The problems with the electoral system effect all offices which are elected by either plurality or majority/runoff, not just those for Presidential electors. This includes all members of Congress, most Governors and statewide elected officials, most state legislators, most mayors and other elected local executive officers, and the many city and county legislative officers (city council, county supervisors, etc.) that are elected in single-member districts.
There's some of the latter that are elected in vote for N and the top N win elections, which tend to provide slightly more choice, but still less choice (and less effective democratic representation of the choices made) than proportional election.
Paraphrasing: "The job of the galactic president is not to wield power, but to draw attention away from it."
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
I haven't seen this suggested in the media.
With the huge number of resources available online for information, I would suggest that the perception of media as only covering presidential elections means that you need to work a little harder and find news sources that give you more valuable content. And if your desired news source doesn't exist, think about making it. For example, my hometown is a town of 20,000 people in a beautiful part of the country, but it suffers from being, at best, a bedroom community for nearby hospitals and colleges since 2008 finally ended the industrial presence. There's a guy there who has decided that he's going to give the town news, and he does fantastically well. He has a facebook page with 10000 followers (remember, the town is only 20000) and summarized positions of all the candidates for the recent city council and school board elections. All his posts have substantial discussions in the comments. In recent months I've had great discussions with high school classmates about where the town is headed, which wouldn't have happened before this facebook page (because we didn't have the information.) We also take a pretty active interest in the town, despite the fact that we all live 500-3000 miles away these days.
That turned into a bit of show and tell. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are people interested in local coverage if it's substantial.
I'm also also curious if there (ever) was a town newspaper.
Here's the link: http://facebook.com/Waynesboro
I haven't contacted the guy, but I believe he does it on the side. I've been meaning to get in touch with him to learn about him and maybe coordinate with him. The town is looking very seriously at building a new high school on the outskirts of town, losing the current strong location and sending the town deep into debt in the process, which they justify because the current school has some leaks in the roof and, as a 1930s building, doesn't have any flashy new technology built into the classrooms. I've talked with some friends at length about this, and we all had pretty much the same feelings. The last thing you want to do is encourage teachers to spend less time at the board, and more showing PowerPoint; centuries-old buildings are perfectly good places for class, as each of us experienced in college; and they're desperately looking for a cure-all, when the reality is that you have a major demographics shift when you no longer have the huge DuPont plant keeping a herd of engineers in town.
On the other hand, it's a beautiful location, it's incredibly cheap to live and buy a home, and the town has been shifting its development patterns in the last ten or so years. The long lost downtown area is coming back to life, streets are being built with bike space, and narrower so cars are less encouraged to speed, and they're starting to emphasize the great parks, river, and proximity to the mountains.
Finally, when you go there, you're struck by how much a single person could really turn the whole place around and onto an incredible trajectory.
That, and the Supremacy Clause. Whatever local laws you vote for are superseded by federal law. By definition, this means federal elections matter a lot more than local elections (even though local elections have a more immediate short-term impact on the populace).
Hopefully the federal government deschedules marijuana soonish.
There are SO many things that we can do.
We invest supposedly in physical and technical infra, but never in political....
THAT is the revolution I want to see.
Your state's Secretary of State office will list upcoming elections, and BallotPedia.org collects many of these.
The resources are already out there and available. It says something that you didn't even know that though.
The only fix is to keep pushing for improvements. Explain the problems to the gatekeepers, lobby for change.
Even the politicians themselves don't portray this consistently, so the "facts" of that are often subject to doubt.
The number of local (especially community budgeting, judicial and special district) elections I've missed out of ignorance, despite checking New York City's Board of Elections website, is nuts. Furthermore, there seems to be an expectation that voters blindly vote along party lines. Almost every election there will be a list of uncompetitive judicial runs I've never heard of, and so had no time to do any research on. The result, for those line items, is me leaving them blank.
That is, if the races were contested. Which they aren't because nobody pays attention to them. Which is in part because there's no information to be had on them even if you look for it. Stupid vicious cycle. So people vote for those offices along party lines or leave the ballots blank.
I've been thinking about trying to build something that would help solve the problem, but it's really a social problem more than a technical problem, and who has the time to go chasing down bios and position statements from hundreds of candidates every spring and fall?
This system definitely allows smaller communities to be heard on the national stage, but it also frequently leads to situations where no single party or pre-election coalitions have enough representatives to form a government (they need at least 50% seats). As a result, coalitions are often formed between unlikely partners who are ideologically worlds apart. Parties forming a coalition at a state level while disparaging their partner at the federal level is quite common, and the number of hoops the politicians jumps through to justify their positions is hilariously sad.
