Not to mention the core parts of the system such as identification are completely outdated.
We should have had ranked choice voting years ago at the very least.
That said, even in open primary states, primary election participation is low outside of presidential contests. I served as a poll worker once for a US House/Senate primary, and my precinct got about 7% turnout, and I'm in an open-primary same-day-registration state.
"Santos ran as a Republican for the United States House of Representatives in New York's 3rd congressional district, against Democratic incumbent Tom Suozzi, launching his campaign in November 2019.[24] Normally, the Nassau County Republican Committee, known for the tight control that its leadership exercises over often competitive races for its nominations, would have discouraged an unknown candidate with such minimal experience. However, Suozzi was expected to win the race easily, and no other candidates had put their names forward."
If you otherwise meet the requirements for the seat--citizen (usually), resident , not a felon--you too can find a ballot line for a contest a party expects to lose.
I should add that I have no idea whether Santos actually was on the primary ballots.
I don't have the data or time offhand, but if you're interested, have a look at ourworldindata.org; they probably have many relevant things.
The effect in California seems to have been to make the state even bluer, but arguably that's because rather than being forced to choose between Republican and Democratic standard bearers, the system returns some advantage to more moderate candidates, just within the field of Democrats (increasingly many of whom were once registered as Republicans). Unless you want to run on stereotypical Republican issues (abortion, religion, etc), your best bet strategically where the electorate is already majority Democratic is to run as a Democrat, regardless of your policies, which is not an option where candidates have to worry about being "primaried".
Ranked-choice is even better, of course, but I think you can see a similar dynamic wrt the candidate pool shifting Democratic.
It’s such a sham and we should move to ranked choice voting, but sadly I don’t think it’ll ever happen with the current political layout.
but e.g. Australia has a great voting system (on all levels from the voting rules to the election day administration), yet they still seem to have fairly screwed up partisan politics.
i think it might improve things but wouldn't help make politics fundamentally better.
Honestly, while I 100% agree that the electoral college and gerrymandering are trash, I feel people do use them as mechanism to avoid dealing with the fact that someone like Trump is just genuinely really popular. Next Tuesday he has a decent shot of being the choice of more than 50% of voting Americans. Ultimately any fair system would still give him the presidency in this case.
If we could somehow "fix" voting (in many or all cases this is a constitutional modification, no simple task), why would we even keep voting at all? Voting's just bad. The things that you and everyone else like about democracy, ironically, have nothing to do with voting. You like the idea that any small child, boy or girl, can grow up to become president. That there is no ruling caste, and so on. That we have peaceful transitions of power from one administration to the next. That there is some sort of time limit on how long one can hold office.
All these things are achievable in a superior system: sortition. Everyone who qualifies (35 and up, no a felon, natural born citizen) has an equal chance at becoming president (similar for other offices). We do 20 or 30 drawings so that if anyone rejects, we go on to the next.
Trying to fix voting when the fundamental flaw with it is that all of us, to the last, is simply not intelligent enough to cast a vote wisely, can't be fix with vote diddling and runoffs and ranked choices and whatnot. The defective portion of the mechanism's still there.
With no one (hardly ever) getting a second term in office, without there being campaign money, parties die. Maybe the polarization dies too.
Oh, and no need for term limits anymore. Sort of baked in, without needing to be explicit.
I'm undecided on whether we'd get more ijit populism or less.
Quite honestly, I think senators should be picked by the states... the 17th was a mistake. It made a bicameral Congress essentially unicameral.
Ranked Choice is also a bad idea because it is too complicated, just do what many sane countries do to great effect: paper ballots, filled in with a pencil, deposited in a ballot box under the eyes of a staff member. One ballot per person, mail-in voting restricted to those who absolutely need it. Voter ID for everyone, no exceptions. Early voting is mostly OK as long as the ballot boxes are kept under watch ALL THE TIME, no exception.
After the polls close the ballots are hand-counted in the polling locations, then sent off for an automatic machine recount. Mail-in votes are counted beforehand and the results of that count are made available when the last polling booth closes - this is important because 'late mail-in votes' can be used to 'fill in the gaps' which is not what should be happening in free and fair elections. Provisional results will be available on the same day as the elections are held, those provisional results will become final after all results are in and the machine re-count is finished. The only technology needed is a scanner and a tabulator, Herman Hollerhith [1] could have supplied these.
So: paper ballots, hand counted, verified through machine counting. Voter ID like all civilised countries use, no exceptions. Mail-in voting only for those who absolutely need it. Early voting on polling locations OK but the ballot boxes should be guarded 24/7 in an open and verifiable manner, no exceptions allowed. Results available on election day.
It’s also solving a problem which probably doesn’t exist. The number of arrests / convictions for voter impersonation are next none.
It was introduced recently in the UK, and in the next election, the prime minister at the time the legislation was introduced managed to get caught without ID when trying to vote: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-68947834
I live in Sweden where I have to show my ID when I vote. I lived in the Netherlands where I had to show my ID when I voted. Everybody has to, everybody does it, nobody - and I mean nobody - has any problems with this because everybody understands the need.
People vote. In a world with a national popular vote it wouldn't be cities deciding elections, it would be people. Every single person would have precisely the same say in the outcome.
Also, with approval, there's an additional much more hidden advantage: There's no limit to how many you can vote for, so you can vote for your ideal candidate and an acceptable moderate without feeling like you're throwing away your vote. It makes it more likely for moderates and third parties to win over the more extreme candidates.
BTW, people are overlooking that Nebraska doesn't allocate proportionally, they allocate the votes according to the outcome of each congressional district, which are probably gerrymandered. The overall winner gets the 2 votes for the senate seats.
And I have issues with this idea, that we can know the populations well enough, to slice and dice and shave population groups until we have a 51% winning vote. That doesn't seem real.
True. There's no telling if any of the promises or language will translate into action once governing. In normal times, breaking campaign promises would carry consequences for reelection of the candidate (or the candidate's party), but it's anyone's guess if that applies now.
Candidates stake out an initial position (or affiliation) and then court voters at the margins of that initial position, often by modifying that initial position (edit: or by modifying their messaging around that initial position).
The whole article is amusing. What absolute fucking puffery lmao.