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Barr Sues Over McCain's, Obama's Presence on Texas Ballot
corbettw writes "Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party's nominee for president, has filed a lawsuit in Texas demanding Senators John McCain and Barack Obama be removed from the ballot after they missed the official filing deadline."
An on-line link to the Texas election code: http://tlo2.tlc.state.tx.us/statutes/docs/EL/content/htm/el.011.00.000192.00.htm#192.031.00
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I heard about this a couple weeks ago. Anyhow, the texas filing deadline was before the national conventions, but both parties filed paperwork on time with blank names and amended them afterwards (which is allowed by law). I thought this had already been dismissed, but it's going nowhere.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Except for the fact that would be unconstitutional. States select their presidential candidates independently, and the political parties of each state independently nominate their candidate to appear on the ballot.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
I'm hurt... Don't forget us in PA too! And for that matter KY. :)
- No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades really cramps his style.
And by "states", I'm guessing you mean the 6 or so states that presidents bother to woo, at the expense of the 44 that they permanently ignore? This is a good deal for states how, exactly?
Usually when people say "states' rights", they're talking about the championing the rights of states over the rights of the federal government. But to say it in the context of the electoral college, you're championing the rights of states over the rights of voters. That seems like a much harder stance to defend.
Erm. Connecticut is not a Commonwealth. Massachusetts is.
Really? So you don't think it's a valid complaint?
Let's just say, just for grins, that he wasn't trying to keep his name in the press. If you were in his position, wouldn't you point out unfair violations of the law to an advantage whether you wanted press or not?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
But the states elect the president of the union, not the people. If you don't like that, amend the constitution or move.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
A publicity stunt? Hahahahaha.
I don't think I really have to say anything more. The law is right there on the 'net.
Electors for each state were originally intended to be chosen by the state legislature, not the citizens of the state. This would have given the state government additional power over the Federal government. Choosing of electors by the people, along with direct election of Senators (the 17th Amendment) represent a lamentable erosion of Federalism, and resulted in things like the blatant abuse of the Interstate Commerce Clause, blackmailing states into accepting things like speed limits and Real ID, etc.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Texas has a very strict Write-in policy. If you haven't declared as a write in within 70 days of the election, you can't be a write-in. if this were to be upheld, the only person people would be permitted to vote for would be ... Bob Barr.
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
There is one set of laws that cover federal presidential elections. That governs the electoral college. All this voting you do in November is not federal, it's to pick your state's representatives to the real voting, done the second week in December. States are free to use whatever method they wish (well, not totally free). It's interesting how many people misunderstand how our elections work. There is not, never has been, a national vote on anything in the United States.
That would require an Amendment to the Constitution. For no good reason.
Not exactly. For presidential elections, yes, because the Electoral College is implicated. But for other federal elections, no. See Art. I, sec. 4, cl. 1: The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators (emphasis added).
Congress has the power of preemption of state laws on elections to Congress. But to implement uniform rules for presidential elections, yes, the Constitution would need to be amended.
Nope. If the spelling is close enough that it's obvious who was intended, it counts. Even if it's not entirely flattering.
No, I'm not. I read the indicated section of code as follows: If your party files by the indicated deadline and meets all other requirements, the state must include your candidate's name on the ballot. That's what is meant by "entitled", which is a key word in the law as written.
It doesn't say squat about late filing. By missing the deadline, they missed the state's guarantee of their names appearing on the ballots. But failing to obtain that guarantee does not somehow imply that the state must prevent their names from appearing on the ballot. Lack of a guarantee is not a guarantee of the opposite thing. I'd expect that election officials can and will include the D and R candidates on the ticket, because there is no legal reason why they shouldn't!
Of course, it's possible that they could exclude them if they wanted to, because of the missed the deadline, but who would want to throw a monkey wrench that huge into the election process?
So Barr's making a mountain out of this molehill just makes Barr and Libertarians look bad.
Mountain out of a molehill. That was the point of my previous post. Tryin' to keep it real.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
There are many many ways to do such an election fairly. Look at Condorcet, single-transferable vote, and instant runoff.
