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naraburns  nihil supernum  12d ago (text post)   26776 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

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.

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The voting process should select for higher agency / lower time preference voters. That’s a good thing; those are the people who should have a bigger influence on politics. It’s outside the Overton window to require an IQ test as a precondition of voting, but thankfully it’s still within the Overton window to have some very simple and reasonable measures like, requiring that someone physically travel to a polling place, or requiring that someone procure a mail-in ballot for themselves. Any slight barrier to entry is better than canvassers going door to door and telling people “just sign on the dotted line, please” in order to harvest votes.

Following a discussion with friends about the electoral college last night, I came up with an idea that would select for higher agency / lower time preference voters without venturing into dangerous waters. Basically, if we're not going to have direct election of the president then we should do away with any pretense that we have direct election. My ballot shouldn't say Harris or Trump if I'm really just voting for a predetermined slate of electors to cast the real ballots on my behalf, especially since these real voters are political muckety-mucks whose names aren't even widely publicized. We should get to vote for these people directly, and they should all be selected at-large. If California has 54 electoral votes, then California voters select up to 54 names.

To take things a step further, political parties won't be listed for any of the candidates. You just get names. Running for elector is just like running for any other position; have a certain signature requirement and fee and adjust things enough so the ballot has a reasonable number of names. So when people go to vote they're presented with a ballot on which they have to select numerous candidates from a slate of names without any party identifier. There's already precedence for this; if you vote in off-year elections in Pennsylvania you'll occasionally have to vote in some nonpartisan election for the board of a special district where you have to pick something like 5 names from a list of 20, and unless you really care about the makeup of this board there's a good chance you haven't heard of any of them unless you happen to know them personally. To my knowledge no one has ever complained about this.

Furthermore, the Founding Fathers hated the idea of political parties and would be appalled to discover that they've become a semi-official part of our system of governance. I'm not advocating the abolition of parties, but I don't know why our electoral apparatus needs to provide what is essentially free advertising to people who haven't otherwise paid attention to the election. In my system, electors can advertise who they plan on voting for, and newspapers, the League of Women Voters, and other groups can publish voter guides, and everyone gets full media access. But you have to do a modicum of preparation beyond selecting one of two names that have been pushed on you ad nauseum for the past six months. Some people just won't vote, and others will arbitrarily select names, like many do in the elections I described above. But a sufficient number of actually motivated people will do their research and fill out their ballots, and these are the people who will likely decide the election.

Why all at large and not two at large and one from each district?

The idea is to optimize voting to favor the preferences of the voters who do research on the candidates and make informed decisions, as opposed to voters who turn out for Harris or Trump and then either vote their preferred party the rest of the way down the ticket, arbitrarily pick candidates, or leave the rest of the ballot blank. If you're only voting for one elector per district plus two at-large, it's easy for the parties to narrow in on their preferred candidates and run TV ads reminding you that a vote for Gene is a vote for Trump or whatever, and the uninformed electorate will have an idea of who to vote for. This would still be the case in the smallest states, but as you increase the total number of electors the less oxygen any individual candidate can get. By the time you get to 10 EV states it would be pretty much impossible for anyone to remember all the names based on osmosis alone, and the opportunity for osmosis is limited by the dearth of advertising. Ideally, the number of votes allowed would be based not on available seats but on percentage of the total slate, so that even small states would still have to potentially contend with large numbers of votes. The point is to maximize the amount of noise so the remaining signal comes from people who actually did their homework and are familiar with all of the candidates.

Seeing as the electors do, with few exceptions, respect the preferences of their electorate, I’m not seeing much value.

Why not just ban listing parties on ballots, period? It’s not going to change anything about the top races, but it’ll hit most everything at the state level or below.

For a more drastic (and probably illegal under the VRA) filter, require all ballots to be write-ins. To really get with the zeitgeist, text recognition and counting the vote will be handled by a dedicated AI. We can call it GW.

Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. I have previously argued at some length in favor of abolishing absentee balloting outside of military service.

My claim isn't that 2020 was good, but that it just turns out that the simple model of 2020 has plenty of explanatory power.

I agree with this, but can't put my finger on the principle. It's just a vague sense that universal suffrage is a problem not a solution.

Oh sure. I agree completely. But if we’re stuck with universal suffrage, then the least we can do is require that people actually go to the damn polling place if they want their vote to be counted.

What alternative do you propose to universal suffrage?

Extra votes for my in-group.

Married men, with children born of the marriage get extra votes for their children, provided they're not drawing state benefits.

I think people on this site have made a surprisingly (to me) good case for bringing back property ownership requirements to have the vote. That may not be the best solution (buying a house is not exactly easy depending on where you live), but I do think it's a good idea to require voters to have a vested interest in the long-term success of the country and proof that they are able to contribute positively. I used to think that universal suffrage was an obvious good thing, but I'm not so sure after seeing some discussions on it in the past.

That sounds very interesting. Would you happen to have links to such past discussions?

Unfortunately no, I wish I did.

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