Meh. "Getting stuff done" is relative. I rather like that they're accomplishing so little. Saves the taxpayers a ton of money if they can't agree on what to waste money on.
I am certainly not as well versed in political workings as some of you, but what I understand to be one of the biggest issues is that there is no accountability of the people we put in office. Once someone is elected, they are thrown into these generic groupings of "Congress", "The Senate", or "The House". Who knows (except a small handful of people who are highly invested) what your local representative is doing on the floor. They may claim to run on a specific stance, but in actuality, they may be sitting around, counting their dollar bills all day.
And it is our fault for this too. If you were hired to fix cars all day, but your boss was never at work and never knew how many cars needed fixing, wouldn't you sit around and get paid? Maybe I don't understand it enough, but it seems to me that increasing transparency would be a big step to helping to fix our troubles.
Why do you think these people were elected into office in the first place?
Hint: It's not compromise. Everyone says they want political compromise, but they usually mean they want the other side to compromise to their team. The thing is, the other camp wants the same.
The fact of the matter is that these politicians are getting elected to go against the other party. And that's what they're doing.
Yes, just so. The Republicans ran on an explicit platform of opposing Obama, the people who elected them knew about that platform, and they made a conscious decision to support that platform with their votes.
Thus the question before my mind is whether or not the current political situation really reprsents a failure of American democracy. Here are some politicans running on a platform, getting voted in on that platform, and then executing that platform. Sure, the "platform" was to gridlock the legislative process, but evidently it is the case that sufficiently-many voters prefer gridlock to the furtherance of certain of Obama's policies.
And while we're on the subject, n.b. that recent attempts by the executive branch to ignore these voter preferences and bypass the legislative process might also be considered corrosive of American democracy as well. (By my own lights, more corrosive than the gridlock itself.)
The Tea Party is the end result of what had been brewing the Republican Party for decades. Simply excising the Tea Party won't solve the problems with the core beliefs that compose them. And if you don't deal with those issues the Tea Party will disappear back into the base and until they bubble up to the surface again in 20 years.
I agree with your assertion that Tea Party-esque groups are always lurking latent within right-wing parties, and will surface when sufficiently provoked. However, I am curious what specific issues you'd deal with concerning the influence of these latent groups, and how you'd deal with them.
My own opinion is that reactionaries are, well, reacting to the top-down imposition of social policies they oppose. If we lived in a hypothetical US where social policy was put in place bottom-up, then the Tea Partiers could all move to Arizona, where there would be no Obamacare, and they would suddenly find themselves without a hot-button issue to cry about. Of course, bottom-up implementation of policy is a plank in many right-wing platforms to begin with...
Watching videos like this: I feel like our system is just worn out. ~250 years was just the expiration date for our kind of Democracy.
...Okay. New rule: any video that proceeds to lambaste a voting system without explaining whyevery voting systemhas horrificcollections of flaws and it is ultimately a human choice concerning which of these collections of flaws you are willing to accept, should be regarded as propaganda rather than information.
Furthermore, simple majority voting has an interesting virtue which is not mentioned in the video -- once the system has been winnowed down to two parties, May's theorem guarantees that simple majority voting handles that case "correctly." In other words, one of the flaws of simple majority voting (winnowing to two parties) actually acts in such a way as to remedy all the other flaws!
Another deceptive thing about this video is that it mentions some flaws which have nothing to do with choice of voting system, such as "minority rule" (as long as there can only be one king/president ruling over a sufficiently diverse population, there will always be minority rule) and gerrymandering (which can happen in any voting system; districts which are more likely to highly-weight certain candidates can always be found in practice). (Also, a further word in favor of the Founders: they anticipated the problem of "minority rule" and attempted to correct for it by separating governing powers and putting some of them in the hands of a large legislature, which separation is presently being eroded, soo...)