Pretty much any system is superior to that in use in the United States.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Forcing all the states to vote the same way would be unconstitutional. The constitution outlines how many electoral votes each state gets, and then leaves it up to each state to determine how to allocate them. The only real influence it has is in stating who can't be in the electoral college, such as the president or I believe anyone in the US house or senate.
Any changes would require a constitutional amendment.
It appears to me the creators of the original constitution felt it was important for the citizens of each state to decide how to cast their electoral votes. We may not like it, but that's the way it is. This was all before the ability to instantly count ballots and transmit results across thousands of miles, so while it may not be relevant any longer, it's still in the constitution.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Few other countries (civilized or otherwise) are as big as to be a Union of states.
Your definition of "civilized" may vary, but:
Russia is a Union of States.
Brasil is a Union of States.
Mexico is a Union of States.
Germany is a Union of States.
Austria is a Union of States.
The concept seems to be quite common.
Uhm. The Whigs weren't the third party... the Republicans were.
A long time ago it was the Democrats vs the Whigs.
Suddenly those Republicans crept up and pulled the rhugs out from under the Whigs. *chuckles*
All voting systems are mathematically flawed. It's a mathematical property and can't be avoided. (check Election Math as a reference).
But you won it, too. That's the thing about civil wars.
States were supposed to govern their own borders and the Constitution was there to limit a few things that states could not govern (like trade between states, or basic rights).
Like the inalienable right to keep and bear slaves.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
If you did that to California, it would be a bit fractal in a way. The map of California would look a lot like the map of the nation, with blue on the edges, a few blue spots in the middle, and red filling up most of the center.
This reference does not consider non-ranked systems. Yes, all ranked systems fail Arrow's theorem, but there exist other systems. One such system is range voting. Give each candidate a 0 to 9 rating. This gives more ability to show preference than any ranked system. The candidates ratings are totaled and the highest total wins. Because there is only one round of eliminations, there aren't weird effects where a candidate will endorse a less popular party to increase his chances of winning. Also, there isn't any disagreement about how to count preference. A simpler way to do range voting would be a range of 0 to 1. This is approval voting and can be done on current ballots.
Actually the Civil War is not the main cause of today's over-reaching Congress. The "Commerce clause" and the U.S. Supreme Court is the main problem. The U.S.S.C. has interpreted the commerce clause in such a way that Congress can now regulate almost anything it wants. That happened during the Depression (1930-40s), and the decision allows Congress to tell you how much wheat you can or cannot grow in your own backyard. Clearly this was not what the Framers intended when they gave the U.S. the power to regulate interstate commerce. What I grow in my backyard is INTRAstate commerce and should not involve Congress at all. It should be the Pennsylvania government that regulates that.
It would be roughly equivalent to the European Parliament telling British citizens how much food they can grow for their own personal consumption. Clearly that's not part of the EU's mandate, and it's not part of the U.S.' constitution either.
Stupid, stupid supreme court justices.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Stupid, stupid supreme court justices.
Eh, FDR basically held a gun to their heads back in the day.
FDR is one of my heroes but I think that's one of the darkest moments of his presidency.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
> That's why you had a civil war. People in the southern states were keeping slaves.
While the issue of slavery was a big issue, and was resolved because of the war, the war did not happen because of slavery. The US civil war was inevitable by the end of the revolution.
Okay, it's true that the "trigger issue" that set the thing off was the secession of South Carolina, and the main excuse for said secession was the slavery issue. But this only *caused* the war in the same sense that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand caused the Great War. It's what set the thing going, yes, but if it had not done so, something else would have come along and set it going at some point, probably sooner rather than later.
The real major driving issue behind the civil war was the strong correlation between geography, economy, and politics. You could get out a map and pretty much draw a line between the conservative, rural areas with a simple, primary (and to a large extent agrarian) economy, and on the other side of the line the liberal areas, with higher population density and a more complex (and more modern) economy. The south wanted protectionism. The north wanted a more laissez faire, free-market approach to economic issues. The south was mostly anti-federalist, believing strongly in reserving as many powers as possible to the states and the people, limiting the power of the federal government to the absolute minimum. The north mostly was largely federalist. The southern economy relied heavily on slavery; the northern states didn't even allow it. And so on and so forth.
