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49 thoughts on “Hooray for the US election system!

  1. middleoftheroaddem

    While I really dislike the results, I am content with the election process. Further, I am happy have, it seems, avoided political violence.

    1. Josef

      That because the single person who has instigated violence because he lost, won. That's the single solitary reason why. Why this gives you comfort is beyond me.

      1. MF

        Well, it is still good.

        Now, I hope Trump starts of his term in a bipartisan way by moving forward on some Democratic policy proposals like abolishing the filibuster in the Senate. He can be a uniter, not a divider!

      1. Josef

        The belief that just because he won, the hatred that made it possible will just disappear is the height of naivete and or stupidity.

      1. ScentOfViolets

        I don't think they're that far off the map, and that in actual fact, they are a Democrat. Calling themselves 'middle-of-the-road" of course, is something else.

        1. Josef

          He might be a Democrat. To me that's irrelevant. Bigotry, ignorance and hatred transcends party affiliations. To paraphrase Forest Gump, an asshole is as an asshole does.

  2. Joseph Harbin

    The election system for recording and counting votes works, as long as you ignore the bomb threats at polling places, purges of voter rolls, and other anti-democratic actions.

    The election system for informing voters about the candidates and issues is hopelessly broken.

    That is, if you believe particular issues were key for this cycle. For example, maybe voters are really feeling pain about inflation (subject of at least a couple of posts so far). Maybe they are worried about rising crime. Maybe they are worried about the border. Maybe they're okay with banning abortion after all.

    Except:
    1. The candidate who won had the most extraordinary inflation-inducing policies of any candidate in modern history, an escalation of tariffs that would cost the average family thousands of dollars a year.
    2. The candidate who won had the problem with rising violent crime during the last year of his presidency. That's less a problem now.
    3. The candidate who won nixed the bill and funding that would fix problems at the border.
    4. The candidate who won bragged "I was able to kill Roe v. Wade," while voters showed strong support for reinstating abortion rights in various ballot measures around the country.

    It doesn't make any sense if you're trying to find the hot button issues that Trump rode to victory, inflation included. For each of the issues, they voted for the guy who's on the wrong side.

    How could that be? A few factors:

    a. Voters don't vote for issues. They vote for candidates.
    b. Voters are ignorant and lazy about learning who the candidates are, inc. what they did and what they stand for.
    c. Traditional news media does not help voters make informed decisions regarding elections. It promotes personalities, conflicts, controversy. It holds parties and candidates to vastly different standards, blowing out of proportion slight missteps on one side while sanitizing the deep rot on the other, all in the name of "fairness." It's all a crock, folks.
    d. The vast right-wing media complex does not seek "fairness," or even a twisted version of it. It's all a propaganda machine aimed specifically to misinform voters for the benefit of their side.
    e. Social media is the ultimate propaganda machine, and the billionaire oligarchs and foreign adversaries like Putin serve the people in the bubble the lies and distortions and the deep cultural hate that they eat up with gusto.

    Another reason why I think the problem is the Information System and not the Issues (like inflation): Take the economy, for example. We will have the same economy in January we have today, and by then (if not sooner) all the people complaining about inflation, the Biden economy, yada yada yada, will be singing a different tune. It will be the Trump economy then, and it's going to be the greatest fucking economy in the history of the world.

    Which will be true, until he ruins it.

    1. Salamander

      Yes. A few decades ago, a study (no, I can't even cite who) determined that the United States no longer had enough journalism to support democracy.

      You can't run a democracy when people don't know what's actually going on. In government, sure, but also in the natural environment, the schools, the boardrooms and workplaces.

      Our infotainment media has largely ignored this responsibility in favor of views, clicks, market share, etc. That means moving towards eye candy, scandal, titillation, the weird and bizarre, celebrity.

      Fake business tycoons like (urp!) the next president are naturals in this environment. Democrats, with their boring "policies" and "positions" and even "white papers" are the nerds nobody wants to be seen with. It's a miracle that any of them ever get elected to anything.

