> Last Sunday Belarus saw its first business glass door shattered as a result of protests

https://news.tut.by/society/699561.html

That glass door was broken by the chief of the narcotics and organized crime unit.

> Based on data collected by from only some polling places, there is a huge discrepancies in results comparing to official ones. Most poling places refused to post results. People, who demanded to post results (as the law requires), were arrested. You can read more about it at belarus2020.org

Whatever country you're in, this is a good time to think about becoming a poll watcher. The exact arrangements vary but elections nearly always have a place for volunteers to watch the count somehow.

there were a lot of people who wanted to observe polls. many of them were arrested for "disrupting voting process", or were pushed all the way out of the polling place. Independent observer had to use a chairs and binoculars to try to see anything. Seriously.

https://gdb.currenttime.tv/180604A0-D026-4424-8214-7E00D4B60...

It is important to understand who the poll watchers are and what their motives are. In the U.S. in the 1980's poll watching was used as a cover for voter intimidation when white males in combat boots and 10 gallon cowboy hats and even some with guns, many off-duty police officers, were recruited and sent to African American and Latino communities to stand near polling places with signs saying they are patrolling the area.

What you are saying is true. But it is irrelevant in Belarus. See picture above representing a typical independent observer in Belarus.

Oh definitely. I wasn't trying to imply this is the situation in Belarus and I apologize if it came off that way, just that poll watching (like most things) can be used for both good and for evil, so it important to make sure there are safeguards in place for the latter.

One of those safeguards is just having more poll observers.

Of course, most of the time in functioning democracies it's going to be a lot more boring than that -- in my personal experience you just say hi to your counterparts from other organizations and then watch in silence as everything runs smoothly according to the rules.

EDIT: it should without saying that observers not being allowed to bring weapons into polling places should be one of those rules!

Didn't seem to have helped much in Belarus. OSCE/ODIHR were present since 2001 (at least), noted some things, and here we are:

https://www.statista.com/chart/22512/belarus-presidential-el...

Then they were absent this year, and the official result was the exact same 80%.

While I generally agree, I'd like to point out the fact that observing the elections in a western democracy is nothing like observing the elections in a country like Belarus where the president has been in power since 1994.

The elections in Belarus can hardly be called that. There really isn't that much to observe besides the obvious. No number of observers could have changed the results.

I still think it is important to try to observe what can be observed.

For example, thanks to the independent observers we know that the number of ballots reported by the voting place were greater than the total number of people who visited the place during early elections days. Even pushed outside of the building, observers can count number of people walking in and compare to protocols published.

So, it's that simple, isn't it?

There is a reason that the word 'clandestine' exists. Opposing the government in the open works only when the government is not yet a dead zombie corpse.

You will disappear if you try to do sth like that in Belarus or Russia.

And potentially making you a liability to unscrupulous dictators is smart?

It's either pointless because nobody wants to fake results or you're another obstacle to remove.

In 1990, my brother observed the elections in Croatia that lead to the Yugoslavian war. Western Europe was recruiting young people to defend democracy and human rights across the continent. The bet was to stabilize all countries on the continent.

Pro-Serbian regime tried to fraud, but with the help of international observers, they got shutdown, votes have been reorganized when needed, and the sole presence of neutral observers acted as a strong deterrant. Now Croatia is a prosperous country that we enjoy spending vacation to.

Because of this act of courage, my brother got hired by the UN. From taxi driver in 1990 to now diplomat in 2020. He served in Darfour, Afghanistan, Mexico, Guatelama, Irak, Senegal, Sudan, Tanzania. Saved countless refugees from certain death, negotiated with dictators, put pressure one step at a time.

I understand your concern, but don't take courage for foolishness. My brother is not a fool, he is an idealist and will probably have more lasting impact on the world than me.

Shit, this is a comment that doesn't deserve to be hidden on hacker news, this is amazing. Thanks for sharing this.

