How about those elections? (USA 2016)

[Blueysicle]

Nov 11, 2016 13:14:18 GMT -5 Jae said:

Nov 11, 2016 11:59:59 GMT -5 Crystal said:

Also, let's have some good news! Maine passed ranked choice voting.

Explanation: (people correct me if my understanding is flawed)
When casting your vote, you rank candidates. For instance, if you're a NeverTrumper but don't care much for Clinton either, then in this election you had the unpleasant duty of either voting third party (essentially throwing away your vote), staying home (literally throwing away your vote), or sucking it up and voting Clinton (bleargh).

Under the new system, you might vote:
1) Gary Johnson (agree with some of his policies but don't think he'll win)
2) Clinton (well, I don't like her, but she's better than...)
3) Trump

And your opinion will be taken into account.

So this is a pretty cool overhaul of the current system in that it allows people to vote for who they actually want (like a third party, or a Republican in a predominantly blue state) without worrying that "their vote won't count". So a candidate who got a majority of #2s but not a lot of #1s (indicating that they're not everyone's first choice, but most people can live with them) might trump someone who got more #1s but also a lot of #3s (indicating that there's a huge divide in public opinion).

The downside is that it's not as simple to understand as the current system, since there's a lot of math behind who actually wins. But it seems a lot fairer in general and will definitely be good for third-parties and for bridging divisive public opinion gaps, like what happened in this election.

That's an interesting system but I have a question: How do write-ins work? Like do they get added after the 'official' rankings? Or can you slot them in wherever? Like (to amend your list):

1. Gary Johnson
2. Clinton
3. My cat
4. Markiplier
5. Corey Kluber
6. Trump

Probably worth pointing out the write-ins have to be registered as a candidate for it to actually count. So the people that wrote in Bernie Sanders (Against his wishes) threw their vote away, since he officially dropped out of the election. (As did the people that voted for Harambe. I mean, what) So the results of your example would be no different than the one Crystal gave.

As for write-ins that are actually registered candidates, I'm actually not too sure either.

[Crystal]

Nov 11, 2016 13:14:18 GMT -5 Jae said:

That's an interesting system but I have a question: How do write-ins work? Like do they get added after the 'official' rankings? Or can you slot them in wherever? Like (to amend your list):

1. Gary Johnson
2. Clinton
3. My cat
4. Markiplier
5. Corey Kluber
6. Trump

Here's how San Francisco does it (I'm not sure about Maine's rules yet):

Write-In Candidates:

To vote for a qualified write-in candidate who is not listed on the ballot, write the person's name on the blank line at the end of the candidate list and complete the arrow.

When marking the ranked-choice ballot, keep in mind:

You may--but are not required to--rank up to three candidates. If there are fewer than three candidates for the same office, or to rank fewer than three candidates, leave any of the remaining columns blank.
If you select the same candidate in more than one column, that vote for that candidate will count only once.
Your second choice will be counted only if your first-choice candidate has been eliminated. Your third choice will be counted only if BOTH your first-choice and second-choice candidates have been eliminated.

How ranked-choice voting works:

To start, every first-choice selection is counted. Any candidate who receives a majority (more than 50%) of the first-choice selections is declared the winner.
If no candidate receives more than 50% of the first-choice selections, the candidate who received the fewest number of first-choice selections is eliminated.
Voters who selected the eliminated candidate as their first choice will have their vote transferred to their second choice.
The votes are then recounted. If any remaining candidate receives more than 50% of the votes, he or she is declared the winner.
If no remaining candidate receives more than 50% of the votes, the process of eliminating candidates and transferring votes to the next ranked candidate is repeated until one candidate has a winning majority.

Like Bluey mentioned, if the write-in candidate isn't registered, then it doesn't count. My boyfriend wrote in Sanders just to be a protest troll - we live in a very blue county so he knew his vote didn't matter, and he didn't have a high opinion of either of the candidates. Hopefully this form of voting will cut down on problems like that. I would have been interested in seeing how the primaries would have turned out, had it been implemented across the board.

[Reiqua]

We have preferential voting here in Australia.

