Would abolishing the electoral college benefit the left?

Would abolishing the electoral college benefit the left?

Other urls found in this thread:

prwatch.org/news/2017/06/13254/koch-convention-rewrite-constitution-roadblocks
salon.com/2000/12/04/voter_file/
cnet.com/news/defcon-hackers-find-its-very-easy-to-break-voting-machines/
twitter.com/AnonBabble

no

It would benefit democrats. I don't know whether it would benefit the left or not.

It would make a third party more viable, so yes.

Yes

yes

...

No
Imagine the state of the "left" in the US if she won

There's no guarantee the votes would have been the same with no electoral college. People might be less likely to feel like they "wasted" their vote by being in a solidly blue/red state, and vote third party.

I share that view, but I think that it is absurd that the left in America has just abandoned the concept of campaign finance reform and now just want to get rid of the electoral college.

The left hasn't abandoned campaign finance reform. The Clinton worshipping Democrats never cared about that.

It would shift the balance more towards us, but not necessarily Leftism. The biggest systemic change that could be made in our election system in terms of Left/Right representation is proportional representation. It turns out that single-member districts biases representation towards rural areas which are generally more right-leaning. Wiping out these districts for one giant state-wide (for state legislatures) or nation-wide (for Congress) district with proportional representation corrects for this and brings proportionality back to cities where most of the population lives and where people are more left-leaning.

I mean it would be better than ultra gerrymandered indirect democracy.

Quite a lot of them do care about it, they just succumb to playing the "this is what the opposition is doing so we need to too" attitude.

As long as American democracy is held in a stranglehold by Duverger's Law and the capture of the two parties by donor money, it really doesn't matter. You're going to get neoliberalism either way. So no, it won't necessarily benefit the Left.

I mean as part of the Russia hysteria I figured a natural result would be the abolition of political advertisement and campaign finance reform. It is the most obvious approach to remove all forms of paid influence upon people.
I also mistakenly assumed it would become big once they lost with almost double the money.

Our political system is pretty fucked, so anything would be an improvement. I'm not big into democracy, but it's a hell of a lot better than oligarchy tbh.

The thing is the Clinton-type Democrats don't give a shit if they get elected or not, or at least not enough to risk losing control of the party to Sanders types, they get paid either way.

They don't actually believe any of that shit. It's just an excuse for her losing.

Yes, but if the republicans won one more state legislature they could start constitutional congresses. If they don't reform some it seems like they will lose to a third party.

Are you sure, I have seen russian twitter bot trackers being built

Wait is this legit? Fuck, Liberal Crime Squad time nao

prwatch.org/news/2017/06/13254/koch-convention-rewrite-constitution-roadblocks
That only counts how many republican controlled legislative houses there are.
It potentially isn't as dire but the rise of a third party has to be swift to avoid it.

Voters are too defeatist and complacent to the two-party system. Even though it's not controversial to say the system is shit, everyone falls for the media's attacks on third parties and "spoilers". If the Democrats can still exist after doing nothing with a supermajority, losing every down-ballot seat in 4 straight elections, and lose the presidency to Donald fucking Trump, there is no breaking point. They can keep losing without reform and still not lose power.

I'm 100000% sure this will never happen, even if it's the difference between America turning fascist or not, the Democrats will never give up their corporate money control

Well the Whigs died out and were eventually replaced by the Republicans. The Democrats might be too entrenched at this point though.

I think a constitutional convention would wake up a ton of people
Also they just bought stake in the Chinese version of twitter so I'm not sure I want them touching the constitution.

It would just be subsumed by the democrats as soon as it became popular.

I figured it was over as soon as I saw them change the debate threshold to 15% when Aleppoman got to 5%

Uh yeah in the 1850s, they didn't have to contend with the media landscape of today. In an age of split second corporate communications the Democrats will be able to flood the world with enough propaganda to keep going no matter what happens.

I'm sure. Don't let porky anywhere near the constitution.

American here. The main reason the whigs died out was because they joined up with the confederacy since those were the only states they had any real victories in. Had they gotten any victories in the north it would have been more likely they would have been a third party.

That's a two-way street. It also means the citizens are more connected than ever.

The free market is perfectly natural
Do you think that I'm some kind of dummy?
It's the ideal way to order the world
"Fuck the morals, does it make any money?"
And if you don't like it, then leave
Or use your right to protest on the street.
Yeah use your right, but don't imagine that it's heard!
Cunts are still running the world!

Now that sounds like FREEDOM

It would benefit everyone in general.

The electoral college is corrupt. As a process, as of right now it's thoroughly in the bag with the GOP's dirty tricks - ie, it's basically rigged in their favor.