Wow. What a story. Props to your brother. May we all be so bold and impactful.

Bravery at this scale is rarely risk-adverse. That doesn't make it non-intelligent.

A worse pain is inflicted under dictatorship over a longer period anyways so why not rip off the band-aid now?

[deleted]

Possibly heading for a civil war stoked by the country's president in both cases (one trying to paint his trickster self as a man of law and order, one trying to hold on to power after yet-another mock election). Though the parts of the protests we get to see from Belarus look far more civilized than the pictures coming in from the US.

The US election is likely to be extremely messy and contested. Hence my comment upthread suggesting that people volunteer as poll watchers.

I agree. The situation with the mail is extremely worrying as it indicates more corruption may be on the horizon.

If there was ever a time for Americans to be diligent, it is in ensuring that the election is fair and that the results are honored.

Nearly all protest in the US has been peaceful, but those protests get zero media coverage.

The second US civil war only incidentally involves Trump. He happens to be the figurehead right now, but even if that changes we were on the brink before Trump and we will be on the brink after Trump.

The underlying cause is a mistake of our founding fathers. Because of the winner-take-all structure of our elections, our political parties are forced to be forkophobic. The fact that we can't have a real Tea Party, to say nothing of the Greens and Libertarians, causes our civil war proclivities.

A first step is a proportional House. In this proposal, every state stops drawing House districts, which also kills gerrymandering (although gerrymandering by itself does not cause our civil war problems). Instead, parties must register with the state with a list of N names, people in the state vote for the party rather than an individual, and after the election we first off exclude any parties who have not gotten at least 4% of the vote, then allocate the rest by the Webster method that we already use to allocate House seats among the different states. So a party has 10% popularity in California, that means they receive about five California seats, so the top five names off their pre-published California list go on to the House. Forking a political party is now possible, politicians have spines again at least in the House, and Washington starts working again, hopefully.

This probably does not require a constitutional amendment, just a federal law.

I have been saying for years that the US will never be free of the duopoly without proportional representation. Proportional representation rather than winner take all is the reason that other countries can have many parties. If 10% of the district are Pirates and 5% are Tea Party, then the government should reflect that.

Only... it's not to the advantage of the duopoly to implement something like that, so... entrenched party structure will always be the single choice allowed

The states are free to choose their way of allocating their House representatives so long as they are directly elected. I don’t know if Proportional Allocation would count as directly elected, and to force all states to go along with it you definitely need an amendment.

> to force all states to go along with it you definitely need an amendment

Not necessarily — Congress has vast powers under the Fourteenth Amendment. See the just-published "Abolish the Senate" by lawyer and well-regarded liberal commentator Thomas Geohegan [0].

[0] https://thebaffler.com/salvos/abolish-the-senate-geoghegan

Good luck finding a Supreme Court that would go along with it.

It's been suggested that Congress could protect any given enactment by expressly stripping the Supreme Court and lower courts of jurisdiction to review the enactment's constitutionality — which Congress seemingly has plenary power to do under Article III, section 2, clause 2. [1]

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/158992/biden-trump-supreme-c...

This is correct. Congress can severely curtail the power of the Supreme Court if it wishes.

This sounds like a precedent that's bad to establish because it cuts both ways.

Precedent and norms have somewhat gone by the wayside in recent years, so that might not be a compelling reason not to act.

Given that Republicans removing the filibuster for Supreme court nominations was preceded by Democrats removing the filibuster for lower court nominations and Cabinet appointees, we already have plenty of evidence of one side doing things for convenience that end up blowing up in their face later on.

The response to the slippery slope is not to keep on sliding.

You probably don't; a federal law is probably sufficient.

Article I section 2 is the relevant part of the Constitution; it makes absolutely no statements about "The states are free to choose their way of allocating their House representatives so long as they are directly elected" and indeed that is absolutely not true; in fact the restriction to single member districts is a federal law passed by Congress, 2 USC 1 § 2c [1], after gerrymandering was producing multimember districts that were not state-wide in order to disenfrancise minorities.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/2c

Any idea how to preserve the ability for people to go to "their" representative under that model?