A lot of people think Lincoln wanted to end slavery, and that's why the south seceded. In fact, he had no such intention. He opposed the unchecked *spread* of slavery to more and more states and territories, but he had no plans to suddenly put an immediate end to it in the south. That's the way things played out, but it wasn't what he had in mind before the war. South Carolina opposed Lincoln and seceded when he was elected for complex reasons, and his position on slavery was just one of several things they hated about the man. It was an excuse, and a rallying cry for other states, but the states-rights issue (i.e., antifederalism) was *also* an excuse and a rallying cry.
South Carolina seceded to prove that the state could do that, that the union with the rest of the country was strictly voluntary on the part of the state, and that the majority of the other states could *not* get together and decide things for them at a federal level. Slavery was *one* of the things they didn't want the federal government deciding for them. Tariffs were another. But the main thing is that the state government of South Carolina felt too much of their authority was being usurped. To them, Washington was the next London. The North didn't agree, because as far as they were concerned the south had full representation. South Carolina had as many US Senators as any other state, and Representatives proportional to their population, and so on and so forth, the same as any other state in the union.
As I said, slavery was a major issue, both in contributing to the war and in being resolved by the war. (The protectionism issue, in contrast, was not resolved until much later, if indeed it has been fully resolved, and there's some question about that.) But it was not, by itself, the cause of the war, nor was it the main thing the war was ultimately about.
And actually, the slavery issue might not have been as completely resolved by the war if Lincoln had not been assassinated. His plan for reconstruction did not include immediate abolition. He wanted to bar the major Confederate ringleaders from holding future political office and then let the southern states back into the union almost immediately, with the understanding that the issue of secession had been decided and it was not permitted. But Johnson wasn't able to make it work that way.
Incidentally, the GOP was the liberal party at the time, and the Dems were the conservatives. The history of how that got turned around is interesting in its own right.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
What makes you think Texas won't get its electors?
It will receive its electors. It just won't be able to select those electors in a way that reflects will of the people.
There will be no mechanism by which electors pledged to either candidate can be chosen by the people of TX. Either the electors will be pledged to a third party candidate, or they will be unpledged. If they are unpledged, you have a situation where the people are cut completely out of the process.
I'm a reasonable person. If the unpledged electors voted for McCain, that represents the probable will of the voters, and its probably the best result here should Barr carry the day. But it's not a good thing for small-r republican government. Elections aren't supposed to be about probabilities.
I'm for overruling the rules in this case. What matters here, I think, is not fairness to the candidates. Screw them. It's fairness to the voters.
Empowering the voters in a fair way is what the rules are there for. The Constitution doesn't say how the states are supposed to select electors, but it does require the states to guarantee small-r republican government. You can do that by having the legislature appointing electors, which is bad but not the worst possible thing. You can't do that by holding an election that rules out the choices of the vast majority of voters.
That would be republican in form only, not substance. It is the substance that matters, not the machinery of the election.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That's why you had a civil war. People in the southern states were keeping slaves. Now if you'd like to make some big spiel about how the Union winning the civil war lead to negative repercussions for your state's rights, then I'm simply going to point out that the previous system was far, far worse. It allowed slavery. Yes it did. So arguing for states rights to be reinstated in order to protect people's rights is not really a solid argument.
You my friend are the victim of revisionist history. Don't feel put out though, most of us are. The civil war was not about slavery. It was about the economy. The south produced the feedstock for the northern textile industry and the Europeans were cutting the south a better deal. As such the south was exporting to Europe vice the north. The north just couldn't have that. The secession of the south was totally legitimate. Now I am not saying that slavery is good and that the war didn't end it, but the war was not fought over slavery. I know that what I am saying sounds like heresy, but have an open mind and do a little research, you might be surprised.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
That's an excellent summary but I wanted to correct you on one point. Prior to the Civil War, the South wanted laissez-faire and free markets and international trade, while it was the North that was dominated by its big city banking elite that wanted protectionism. The north wanted to sell its manufactured goods to the south while preventing the superior and cheaper European goods from being sold in American markets. The South saw this as an outright money-grab by the northern states (and I believe it was) and was one of the main, if not the main, motivations for southern independence---to create free-markets. Invariably exporting economies favor international trade, while importing ones favor tariff barriers, mercantilism, and statism.