So, bottom line: no matter what voting system is chosen, some snarky cynic with too much time on his hands is always going to be able to make a cute Youtube video with cartoon tigers lambasting that particular system. Call this the No-Voting-Utopia heuristic. And so, no matter what democratic voting system you, Taylor, find yourself in, you will be singing the same dirge.
To be sure, the founders made certain subjective choices regarding the voting system -- choices which, given their lack of sophisticated mathematics, they didn't even realize were subjective. Nevertheless, it has not yet turned out that their choice has been proven "wrong" in any objective sense. So, you've jumped the gun here.
The problem with the supposed flaws of preferential systems is they require small populations of voters who have a deep understanding of the voting - and preferencing - behaviours of other voters. in a vote where the number of voters is in the mid tens to hundreds of thousands - or millions - of people, that's simply not a safe bet. (also, those wikipedia links are largely useless, as they just say the theorums exist, not what the theorums are)
There is rarely* a situation in which a single vote determines the outcome of an election, and that is no more likely in preferential voting than FPP or other non preferential systems. Yes, the possibility of strategic voting exists, but - just ask the english - it exists where you have no preference voting as well. Or, indeed, ask any rep or dem president who has run with a strong third party on their own side. When republicans are motivated to support the campaigns of greens because it makes dems lose, it's a big problem.
Prefential voting (when done correctly) helps ensure that the right candidates are elected. It has bigger issues for multi-member electorates, as the last person elected is often elected essentially at random. But for single member electorates, it's pretty good.
* although we did actually have one in the last australian federal election, where deep in preference counting a single vote distrubtion pushed party A ahead of party B by one vote, which meant further down A green and a random elected instead of a conservative and a random.
(This is, by the way, due to a giant ******* mess in our electoral system around party preferencing which I can get in to if anyone cares; basically you for the senate you can preference yourself, or pick a party and let the party do it, and to do it yourself in most states you have to number 100-200+ boxes)
[quote from="Crashing00 »" url="http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/outside-magic/debate/599338-how-to-get-congress-working-together-again?comment=10"]The problem with the supposed flaws of preferential systems is they require small populations of voters who have a deep understanding of the voting - and preferencing - behaviours of other voters. in a vote where the number of voters is in the mid tens to hundreds of thousands - or millions - of people, that's simply not a safe bet.
It is generally agreed that IRV is more secure than other ranked systems against strategic voting. However, this comes with tradeoffs. For instance, IRV is weak against strategic running: adding irrelevant candidates to the ballot can change the outcome of the election.
(To drum home the point of my previous post, I'm going to repeat that every voting system comes with tradeoffs and the Australian people have chosen to accept a particular set of tradeoffs. Those tradeoffs are not necessarily "right" or "better" than the tradeoffs accepted by another people.)
(also, those wikipedia links are largely useless, as they just say the theorums exist, not what the theorums are)
The links do give the statements of the theorems, and if you follow the sublinks you can get definitions of the subsidiary terms. Wikipedia's subsection on social choice theory is actually very good. I could easily link textbooks or papers on social choice theory, but I think the Wikipedia articles are going to be far more comprehensible to a nonmathematical audience.
There is rarely* a situation in which a single vote determines the outcome of an election, and that is no more likely in preferential voting than FPP or other non preferential systems. Yes, the possibility of strategic voting exists, but - just ask the english - it exists where you have no preference voting as well. Or, indeed, ask any rep or dem president who has run with a strong third party on their own side. When republicans are motivated to support the campaigns of greens because it makes dems lose, it's a big problem.
Is that as big of a problem as, say, Republicans deliberately running a straw-Democrat or third-party candidate in order to affect the vote? Or how about non-monotonicity: increasing the ranking of a candidate on your ballot can actually cause them to lose the election...
I mean, go to the wikipedia page. There are a litany of problems with IRV. What basis is there for thinking that the benefits outweigh the flaws?