      An informed citizenry has a chance to make informed choices. A misinformed citizenry will decide on the basis of whatever lies are being pushed out by the powerful. As we have just seen, to our cost.

      1. Narsham

        I doubt any of those "cheater/stolen election" folks sharing footage of "ballot stuffing" on X could walk through even two steps of how an election actually works, much less have the slightest idea of what checks are in place administratively.

        Political reporters overwhelmingly report on horse-races and celebrities or do gimmicky "went to a mid-west diner" stories while being completely disinterested in the actual ways government works.

        Reporting tells you more about which celebrities appeared at which rallies than about what the candidates actually say they will do in office. Imagine if over a year of Trump promising to deport illegals on "day 1" had been coupled with a year of informing people about how deportation works, what makes someone an illegal immigrant, how people enter the country illegally versus entering legally and staying illegally... in such a world, at least a larger percentage of the electorate would be able to assess campaign promises based on anything beyond the logic of the clickbait headline.

      2. ScentOfViolets

        I believe you. Oh boy/girl, how do I believe you! I no longer own a car, but if I did, I'd apply the sticker "The World Book Encyclopedia says it, I believe it, end of discussion" to the back bumper.

      3. RantHaven

        Promoting ignorance is the fascist way. Make the rubes rubier, make education less educational, make the truth less truthy, make the intelligentsia more out of touch.

    1. iamr4man

      The graph indicates votes, not ballots cast. You will get a better idea once all of the votes have been counted. For instance, here in California, there have been about 10 million votes counted. But that represents only 54% of the total who voted.

        1. iamr4man

          I’ll try again. The chart you linked indicated votes counted. For the years other than 2024 all votes cast have been counted. For 2024 all votes cast haven’t been counted yet. It will likely take days for that to happen. California has counted 10 million votes amounting to 56% of the total ballots. That means that there are approximate 8 million ballots yet to be counted. Your link is thus deceiving in that it seems to show far fewer votes for 2024 than 2020 but it only includes counted votes and all votes for 2024 haven’t been counted yet. My reference is the NYT but it might be paywalled:
          https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/05/us/elections/results-california-president.html

          1. name99

            OK, so you think it's unsurprising that the popular vote jumped by 18M (ie 30% more people than 4 years earlier decided to vote) in 2020? Theories as to why?

            And that once all the votes are counted in 2024 we'll see something close to the 2020 count?

            Well, won't be long until the popular vote tallies are in. At which point will you admit there's something fishy if those numbers look like the obvious (population growth) 2016 numbers, not the 2020 numbers?

            It is somewhat remarkable that the CA population in 2020 was basically identical to that in 2016, but the votes cast in 2020 were ~17M vs ~13M in 2016. That get out of the vote sure worked well...
            I'd be curious to see how this sort of thing played out in multiple states (eg TX, FL, NY) but don't have the time to do it myself.

            1. iamr4man

              I’m not sure what you are trying to say here. What is suspicious about more people voting in the age of Trump? I think it’s mostly a hate/fear vote on both sides. What type of funny business do you suspect?

              1. name99

                Reagan inspired the same hate/fear.
                Nixon inspired the same hate/fear.

                The best graph I can find is this:
                https://www.statista.com/statistics/1139763/number-votes-cast-us-presidential-elections/

                The population growth, and growth of eligible voters are as expected. But the growth in votes cast is rather less smooth than I would expect.
                There are notable blips at 1992 and 2008, and the whole pattern since about 1992 seems off relative to prior years.

                So what do we make of this? One can argue that Clinton and Obama were uniquely charismatic candidates (true) but arguing that for Biden is a tough sell.

                MAYBE modern media have encouraged more people than say before the 90s to now vote? Though it's hard to believe, given everything else we are told about the 60s, that there was a larger fraction than now uninterested in voting.

