Audio from bystander video indicates 11 shots were fired before Wilson died from two gunshot wounds, while the department’s posted policy sharply restricts shooting at moving vehicles.
Audio from bystander video indicates 11 shots were fired before Wilson died from two gunshot wounds, while the department’s posted policy sharply restricts shooting at moving vehicles.
“Representative democracy” - representative of the control freak rich holding the purse-strings that have long financed the vast majority of election campaigns.
The best democracies in the world are also representative. That is not the problem, the problem is that USA instead of improving regulation to reign in capitalism, has chosen to allow it to run wild taking over elections, and hasn’t improved on the flawed FPP system.
Some places have ranked voting, and hopefully they will be pointers to the future, but there’s a long way from where USA is currently to having any chance of that.
I’m 100% in the ranked choice voting camp. And ideally, we’d find a way to do it proportionally but I acknowledge that would be a bit of a heavier lift within the current US framework, so I’d be happy with RCV as first step so we can work to elect folks that will help get the proportional aspect implemented.
For anyone who wants to know more, check out https://rcvresources.org/why-adopt-rcv and https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/proportional-ranked-choice-voting-information
And I also think we should have Democracy sausages! :) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_sausage)
People sleep on proportional representation but it would honestly be so much better than either FPTP or even ranked choice.
The problem is that to implement it here would probably require a constitutional convention and a complete restructuring of our electoral and representative systems. Which, yeah I don’t see that happening anytime soon and with the current government, if something big like that happened it would not have a good result.
So yeah, ranked choice to improve our elections until we have enough decent representation to implement proportional.
I mean it could still go by state, but we’d have to ditch the concept of districts. Each state could still have the same number of representatives that they already do, but instead of each district electing one rep, the whole state would vote, and the parties’ seats would be allocated by overall proportion of the vote they received.
It would be fairer for everybody, and eliminate gerrymandering. And it would enable more parties than just two. But yeah, it would require a constitutional amendment.
Oh and the Senate could either stay FPTP or have a set threshold for each seat. Like there’s two seats total, so if you get 50% of the vote you get a seat… but you shouldn’t get both seats just because you got 51% of the vote. So there needs to be a threshold, for the second seat, like maybe 67% or 75%. So then the threshold for the first seat would really be 33% or 25%. But of course that gets more complicated when you add more parties. So Senate could honestly stay FPTP but with ranked choice, for the sake of simplicity.
Yesss we’d have to rework quite a few things for sure and I’m not good enough at math/statistics to know what that looks like on a more granular level haha.
But I wholeheartedly agree, whatever we can do to make things more proportional (and raise awareness about the concept) needs to be done, even if we’re pausing on a few stepping stones to get there.
I feel like we’d have a lot less voter/politics apathy if folks felt like they could cast a 3rd party vote ballot that actually mattered. Which is obvs somewhat intentional given our current framework… Heh.
I’m even struggling with how I want to vote for one of our local spots in November because we have an independent candidate that I really like, but, I know they probably don’t have much of a chance of winning so don’t want my vote to inadvertently be a boon for a candidate I really don’t like. Heh. 🥲
Do you have a reason to prefer ranked choice over STAR?
https://www.starvoting.org/
I hadn’t heard of this before! I’m still reading all their info, but if I’m understanding the jist correctly, I’d support this as well for the same reasons I like RCV, and I really like how this method factors in how strongly you support the candidate! It seems like we’d still need to figure out the “proportional” aspect, but, this would definitely be a step in the right direction! Thank you for sharing and sending me down a new voting research rabbit hole! Haha.
Glad to help! And yeah it’s less intuitive than rcv as a solution and it’s relatively new (like a decade old), but it’s designed to resolve a lot of the issues that have arisen with both rcv and single choice voting.
The only real drawback imo is that it’ll confuse people until they get used to it, but we can account for that with instructional information and people to explain at polling places early on. And even if they are confused, they’re unlikely to cast an invalid ballot like people who are confused by rcv do.
Imo it’s: star - 5, rcv - 4, jungle primaries - 2, single choice - 1
I also think just spreading the word about it is a great way to help convince people it might be worth a go. Hopefully Oregon will adopt it soon
Yes! Spreading the word about different options is key, if folks don’t know options exist, they can’t learn about and advocate for them! Haha that was partly why I commented in the first place, and super grateful for your comment!
And yea, you’re right there’d def be a bit of a learning curve, but I agree all we have to do is be mindful of that and meet folks where they are, and provide lots of avenues/formats for them to get the info. Even with our current system folks struggle to know what’s on their ballot, etc. so could be an amazing opportunity to empower voters with that sort of info, too! And then we give them democracy sausages when they show up to vote! Haha.