Prefential voting (when done correctly) helps ensure that the right candidates are elected. It has bigger issues for multi-member electorates, as the last person elected is often elected essentially at random. But for single member electorates, it's pretty good.
Instant-runoff voting cannot be done "correctly". It has irreparable mathematical flaws. Just like all other voting systems. To knock some more entrails out of the dead horse: the Australian people have made a subjective choice of voting systems in which they accept certain negatives in exchange for certain positives. Whether the positives outweigh the negatives is just not clear to me. (Or to the mathematicians who study social choice, which is a very active area of research in which no definitive conclusion about the best electoral system has ever been found.)
(This is, by the way, due to a giant ******* mess in our electoral system around party preferencing which I can get in to if anyone cares; basically you for the senate you can preference yourself, or pick a party and let the party do it, and to do it yourself in most states you have to number 100-200+ boxes)
Certainly you should care about whether or not your electoral system could be described as a "giant ******* mess" before advocating it as a better system.
(You've also pointed up another flaw of IRV: large ballots (with more than a Dunbar's number worth of candidates or so) are essentially impossible for people to preference-rank rationally.)
In the house of reps, it's all single member electorates. Preferencing (and voting) is mandatory. It works.
The senate is a different kettle of fish. Each state has 12 elected members, and in most elections half are up for re-election, so six. You count up the votes, work out if anyone has more than 1/7+1 votes, elect, distribute. If no-one does, you kick out the lowest numbered person,distribute, and go again.
The problem with the system is that you can either number every box below the line (which, as noted, can be huge), or a single party box above the line. If you do, the party gets to distribute your preferences based on a set list. 95% or more vote above the line, more in bigger states. This does lead to some fairly screwy outcomes.
Can preferences lead to perverse outcomes in which I want B more than A but voting for B causes A to win because C is distributed before A? Sure...but ONLY IF the vast majority of voters preference in that particular manner...in which case the will of the electorate was for A to win.
The flaws those systems mention focus on an *individual voter* getting what they want, which is an inherently circular set of reasoning; the system is bad if I want A but can't get A, but also bad if I can prevent someone who wants B getting B. I mean, gold star.
In the house of reps, it's all single member electorates. Preferencing (and voting) is mandatory. It works.
It works if you are comfortable with the tradeoffs you're making. If you're not, it doesn't. I guess most of the Australian people are, and that's fine. I've no more basis for saying IRV is worse than other systems than you have for saying it's better.
The problem with the system is that you can either number every box below the line (which, as noted, can be huge)
Yes, this is a known flaw of IRV. It has excessive voter complexity; it asks people to provide a rational preference distribution over a set that's too large for most minds to handle.
or a single party box above the line. If you do, the party gets to distribute your preferences based on a set list. 95% or more vote above the line, more in bigger states. This does lead to some fairly screwy outcomes.
This is yet another tradeoff. You're "patching" the flaw in IRV by allowing voters to delegate their preferences to someone else. Unlike the other cases, I don't have an actual mathematical theorem to cite here, but this seems like a terrible idea to me. The cure might well be worse than the disease.
EDIT: In fact I can put my finger on a pretty specific flaw here: this blows the "strategic voting" hole WIDE open. You don't need to plant or bribe a bunch of voters with a specific slate of preferences -- you can strategically manipulate the ordering of off-party candidates your party slate and get a bunch of voters to support your strategy "for free."
Can preferences lead to perverse outcomes in which I want B more than A but voting for B causes A to win because C is distributed before A? Sure...but ONLY IF the vast majority of voters preference in that particular manner...in which case the will of the electorate was for A to win.
No, it's worse than this. IRV is non-monotone, which means that you can have the following situation:
- Two elections, 1 and 2, with the same ballot and constituency.
- In election 1, A wins.
- In election 2, one or more people ranked A higher than they did in election 1, but no one ranked A lower; the total preference for A among the voters strictly increased.
- In election 2, A loses.
