Yes, call your friends and tell them HR 5293 needs to be changed to support Condorcet voting, not IRV. Yes, I will keep pointing out that IRV is a broken voting method that's even worse than our current system. Read up, get the facts.
You might have a lot of people that rank only the two candidates they know, true. But those that do know/care about others will then be free to vote honestly. The total share of 3rd party voters might jump from ~5% to ~10% overnight. That's not insignificant. A little news coverage on the issue, and then more people start learning there are other options. Hey, it could happen!
The problem is that everyone replies to the pollsters with their preconceived notions of how they think the polls are going to go. It's a feedback loop. What if the question wasn't "who are you going to vote for" but "who is the best candidate" and everyone answered Gandhi. Suddenly his numbers shoot to 83% and people say "what the heck have we been doing for so long if we all really wanted the best guy the whole time?"
Plurality voting is a runoff where all the rounds except the last are held in the court of public opinion, and manipulated by the media. We need to stop second-guessing ourselves.
say "no" to IRV, "yes" to Condorcet
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The Nader Factor
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· Score: 1
I just tell everyone to vote for the person they honestly think will do the best job. Forget strategy, this is the only compelling selection criterion. Anything else won't get you what you really want, and you're selling yourself a bill of goods if you vote otherwise.
If he wasn't running, those votes would go to Nader|Cobb|Brown. Darn that Kerry! Why doesn't he just drop out of the race and let a candidate with real ideas run?
It's hard enough to get people to switch once. You put forth all that effort to get them to switch once, do you think they'll switch again? (Even though it would be trivial to change the back end counting, you still need to get support to have the law itself changed.) Doubtful...we'll be stuck with an inferior method.
I'll maintain that acknowledgement != promotion. The Judeo-Christian religious tradition has had far more influence on shaping our nation and culture than any other. Ignoring where we came from as a nation, essentially forgetting why we're the nation we are today, isn't healthy for continuing on with the freedoms we've enjoyed thus far largely because of that history.
It is precisely because of the Judeo-Christian heritage of America that Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, etc all have the unprecedented freedom to worship that they do. Refuse to acknowledge that if you want, but you do so at your peril. There are plenty of examples from history (and even current events) where not conforming to the government's religious (or areligious) expectations leads directly to a loss of liberty or even life. That doesn't happen in America - because of our national acknowledgement which you feel is unduly burdensome. You don't know what burdensome is. Crying about having to use money with "God" printed on it when others are dying with tacit approval, if not direct involvement, of government doesn't win many points.
I don't think there's anything wrong with immigration quotas. The economy and culture can only absorb new people so fast. If borders don't matter, nations don't matter. Maybe you'd prefer anarchy, and maybe in an ideal world it would work. But this is not an ideal world, and we need some level of governance, which leads to jurisdictions, which leads to nations and borders.
A state is not a monolith. Supporting a proportional or districted EC allocation means doing the right thing for those that voted against you in your own district. Being a republic means the minority is protected even while the majority is served.
No, you don't have to. Anybody you don't rank gets a default rank of "last". Ties are allowed for any ranking. Thus if you like both the Constitution and Libertarian candidates equally well and in preference to whatever the next choice is, you can give them both a 1.
Condorcet voting can avoid Arrow's paradox too, and is superior to Approval in many ways.
The EC does not need a complete overhaul, unless you can come up with a better system to represent the notion that the US are a federal union of sovereign states (as the two house Congress does) for a singular office. It would probably be good if states awarded EC votes proportionally or by district, but the EC institution itself is pretty sound. My solution would be to award EC votes by district and use the two at-large votes to adjust those results toward the proportional result. This allows people to organize geographically (which is obviously an efficient way to do so) to win their neighbors without completely disenfranchising the losers state-wide.
Oh please for the love of Pete, NO! I've said this many times on \. already too, but this is LJ post is the only recent one I can find. IRV is a provably flawed system, please stop advocating it! Pushing for voting reform is great, but we need Condorcetvoting, not IRV.
That may have been due to the nature of the debates (primary vs general) themselves. It's a single party, all the candidates are going to have very similar views - that's why they chose to belong to the same party after all. Primary debates are more about finding who can deliver the message in the best (most lucid, most eloquent, most charismatic) way. But the fact that there were 6 candidates wasn't a problem hindering the process there, and I don't think it would be in the general election campaign either. The recent 4-way debate at Cornell lasted only an hour, yet everyone got to air their views on important and relevant subjects, and it was much more lively than the Duopoly's joint press conference was.