Obviously it looks quite different because our whole political system is rather different.
But when I go to vote, I'd expect to see a ballot paper with about half a dozen names on it. So I either number the names 1-6 in the order I see fit, or I just put a '1' in the box next to my favourite party, and that party will have submitted preferences for itself, so automatically the rest of my preferences go the way that the party wants them to.

In Australia, the way votes are counted works pretty much exactly as Crystal said of the San Francisco system.
Because we have an essentially two party system, what that means is that as soon as you put a preference for one of the major parties, your vote effectively goes to that party. The reason it makes a difference though is a) psychological, and b) because funding is allocated to parties based on the number of #1 votes they get.

So if I filled out my ballot like this:
(swapping party names for candidate names, because seriously who knows or cares about Australian politicians - not me!)

4 - Labor
6 - Palmer United Party
3 - Hunting and Fishing Party
1 - Greens
5 - Liberal
2 - Christian Labour Party

(That's definitely not how I'd vote, but let's just say I have a huge thing against the two major parties (Labor and Liberal) that year)

Basically what that means is that my initial votes for each of the minor parties (Greens, CLP and HFP) would be discounted one by one, and my vote would eventually fall to Labor (no, I have no idea why we spell that the American way - only in the name of the political party do Australians spell 'labour' like that). 
The fact that I preferred Liberal to Palmer United Party doesn't get taken into account, because they stopped counting my voting preferences when they got to Labor. Not because it's one of the two parties in our two party system, but because Labor and Liberal happened to be the two parties that got enough votes to be the ones facing off against each other.
But because I put a number one in the box next to Greens, they'll get a tad more funding as a party because a few more people voted #1 for them.

(Btw, in Australia our Liberal party are the conservatives. Apparently that's not a contradiction in terms but I've yet to work out how)

I think preferential voting is great (I didn't even realise other places didn't have it)

[Crystal]

A bit of a throwback to an earlier page in this debate, but I felt that the New York Times ran a great article today that really goes a long way toward humanizing the concerns of Trump supporters to the primarily liberal/Democratic audience in this thread. The Washington Post has some more reading here if you're interested.

I'll quote part of the article here: for reference, it focuses on interviewing the people living and working around the Carrier factory in Indiana, which will soon be closing.

Carrier’s decision to move the factory to Monterrey, Mexico, will eliminate 1,400 jobs by 2019. Mr. Trump quickly made the factory Exhibit A in his argument against the trade policies of Republicans and Democrats alike.

He cited Carrier again and again on the campaign trail, threatening to phone executives at the company and its parent, United Technologies, and to hit them with 35 percent tariffs on any furnaces and air-conditioners they imported from Mexico. To the cheers of his supporters, he predicted at rallies that Carrier would call him up as president and say, “Sir, we’ve decided to stay in the United States.”

Now his supporters expect action. “If he doesn’t pass that tariff, I will vote the other way next time,” warned Nicole Hargrove, who has worked at Carrier for a decade and a half and is not certain what she will do if and when her job goes to Mexico.

Carrier isn’t changing its plans. On Friday in a written statement, the company said, “We are making every effort to ease the transition for our Carrier colleagues in Indiana.” The company pointed out that it will finance four-year retraining and educational programs for employees and provide financial help.

For Mr. Trump, now comes the hard part. In interviews in recent days and in March, Trump voters here made clear that if he does not follow through on his promises, they are prepared to turn on him, just as they are seemingly punishing Democrats today for not delivering the hope and change voters sought from President Obama after he won as an outsider in 2008.

And while Mr. Roell is a conservative, Mr. Trump’s tough talk about Carrier, the economy and the future of American manufacturing jobs also appealed to moderates like Darrell Presley, a steelworker in rural Crawfordsville, Ind., who voted for Mr. Obama in 2008. “He was for change, and said he would take care of the middle class, but he didn’t live up to those expectations,” Mr. Presley said. “I feel like the American people are at the point where they’ve had it, and this was the last chance.”

(...)

Diversity and Distrust

Some blue-collar neighborhoods that supported Mr. Trump have been portrayed as monocultures, the opposite of supposedly more diverse, cosmopolitan cities that favored Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic candidate. That caricature does not hold up here.

