So you’re telling me that, not only are federal elections decided by states rather than votes, but each individual state has their own set of laws to prevent you from appearing in the ballot? And it’s somehow still fine because “you can just do a write-in vote”?
My favourite one is the Texan one, where you need to have gotten boatload of votes in order to appear on the ballot.
For a registered political party in a statewide election to gain ballot access, they must either: obtain 5% of the vote in any statewide election; or collect petition signatures equal to 1% of the total votes cast in the preceding election for governor, and must do so by January 2 of the year in which such statewide election is held. An independent candidate for any statewide office must collect petition signatures equal to 1% of the total votes cast for governor, and must do so beginning the day after primary elections are held and complete collection within 60 days thereafter (if runoff elections are held, the window is shortened to beginning the day after runoff elections are held and completed within 30 days thereafter). The petition signature cannot be from anyone who voted in either primary (including runoff), and voters cannot sign multiple petitions (they must sign a petition for one party or candidate only).
In Democratic America, you can only win elections if you’ve already won the elections.
If you actually wanted to do democracy (and I think one day we will want to do democracy for many if not most things, once the average person is not quite so steeped in false consciousness) you would treat it the same way you would treat a survey. I don’t think each and every person voting actually matters, just like you don’t have to ask every soul in America to find out, say, America’s favorite pie. If only 1% were sampled to vote and it was done so in a reasonably unbiased way, your results would be 99.999% in line with the average American’s opinion/wants.
Takeaway: We’ve been doing studies and combating sample bias for hundreds of years, including before “democracy” began in the US. We know how to do it, it’s genuinely never been tried.
you are vastly overstating the accuracy of polling, and making a system with a hugely glaring way to game the system. if you thought the voter suppression in the us is bad now, wait until you see the stupid fucking political games being played with the sampling rules in your proposed system.
My point is that we know what introduces sample bias, that’s it. it’s already gamed to the point that it’s hardly worth talking about.
I don’t understand what you’re responding to here. Vote by state?
But I also don’t see the need to sacrifice accuracy by sampling votes for the sake of “efficiency”. The voting method of the USA is a laughing stock here in Brazil, where we usually know the results within 12 hours of the polls closing. Their voting methods aren’t inefficient due to some intrinsic property of polling the whole population, they’re just doing their best to prevent non-white/working people from voting.
Either way, this post is just complaining about how the USA states have made it effectively impossible for parties like the PSL to compete in elections by denying them ballot access, then turn around and call that democracy. In no way did I intend to imply that voting is equivalent to democracy, which it is not. Voting is just a mechanism for legitimisation of a regime, whether it is democratic or not.
Clearly I’m not communicating this very well, and I only meant it as an off hand comment not a world changing statement. No, I wasn’t concerned about efficiency, just pointing out that we know how to do voting, but bourgeois democracy chooses not to.