Self-fulfilling prophecy. If the media and the pollsters decide that ahead of time, and don't even bother to include third parties, well of course that's what will happen. The Democrats weren't confused by having 6 candidates in their primary debates. I don't see why we can't include all 6 candidates (with a mathematical possibility of winning) now.
I don't trust in any god. Nonchristians don't trust in that god, they trust Allah, Vishnu, Zeus, The Great Spirit, or somebody else.
No nation founded on Allah, Vishnu, Zeus, The Great Spirit, or atheism ever promoted a guarantee of religious freedom. (Or if they do have one on the books, it isn't regarded nearly as highly as the 1st Amendment.) It took a country founded by believers in the Judeo-Christian God to do that. So yes, I do believe it is appropriate to acknowledge God. Again, not to enforce a belief - that would violate the very principle in question.
if we eliminate welfare, the lazy ones won't want to come here
That I largely agree with. I am still opposed to unrestricted immigration. If your very first act as an immigrant is to break the law, I don't see much hope for you to become an upstanding citizen. If you think America is a great country and want to live here, go through the proper channels, learn the culture, learn the history, learn the language - I'll welcome you with open arms. This isn't to say you have to forsake your heritage - I'm proud of mine. But if you're going to live in America, be an American first.
Egads, man, if you can't stomach Nader isn't there someone else you can vote for? What about Badnarik, Cobb, Peroutka...there's got to be someone closer to your beliefs. Sacrificing your conscience just to make a point doesn't seem like an equitable trade, IMO.
You are correct. I happen to be an elector for my (third) party. I presume Nader's supporters choose electors like everyone else, just because they don't have a formal party structure wouldn't change that.
I don't think he would be willing to keep the wall of not having a state sponsered church go up
Why not? It's the plainest thing in Amendment 1. Congress shall not establish a religion. Even if he did want to, how's he going to get 218 reps and 50 senators to support it? The president cannot act unilaterally like that, it's not how the system works.
Like I've said elsewhere in this thread, if you look at all of Peroutka's positions, he is consistently about downsizing gov't to its Constitutional size and scope. When Congress is only doing the 18 things mentioned in Art 1 Sec 8, gov't doesn't have enough power to be telling you what to believe.
You are free to think what you want of him, of course, but I believe your concerns are completely unfounded.
You have the wrong perception of the Constitution Party. See my responses and links elsewhere in this thread. This wasn't a front page story, so there aren't too many posts to sort through. Acknowledging God as the author of liberty is nowhere near the same thing as establishing a theocracy, which is what you fear. Besides, the CP wants to cut the gov't back to its Constitutional size and scope. Once you do that, there's not enough power to force everybody to do much of anything.
I personally believe those extra two votes could be used to adjust the EC count closer to a proportional result. If one party narrowly carries every district, why should you get a +2 bonus when 49% of the state is disenfranchised?
And this makes that point in time completely dependent on constantly changing technology. Fifty years ago no one would have dreamed that we'd be saving babies born 20 weeks premature. What happens when we get to the point when babies can be grown in test tubes, no uterus needed? Does that change the definition of when life begins?
Conception is the only definitive time we can point to. Anything else is arbitrary. Morality and ethics should not shift with time, technology, or opinion polls.
As I've said other places (not actually the best summary but the only one I can find right now), simply acknowledging God as a civic leader does not mean you're establishing a theocracy. Watch this interview (\. screws up the direct link), you'll see he says the same thing. Rather, I believe you'll see your 1st Am. freedoms better defended by someone who sees it as a religious obligation to do so.
"Separation of church and state" is a misstatement of what our freedom is. That phrase was used by Jefferson, IIRC, only as an analogy. The 1st Am. actually says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof [...]". The Founders were religious people of diverse denominations. It was because of their religious beliefs, and their acknowledgment of God as the giver of liberty, that we have a Constitution that protects those freedoms. Peroutka will not establish any one religion as official nor compel anyone to worship any special way or even worship at all. I believe he would, however, remove many of the restrictions gov't has placed on religious groups.
To summarize, the "wall of separation" only means that gov't is not going to dictate your beliefs to you, nor is any church going to run the government. There is no direct influence from one to the other. It does not mean a complete divorce of God from one's civic service. These indirect effects, such as a leader's personal attempts to govern in a moral and godly way, are completely permissible.
IMO it has gone too far to the Social Conservative side...
I've posted this before, too, but will repeat also. Many people that consider themselves "socially conservative" (like myself) believe Bush has abandoned them. Personally I'm voting Libertarian and Constitution whenever there's one running. In other cases I'm doing research and will weigh the candidates on their stances on issues, not party affiliation. If I don't see myself aligning particularly close to any, maybe I'll write myself in to make a statement.
