So you're telling me that, not only are federal elections decided by states rather than votes, but each individual state has their own set of laws to prevent you from appearing in the ballot? And it's somehow still fine because "you can just do a write-in vote"?
My favourite one is the Texan one, where you need to have gotten boatload of votes in order to appear on the ballot.
For a registered political party in a statewide election to gain ballot access, they must either: obtain 5% of the vote in any statewide election; or collect petition signatures equal to 1% of the total votes cast in the preceding election for governor, and must do so by January 2 of the year in which such statewide election is held. An independent candidate for any statewide office must collect petition signatures equal to 1% of the total votes cast for governor, and must do so beginning the day after primary elections are held and complete collection within 60 days thereafter (if runoff elections are held, the window is shortened to beginning the day after runoff elections are held and completed within 30 days thereafter). The petition signature cannot be from anyone who voted in either primary (including runoff), and voters cannot sign multiple petitions (they must sign a petition for one party or candidate only).
In Democratic America, you can only win elections if you've already won the elections.
All that matters is
. Don't think too hard about what happens before or after that!It's kind of the opposite of most Socialist "bottom up" systems, where there are a series of elected councils that go from local areas all the way up to the top. Instead it's a kind of "top down" series of councils where the people at the top need to make sure every group under them are acceptable to them and them alone, the people be damned.
people at the top need to make sure every group under them are acceptable to them and them alone,
And any group deemed unacceptable are bureaucratically excised from the voting process (gerrymandering of districts, elections not being a mandatory holiday, legitimate voters being stricken from the voting rolls with an "oopsie, we wuz trying to delete the deceased voters" excuse, etc).
Bureaucratically at best. At worst it will be full on police raids and arrests. Everything they accuse the USSR of doing, they themselves have done far worse versions of it.
I'd think police raids and arrests are too public, too costly, and too much effort.
Having somebody show up to a polling place, wait in line for an hour, and be told that "oops! can't find you on the rolls" is much easier and cleaner. The voter will either fill out a provisional ballot or walk away (cause they gotta get back to work) and I'm pretty sure provisional ballots wind up getting counted so far after federal elections that its just kinda accepted that a provisional ballot is likely to never be counted.
Mail in ballots are handled differently in each state so its completely possible that you'll find multiple different instructions for if/when/how to get a mail in ballot and not know which one is the correct method for the current election. So that's a way to shave off a percentage of voters.
Didn't answer the postcard asking if you're still at the same address last listed on your voting records in a timely manner? Well, we aren't going to take the time to find out where you live now... deletes entry in voter roll database Hope you didn't just move next door or down the street or get a new PO Box or the postcard didn't get stuck to some other piece of mail and lost in the shuffle.
Haven't updated your photoID to have the correct "expiration date" even though the picture is of you, has your current physical address, and all the poll workers know you by name? Sorry, sir, we cannot allow you to vote today.
Closing a polling place is way cheaper than having police work overtime.
Ah, I was thinking of party organizations being prevented from participating in elections, not individuals or communities. You're right that the police wouldn't arrest people for voting for the wrong person, because it would just be a waste of resources.
Ah... okay, makes a bit more sense now. The COINTELPRO people never actually stop.
“Aren’t you scared Trump will kill democracy??”
Dog what democracy? There are so many policies with mass public support that are nowhere near to getting enacted. If the ruling class just let everyone keep voting but didn’t count the ballots and picked whichever candidate they wanted to win would we even notice? Doubtful
if the accusation is always a confession,
then by contrapositive,
every self-claim is a contradictionThe only people that still call the US a democracy were just told all their lives that it was and never looked into it themselves.
The moment they decided on a representative system was when people should have accepted that it was never a democracy to begin with.
I feel like everything about the US's public perception is only because it is just stuff people state as true without investigating. Everything the US claims to be, or claims to be good at, is just a flat out lie.
This has become more and more apparent to me, especially after reading more theory and history(as best as I can find that doesn't have a Fed/school system bias).
LIke is it crazy sounding to state that the US is actually a Fascist system? On the surface, I totally get why leftists can get hazed for saying that but like, sure we aren't 1940s Nazi Germany but look at how we have taken over the global south, glassed the shit out of Iraq twice for it's oil, and even politically use the same tactics that Fascists in history have used for political discourse. Media has done a great job of building a facade that the US is a functioning democracy when it's closer to a mix between an oligarchy and maybe a quasi-monarchy(if you consider that each president comes from extremely wealthy families with a lot of power, especially over the last 5 or so decades.)