How is it that someone can get a majority of votes and not win? Everyone's vote should be equal; having some people's vote count more than other people's vote is absurd.
You would be correct if we had a Democracy, though. In a true Democracy, every person votes, and every person's vote counts equally. However, we are a Republic in the USA; a group of people appointed to cast votes control the election outcome. Now, we happen to have a Democratic Republic, where the people casting votes are elected by the rest of us. However, your "popular vote" is actually worth nothing. It makes people feel good that they voted, and it hypothetically influences our Elected Officials to cast their votes the way we want them to. In truth, they could vote however they wanted and we couldn't do anything about it, except NOT re-elect them next term. Now, the wise Official would want to vote the same as the majority of his/her constituents, but they aren't legally bound to, by any means.
Last night I played a blank tape at full volume. The mime next door went nuts.
> Thanks to our lousy government run education, everyone thinks Lincoln abolished
> slavery with his "Emancipation Proclamation". Read it. It allowed slavery in the north.
Actually, it allowed slavery in the south as well. The only slaves freed were those encountered by Union forces during the actual war. After Appomattox, southern slave owners who had managed to retain their slaves would have been permitted to keep them -- for the time being.
Lincoln was not an abolitionist. He had other priorities. He was willing to let slavery continue in the south for the time being, in exchange for other concessions. Lincoln did disagree in principle with slavery, but he was a liberal, not a radical. He believed in doing things gradually.
Abruptness is harmful. You free all the slaves at once, overnight, and you get exactly what we got: a sudden surplus of unskilled agricultural workers with no education, no property, nowhere to go, and no way to earn a living. Many of them were worse off than they had been before. Almost all of them had to go to work for former slave owners, doing the same kinds of things they'd done before, only now they were responsible for their own debts and bills, providing food and housing and whatnot for themselves and their children. The former slave owners were extremely unhappy with the situation and were not strongly inclined to pay more for the former slaves' wages than they had previously spent on their upkeep, and they were no longer required to provide benefits like free housing... It was a real mess for a long time. The descendants of the slaves *still* have lower average per-capita incomes and education levels than the rest of the population, going on a century and a half later. And we haven't even started talking about the bitterness and social upheaval and resentment...
On the other hand, if you do things more gradually... Say for instance you provide the children of slaves with the same education opportunities as other children, and free two-thirds of them at age 21. That's just *one* way to do things a bit more gradually.
Don't get me wrong: I have some philosophical objections to slavery in general, and numerous *very strong* moral and ethical objections to the way slavery was practiced in the US. It was an extremely egregiously bad system, and it absolutely had to go. I'm very glad we don't have that in this country any more. It's a system I wouldn't wish on anyone, even the gravest of enemies, and it's good that we're rid of it.
I'm just think the *details* of the way in which it was phased out were... suboptimal.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
You're both wrong (and I guess both right, but I prefer everyone being wrong). Both sides wanted some things to be strongly protected and others strongly deregulated, and it just so happened that a lot of these things were opposite to the wishes of the other.
The south absolutely did not want to see things deregulated with regard to domestic trade and law, to the point that prior to the Civil War they were willing to override the rights of other states and force them to legalize slavery (see: Missouri, California) in order to maintain a balance which would keep their internationally unpopular status quo; they also didn't want to see the north increase imports of food and raw materials from elsewhere. On the other hand, they wanted better access to European goods and markets so that they could increase exports and decrease expenses.
The north, on the other hand, liked the idea of the south being forced to buy their manufactured goods and didn't want to compete with Europe for goods from the south, but did want to be able to increase imports of food and materials from Europe and elsewhere. As in, everything they wanted the south didn't, and vice versa.