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Yes, call your friends and tell them HR 5293 needs to be changed to support Condorcet voting, not IRV. Yes, I will keep pointing out that IRV is a broken voting method that's even worse than our current system. Read up, get the facts.
You might have a lot of people that rank only the two candidates they know, true. But those that do know/care about others will then be free to vote honestly. The total share of 3rd party voters might jump from ~5% to ~10% overnight. That's not insignificant. A little news coverage on the issue, and then more people start learning there are other options. Hey, it could happen!
The problem is that everyone replies to the pollsters with their preconceived notions of how they think the polls are going to go. It's a feedback loop. What if the question wasn't "who are you going to vote for" but "who is the best candidate" and everyone answered Gandhi. Suddenly his numbers shoot to 83% and people say "what the heck have we been doing for so long if we all really wanted the best guy the whole time?"
Plurality voting is a runoff where all the rounds except the last are held in the court of public opinion, and manipulated by the media. We need to stop second-guessing ourselves.
already said this
I just tell everyone to vote for the person they honestly think will do the best job. Forget strategy, this is the only compelling selection criterion. Anything else won't get you what you really want, and you're selling yourself a bill of goods if you vote otherwise.
If he wasn't running, those votes would go to Nader|Cobb|Brown. Darn that Kerry! Why doesn't he just drop out of the race and let a candidate with real ideas run?
It's hard enough to get people to switch once. You put forth all that effort to get them to switch once, do you think they'll switch again? (Even though it would be trivial to change the back end counting, you still need to get support to have the law itself changed.) Doubtful...we'll be stuck with an inferior method.
I'll maintain that acknowledgement != promotion. The Judeo-Christian religious tradition has had far more influence on shaping our nation and culture than any other. Ignoring where we came from as a nation, essentially forgetting why we're the nation we are today, isn't healthy for continuing on with the freedoms we've enjoyed thus far largely because of that history.
It is precisely because of the Judeo-Christian heritage of America that Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, etc all have the unprecedented freedom to worship that they do. Refuse to acknowledge that if you want, but you do so at your peril. There are plenty of examples from history (and even current events) where not conforming to the government's religious (or areligious) expectations leads directly to a loss of liberty or even life. That doesn't happen in America - because of our national acknowledgement which you feel is unduly burdensome. You don't know what burdensome is. Crying about having to use money with "God" printed on it when others are dying with tacit approval, if not direct involvement, of government doesn't win many points.
I don't think there's anything wrong with immigration quotas. The economy and culture can only absorb new people so fast. If borders don't matter, nations don't matter. Maybe you'd prefer anarchy, and maybe in an ideal world it would work. But this is not an ideal world, and we need some level of governance, which leads to jurisdictions, which leads to nations and borders.
A state is not a monolith. Supporting a proportional or districted EC allocation means doing the right thing for those that voted against you in your own district. Being a republic means the minority is protected even while the majority is served.
Yes. Heaven forbid that legislators actually do the right thing for the people they represent and server. Must protect party interests at all costs.
I hate politicians. Where are the statesmen and citizen legislators?
No, you don't have to. Anybody you don't rank gets a default rank of "last". Ties are allowed for any ranking. Thus if you like both the Constitution and Libertarian candidates equally well and in preference to whatever the next choice is, you can give them both a 1.
Condorcet voting can avoid Arrow's paradox too, and is superior to Approval in many ways.
The EC does not need a complete overhaul, unless you can come up with a better system to represent the notion that the US are a federal union of sovereign states (as the two house Congress does) for a singular office. It would probably be good if states awarded EC votes proportionally or by district, but the EC institution itself is pretty sound. My solution would be to award EC votes by district and use the two at-large votes to adjust those results toward the proportional result. This allows people to organize geographically (which is obviously an efficient way to do so) to win their neighbors without completely disenfranchising the losers state-wide.
Oh please for the love of Pete, NO! I've said this many times on \. already too, but this is LJ post is the only recent one I can find. IRV is a provably flawed system, please stop advocating it! Pushing for voting reform is great, but we need Condorcet voting, not IRV.
And BTW, we need to keep the EC.
That may have been due to the nature of the debates (primary vs general) themselves. It's a single party, all the candidates are going to have very similar views - that's why they chose to belong to the same party after all. Primary debates are more about finding who can deliver the message in the best (most lucid, most eloquent, most charismatic) way. But the fact that there were 6 candidates wasn't a problem hindering the process there, and I don't think it would be in the general election campaign either. The recent 4-way debate at Cornell lasted only an hour, yet everyone got to air their views on important and relevant subjects, and it was much more lively than the Duopoly's joint press conference was.
