With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.
If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.
Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
...more anti-democratic and blatant than anointing Kamala the Democratic nominee without a primary process?
Do they have any choice, really? Referendum voting is terrible, and often saddles legislatures with impossible choices. People are in general pretty happy to increase spending and cut taxes forever, and the process is inevitably infected by special interest groups looking for ways to manipulate a gullible electorate into false consensus building.
Admittedly, I have a much bigger problem with "power grabs" than with "anti-democratic." As someone once apocryphally said--the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.
So here's the language voters see, and I've bolded the most problematic parts:
The impression is clear: a voter who trusts the descriptions to be accurate would get the impression that the initiative process is currently weak, and that the legislature doesn't have to follow ballot initiative intent. In reality, the exact opposite is true!
Again I note that the issue is not that there was a few ballot initiatives that failed miserably. Most of the ones that make it to the ballot at least in Utah are typically just fine or even good -- the amendment that made them mad was literally an anti-gerrymandering one, which most all regular people agree is a good idea. It would be something else entirely if there were any cases of actual disasters or actual foreign influence (even proponents admitted this had never happened).
More options
Context Copy link
I don't understand this complaint. The nominee is formally selected by convention, and has been since the 1830s. Primaries played no role in the selection of delegates prior to 1972; prior to then most states didn't even have them, and the ones that existed were mere "beauty contests" to demonstrate voter preference to the actual delegates. There was a brief period when Democratic delegates were bound to the candidate they had been selected for unless the candidate formally released them, but that hasn't been the case since 1984. When Biden dropped out of the race, the same delegates who were selected in the primaries were the ones who participated in the convention. They could have voted for anybody, but nobody besides Kamala made any serious play for the nomination.
If Donald Trump's assassination attempt the Saturday before the convention had been successful, do you seriously think that the Republicans would have postponed the convention so they could hold anything remotely resembling new primaries in all 50 states? As presumptive vice-presidential nominee and with Biden's endorsement, at least Kamala was an obvious choice. The GOP didn't have this luxury, and Nikki Haley, Ron Desantis, and anyone Trump had talked to about possibly being vice president would have all been jockeying for position. You're also talking about a party that's still hanging on to a caucus system that nobody outside of the relevant states seems to understand.
You get that it's not 1972, right?
Do you really not question why literally no-one in the Democratic Party has addressed this issue by going on to CNN and saying "What gives? The Party decides the nominee, not the voters; why do you all care so much how badly we're rat-fucking you?"
Voters expect the parties to put forth the candidates they voted on, not whoever they selected behind the scenes. This isn't "let's get together and decide the nominee behind closed doors in a cigar smoked room" anymore.
More options
Context Copy link
Sure, those are all very pragmatic reasons to do undemocratic things.
That's just my point, though. There are a great many reasons to not fret if the democratic process of referendum elections gets disrupted.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A legislative veto is one thing but rewriting the referendum is just ridiculous.
Legislatures are usually the ones proposing spending related referenda anyway IME, so it's kind of a case of "stop hitting yourself".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link