No one side was more in favor of protectionism or free trade, both sides were more in favor their best interests and were more than a little hypocritical about it.
One of the great ironies is that the south only really wanted slavery because it allowed them to be competitive with more modernized farming techniques, but it was actually quite a bit less efficient. After the Civil War and abolition the south actually became much more profitable because they started to use less labor intensive and ultimately less expensive techniques and started to invest in heavy equipment rather than slaves. The north also became more profitable because the Civil War seriously advanced northern industrial facilities and technology, leaving them in perfect position to manufacture the huge amount of product required by the modernizing south and the expanding railroads. The bloodshed and destruction of the Civil War accomplished nothing that could not have been arranged by both sides simply cooperating and thinking it through (with the possible exception of rebuilding Atlanta as a modern southern metropolis).
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
No, I don't think you will see any last minute, bi-partisan efforts to fix this. Here's why:
(1) The Texas Legislature is not in session. The governor can call a special session, which would require the legislators to return to Austin from their homes, but...
(2) The Democrats, Libertarians and Independents in the house will refuse to return for the special session because they all benefit from this. Without the non-Republicans the legislature would not have a quorum and will not be able to hold a special session. They did this a few years ago when the Republicans tried to re-district the state and it worked well enough for several weeks.
Texas is a "sure win" state for McCain, who would pick up all of the states' 34 electoral votes. If Texas is removed from play, McCain would have to win every single "toss-up" state to win with 271 votes.
In other words, if Bob Barr's suit works, McCain is screwed and Obama should start packing up his house because he's moving in January.
P.S. I live in Austin and I follow these matters closely.
As another poster stated, Gore didn't ask for a statewide recount.
Additionally, are we including the military votes that the Gore lawyers threw out in "all the votes" that had Gore winning?
Gore and the Democrats weren't interested in counting all the votes, just the ones that would lead to them winning.
And, in any event, Florida law states if the election results cannot be certified by a specific date, then it goes to the Florida legislature...which was Republican controlled. The democrat controlled Florida Supreme Court tried to step in and change election law on the fly, and this is what was shot down by the SCOTUS.
There are multiple methods of allocating electoral votes, and the "winner takes all" system isn't even spelled out in the U.S. Constitution. It isn't even the only method used for allocation of electoral votes in each state.
Maine and Nebraska use a system of allocating the two votes for the senate as "winner take all" for the state-wide vote, and then allow each congressional district an independent vote... with each district's electoral vote allocated by the highest vote within that district. California and Florida would have both been "split" votes under such a system if those states were to switch to such a system.
Colorado in 2004 tried to set up a purely proportional voting system for electoral votes... and was voted down due to Democratic (big "D") opposition that ultimately hurt John Kerry in that Presidential election anyway. Again, if some of the larger states like Florida, California, or Texas were to vote this way, you would certainly see more attention to even subtle shifts in popular opinion in these states. Texas wouldn't have just 2 or 3 "blue" votes, but a whole bunch... possibly a few "green" votes (from 3rd parties) thrown in for good measure.
One other thing to consider... without even amending the constitution or any such nonsense... is to simply increase the number of representatives in Congress. What is up with the magic number 435? Even a modest increase to around 500 would give better representation in the House as well as better proportional representation in Presidential elections as well.
Those who complain about the electoral college often don't understand modest changes that could be done without having to completely overhaul the system... and could have a major impact on how candidates actually campaign if these modest changes were implemented.
I do agree, however, that changes can and should happen with the electoral college.
ah.. because this is not a democracy? The US is a constitutional republic. From wiki: Constitutional Republics are a deliberate attempt to diminish the threat of mobocracy thereby protecting dissenting individuals and minority groups from the tyranny of the majority by placing theoretical checks on the power of the majority of the population.
Your definition of "civilized" may vary, but:
Russia is a Union of States. Brasil is a Union of States. Mexico is a Union of States. Germany is a Union of States. Austria is a Union of States.