Self-fulfilling prophecy. If the media and the pollsters decide that ahead of time, and don't even bother to include third parties, well of course that's what will happen. The Democrats weren't confused by having 6 candidates in their primary debates. I don't see why we can't include all 6 candidates (with a mathematical possibility of winning) now.
Peroutka's site gets more traffic than Nader's too.
No nation founded on Allah, Vishnu, Zeus, The Great Spirit, or atheism ever promoted a guarantee of religious freedom. (Or if they do have one on the books, it isn't regarded nearly as highly as the 1st Amendment.) It took a country founded by believers in the Judeo-Christian God to do that. So yes, I do believe it is appropriate to acknowledge God. Again, not to enforce a belief - that would violate the very principle in question.
That I largely agree with. I am still opposed to unrestricted immigration. If your very first act as an immigrant is to break the law, I don't see much hope for you to become an upstanding citizen. If you think America is a great country and want to live here, go through the proper channels, learn the culture, learn the history, learn the language - I'll welcome you with open arms. This isn't to say you have to forsake your heritage - I'm proud of mine. But if you're going to live in America, be an American first.
Egads, man, if you can't stomach Nader isn't there someone else you can vote for? What about Badnarik, Cobb, Peroutka...there's got to be someone closer to your beliefs. Sacrificing your conscience just to make a point doesn't seem like an equitable trade, IMO.
You are correct. I happen to be an elector for my (third) party. I presume Nader's supporters choose electors like everyone else, just because they don't have a formal party structure wouldn't change that.
Why not? It's the plainest thing in Amendment 1. Congress shall not establish a religion. Even if he did want to, how's he going to get 218 reps and 50 senators to support it? The president cannot act unilaterally like that, it's not how the system works.
Like I've said elsewhere in this thread, if you look at all of Peroutka's positions, he is consistently about downsizing gov't to its Constitutional size and scope. When Congress is only doing the 18 things mentioned in Art 1 Sec 8, gov't doesn't have enough power to be telling you what to believe.
You are free to think what you want of him, of course, but I believe your concerns are completely unfounded.
You have the wrong perception of the Constitution Party. See my responses and links elsewhere in this thread. This wasn't a front page story, so there aren't too many posts to sort through. Acknowledging God as the author of liberty is nowhere near the same thing as establishing a theocracy, which is what you fear. Besides, the CP wants to cut the gov't back to its Constitutional size and scope. Once you do that, there's not enough power to force everybody to do much of anything.
I personally believe those extra two votes could be used to adjust the EC count closer to a proportional result. If one party narrowly carries every district, why should you get a +2 bonus when 49% of the state is disenfranchised?
And this makes that point in time completely dependent on constantly changing technology. Fifty years ago no one would have dreamed that we'd be saving babies born 20 weeks premature. What happens when we get to the point when babies can be grown in test tubes, no uterus needed? Does that change the definition of when life begins?
Conception is the only definitive time we can point to. Anything else is arbitrary. Morality and ethics should not shift with time, technology, or opinion polls.
As I've said other places (not actually the best summary but the only one I can find right now), simply acknowledging God as a civic leader does not mean you're establishing a theocracy. Watch this interview (\. screws up the direct link), you'll see he says the same thing. Rather, I believe you'll see your 1st Am. freedoms better defended by someone who sees it as a religious obligation to do so.
"Separation of church and state" is a misstatement of what our freedom is. That phrase was used by Jefferson, IIRC, only as an analogy. The 1st Am. actually says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof [...]". The Founders were religious people of diverse denominations. It was because of their religious beliefs, and their acknowledgment of God as the giver of liberty, that we have a Constitution that protects those freedoms. Peroutka will not establish any one religion as official nor compel anyone to worship any special way or even worship at all. I believe he would, however, remove many of the restrictions gov't has placed on religious groups.
To summarize, the "wall of separation" only means that gov't is not going to dictate your beliefs to you, nor is any church going to run the government. There is no direct influence from one to the other. It does not mean a complete divorce of God from one's civic service. These indirect effects, such as a leader's personal attempts to govern in a moral and godly way, are completely permissible.
I've posted this before, too, but will repeat also. Many people that consider themselves "socially conservative" (like myself) believe Bush has abandoned them. Personally I'm voting Libertarian and Constitution whenever there's one running. In other cases I'm doing research and will weigh the candidates on their stances on issues, not party affiliation. If I don't see myself aligning particularly close to any, maybe I'll write myself in to make a statement.