Due to this coalition politics, often important legislation can't be passed as it is difficult to make any progress while satisfying all the partners. The government is also prone to "blackmail" from coalition partners who often threaten to withdraw support unless their demands are met. In a two-party system, at least things move. In a multi-party scenario, there is always a risk of a complete deadlock.
Add that the districts are drawn by elected officials and easily and regularly manipulated to give parties disproportionate power and we end up with a situation where very few people in a very big country are able to completely disrupt the political system and hold the sovereign debt (and the economic stability of the world for that matter) hostage in order to try to take health care away from poor people.
I can't speak much about the political system of India, but I think it's quite evident that with the rise of politicians like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, people are very dissatisfied with the politicians we've been electing. And by virtue of that, the way we've been electing them.
Bernie Sanders is a politician that's been being elected to federal office for quite a long time.
Voters are doing a simple cost/benefit analysis weighing the cost of taking the time to vote vs the impact their vote will have.
Why would a Sanders supporter want to risk putting someone like Trump in office (through inaction)? Asides from maybe the anti-establishment aspect, Trump and his proposed policies spits in the face of everything Sanders stands for. Even if we ignore his own dangerous, egomaniac tendencies, having a Republican president in office with a supreme court nomination on the line could easily undo all the progress (however little) the US has made in areas like healthcare, marriage equality, minority rights, gun regulation, climate change, etc, and very possibly even regress on certain areas.
There's so much at stake in this election and a Trump presidency will be absolutely disastrous for not just the US, but the entire world.
Resigning oneself to naked fascism with the idea that it could somehow lead to more progress down the line is quite the gamble. Perhaps it could work out, but you're playing with some serious fire.
It's anyone's guess how Trump would actually rule, but throwing dissenters in jail would be admitting defeat on his only real core value, which is that he's so great that he always gets his way on charisma and "negotiation skill".
Other than that, I do agree that "it must get worse before it can get better" is bad policy, since the former is usually a lot more reliable than the latter.
That's a pretty ignorant attitude.
The next President will be appointing 2-3 SCOTUS judges and a slew of Federal judges. You're totally cool with letting Trump pick those people?
People SHOULD be voting at the local level where their votes still matter quite a bit, but generally don't through an interesting combination of apathy and ignorance (e.g. few people actually know who their rep on the city council is and what their basic platform is).
A variety of web sites have tried to fill the need, but the money needed for local news far exceeds the revenue they're able to generate.
Your vote, win or lose, also communicates very important messages:
1) 'I vote, and people in my community vote'. If you don't vote then why the hell should the politician care what you want? Does McDonalds care about the opinions of people who don't eat fast food? You think they should put more healthy options on their menu? 'So what? Who are you? Stop wasting my time.' The same goes for your community: If your community doesn't vote, then why would anyone address its concerns? In a world of 50% turnout, imagine the attention a community would get if 95% voted - on every issue, they'd be wondering, 'what does neighborhood X think? how does it affect them?'
2) It expresses a political outlook. A politician who sees their constituents vote 80-20 for Clinton over Trump is going to behave much differently than one who sees a 55-45 vote.
1. At least in Australia we have compulsory registration and compulsory visiting the polling station on the Election Day - if you don't want to vote you don't really have to.
Honestly it is a hard one to mandate as a single few hour window on a single day. Someone has to be working at hospitals for example.
Maybe it should be election week
And the queues at Australian voting stations on The Day aren't anywhere near as long as in the US. I've heard some horror stories where some people have had to wait 4+ hours (on a Tuesday) to vote in the US.
A ballot isn't an exam -- you don't get penalized for not filling out every element. Voters should be encouraged to vote only on the elements they understand.
It seems plausible, but is there some data to back up this theory?
There have been a number of studies on the relationship and they all seem to point to a positive correlation between PR and voter turnout.
Sorry, this is complete malarky. The calculus of voting is: vote for the least of two evils. If we had 100% voting and everyone did this, the politicians would get better over time, because they would learn that being a certain way would result in failure. The general pool of would-be politicians would learn that maybe it would be OK to run since more normal people are winning.
It's that damn simple. Everything else is an excuse to service some BS idea.
It's not an equation, but rather one gigantic shit show designed to stir emotion, bought and paid for by those who have money, and they give it to both sides.
It's like a 140 lb weakling being squashed by a 300 lb sumo wrestler and you're telling him to just squirm more.