So people can increase their preference for a winning candidate and thereby have the person lose. This is not an extreme edge case among candidates that were just going to lose anyway. This is a case where the actual winner of an election can lose another election for the sole reason that more people voted for him.
The flaws those systems mention focus on an *individual voter* getting what they want, which is an inherently circular set of reasoning; the system is bad if I want A but can't get A, but also bad if I can prevent someone who wants B getting B. I mean, gold star.
The flaws concern themselves with whether the voting system reflects the will of the voters. "Will of the voters" is obviously not a well-defined mathematical phrase and as a result there are many different criteria for voting systems. IRV meets some of those criteria and blatantly fails on others. Some people might say that a winner getting more votes and yet losing a subsequent election is an unacceptable perversion of the will of the people. Other people might be cool with that if they get other benefits. I myself am aware of no moral law that says one of these is preferable. I've seen no empirical evidence that societies with preference-ranked voting systems are somehow better or more democratic. All I see when I look at arguments about competing voting systems is yet more irrational partisanship, where people take sides in an issue that is totally unresolved from a scientific standpoint.
No, it's worse than this. IRV is non-monotone, which means that you can have the following situation:
- Two elections, 1 and 2, with the same ballot and constituency.
- In election 1, A wins.
- In election 2, one or more people ranked A higher than they did in election 1, but no one ranked A lower; the total preference for A among the voters strictly increased.
- In election 2, A loses.
Only if you have a situation where, actually, less overall people wanted A to win. A might go from 25 to 30% of primaries and lose - absolutely! But it can *only* happen if they lost a bunch of preferences.
It can only happen that A loses to B if, at the time of voting, if there were exactly 2 candidates, more people would have voted for B than A.
So it might "feel funny" that A lost despite increasing their primary vote, but it's because they didn't actually increase their vote.
People don't lose "because more people voted for them". They lose because they were the less preferred candidate.
Also, and I may not have been clear earlier, but the above the line senate voting was something I was indeed suggesting is a bad implementation.
For the US, it's mostly the parliamentarization of the two party system, being that we have no other parties that can dislodge and force the two big parties into alliances to form a government. This in and of itself keeps a government "doing stuff," but the fundamental philosophy in the US that has encroached here is a "winner takes all system, and screw you if we don't get our way." This begins with Gingrich and the GOP of the 1990's in a winner takes all game to try and usurp power during the Clinton Administration, however Gingrich overroad his power and was eventually defeated. Boehner has better people skills than Gingrich, to quote him "I learned everything in that bar that has made me successful today."
The issue with Boehner and the GoP is the presumption on the role of Congress itself, the party of localism feels that it is the House that should hold the most power and that government has too much power. Yet, through usurping power over time such as inviting Netanyahu to speak undermined traditional presidential authority on foreign affairs. Furthermore, I see as the GoP coalition with a more adept social leader will probably form a stricter alliance to maintain the House in the future for now because of the Gerrymiandering of the states.
I'm not a huge detractor of Boehner as I was with Cantor and the Tea Party, since they were immature and failed to acknowledge what business means. But what the business lobby lacks is a simplistic philosophy based on Jeffersonian idealism, rather than a clear headed understanding of government functions which is inherently Frankin-Madison-Hamilton. The libertarian rejection of people such as Montisquieu with the embrace of some lesser knowns like Mises beckons to some strange ideals about government in general that lack a refined sense of social and economic justice. Callousness within Jeffersonian and limited government tradition creates a situation where a lack of investment into basic research and so forth creates a negative feedback loop. Yet, the entitlement about a war machine for conservatives is something that is truly unJeffersonian in nature.
With that said, I'm disillusioned about the overt points about reducing the size of government rather than right sizing government for the era in which we live. Boehner has quoted himself as saying "Don't judge us by how many laws we pass, but how many laws we repeal." I find that an overly simplistic worldview without an understanding about the role of being a good editor to a larger tradition. Tearing away government is a childish ideology from a person like Jefferson who lived in fear of taxes as a farmer, yet embraced Hamiltonian mechanics whenever it suited his own presidency when he had eight years to kill the bank that he had hated so much in its infancy.
