On Thu, 7 Apr 2016 04:05:21 AM Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote:
Quoting Russell Coker (russell@coker.com.au):
On Wed, 6 Apr 2016 03:27:18 PM Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote:
If the US had a similar system there could be candidates representing the Tea Party and the mainstream Republican party competing for a seat.
Forgot to mention earlier as background for Oz folk: The 'Tea Party' is not an actual political party. It is a wacky reactionary, relatively small, Koch Brothers-funded ideological faction that attempts to control Republican Party functions and policy.
It started out as a Koch funded thing but then took on a life of it's own. I think the Koch brothers are smart enough to realise that it stopped doing useful things for them a long time ago.
However, e.g., no US state's ballot ever has 'Tea Party' as a qualified political party -- because there is no such party. No party central committee, no partisan affiliation that candidates run under on state ballots, no party nominating convention -- because no actual political party at all.
It's a parasite on the Republican party.
Obama Presidency) and their own Republican leaders. (This is the biggest reason why John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives and conservative Republican from Ohio, resigned as both Speaker and Congressman in 2015, and why conservative Republican Paul Ryan of Wisconsin only reluctantly agreed to take his place as Speaker: The job has been made difficult and thankless by mindless obstruction from the small ~10% faction of Tea Party nitwits, who undermine and sandbag Republican Party leaders.)
Which is one upside of the Tea Party, they replace Republicans who make deals and craft legislation that can pass and be enforced with incompetent people who live for media sound bites. It's like Family First in Australia, we were fortunate that Steven Fielding was too lazy to show up half the time, I haven't tracked what the current idiots are doing.
(Trumpism, if there is such a thing outside the celebrity ego cult, is idiocy, too, but the point is that it's a different type of idiocy.)
Dubya has proven that brains are not required for that job. :(
And last, of course, the Westminster system is easy to understand, which cannot be said of USA voting. (US voters would disagree, but solely on account of ignorance.)
I don't think there's much difference in the ease of understanding. But maybe that's because of all the media attention and Hollywood coverage of the US system. In many ways we have more opportunities to learn about the US government than our own.
Also, each of the fifty states is free to conduct its primary elections entirely as it pleases, _and_ also each party within each state is free to conduct its primary-election affairs as it pleases within limits set by the state's government (which, after all, is paying for the balloting).
To my annoyance, news reporting typically behaves as if those complexities don't exist, and reduce electoral results to sports metaphors. For example, if you read about yesterday's primary election in Wisconsin, you probably read that the despicable Cruz 'won' the Republican Party primary, and Sanders 'won' the Democratic Party one, and wasting a lot of verbiage talking about 'momentum' and about percentages of the vote count statewide.
Wow, it's even worse than I thought!
Given the prevailing idiocy elsewhere in the press, FiveThirtyEight is the best place to follow this and other aspects of the 2016 election cycle.
Everyone seems to say that!
Even without that we don't have many seats won by people who aren't representing the major parties in Australia. That's mainly due to publicity and financing. But unfortunately there are Australians who don't realise that the "wasted vote" thing applies to the US only.
Well, no, that's not true. It is a problem in many corners of even the Westminster system. It's basically true in any constituency that applies first-past-the-post voting.
True. But the political news in Australia focusses on the US and Australia. Most Australians know almost nothing about the politics of any other country. While the problem applies to other countries it's news reports about it afflicting the US that influence Australian voters.
[California 'top two primary':]
I've just read that. How does it make things better? Instead of a first past the post with multiple candidates in the general election you have first 2 past the post in the primary.
It helps by forcing all state candidates to appeal during the primary election season to _all_ voters and not just narrow constituencies. Extremists of all types will have a more difficult time prevailing at the primary stage to pass along to the subsequent general election -- because they will appeal insufficiently to voters in the middle of the Bell Curve of ideological and other voting criteria.
Let's imagine a case where you have 2 Democrats and 2 Republicans in a CA primary. Each person who's loyal to one of those parties would vote for their candidate who seems best to them (extremist or not depending on preference). Each unaffiliated voter gets to choose between the less extreme candidates of the 2 parties. Each of the parties would probably get half the unaffiliated voters which gives the party loyalists a 2:1 advantage over independents. As most people are loyal to one of the big parties I think it will be uncommon for that to change election results. One of the problems with the US system is that as voting is optional candidates need to attract voters to the polling booths not convince voters that they are a better (or less awful) candidate than the other contenders. Extreme positions can apparently work to get voter turnout and I think that the CA primaries will have the same problem.
The web page says that you might have 2 candidates from 1 party, but unless I'm missing something that doesn't seem likely to happen often except in cases where an electorate reliably gets well in excess of 66% votes for one party. But I guess it makes sense to have this in those cases. How many electorates are dominated by one party to that extent?
There are some pronounced regional biases. The biggest urban areas in California are the San Francisco Bay Area that includes Silicon Valley (heavily Democratic), Los Angeles (same), the Orange County city cluster just south of Los Angeles (heavily Republican) and San Diego (mixed). All other cities are relatively small, and many probably have party skews but have much less voting power. The very large agricultural Central Valley is heavily Republican (except in some of its cities), but its sparse population means also low voting power. The state as a whole skews strongly to the Democratic Party in most matters, with some exceptions.
How many of them get in excess of 66% voting for one party? In Australia a seat that gets 66% of the first preferences for one party is considered an unassailable safe seat and other parties will only run candidates who don't expect to win. Due to the way elections work in Australia lots of voters think about the lower house while voting for the senate. So small parties run candidates for the lower house with the aim of just attracting voters to their senate ticket.
http://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/
The bloc voters generally failed to understand any of this, and have issued an unending wail of protest against many parts of it, including claiming that 'No Award' deprived them of some sort of entitlement. Cynicism aside, it's quite possible that this is genuine failure to grasp the voting system in question rather than just sour grapes.
Those bloc voters aren't the world's smartest people. Anyone who thinks that sci-fi should only feature worlds run by straight white men really doesn't get what sci-fi is about. They are also some of the world's most whiny people. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/