I truly don’t think most governments are going to give up THEIR rights, or step back. I mean, look at what happened with my government during the economic meltdown years ago, where they fucking prorogued the parliament.
tl;dr they just declared parliament over (parliament usually lasts about half the year, so the members of parliament can go back to their home riding aka town/district, instead of Ottawa).
Add to that the list of NSA/etc spying shit, erosing of freedoms and rights in the fucking name of terrorism and safety, lackluster Copyright laws (Hollywood has flat out bought a huge chunk of the US government, and gets away with delaying copyrights from entering the public domain, and the infamous http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting that lets them claim hugely successful movies lost them money because reasons), crooked corporate taxes and loopholes (as well as taxing of the rich and ultra rich), the corporate selling out by the government to lobbyists, and a multitude of other nonsense that will never get fixed, because rich people literally bought the fucking law.
You think this shit will go away because more people are forced to vote?
nuh uh…gonna need bloodshed to achieve those lofty goals.
This is true but America is heading that way, and it will get there eventually. So you want to wait until it gets that bad, go for it. The people shouldn’t fire the first shot. The government has to make the first move. So what will be the trigger? How bad does it have to get?
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I agree about us not being the ones to fire first…but what bothers me is the government seems to be preparing to crush the shit out of whoever fires back in an overwhelming display of force. I think by the time it gets bad enough to force people to fight back, we’ll have no chance. Irs, Homeland Security, and even the police forces are getting military-grade transport and weapons…why? Nothing they face is making this kind of armament necessary. I think they’re gearing up for when the people get maxed-out POW meters, so they can demolish the troublemakers and quell any real uprising before it begins.
After reading through the thread, I’m surprised no one suggested that the problem isn’t mandatory or non-mandatory voting, but rather the voting system itself. First-past-the-post voting is really, REALLY awful, and given the state of American politics, an alternative should replace said system. Sadly this means every single fat politician in congress and the senate would never allow this to happen since it would threaten the jobs they don’t do and their fat pockets.
So what’s the best option? Mandatory voting? No more first-past-the-post voting system? A combination of both? It’s worth discussing different voting systems in an attempt to make change.
What do you mean? You want to use a system that gives up seats depending on the breakdown of the vote? I think that can work on state level but will be impossible to implement fairly on a federal level.
If mandatory voting becomes a thing, I will pencil in my vote for Senator Steven Armstrong every year until the day I die. Because every man should be free to fight his own wars.
I know people who live in countries where it’s mandatory, they hate it.
I like the phrase the “tyranny of the majority”.
Anyway, this is a bad idea. I rather have a two-round system; candidates that have less than a certain proportion of the votes are eliminated, and a second round of voting occurs. That’ll show the discontent of the people with both parties.
More or less, yes. To be honest, I think anything, or rather an alternative voting system, is better than FPTP, as that system has way too many issues.
Alternative voting systems for those that don’t know:
I encourage others to watch those videos if they are unaware of alternative voting systems. They’re easy to understand and show how flawed the current voting system is (and that’s not exactly addressing gerrymandering, which I didn’t link).
@Raz0r : to address whether or not a new voting system will work on a federal level, I don’t know if it will. However, I think change is in order. I mean, how many people that DO vote can honestly say that the candidate they vote for, be it a representative, senator, or president, accurately represent how they feel and aren’t influenced by strategic voting (i.e. voting for someone so the “other guy” doesn’t win).
We don’t have voter ID cards in Australia, although QLD did trial it at the recent state election.
Voter fraud is already pretty much non-existant in our system. A voter ID is not needed.
Why the fuck would you try to willingly vote under someone else’s name? Most cases of multiple voting are by old people, new voters or people with language problems.
Australia has a system similar to this (I wont go into too much detail, but parties get more funds if they get more seats), but it doesn’t solve everything. For one, we still have political donations, and there’s also the argument that the approach simply helps the powerful stay in power. The current large parties have lots of seats, which means they get extra moneys, which means that they have more funds to win more seats next time, etc.