This is why in part embracing not just wholistically Hamilton or Jefferson, really these were only two men in our long western traditions. Why are there fewer Madisonians? Or people who look to Jay? What about Franklin beyond talking about his virtues and maxims? Then there are other people such as MLK and embracing different ideologies from the past like stoicism.
The point is form a pastiche and a greater appreciation and utilization of concepts and ideologies outside of your traditional network to evolve and build your own followers and traditions to the greater western tradition. If everyone is Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian, what effort is there than just using original intent to solve all our problems? That's mostly just a reiteration for the Sola Scriptura tradition that has been able to be sustained only in part because of the democratization of reading and the Gutenburg Press. Which inherently is a luxury, not a natural way to always view human change through centralization vs. decentralization.
Furthermore, business has no ethical foundations within any society, and has been often brought to profit and plunder, there's a reason why the Robber Barons are called Robber Barons. Company Towns existed, and to a portion that crony capitalism exists in part because of weak government and a philosophy of egoism without societal responsibility within the greater civic tradition. This is the error that people like Boehner makes, is that without creating a better ethical tradition for business, not just government, beyond that of "self reliance" there is no tradition to create or refine to leave to the next generation.
It is only through our actions today to build the next century of institutions, to allow the future countries of the world to look back upon us as the Founders did to the ancients and say "this is how we will build our nation." Refining and building, not tearing down and defacing our long federalist tradition is what makes us better than other nations. Failure to do so, invites people to follow the Singapore-Chinese ideal of authoritarian capitalism than the Anglo-American tradition of classical liberalism.
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Life is a beautiful engineer, yet a brutal scientist.
It's seriously that simple. To expect to have a government representing anything but the most extreme views (Which are held by the most politically active in the nation) while having a voting turnout near 35% is simply silly. It isn't partisanship. It isn't the two sides not listening to each other. Those are merely symptoms, the problem is that the American people are lazy and do not vote.
The politicians don't really hold many views, they'll say what keeps them in power, which is dependent upon the constituents, who respond, seemingly always with "Do whatever you want and we'll vote you back in" as we have an incumbency rate in the 90's.
STATISTICS.
All of these "Let's eliminate bad cards" crusades are simply ignorant. And when they start to devolve into "WotC is conspiring to give us crappy cards," they just become embarrassing. MATH is conspiring to give you crappy cards.
Does the partisan Congressional problem really need to be resolved? Aside from possibly national debt, I don't see many issues in need of urgent resolution. Anyway, Congress isn't really dysfunctional. I don't recall which Congressman or woman said this but it was something along the lines of 'Most bills before us are boring and don't garner much debate. Only a small fraction are political hot topics that we fight over.'
In twenty years or so, when the GOP can't win an election anyway due to demographic shifts, that's when we may start to see a real reinvention process.
All the GOP has to do is scrap their anti-immigration agenda and that may be resolved and not even be an issue in 20 years. Many Latino voters will shift Republican. Also, consider that in 20 years the GOP may not need to cater to the Tea Party anymore due to the "demographic shift" that you speak of.
All the GOP has to do is scrap their anti-immigration agenda and that may be resolved and not even be an issue in 20 years. Many Latino voters will shift Republican. Also, consider that in 20 years the GOP may not need to cater to the Tea Party anymore due to the "demographic shift" that you speak of.
What exactly do you mean why scrapping the anti-immigration agenda? No matter what the GOP does they will not able to sufficiently attract minorities.
In 20 years Texas will likely become a blue state, which will mean the GOP will never win another presidential election again. And as the US becomes more heterogeneous after that the GOP as a party will eventually be done for.