I mean, you now have a few more people to go to.

Like, I used to live in Kansas City, Missouri. I used to have exactly one representative I could go to, but his reelection is almost surely guaranteed as long as he wants to keep running. He has run the exact same campaign against the exact same opponent, Jacob Turk, since 2006, besting him by 10-20 points and taking the seat. One of the larger roads across the center of the city is named after Cleaver. With a proportional house I could instead be heard by 8 different folks.

More importantly, in a proportional house my vote can really matter to Cleaver. Maybe he is just a beloved politician and will be the top of the party list no matter what his party is: so maybe his re-election is always guaranteed no matter whether he runs a one-off race against Jacob Turk or not. But he still cares because my vote can be the difference between an extra ally in the House or not. So if I come to him and say “hey I normally vote for your party but we have had a ridiculous heat wave and the scientists are telling us this is our new normal under anthropogenic climate change” he is much more likely to think “oh yeah, I need to care about that because Missouri is being wracked by heat and droughts.”

>>> I used to have exactly one representative I could go to

No, you have always had 3. Your districts congressman, and your 2 state senators.

State Senators serve in the state legislature, US Senators serve in DC.

They are not representatives in the sense of being people who serve on the house of representatives, the legislative body whose modification is being considered.

You're much more likely to get "your" representative in this model.

In geography-based districting, you only have a chance to vote for someone who represents your interests if they run in your district. Gerrymandering is often perpetuated under claims that we need to draw districts to group like voters so they can have representation.

Example: Black majority districts were drawn to allow for Black representatives, but also are used to concentrate Black votes and remove them from other districts. With no districts Black voters instead could still support black candidates across a state and get representation that way. Even better, with multi-seat districts they can vote for multiple candidates for different reasons, including policy; effectiveness; honesty; faith or lack-of; gender, race, sexual-orientation representation; etc...

Proportional representation allows voters to support representatives regardless of proximity, so even smaller minority groups - including minority viewpoints and parties - can effectively pool votes to get representation. If ~10% of the population is socialist, they'll almost never get a socialist representative with districts, but you could expect ~10% representation with proportional representation.

The problem is there's no way to draw the lines that's fair for everyone (although there are ways to draw the lines that are unfair for some).

At the same time that concentrating a constituency (such as black voters) into a district will make it more likely they get a representative that cares about their needs, it can also be used to reduce the total number of representatives that constituency would get in other instances.

For example, four districts with ~40% black constituents may be redrawn into one district of 85% black constituents and three districts of 25% black constituents, resulting in a representative that should be more responsive to the black constituents in that district. Conversely, four 60% black districts can be redrawn into two 80% and two 40% districts, resulting in likely fewer representatives that would cater to those constituents and their wants. The exact same strategy can be helpful or hurtful based on the specific makeup of the districts in question.

The problem with the proposed system is that you lose local representation, and you lose a level of definition in the views. If I live in the inner city, do I support the green party, or do I support the group that cares about inner city issues? I'm guaranteed me vote counts towards the group I put it towards, but I may be much less likely to find a group/candidates that actually encompass most my views and wants well (even if that candidate might not have been elected).

These systems aren't better or worse than each other, they're just different, and depending on who they are representing, they will do better or worse. It's entirely possible that if we could accurately measure how well people felt their views were represented and their will carried out a change could result in those going up, and a decade from now a change back to the current system could do the same (likely after a continuous drop in those numbers over years), because the groups and people represented are continuously changing and any assumption that a single system will work best in perpetuity is itself flawed.

I just don't know that an entire US state is the correct resolution to have multi-seat districts at. I feel like I would prefer in larger states to have a multi-seat district of one or more counties, but not really an entire state.

