1943
Anything to undermine democracy
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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Integrity is most common in other countries, but not in the united states.
Pay more attention to home friend, Europe is sliding into corruption hand in hand with us. But that would get in the way of nationalism wouldn't it?
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This is kinda if topic, but why does the US have term limits for the presidency, but not all the other major positions?
They focussed more on term length
- House: two years for frequent turnover, voice of the people
- Senate: 6 years for stability, maturity
- judges: lifetime, for independence from who appointed them and from politics of the day
While these don’t seem to be working right, anyone proposing changes needs to understand what they were trying to do and not make it worse trying to fix another aspect
In the original Constitution, there are no limits for any of them. George Washington made it a tradition not to seek a third term, but it wasn't actually enshrined into law until ~150 years later.
It was invented because FDR was so popular that without that rule, his bones would probably still be president to this day.
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Both sides have had opportunities to make it illegal and neither have done it. I wonder why.
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What's even more unfair is area based voting, where your individual vote doesn't count to affect the government, you instead vote for a local representative which in turn effects the government. Your vote for president or prime minister should be direct, not a postcode lottery even without gerrymandering.
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In my opinion there shouldn't be districts at all. Too much potential for fuckery.
Proportional representation is the way. X% of the vote means X% of seats, no shenanigans
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The figures only make sense in “first past the post” (or “winner takes it all”) systems.
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Obligatory mention of CGP Grey and his fantastic animal kingdom voting series: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY
And Alpha Phoenix demonstrating how to produce rigged boundaries that look natural and not suspicious:
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Is there even a way to mathematically divide up land area into completely fair districts? I heard somewhere that it wasn't possible.
there are generally a couple (probably more but modern democracies afaik have settled on 2) ways of dividing up government: representative (you as a person living in an area elect someone to represent you) and proportional (you as a citizen of the country elect a party to represent your preferences)
rather than dividing land area (representative aka districts) to elect individuals, there are voting systems that take proportionality into account… parties put forward candidates based on their proportional vote (ie the party leader would get in first, and then they have a list of candidates who get chosen based on their % of the vote)… they don’t represent a district/area, but the party… so the idea is that if a minority party gets 10% of the vote, they should have 10% of the representation - districts be damned… philosophy is more important than land… this leads to a whole lot of minor parties having to form a coalition government
i live in australia, and we don’t have proportional representation (we have a party… kind… called the coalition but that’s… different… it’s complex… ignore it… afaik germany and nz have proportional representation: they’re probably the best places i know of to look for these systems: parliaments composed of many minor parties)… we do have ranked choice voting, so we’re kind of a middle ground: ranked choice without proportional representation still leads to a 2 party system, but imo theres debatable up sides and down sides from representative to proportional (proportional systems can lead to a lot of nothing - small parties that are technically the majority but can’t agree on anything and not able to get anything done)
i thiiiink i’ve heard that there are systems that combine proportional and representative (actually, i think our australian senate is proportional and our house of representatives is representative - our HOR is pretty 2 party and our senate has a about 5-6 minor parties) but this is where my knowledge gets fuzzy
first past the post is the root of all evil: there are no up sides, there are only down sides… it causes politics to be horrible (ranked choice you have to worry about not just winning outright but also being likeable - you have to make everyone like you, because you want them to put you 2nd, 3rd, etc because 2nd preference might make you win!), it causes extremism, hate, forced 2 party (in the worst possible way: extremist 2 party), and absolutely no opportunity for change