If they scrap their anti-immigration agenda they lose one of their big motivational whips though
And its not like the Tea Party wing is going to go along with changing a policy viewpoint to win an election. They have a big focus on ideological purity.
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You can trust me, I work for the government
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And it is our fault for this too. If you were hired to fix cars all day, but your boss was never at work and never knew how many cars needed fixing, wouldn't you sit around and get paid? Maybe I don't understand it enough, but it seems to me that increasing transparency would be a big step to helping to fix our troubles.
The problem with the supposed flaws of preferential systems is they require small populations of voters who have a deep understanding of the voting - and preferencing - behaviours of other voters. in a vote where the number of voters is in the mid tens to hundreds of thousands - or millions - of people, that's simply not a safe bet. (also, those wikipedia links are largely useless, as they just say the theorums exist, not what the theorums are)
There is rarely* a situation in which a single vote determines the outcome of an election, and that is no more likely in preferential voting than FPP or other non preferential systems. Yes, the possibility of strategic voting exists, but - just ask the english - it exists where you have no preference voting as well. Or, indeed, ask any rep or dem president who has run with a strong third party on their own side. When republicans are motivated to support the campaigns of greens because it makes dems lose, it's a big problem.
Prefential voting (when done correctly) helps ensure that the right candidates are elected. It has bigger issues for multi-member electorates, as the last person elected is often elected essentially at random. But for single member electorates, it's pretty good.
* although we did actually have one in the last australian federal election, where deep in preference counting a single vote distrubtion pushed party A ahead of party B by one vote, which meant further down A green and a random elected instead of a conservative and a random.
(This is, by the way, due to a giant ******* mess in our electoral system around party preferencing which I can get in to if anyone cares; basically you for the senate you can preference yourself, or pick a party and let the party do it, and to do it yourself in most states you have to number 100-200+ boxes)
It is generally agreed that IRV is more secure than other ranked systems against strategic voting. However, this comes with tradeoffs. For instance, IRV is weak against strategic running: adding irrelevant candidates to the ballot can change the outcome of the election.
(To drum home the point of my previous post, I'm going to repeat that every voting system comes with tradeoffs and the Australian people have chosen to accept a particular set of tradeoffs. Those tradeoffs are not necessarily "right" or "better" than the tradeoffs accepted by another people.)
The links do give the statements of the theorems, and if you follow the sublinks you can get definitions of the subsidiary terms. Wikipedia's subsection on social choice theory is actually very good. I could easily link textbooks or papers on social choice theory, but I think the Wikipedia articles are going to be far more comprehensible to a nonmathematical audience.
Is that as big of a problem as, say, Republicans deliberately running a straw-Democrat or third-party candidate in order to affect the vote? Or how about non-monotonicity: increasing the ranking of a candidate on your ballot can actually cause them to lose the election...
I mean, go to the wikipedia page. There are a litany of problems with IRV. What basis is there for thinking that the benefits outweigh the flaws?
Instant-runoff voting cannot be done "correctly". It has irreparable mathematical flaws. Just like all other voting systems. To knock some more entrails out of the dead horse: the Australian people have made a subjective choice of voting systems in which they accept certain negatives in exchange for certain positives. Whether the positives outweigh the negatives is just not clear to me. (Or to the mathematicians who study social choice, which is a very active area of research in which no definitive conclusion about the best electoral system has ever been found.)
Certainly you should care about whether or not your electoral system could be described as a "giant ******* mess" before advocating it as a better system.
(You've also pointed up another flaw of IRV: large ballots (with more than a Dunbar's number worth of candidates or so) are essentially impossible for people to preference-rank rationally.)
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
In the house of reps, it's all single member electorates. Preferencing (and voting) is mandatory. It works.
The senate is a different kettle of fish. Each state has 12 elected members, and in most elections half are up for re-election, so six. You count up the votes, work out if anyone has more than 1/7+1 votes, elect, distribute. If no-one does, you kick out the lowest numbered person,distribute, and go again.