It's not like states are some auspiciously chosen grouping of counties with clear benefits.

No, but they are the smallest form of government who doesn't rely on some other form of government for its existence.

States exist because the Constitution (and one or two other things) say they exist. The US government cannot pass a law abolishing Missouri, even if everyone really wants to. Missouri, however, can change its county structure, abolish cities, etc. Because the very existence of those forms of government depend on the existence of Missouri.

By design, the US is a federation of more-or-less sovereign States. "Laboratories of Democracy" and all that.

It doesn't really make sense to have proportional representation at any level smaller (or larger) than the individual state.

With the exception of lobbyists that actually have a chance to make their case directly to representatives I doubt much would change as most people's way of contacting their representative is an email, letter or phone call, which pretty much is always answered by some random staff of the representative.

I've always had great luck visiting my reps, either at home or in DC. The rarely get visits from actual voters and they and their staff love getting someone who is not a lobbyist as a guest. If you do so, have an ask, and most importantly have a story about how you or someone close to you is affected by whatever you want changed. Every time I've got things to move in a positive direction, and never once was I asked to make donations.

You can absolutely make appointments to speak to your representatives (Senators included). You're more likely to get someone discussing an issue they're working on, or that one of their committees is working on, but they'll see you for anything.

You can ambush them in a hallway or at a fundraiser, and they'll talk to you, but you'll have just as much luck making an appointment.

Please don't compare protests like this, it never looks good.

RoW thinks Portland is borderline civil war anyway. Only a true American could conceive of hundreds of masked, rifle-bearing men marching around and clashing with other groups as a protest.

Sure, but this seems like something where the Americans have it right. Despite all the guns, Portland doesn't seem any more violent right now than, say, Paris during the yellow vest protests.

which was violent, to be fair.

What is RoW?

Rest of the World I think

Well, some parts of the world have different cultures I guess.

Not the OP, but RoW probably means Rest of World.

Protests in Belarus are way more civilized than recent protests in both Portland and the rest of USA. The difference is stark, shocking, and puzzling.

Do you mean the police in Belarus are acting way more civilized?

Aside from property damage I've seen over 1000:1 ratio of police brutality content to protestor violence content in the US over the last several months. Presumably the ratio is somewhat lower than that, but I imagine it still leans this direction.

As a specific illustration, in just a month police shot like 7 protestors' eyeballs out. The cost of these alone is incalculable.

>Do you mean the police in Belarus are acting way more civilized?

No. The police in Belarus is just torturing people in cells where no evidence can be produced. Different style, you see.

Considering America is awash in guns, I don’t think it should be surprising. In the early days of the republic there were many armed uprisings... Not to mention the US Civil War.

The violence around protests has had remarkably little to do with guns, except maybe for police shooting protestors. A tiny handful of events when huge protests are taking place in basically every city is itself pretty remarkable.

Belarusians have a lot of hunting riffles on hands too. But these are tightly regulated. You can't wear it just because you want to. And people were jailed for possession a single WW2 era round found in the forest (Belarus had a lot going on on its territory during WW2 and as the result - a lot of stuff is still in the soil all across the country).

I think we should be pretty skeptical of these kind of broad generalizations. How do you know you're seeing a representative sample of protests in either country?

The US protests are being sabotaged with violence from outsiders to delegitimize them.

How do you know Belarussian protests aren't ?

I assume they are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men_(Ukrainian_cr...

Agreed, this is why portland protesters are demanding these outsiders (the national guard) leave.

They're mostly concerned with Feds more than NG, but your point is spot on

Because the situation is (probably) a lot more nuanced than what you paint it as.

Well, Proud Boys are outsiders specifically entering Portland to cause trouble, further nuance can I guess be found in other hate groups that are coming in from outside Portland to stir the pot even more.

I just watched a video that included press, local cops, proud boys, KKK (labeled as such), and a single BLM protester (being beaten by the proud boy people).

My points were nuance.