I was with you until this part.
States gave us a path to gay marriage, and allow people to move to different areas that hold different values than the whole nation.
I'd suggest trying instant runoff voting before moving to something as drastic as abolishing states. I think IRV would allow people to express their votes and opinions more clearly than the system we have today.
Do you think IRV alone helps? What exactly do you propose?
Aside: in Australia, which has IRV, gay marriage is still not legal. Yay democracy. /s
How long has Australia had IRV? I don't think it's a magic solution on its own. But I do think it allows voters to more clearly express their wishes without playing as many games wondering what the rest of the voter base will do. That's not democracy.
Anyway, IRV does not guarantee your favorite will win and it only gives different results in certain situations, such as close elections. Maybe Australia hasn't had the right circumstances come up yet. There are still a lot of barriers to becoming a presidential candidate, and many good people just don't want that job, like Biden. I'm sure that's true at other levels of government too. I know I would not like to be in a room arguing for gay marriage against some Christians. Or discussing budget for things I don't understand. Or any other number of boring things. And at the end of your term, if you aren't reelected, there's a good chance many people don't like you. Public office isn't glorious while you're there. It's only glorious after you're long dead, and even then you probably had to do something hugely important to be praised.
> Do you think IRV alone helps? What exactly do you propose?
A good government is made up of active voters. I propose making good use of your voice through the internet, in person, and on the phone and in letters to your representatives. Inspire others to do so, keeping the focus on supporting issues you care about, and less so much about people or particular candidates. Share facts. Don't try to brainwash your fellow citizen by convincing them to vote in your man. Discuss and debate with mutual respect for everyone you meet, because we are all equals, you, me, the president, and those natives in Brazil who don't want to meet anyone from outside their jungle village. The more you can discuss without disrespecting someone's right to their own opinion, the more trustful and open our society will become, and we will advance to use technologies you can't imagine today. I know this because we're living in that future that people from the 1950s couldn't fathom. Use your vote and your voice, or risk losing it. It's your choice.
IRV has nothing to do with reducing the strength of two main parties. It just reduces the weirdness in the case of moderately close races.
EDIT: Just read a bit about approval voting and score voting. I guess I'll suggest those next time instead of mentioning IRV.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system#Compliance_of_se...
Another thing Australia has, besides IRV, is compulsory voting.
> The state governments are hotbeds of corruption, ruled by minority interests because state elections have low voter turnout, and add an enormous administrative tax to pretty much every economic or legal transaction that happens in the U.S.
Maybe that needs to happen once in awhile for us to wake up and start exercising our rights again.
I don't think the world has gotten any easier to administrate. If anything it's gotten tougher. I like the idea of allowing smaller areas to administrate themselves outside the national constitution. The world is changing more quickly every day, states have worked well for 240 years at preventing dissolution, and if we consolidate more power we risk creating a majority who is unhappy enough to revolt, in my opinion.
Our goal is not to become all powerful and ignore citizens who aren't making use of their right to vote. Our goal is to be balanced, and in doing so we find strength as a byproduct. When you seek power as a goal, you have already started down the path to failure when someone inevitably usurps your authority. Sustainability is our goal, and balance is the way.
Surely, the Confederate secession qualifies as a dissolution.
I am of the opinion that the U.S. would fare better with more states, rather than fewer. If Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, Boston, and San Diego all became city-states, the usual civic corruption would have less impact on the statewide governments of the donor states.
But I don't expect that change anytime soon. It was after all the states who gave up some of their sovereign powers to form a federal system after breaking free of British rule.
If YOU can't make up your mind, then just don't vote. Seriously. You can get Approval Voting and just not even show up and vote. You'll still get massively better election outcomes because of all the people who do show up to vote are using an objectively better decision-making algorithm. Yes, objectively better.
The optimal strategy on who to vote for depends not only on preferences, but also on what you know about the other voters. Polls help here.
The nice thing about approval voting is that, even though their might not be one single, clear and obvious way to translate your preference into your vote; but there is a clear and obvious family of ways to do so. And they have nice properties.
In-first-past-the-post, people often elect to give their vote to the lesser evil, instead of their preferred (third-party) candidate.
In approval voting, you will never have to give a compromise candidate more `vote' than any other candidate you prefer.
Ie all families of sensible voting strategies for approval voting look like this:
- sort candidates in order of preference - figure out a cutoff - approve anyone above the cutoff
The optimal cutoff depends on the peculiarities of the election (polls etc).
In practice, people manage this quite well intuitively. (I have run approval votings for small things, like which restaurant to take the team to.)
Bayesian Regret calculations show IRV is actually THE WORST of the five commonly discussed alternative voting systems.
The best is Score Voting, but it's not as simple as Approval Voting. http://ScoreVoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
Clay Shentrup Co-founder of The Center for Election Science
The site you linked looks like it was built in 1998
You're overlooking the fact that people and politicians need time to grow and hone their skills. Without states, without giving them some ability to be corrupt, there is no testing ground. Politicians at the national level would not be experienced negotiators because the first step in being a politician would be joining the federal government. And I don't think forcing gay marriage on the US would've been a good idea any sooner even if we'd had a sufficiently progressive president and congress. I have deep sympathy for all the people who had to wait so long for society to officially accept them, but I think even they can respect that we might not be as strong of a unified society if gay marriage had become legal in, say, the 80s, rather than today. A unilateral decision by a president and majority congress could have set the issue back even further.