The problem with the system is that you can either number every box below the line (which, as noted, can be huge), or a single party box above the line. If you do, the party gets to distribute your preferences based on a set list. 95% or more vote above the line, more in bigger states. This does lead to some fairly screwy outcomes.
Can preferences lead to perverse outcomes in which I want B more than A but voting for B causes A to win because C is distributed before A? Sure...but ONLY IF the vast majority of voters preference in that particular manner...in which case the will of the electorate was for A to win.
The flaws those systems mention focus on an *individual voter* getting what they want, which is an inherently circular set of reasoning; the system is bad if I want A but can't get A, but also bad if I can prevent someone who wants B getting B. I mean, gold star.
It works if you are comfortable with the tradeoffs you're making. If you're not, it doesn't. I guess most of the Australian people are, and that's fine. I've no more basis for saying IRV is worse than other systems than you have for saying it's better.
Yes, this is a known flaw of IRV. It has excessive voter complexity; it asks people to provide a rational preference distribution over a set that's too large for most minds to handle.
This is yet another tradeoff. You're "patching" the flaw in IRV by allowing voters to delegate their preferences to someone else. Unlike the other cases, I don't have an actual mathematical theorem to cite here, but this seems like a terrible idea to me. The cure might well be worse than the disease.
EDIT: In fact I can put my finger on a pretty specific flaw here: this blows the "strategic voting" hole WIDE open. You don't need to plant or bribe a bunch of voters with a specific slate of preferences -- you can strategically manipulate the ordering of off-party candidates your party slate and get a bunch of voters to support your strategy "for free."
No, it's worse than this. IRV is non-monotone, which means that you can have the following situation:
- Two elections, 1 and 2, with the same ballot and constituency.
- In election 1, A wins.
- In election 2, one or more people ranked A higher than they did in election 1, but no one ranked A lower; the total preference for A among the voters strictly increased.
- In election 2, A loses.
So people can increase their preference for a winning candidate and thereby have the person lose. This is not an extreme edge case among candidates that were just going to lose anyway. This is a case where the actual winner of an election can lose another election for the sole reason that more people voted for him.
The flaws concern themselves with whether the voting system reflects the will of the voters. "Will of the voters" is obviously not a well-defined mathematical phrase and as a result there are many different criteria for voting systems. IRV meets some of those criteria and blatantly fails on others. Some people might say that a winner getting more votes and yet losing a subsequent election is an unacceptable perversion of the will of the people. Other people might be cool with that if they get other benefits. I myself am aware of no moral law that says one of these is preferable. I've seen no empirical evidence that societies with preference-ranked voting systems are somehow better or more democratic. All I see when I look at arguments about competing voting systems is yet more irrational partisanship, where people take sides in an issue that is totally unresolved from a scientific standpoint.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Only if you have a situation where, actually, less overall people wanted A to win. A might go from 25 to 30% of primaries and lose - absolutely! But it can *only* happen if they lost a bunch of preferences.
It can only happen that A loses to B if, at the time of voting, if there were exactly 2 candidates, more people would have voted for B than A.
So it might "feel funny" that A lost despite increasing their primary vote, but it's because they didn't actually increase their vote.
People don't lose "because more people voted for them". They lose because they were the less preferred candidate.
Also, and I may not have been clear earlier, but the above the line senate voting was something I was indeed suggesting is a bad implementation.
The issue with Boehner and the GoP is the presumption on the role of Congress itself, the party of localism feels that it is the House that should hold the most power and that government has too much power. Yet, through usurping power over time such as inviting Netanyahu to speak undermined traditional presidential authority on foreign affairs. Furthermore, I see as the GoP coalition with a more adept social leader will probably form a stricter alliance to maintain the House in the future for now because of the Gerrymiandering of the states.
