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Michigan Election Security - Benson Rejects House Contempt Vote as Dangerous Power Grab
Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson pushes back against legislative subpoenas, citing voter safety and systemic risks to Michigan election security. Contempt Vote Sparks Firestorm Over Michigan Election Security Oversight Battle LANSING, Mich. — Michigan’s top election official, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, is standing firm against a Republican-led legislative attempt to force the release…
By 2035, the Decentralized Voting Systems Market is estimated to expand to USD 7.73 Billion, showcasing a robust CAGR of 32.5% between 2025
Friendly reminder that in Germany, every person who is allowed to vote is registered by the government (you don't have to do that yourself) and receives a letter inviting you to vote personally or per mail, detailing how to vote per mail and telling you where exactly to go to vote.
This is what it looks like when the government wants you to vote.
The voting system in the US is dogshit in my humble opinion.
What are you guys's plans to reform past the post voting system into an alt one?
A group of computer security experts have written to Vice President Kamala Harris to alert her to the fact that voting systems were breached
-If true...
-Dunno, if anything will happen...
Test out 4 different voting systems!
First Past the Post (current)
RCV
Approval
STAR Voting
Basically this is a demonstration of how each voting system works and what results it produces based on your ballots.
It's very neat! If you've ever thought to yourself that you wanted to be able to vote third party, this also shows which voting system makes those choices more likely to win (assuming that each voter is truthful throughout).
Candidates
Kamala Harris (Democrat)
Donald Trump (Republican)
Jill Stein (Green Party)
Chase Oliver (Libertarian Party)
Robert F Kennedy Jr (Independent)
Cornell West (Independent)
Claudia de la Cruz (Party for Socialism and Liberation)
Randall Terry (Constitution Party)
After recent practice runs showed significant problems in transferring data accurately, the battleground state’s new centralized voter regis
In honor of Debate Day (I'm cringing already, and I have to watch with my kid for a school assignment): I keep seeing political posts on here that demonstrate a misunderstanding of the American electoral system, and I want to explain a few points. Because I have a PhD in Political Science and apparently I can't help myself.
E.g. "You people keep saying to vote for the (blameworthy) democrat and then force them to the left, but then you never force them to the left!" <- in a way, this statement is true enough, but not for the reasons that it seems to imply.
The US Constitution doesn't establish a two-party system. However, it does establish the Electoral College, which is a major way in which the US electoral system diverges from a popular vote. The manner in which each state chooses and constrains its electors (the people who make up the Electoral College) is left to the states, but 48 of the 50 states use a voting system called "First Past the Post," or first-preference plurality. FPTP is a system in which voters choose one candidate and the candidate with the largest number of votes (a plurality) "takes it all," even if they do not secure a majority of the votes. So if there are three candidates—say, Gore, Bush, and Nader—and Bush gets the plurality of electors, Bush wins. Even if more voters voted for Gore than Bush. Even if Nader voters indicated in exit polls that their second choice was much more likely to be Gore than Bush. US Congressional seats, likewise, are elected in single-member districts with FPTP winner-takes-all. So in a FPTP system, the makeup of the electoral body is not proportional to the votes cast by voters, and in the Electoral College, it may lead to results in which a candidate with a plurality of overall votes doesn't win the election.
Single-member FPTP systems therefore discourage voting for smaller parties and encourage, as the rational outcome of the electoral system, strategic voting for one of two big parties. This is in direct contrast to electoral systems that run on some variation of proportional representation (ranked preference voting, multi-member districts, etc), where the percentages of votes for each party are reflected in the final makeup of the elected body.
So even though there's nothing in the US Constitution saying we have to have a two-party system, in Political Sciencey terms: Duverger's Law states that all FPTP systems will become two-party systems. This is true because it is the logical outcome of rational actors operating in the system.
Okay, but who cares if we have a two-party system? We can still push democrats to the left, right?
Well, kind of? But ultimately, not really. Because think about it: if you have two parties competing for votes among the entire populace, they can only position themselves against the other party. You've got one candidate on the right and one candidate on the left. Committed leftists and committed right-wingers are going to vote for their party (or not vote at all). There's no incentive for a party to make any concessions to those voters. Whose votes are they trying to get? The people in the middle. Those are the only people they should care about, if they want to win. So the voters in the middle can exert influence over the platforms, and that has the effect of pulling both sides toward the very middle.
(One thing that has happened in recent years is that the Republicans have been successful at moving the entire distribution of votes farther to the right. This hasn't changed the fact that the two-party system will always pull both parties toward the center of the vote distribution, but it's definitely fucked us over. If the democrats had any way to enact this sort of shift, I would be all over it, but I don't see how they could. The entire system is fucked even beyond all I've already said by gerrymandering and the fact that leftists are geographically isolated in cities, both of which systematically benefit the right, so it doesn't seem likely that the democrats could be successful at a shift like that without changing some of the laws about gerrymandering, if not also the Electoral College.)
On the other hand, in systems that have more than two parties, you end up with bimodal distributions of votes. Why is that? Because say you have three parties on the left, and voters know that they aren't throwing their vote away if they vote for a smaller party. What will happen? The three parties on the left will be vying for the votes of the leftists. And the same thing will happen on the right. In this way, the voters will pull the party platforms farther from the middle, out to each side. The leftmost and rightmost "fringe" parties will each get a small proportion of the votes, and the more mainstream parties will get more, but those fringes have much more power than they ever could in a two-party FPTP system.
So when people say, "You say, vote for the democrat, then force them to the left, and then you don't force them to the left"—correct. There is no clear way to force a democratic candidate to the left in our two-party FPTP system. How would one even do that? The only thing leftists can threaten is to not vote, when not voting will certainly benefit the candidate on the right. So, sure, you can do that—if you want your behavior to benefit the right as a way to threaten the left. Some people will make that choice, but not many, because it will help the right!
To be clear: this is fucked! I think this is fucked! But we get nowhere by sticking our heads in the sand about how the electoral system actually works.
I'm not pretending that there's only one right way to act. Our system is fucked and has been for a long time. What I do think is key is understanding how the system actually works and making your decisions from there.
For me, I've often said, "Vote for the democrat for harm reduction, because that will absolutely reduce harm compared to the republican candidate. Then, fight the system." But I realize this maybe wasn't specific enough. What I mean when I say that is: I will vote for Kamala with zero qualms. Because I believe that Trump would be worse for literally every demographic in the world that I care about. To me, that's the only thing the vote is about. Do I agree with Kamala on Israel-Palestine? No. Do I think Trump would be worse for Palestinians and for American Jews (probably for Israeli citizens too)? Absolutely. Do I shudder to think what happened last time Trump had control over creating the Supreme Court? YES.
But when I say, "Then, fight the system," I mean specifically: the number one thing that leftists should be doing if we want to make any headway, if we want to shift that distribution of votes back from the rightward journey its taken in recent years, is to fight to overturn the electoral college and gerrymandering. Every tiny step we take in making our electoral system closer to the popular vote favors both principles of democracy and the left. If we can amend the constitution (this is enormously difficult) to get rid of the Electoral College, then we can turn to changing the electoral system to something other than FPTP.
I do not mean "vote for Kamala and then spend 4 years yelling at democrats for not being leftist enough." I agree: that is a terrible strategy, and will do nothing.
We can't keep ignoring, in between elections, that the voting system itself is where our focus should be! We can't keep pointing fingers at each other, even though we're all acting within the constraints of a fucked system, every time an election comes along! Maybe I'm getting old but I am so weary of this! We can't somehow willpower our way out of the system in which our votes are being cast! We have to change it!