                Maybe this is the result of on-going attempts to make it "easier" to vote (no ID, voting by mail, all that sort of thing)? That was (IMHO) cynically pushed by one party which believed it would benefit more from the additional voters (and expected that any, generally uncoordinated, fraud that resulted would be to their benefit). Given how spectacularly that blew up in their faces this year (ie the voting patterns of youth, hispanics, arabs, even native americans) I expect soon enough we'll start seen reasons why it's important to in fact be more careful in whom we allow to vote...

                Overall, I think, I'd say the pattern suggests not fraud, but definitely reasons to be concerned about the system - meaning reasons to take seriously attempt to fix the system. So far, as I said, one party has very definitely been opposed to that. There may be a brief window (before 2026) to get both sides willing to do what's necessary, before yet again the too-clever-by-half strategists (this time perhaps on the GOP side) start trying to persist the problems of the current system.

                1. name99

                  Here's an even clearer set of graphs:

                  https://x.com/triplebankshot/status/1854972389592911966

                  Once again, OTHER people may be focussed on the D/R split; I am not; I'm more focussed on the jump in the total number of votes (@TripleBankshot's third graph).

                  To me this suggests that, regardless of which party benefits, there's something problematic about the extreme looseness in the 2020 and 2024 elections that needs to be resolved.

    2. GenXer

      We go through this every 4 years because conservatives don't understand elections. They think a ballot gets counted immediately and magically as they drop it in the ballot box. It usually takes up to a week to count all the ballots in an election of this size. There's still around 14-15 million ballots nationwide to be counted. They won't change the outcome because most are concentrated in states Harris won (Cali, Oregon, Wash, NY) but they will change the vote totals significantly.

      Reasonable final estimate would be Trump 77 million and Harris 74 million.

      1. DudePlayingDudeDisguisedAsAnotherDude

        Yep, I am guessing the gap will narrow to about 2mil votes. There are still quite a few uncounted votes on the left coast and in NY, Ill, and other urban centers.

        1. Jasper_in_Boston

          Yep, I am guessing the gap will narrow to about 2mil votes.

          I hope you're right. I will take some small consolation in the knowledge that we're still basically a 50-50 nation (or, more realistically, a 46-46 nation with eight percent low info voters who vote on gas prices and vibes).

          All this breathless! talk! of a great! new! realignment! is scary.

          1. iamr4man

            Harris will likely underperform Biden in California and only win by 3-4 million compared to Biden’s 5 million. This was why I mentioned in an earlier discussion that I thought Harris would win the popular vote, that a large block like that would be hard to overcome. I was clearly wrong and frankly I’m shocked. The “realignment” if there is one is Hispanics voting for Trump. Something like 46%. I find this unfathomable.
            Mind you, I always thought the Republicans were really missing a bet on not courting Hispanics who are naturally conservative. But I thought that would require a candidate that didn’t demonize them. I guess I was wrong about that too.

            1. DudePlayingDudeDisguisedAsAnotherDude

              I was going by the margins in California, based on the 58% that had already reported.

              I lived in San Jose for a spell, doing a stint in Silicon Valley. US-born Latinos are conservative and, in fact, don't like the new Latin American immigrants. I understand that it's a broad generalization, but that works for elections.

              1. iamr4man

                I think all Latinos are basically conservative. I think most of the citizens are Mexican and most of the immigrants are Central and South American. That might account for what you are saying. I also think the “transgender” issue was a big deal.

  3. Jasper_in_Boston

    Looking for silver linings is a basic human psychological defense mechanism—it's certainly one of mine. So, while it's small consolation, "The Capitol is not going to be attacked" is actually a pretty good thing.

    Another good thing? Donald Trump will never again run for president.

    1. Josef

      He has set so many horrible new precedents and the abandonment of so many norms. We should be wary of what the next Trump will do. Knowing he can't run for president is of little comfort. For me atleast. The damage he's done is most likely permanent.

  4. Batchman

    Yes, "Donald Trump will never again run for president" because in 2028 he will declare himself President for Life and no one in Congress or on the Supreme Court will have the balls to challenge him.

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