Does it require a constitutional amendment to disband the federal government?
Technically, yes. That would be done via a Constitutional Convention, presumably, like how the current one was written and enacted.
Major change wouldn’t be easy
I think our aversion to anything difficult or challenging is a big part of the problem. We’ve gotten really bad at doing things that are hard. Unfortunately, though, I don’t think we can just avoid doing hard things forever.
Even worse, we’re so adverse that someone in the middle of circumventing said challenges, when asked why they don’t go through proper methods, only has to say, “doing this the right way is difficult, so I just have to be corrupt in general.” Then we all just shrug and tell each other, “any other way would be difficult, so I guess we need corruption to navigate the system they built for the purpose of making things difficult for us.” And then we reject anyone who says they wanna try doing things the right way because the leaders we hate continued to bolster the system we hate because we’re not even willing to learn why things are difficult.
Not just things that are hard, but anything that doesn’t have an immediate payoff. If it’s something we need to do now, but won’t see results for another 5 years, you may as well forget about it.
We are going to avoid doing the hard things until the hard things are forced upon us. There’s too much profit in keeping things status quo, so any attempt to make the world a better place is met with the unified forces of unfettered capitalism.
We are going to avoid doing the hard things until the hard things are forced upon us.
Likely true. And when that time comes, I think it’s going to be rough.
I think we got a preview during Covid of just how selfish and lazy people can be. Stay home and wear a mask outside was far too much to ask of the American people. People murdered people over masking. Little piece of fabric over your nose and mouth, and only when you’re inside a store or public building. “No, I’d rather you be dead.”
When the water runs out and the air is toxic and the grocery shelves are bare, it’s going to be chaos.
Yeah, maybe it’s time for amending the constitution, there should be a amendment that allows ranked choice voting
If we held a constitutional Congress now, we’d end up with something far far worse than what we currently have
No time burn the fucking one that been used for 250 years. Fucking thing should be burned and rewritten 30 years after it’s creation exactly as Benjamin Franklin stated.
We need a constitution that wasn’t written by slave owning white rich men. Instead a new one that actually gives us a bill of rights and true freedom.
It should be allowed but I think it needs more state and local testing along with other alternatives. It’s not clear it’s the absolute best system despite being better than what we have now. Enshrining it in the constitution would be premature at this point.
Actually, “majority-rule (Condorcet) methods of ranked voting uniquely minimize the number of spoiled elections by restricting them to voting cycles, which are rare in ideologically-driven elections.”
I don’t know what this passage is saying.
There are a few edge cases that are generally considered ‘bad’ and best avoided in the study of voting methods. Things such as voting for a candidate actually reducing the chance the voter receives an outcome they would be happy with, or of there being a single person whose vote could alter the outcome of the election.
The particular passage they linked is talking about the spoiler effect, where a candidate close in ideology to another candidate causes both of them to lose and a candidate of a different ideology than the one with the most support wins. E.g. in 1912 Roosevelt ran against Taft, allowing Woodrow Wilson to win with 40 ish percent of the vote, despite Taft and Teddy have a majority between them and being much closer on policy.
Arrow’s impossibility theorem is a formal statement (and accompanying proof) that any ordinal system of voting, where voters indicate relative preferences between candidates, is subject to the spoiler effect. First past the post and ranked choice voting are among the worst in this regard, creating spoilers even in cases where voter preferences do not require such a condition to exist.
Other majority-rule systems such as condorcet methods are less sensitive to spoilers and, under certain models of voter preferences (e.g. smooth ideological preference 'i like candidates on the right and I like them less the more left they are), is immune to spoilers.
Thanks, I don’t believe when people are talking about ranked choice, they mean this condorcet form, correct?
It’s been a while since I read up on this stuff but I recall being most intrigued by STAR voting and various proportional voting systems. The latter seems important as it eliminates a lot of electoral chicanery. I think if each faction receives power exactly proportional to the votes they receive, it will reduce the incentive to do voter suppression.
Ranked choice in the US is pretty much only instant-runoff (IRV).
All the votes are tallied for a voter’s first preference, if no majority winner then the ballots for the lowest-voted candidate are re-tallied for their next preference - repeat until some candidate gets a majority.
It is a terrible voting system, mathematically only barely better than first-past-the-post. The reason (in my opinion) that it has gotten some traction in the US is that it is the change that is least-threatening to the party duopoly, with the math telling us that is supports the same big-tent duopoly that FPTP does as an end-state.
A better form of it is the condorcet method, where candidates are compared pairwise based on preferences. E.g. on how many ballots is candidate A ranked above candidate B? The winner of such an election is the one who wins the greatest number of head-to-head elections.
STAR is interesting, but I personally find it too complex and it fails at preventing many different electoral pathologies.
Approval voting is the method I prefer (mark all candidates you approve for holding this office). Immune to spoilers, simple to explain, adaptable to single and multi-winner elections, and ensures that the candidate that has the broadest electoral support wins.
I want nationwide STAR voting
Neat thing is that the constitution can be amended. It has a pile of them already and there’s plenty of room for more.
Not with the existing election system it can’t. There is a reason the last amendment was implemented over 30 years ago.
And the 27th Amendment is a joke considering the staying part of incumbents. If Birch Bayh could’ve gotten his Electoral College abolition amendment through twenty years before that, we’d be in a very different state of things right now.
And, statistically, we’re over due for another one.
Let’s make it a good one?
If they’re just going to ignore the rules already in the constitution, what good would new rules in it matter?
The constitution needs to be rewritten to make an example out of corrupt assholes. Like public disgrace through imprisonment and confiscation of wealth. Everyone convicted of a criminal offense gets a public defender, including Richie Rich.
Right now it’s written to allow the Epstein class to murder, molest and pillage without any repercussions. It’s not an error, it’s a baked-in feature to protect rich, white male property owners.
I think we might be past the parliament stage and need to go straight to funkadelic.
Definitely needs to be an easier way to oust a tyrant.
There is, but nobody has done it yet.
Well… Yes. I guess I meant a LEGAL way.
All we have to do is pass it through the legislative body that hasn’t passed a consequential piece of normal law since 2022. Easy.
What consequential piece of normal law was passed in 2022? I thought the last one was Obamacare.
The inflation reduction act. Like it or hate it it did something.
We have a what? I thought that was scotus and pedo at large toilet paper.
Can’t wait for the next episode. What will they think of next? A chimpanzee in a tophat? Maybe, who knows.
Uh no shit idiot. Quit trying to soft-serve Voter ID though