The USA is 100% a fascist dictatorship from the perspective of working class BIPOC both within and without its borders. If you are rich and/or white and cisgender, it’s a representative democracy.
Largest prisoner-per-capita and largest prison population on Earth, felons get disenfranchised from voting, cops kill over 1000 people a year, police are militarized and alienated from the communities they police, and half the presidents in my lifetime lost the popular vote.
Also absolutely agree with you. Forgot the part about losing the popular vote since I've only been paying attention to the real numbers since after Bush Jr.
I think media and basic history education focuses expressly on Nazi Germany as an example of fascism rather than Italy at the same period, because they have essentially the same symbols (in terms of the US stealing the Roman's aesthetic and national myth) and methods for controlling the ballot.
For sure. And like from my memory of history class, since we had to be taught that we were the good guys, we were taught that both Germany and the USSR were equally bad. This is a comparison that gets brought up literally all the time and I know we've all seen in all over social media. But regarding what made Germany fascist, it just always felt very glossed over. I didn't even consider this until I started getting push back from people when I even mentioned that Trump was at least a little bit fashy(plot twist, he's a lot a bit fashy). So like, can't even tell these people that our system is also fascist. Republicans will flatout refuse and Dems for sure won't buy it lol.
I canvassed for the greens once. It isn't so simple as "campaigning" for them, you have to gather thousands upon thousands of signatures for them first before they're really even allowed to run.
They paid $10 per signature, though. Not a bad gig lol. Selling democracy to the highest bidder!
Local GOP keeps posting a canvasing job on indeed and I keep thinking about it lol.
Game the system for my own financial needs because it's fucked anyway.
Of you look at American electoral history, because elections are carried out by States, and you're not voting directly for president, but instead for electors to go to the electoral college, each state had a wildly different way of deciding who these electors ought to be.
Some had elections (property owning white men, only), others had the state legislature decide. If a state chose via the state legislature, they couldn't even agree on how that shit was supposed to work!
And then, early on, there was no expectation that the electors had to abide by the will of the people who selected them. They were free to vote for whoever, like Cardinals picking the fucking Pope!
And any time an election, or anything else for that matter, didn't go the way a state wanted, they would threaten secession from the Union.
It's genuinely shocking that the US didn't immediately fucking implode, given how genuinely batshit its institutions are.
Edit: for more stupidity I just thought of: if the electoral college can't figure it out, how is the president chosen? It's totally vibes based. In 2000, the supreme court just snatched up the ability to do this, effectively stealing an election. But in 1824, when they couldn't decide, it went to the fucking House of Representatives, and they decided!
If you actually wanted to do democracy (and I think one day we will want to do democracy for many if not most things, once the average person is not quite so steeped in false consciousness) you would treat it the same way you would treat a survey. I don't think each and every person voting actually matters, just like you don't have to ask every soul in America to find out, say, America's favorite pie. If only 1% were sampled to vote and it was done so in a reasonably unbiased way, your results would be 99.999% in line with the average American's opinion/wants.
Takeaway: We've been doing studies and combating sample bias for hundreds of years, including before "democracy" began in the US. We know how to do it, it's genuinely never been tried.
If only 1% were sampled to vote and it was done so in a reasonably unbiased way, your results would be 99.999% in line with the average American’s opinion/wants.
you are vastly overstating the accuracy of polling, and making a system with a hugely glaring way to game the system. if you thought the voter suppression in the us is bad now, wait until you see the stupid fucking political games being played with the sampling rules in your proposed system.
My point is that we know what introduces sample bias, that's it. it's already gamed to the point that it's hardly worth talking about.
I don't understand what you're responding to here. Vote by state?
But I also don't see the need to sacrifice accuracy by sampling votes for the sake of "efficiency". The voting method of the USA is a laughing stock here in Brazil, where we usually know the results within 12 hours of the polls closing. Their voting methods aren't inefficient due to some intrinsic property of polling the whole population, they're just doing their best to prevent non-white/working people from voting.
Either way, this post is just complaining about how the USA states have made it effectively impossible for parties like the PSL to compete in elections by denying them ballot access, then turn around and call that democracy. In no way did I intend to imply that voting is equivalent to democracy, which it is not. Voting is just a mechanism for legitimisation of a regime, whether it is democratic or not.
Clearly I'm not communicating this very well, and I only meant it as an off hand comment not a world changing statement. No, I wasn't concerned about efficiency, just pointing out that we know how to do voting, but bourgeois democracy chooses not to.