I'm not a huge detractor of Boehner as I was with Cantor and the Tea Party, since they were immature and failed to acknowledge what business means. But what the business lobby lacks is a simplistic philosophy based on Jeffersonian idealism, rather than a clear headed understanding of government functions which is inherently Frankin-Madison-Hamilton. The libertarian rejection of people such as Montisquieu with the embrace of some lesser knowns like Mises beckons to some strange ideals about government in general that lack a refined sense of social and economic justice. Callousness within Jeffersonian and limited government tradition creates a situation where a lack of investment into basic research and so forth creates a negative feedback loop. Yet, the entitlement about a war machine for conservatives is something that is truly unJeffersonian in nature.
With that said, I'm disillusioned about the overt points about reducing the size of government rather than right sizing government for the era in which we live. Boehner has quoted himself as saying "Don't judge us by how many laws we pass, but how many laws we repeal." I find that an overly simplistic worldview without an understanding about the role of being a good editor to a larger tradition. Tearing away government is a childish ideology from a person like Jefferson who lived in fear of taxes as a farmer, yet embraced Hamiltonian mechanics whenever it suited his own presidency when he had eight years to kill the bank that he had hated so much in its infancy.
This is why in part embracing not just wholistically Hamilton or Jefferson, really these were only two men in our long western traditions. Why are there fewer Madisonians? Or people who look to Jay? What about Franklin beyond talking about his virtues and maxims? Then there are other people such as MLK and embracing different ideologies from the past like stoicism.
The point is form a pastiche and a greater appreciation and utilization of concepts and ideologies outside of your traditional network to evolve and build your own followers and traditions to the greater western tradition. If everyone is Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian, what effort is there than just using original intent to solve all our problems? That's mostly just a reiteration for the Sola Scriptura tradition that has been able to be sustained only in part because of the democratization of reading and the Gutenburg Press. Which inherently is a luxury, not a natural way to always view human change through centralization vs. decentralization.
Furthermore, business has no ethical foundations within any society, and has been often brought to profit and plunder, there's a reason why the Robber Barons are called Robber Barons. Company Towns existed, and to a portion that crony capitalism exists in part because of weak government and a philosophy of egoism without societal responsibility within the greater civic tradition. This is the error that people like Boehner makes, is that without creating a better ethical tradition for business, not just government, beyond that of "self reliance" there is no tradition to create or refine to leave to the next generation.
It is only through our actions today to build the next century of institutions, to allow the future countries of the world to look back upon us as the Founders did to the ancients and say "this is how we will build our nation." Refining and building, not tearing down and defacing our long federalist tradition is what makes us better than other nations. Failure to do so, invites people to follow the Singapore-Chinese ideal of authoritarian capitalism than the Anglo-American tradition of classical liberalism.
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It's seriously that simple. To expect to have a government representing anything but the most extreme views (Which are held by the most politically active in the nation) while having a voting turnout near 35% is simply silly. It isn't partisanship. It isn't the two sides not listening to each other. Those are merely symptoms, the problem is that the American people are lazy and do not vote.
The politicians don't really hold many views, they'll say what keeps them in power, which is dependent upon the constituents, who respond, seemingly always with "Do whatever you want and we'll vote you back in" as we have an incumbency rate in the 90's.
All the GOP has to do is scrap their anti-immigration agenda and that may be resolved and not even be an issue in 20 years. Many Latino voters will shift Republican. Also, consider that in 20 years the GOP may not need to cater to the Tea Party anymore due to the "demographic shift" that you speak of.
What exactly do you mean why scrapping the anti-immigration agenda? No matter what the GOP does they will not able to sufficiently attract minorities.
In 20 years Texas will likely become a blue state, which will mean the GOP will never win another presidential election again. And as the US becomes more heterogeneous after that the GOP as a party will eventually be done for.
And its not like the Tea Party wing is going to go along with changing a policy viewpoint to win an election. They have a big focus on ideological purity.