The concept seems to be quite common.
Of the examples above, only Germany is even vaguely comparable.
Brazil and Mexico were single colonies of a single foreign power (Spain and Portugal) before becoming independent countries. The USA (before it existed) was made up of 13 separate colonies that were all administered quite separately, with different customs, political biases, etc.
Germany as a country is a recent invention, and is the result of Bismarck's enforced union in the 19th Century of entirely separate German-speaking countries, under Prussian domination. The only reason Austria isn't part of "Germany" is because they were already a fairly strong empire in their own right at the time (the Austro-Hungarian empire.)
My Austrian friends hate to hear this, and claim a political difference in the present day reflects the difference back then. The truth is that at the time of German unification, they had more in common with most Germans that the Bavarians, for example, who had customs and even language that diverged significantly from the rest of Germany. The only difference was Bavaria had a weaker ruler and was more easily forced into the federal system.
http://clightnirish.wordpress.com/
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
"I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position." --Abraham Lincoln, 21 Aug. 1858
And: "Free them [slaves] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this. We cannot, then, make them equals."
Fun fact of the day: MA is a commonwealth because John Adams decided to call it that when he was writing the MA Constitution, and no one bothered to really discuss it one way or the other.
KY is pretty mediocre lube and it tastes awful. Check out Good Vibrations for a selection of other lubes.
And still they have separate states with separate parliaments, with separate tax regulations and separate state subvention programs.
Hey, the nickname of the state Vorarlberg is actually "Canton Leftover", because they once (1923) wanted to join Switzerland, but Switzerland didn't want them. Vorarlberg's biggest town has 50,000 inhabitants, all other towns are smaller than 25,000 inhabitants.
Same with Tyrol. I live in the 10th largest community of the whole state of Tyrol. The village has 8330 inhabitants.
And the city of Vienna is not only the biggest city of Austria (Graz comes next, which has a quarter of the inhabitants), it is at the same time the biggest state of Austria.
So don't talk about small. Austria is small. But still... they are a federal republic. They don't need to be. But they are for historical reasons: Some of the states (like Carinthia) have more than 2000 years of history as separate entities. The predecessor of Carinthia, the kingdom of Noricum, basicly today's Carinthia, Styria and Slovenia, was founded ~200 B.C., and Carinthia itself around 600 A.C.. It became part of Austria in 1335.
"The two-party system was how our Republic was founded."
you're a bit historically challenged there. yes it's true there were 'two major national parties' but the fact is one of them was a coalition of about 5 political parties that each had regional party names, to a certain respect the 'democrat' and 'republican' parties are still coalitions of smaller state based parties. as a matter of fact in Minnesota they still call their party the 'democrat farm and labor party' DFL and they're a part of the modern coalition of the 'democrat' party.
and to demonstrate my point that it is a coalition, http://www.freeople.com/blog/brady-wright-reports-rnc-minneapolis-suggests-next-steps-r3publicans/1410 the RNC silence ron paul supporters at the RNC because ron paul was supported by a state political party that didn't vote for mccain, despite being part of the RNC. it is a coalition, a 2 coalition system.
libertarians who are out there and in numbers who dislike the coalition process have very good reasons for disliking the coalitions, because trying to keep that many independent organizations to support the same basic party planks is all but a joke. anyways the point being in the old days when only land owing white men had suffrage, there were still more than 2 political parties, but for the sake of winning presidential races small state based parties formed coalitions using names like the 'federalists' and the democratic-republican party' over the ages the names of the national coalitions changed, as did their policies and beliefs... there could easily come a day when the 'libertarian' party reaches the critical mass needed to replace the 'democrat' party and we wind up having a 'libertarian' and a 'republican' coalition instead of the republican and democrats...
