well during the legislative process. Americans are in deep trouble, because 'Activist Judges' was recognized as part of the winning game by the Right, and so a minority of the population foisted judges onto the populace that then forces people to obey rules written by an Elite Few.