At least half of the workers on Carrier’s assembly line are women. And dozens of Burmese immigrants have gone to work at the factory in recent years, part of an influx of nearly 15,000 refugees from Myanmar into Indianapolis since 2001.

“It can be hard to communicate, but they work very hard,” Mr. Maynard said. “They don’t complain, and I love their work ethic.”

And the neighborhoods around Carrier’s factory are considerably more diverse than many wealthy New York and San Francisco suburbs, where Democrats dominate.

Down the road from the Carrier factory, past the railroad tracks and a few patches of farmland that remain in Indianapolis, the tidy neighborhood of split-level and ranch houses where Cecil Link Jr. lives has changed in recent years. A worker at a plastics factory nearby, Mr. Link noted that a Hispanic family recently moved in next door, and he said he was pleased that blacks and whites now socialize in ways almost unimaginable decades ago.

“It pains me to see this country divided by race,” Mr. Link said. Nevertheless, he voted for Mr. Trump.

The last time he voted in a presidential election was 1992, when he cast his ballot for Bill Clinton. But this time, he said, he registered explicitly to vote for Mr. Trump. “I was tired of corruption and lies in Washington,” he said. “I just wanted a nonpolitician like Trump.”

Mr. Presley, the 59-year-old white Crawfordsville steelworker who voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 and Mr. Trump in 2016, was even more emphatic that racial resentment or ethnic bigotry was not behind his support for Mr. Trump. “I grew up on the West Side of Indianapolis in a racist environment,” he said. “But I went to a high school that was 57 percent black, and I played football with a lot of black guys and we became close friends. I learned not to be racist.”

Instead of bias, what animates these voters, whatever their race or political orientation, is a profound distrust and resentment of wealthier, educated Americans, a group they say lacks a connection to them and does not care about their economic situation. And to them, Mrs. Clinton seemed at least as elite as Mr. Trump, if not more so.

[June Scarlet]

I think the conclusion I've taken away from all this is this. If I want certain issues to be supported, if I want certain things to happen, I can't just stop at casting a vote. That's not enough. I don't have the luxury of sitting back and letting those in power run the show on autopilot anymore. I will have to fight for what I believe in constantly.

This isn't the time to run away to Canada. This isn't the time to give up and mope that things are going to be bad from here on out. This isn't the time to be a coward. It's time to stand up, and be brave.

That's hard. I am used to just letting things happen, trusting that everything will work out for the best without my input. But I know that's not true anymore.

I'm still deciding what exactly I'll do, how far I'll go. I know I'll never be extremely outspoken, that's just not who I am as a person. But I still feel there's things I can do. I can write letters to my congresspeople, I can donate money to causes I support, I can let my opinion matter beyond just casting my ballot.

I expected to coast through another four years. But now, it's time for me to stand up and fight.

[Tiger]

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[Strider]

So I was talking to some people on another forum. Some are thoroughly convinced that Trump will arrest them for not voting for him.

I mean, I have some slight concern that there's a very remote possibility it could happen, but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't want to have a revolution on his hands and the UN kicking down his door.

[Jae]

Jan 1, 2017 12:25:43 GMT -5 Strider said:

So I was talking to some people on another forum. Some are thoroughly convinced that Trump will arrest them for not voting for him.

I mean, I have some slight concern that there's a very remote possibility it could happen, but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't want to have a revolution on his hands and the UN kicking down his door.

Wow. And people said the right was the only side that got in on the fear-mongering.

How's he going to know who voted against him? At least where I voted, no PII was inputted into the actual machine; it was all handled by the volunteers at the entrance of the building. I suppose theoretically he could get the information of people who submitted absentee ballots, but that's about it. It's just straight-up paranoia to think that he hired covert agents to break into every single voting location and install secret cameras to observe which candidate everyone voted for.

Even if that all did happen - of which there is like a .000001% chance - the Supreme Court would rightfully declare it unconstitutional and shut the whole operation down.

A lot of people are blowing Trump out of proportion. For better or for worse, he doesn't care about 99% of the country, he cares about 1% of it and we all know which 1% that is. He has a lot of tax breaks he needs to cut to his buddies in the four guaranteed years he gets, he's not gonna waste time incarcerating random people for not voting for him.

[Twillie]

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