so the illusion of their being a 2 party system in the US is really just that, we really have a coalition of two groups that each have 50 state sized political parties, while the constitution party the green party and the libertarian parties are outside attempts to erode the power bases of the existing republican and democrat power bases because some people just can't stand the types of compromises politicians make the be 'part of a coalition'
if the 'green' party became large enough to replace the democrat coalition, it would still wind up being a coalition of 50 state parties, each state has it's own society it's own politicians and it's own interests and types of corruption. the broken part of the system is that you'll never get a 1 size fits all solution to the problems of the day. oh yeah, that and every major politician in Washington DC is pro big government, no matter what they say to the contrary. All you have to do is go back and look at the budget deficits that the major political parties voted to create, bill clinton was marginally an outsider who was supposed to loose to bush, and he's the only guy who turned around the budgets by repeatedly shutting down the government. this is why big money used every trick in the book to get obamam in there against Hillary Clinton. they trust obama but Hillary might have learned something from her husband.
there are rich and wealthy who make their living off buying US treasury bonds, and for there to be enough US treasury bonds for their wealth to keep growing, the US debt has to keep growing. this is the disconnect between the uninformed electorate and the corruption at the highest levels of the government.
9/11 wasn't a 'failure' of American security, it was a planed national crisis to start a trillion dollar war so the rich could avoid having to buy junk bonds, and could keep playing it safe in high grade us government bonds. If the average American actually pieced together the truth, they would probably in mass vote for politicians who didn't even run TV ads and instead used free internet message board systems to communicate their goals and ideals, and
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I read the post you linked. It provided a perfect example of what I was saying. If you read to the bottom it concludes with "However, people will not honestly vote. Hill-dogg supporters will look at Obama's slight lead, and since they'd much rather prefer Hill-dogg instead of Obama, they vote like this: Hill-dogg 10, Obama 1, McCain 0. Obama supporters, worried about their slight lead, vote the converse. McCain supporters vote McCain 10, Hill-dogg 0, Obama 0.
If you tweak that "Obama 1" into "Obama 0", you'll see that his example has degenerated exactly the way I said it would. It turns into approval voting with people using the limit values - 0 and 10.
His example was intended to prove what approval voting is BAD... intended to prove how and why approval voting will elect the worst candidate last choice candiate... but it also showed the min-max effect turning range voting into 0 1 approval voting.
I give a full explanation why there is never ever ever any valid reason to vote anything except 0 or 9 in this post.
The best voting system is called Condorcet voting. You put the candidates in order, like Hillary #1 Barack #2 and McCain #3. Condocet then look at it as a bunch of 1v1 races. It looks at Hillary-vs-McCain, Barack-vs-McCain, and Hillary-vs-Obama as three seperate races. With 60% Democrats, presumably Hillary would beat McCain in that race, and Obama would beat McCain in that other race. It would also look across all voters to decide Hillary-vs-Obama. Democrats might have some light preference one way or the other, but in fact it would likely be the Republicans overwhelmingly deciding that race based upon which candidate they found less offensive - which candidate they put in their second slot. Condorcet voting finds the best most "central" candidate.
By a variety of mathematically reasonable standards of measurement, Condorcet is provably the best voting system when there are more than two candidates
I highly recommend the website Accurate Democracy.
They give an excellent discussion of Condorcet and a variety of other problems of democracy and solutions to building the best possible democracy. He have learned a lot about how political and election systems work in the last few hundred years. The authors of the US Constitution were brilliant guys, but there's a lot they just didn't know, and in a number of ways our system of government is flawed or just plain broken, and in many cases we do know how to fix it. It just tends to be politically impossible impossible to have our system vote to fix itself. The biases in place and those who benefit from the current power distribution have no interest in surrendering those selfserving advantages. For example it is virtually impossible to make any change to the presidential election process because any change will create a short term benefit towards either the Democrats or the Republicans, so the other side will always rationalize arguments to reject it.
If by any chance you found a new Democratic government from scratch somewhere else, I'd be more than happy to join up to use all of the accumulated knowledge from math and history and sociology and every other field of human knowledge to design the best possible mechanisms of Democracy we know how :D
P.S.
If you wanted to make the link in your post a proper clickable link, it goes like this:
<A href="address">text</A>
You write:
<A href="http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=969061&cid=25081019">Hello there!</A>
and it shows up like this:
Hello there!
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.