Just a minor correction - Australia’s two main parties are centre-right (“Liberal”, current government) and centre-left (“Labor”, current opposition). There are full-right-wing (Family First) and full-left-wing parties (Greens), but for the most part these are less popular. Most of the things proposed by your Republican party wouldn’t fly with the Liberal party here, though there’s a reasonable amount of similarity between our Labor and your Democrat (though there are differences). You could argue whether it’s a result of compulsory voting or something else, but it’s true that Australia traditionally prefers less extreme points of view on either side of the political spectrum. In fact, there was a problem in the 2007 election where for a while the two major parties had trouble distinguishing their policies from each other because their positions on a lot of things seen as important at the time were virtually the same.
For context, Australia currently uses a system of all-preferential instant-runoff voting (listed as “alternative voting” in the videos, except you HAVE to number all of the boxes for your vote to be valid) for the lower house. The upper house is a little more complicated - It uses Single-Transferrable Votes (as in the video of the same name), except that again you HAVE to number all of the boxes and multiple entrants from the parties are allowed. Also, only half of the upper house is changed every election to keep some continuity in the checks and balances. This system has some real issues that I can go into (I love me some psephology), but I just wanted to provide some context so that if people mention “Australia’s system” you know what they’re talking about.
EDIT: No voting system anywhere is perfect, regardless of whether you make it compulsory or not or how you distribute the votes. What I would say to some of the people in the thread is that just because you don’t feel that your current system does not give your opinion any weight doesn’t mean that the effect is the same for all electoral systems.
Spirit Juice, I understand what you mean but our government isn’t set up that way. Could it be? Sure, but that’s going to be a difficult pill to swallow. Our House of Representatives and Senate are already that. They go by districts so in practice it should be a tapestry of parties working together in the best interest of the country as a whole, but the biggest parties in the country bankroll them even at a local level. Like I said before, we’re littered with independent candidates. We just don’t see them often on a national level even though they are there.
Forced voting=more stupid people voting, but go ahead and make everyone waste their time. Want change the fact murica is a corportactacy masquerading as a democracy. Like it or not corps and their lobbyist have their grubby little paws on almost every law written. The state level is even worse then the national level
Also, lol at the multitudes of people who are all for this bullshit “as long as you can keep the opposition out of power”. Seriously, fuck you guys. This is a power play, plain and simple- you assholes don’t want a republic, or even a democracy for that matter, you just want “your team” to have total power without obstacles. Really, I think the best long term solution would be for the nation to break up into pieces where citizens can live among likeminded people without having to constantly fight others whose desires run counter to their own. The hard left could pass all the laws it wants in pursuit of their Marxist “utopia”, the hardcore Bible thumpers could have their precious theocracy, and maybe there would even be a few places for people like me who just want to be left alone by sociopathic politicians, bureaucrats, Bolshevik revolutionaries, and other assorted busybodies who can’t just leave damn well alone. Of course this isn’t going to happen, the libido dominandi burns too strong in the minds of millions of would be dictators (or saviors, as the sort self identifies) to allow actual freedom or liberty to people who don’t share their desires.
The problem with all this is that it doesn’t get to the root cause of voter apathy, which I’d imagine is that a lot of folks who aren’t rich feel like the deck is stacked against them. When completely obvious corruption like the Supreme Court basically removing any campaign funding limits, gerrymandering, etc, what else are people supposed to think? The problem with all the money in politics is that, even if everyone was mandated to vote, candidate choice is going to be based on who has the most money in their war chest. So the voters are still only going to be able to vote for candidates that have taken favors/money from wealthy donors/corporations.
This is pure laziness. If Obama was serious about getting people out to vote, he’d instead try to fix some of the ridiculous corruption that goes on. But he benefits from that, so he’d rather just pass the buck rather than trying to actually fix anything. Some things that would help just off the top of my head:
-Congressional term limits
-campaign funding limits that are strictly adhered to
-SUPREME COURT term limits
-abolishment of superPACs
-make it so that donations can’t come from corporations and have to be made from the donor’s personal bank account, with transparency
-limits to the abilities of lobbyists
Maybe they’re not all feasible, but the attempt would go a long way.
To paraphrase Mencken, if x is the average level of stupidity among the public, and y is the population, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than x.