On the state level, it's rigged in favor of whichever party (of the two biggest) is biggest in that state. Each state has a certain number of electoral votes - most larger states have electoral votes which are mostly added based on the amount of districts they have. Those districts have their own representatives… but in national elections every electoral vote in almost every state is granted to whichever party had the most votes in that state over all. The districts have no say in how their vote is used, it is literally decided by the GOP and Democratic Party who assign party-loyal electors so that no one will change their mind and cast a vote which corresponds to the actual voting population of the state.

This process is not outlined in the constitution, which was written before political parties actually existed. Also of note, many states today also have populations larger than the entire population of the country at the time the constitution was ratified. Like, GA alone has 5 times as many people as the original 13 colonies.

they'll just make jesus a founding father and legally mandate 100% coal power generation and shit.

It is described in the article I linked but I'm sure it would just be used to destroy Kansas any more
Also I would want them to mandate friend of coal stickers on cars.

Let's not play that game. The Dems are fucking complicit in it. They had 8 fucking years to do something and they did NOTHING about it. I applaud this internal strife currently going on in the democratic party.

Bernie needs to take over the DNC and smoke out all the dogs and snakes, close the loop holes and lobbying insentives and make the Democrats a FDR party again. Or whatever.

Come on now

Yes, leftists usually huddle in urban areas.

Gee I dunno guise
Literally the only reason to support this is bigotry against rural people and an ignorance of their history of fighting porky. Once the spooked boomers are dead they rest of those regions will be our best allies

Literally the reason why there is no Leftism in America. Covert the rural people or deal with Clintons types forever, your choice

You really need to get a fucking clue and stop fetishizing what the proletariat is supposed to look like.

In what world would that ever happen? I guess the real question is minimal program vs. maximum program. I know we need to sell people on world communism, which is the maximum program, but I guess the hangup is on what is the transitional demand that takes communist organizing mainstream and starts the process of serious organization around it.

I just don't see the point of engaging with elections… the whole thing is just so far gone, and meanwhile it's easier than ever for memes (as in thought patterns) to go viral. I think something like Occupy is more viable than amending the constitution or having the Dems win more seats in some places. But it makes sense why the left can't give up on the Democrats because what else is there? The answer is our own hands, but I'm one of these cushy armchairs too so I mean I get that it's fucked up.

But yeah in my opinion what would be good for the left is a sensible social movement and even if you don't come out and say "world communism is the goal" your minimum program can't exclude world communism either.

Doesn't the American Electoral College increase the weight of rural areas? If so, given that people in rural areas lean more conservative than in the cities (as is the case in most countries I guess, only counter-examples I know of are Venezuela and Thailand), the answer is yes. But the voting method is shit. The regulations about advertising are shit. The regulations about who has the right to vote are shit. That you vote on a normal working day is absurd and I don't know of any other country that has that. The procedures within the two parties are worse than in many banana republics as these are even less protected by proper regulations, the parties count as private things and not state entities, the big TV debate between candidates is also basically a private event, not a state-thing, so they can exclude third-party candidates from that.

The American election system is about as bad as you can get without "technically" being rigged.

Oh it's that too.

Bush literally stole the 2000 election, if anything like that had happened in VZ the media would still be talking about their government's lack of legitimacy now but instead hardly anyone even knows about it.

salon.com/2000/12/04/voter_file/

what game is this?

Because I fucking live here retard, what you call a fantasy of the past to make yourself feel better about being larping scum is actually reality outside your sheltered bubble
Die

...

There's evidence of election fraud in plenty of other elections too, in addition to increasingly large amounts of voter suppression. The American election system uses unstandardized, highly-exploitable electronic infrastructure with proprietary, closed-source. Some machines literally have the capability in their code of counting votes as fractions, literally serving no other purpose than election fraud. Most other countries realized a long time ago how many new, extra-difficult-to-protect vectors of manipulating the vote that electronic voting and counting brings and went back to hand-counted paper ballots. America has some 10 or so states without even a fucking voter-verified paper trail so even attempting to properly audit an election is impossible. Finally, most states make it as difficult as possible to demand a recount and require private funding to do so. It absolutely is "technically" rigged.

Yes, because people in the irrelevant states are actual working class people, farmers, factory workers, people who live simple lifestyles.
New York and California hoarding so many electoral votes gives too much power to people who live in literal bubbles. American leftists have to concentrate efforts in nowhere land to convince people to join their(our) fight against capitalism.
New Yorkers, Californians, Pacific Northwesterners, Minneapolis, Houstonfags and Austinfags are liberal scum who will never abandon their disgusting lifestyle of being useless cunts and defenders of neoliberal global capitalism.

Bernie is a fucking snake you moron, he sold out faster than anyone I've ever seen.

Not to mention America entrusts its elections to electronic machines produced by a completely unregulated private industry that was allowed to consolidate into 2 regional monopolies.

cnet.com/news/defcon-hackers-find-its-very-easy-to-break-voting-machines/

The fix is in.