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naraburns  nihil supernum  3d ago (text post)   25572 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.

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The thing about Florida is that due to the incentives down there, they actually by and large have very competent and well paid people working at the county level.

Unfortunately that's not true in the vast majority of states. For most places the human capital operating the local government offices, even and especially the election offices, is pretty damn low quality.

Can you go into some more detail about what the incentives are in Florida and how they lead to this result? I'd love to learn more.

A few things:

  • Counties in FL get to create charters, essentially being able to pass laws in their own county
  • More positions are elected than others states including tax assessors
  • The independent county commissioners and special districts have a lot more autonomy than in most states
  • Florida has a bunch of retirees and just a lot of money, lol

I think I bundle your first three points under "more local authority", where I presume the argument is that more local authority means more important local elections, meaning better vetted/better quality candidates. I am sympathetic to this. However, it doesn't seem sufficient. My guess is that if one brought more local authority to other states, they might get better quality local officials, but it's not clear that they would actually execute toward this vision. My further guess is that in order to get the amount of uniformity they seem to have, there would have to be significant state-level carrots/sticks.

So, I guess my question is, what is the long pole in the tent? What carrots/sticks did the State of Florida use to get the local officials to execute? If we brought just those carrots/sticks to another state, would local officials just be too incompetent to execute? If we just brought more local authority and got more capable local officials, would they just not all care to execute in a similar fashion? Or are either sufficient? If we had another state use the same carrots/sticks, would the local officials grudgingly get it done? If we brought more local authority and got more capable local officials, would they just execute in a competent distributed fashion? Or do you truly need both, otherwise it's a hopeless cause?

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