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Peter Martin
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Joined: 17 March 2008
Location: Canada
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Posted: 13 November 2024 at 4:45pm | IP Logged | 1 post reply


 QUOTE:
Lords aren't allowed to vote for the House of Commons? Fascinating.

The historical idea behind this (and it's been a thing for hundreds and hundreds of years) is that the people with peerages sit in the House of Lords which is their house and they therefore don't get a say about who gets to sit in the other house, the one that represents everyone else (the commoners).

Peers have sought to challenge this over the years, but always failed to change it.
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Dave Kopperman
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Posted: 13 November 2024 at 5:27pm | IP Logged | 2 post reply

 Steven wrote:
The problem that has evolved from the way primaries are done is that it has pushed the parties towards the fringes.

That only holds true for the GOP, now, who frequently have their traditional conservative seat holders get successfully primaried from the right. It's quite the reverse for Democrats, where heavily progressive candidates tend to lose to less left-leaning ones except in very specific districts. 

The Democratic primaries start with states that favor white progressives and then go towards the center as the later states enter. It's why Bernie supporters were so bitter in 2016 (and to a lesser extent, 2020), since Bernie took an early lead and then saw it erased as the calendar moved to the south. Many of them took this as a sign that shenanigans were afoot, a narrative that's been difficult to disabuse them of.

 Steven wrote:
Because only party members vote in the primaries the candidates have to please the party members, which is an increasingly small group as voters leave the parties.

Except, as I noted upthread, that's not true for more than half the country, where people are free to vote in whichever primary they choose regardless of affiliation.  And if you take a close look at the states with closed primaries - which, by the way, are sometimes only closed for one party - they're mostly a) later in the calendar, and b) not battleground states (with the exception of Pennsylvania and Nevada, though the latter is a caucus state - and weirdly seems to have only moved to that recently).


Edited by Dave Kopperman on 13 November 2024 at 5:31pm
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ron bailey
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Posted: 14 November 2024 at 1:09am | IP Logged | 3 post reply

Amongst all this navel gazing the media has been doing, has anyone made note of the fact that far fewer people voted this time than in 2020? Trump only got a million and half more votes than last time, but Harris received eight and half million votes less than Biden did, which means a lot of people simply didn't vote. Tragic, but it means the whole country didn't just get Trump fever the way they make it seem. And given that Harris only ran half a campaign, it's not as Biden won by twice a wider margin than Trump did this time too, which is worth noting since so few of us here have high regard for the Electoral College. Just a matter of perspective.
It was inflation that got him into office this time, just like it was Covid that kicked him out of it last time. 
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James Woodcock
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Posted: 14 November 2024 at 5:54am | IP Logged | 4 post reply

That stat of voting numbers is being used by his supporters to ‘prove’ 2020
was rigged.
Funny how Trump has stopped saying the votes were rigged for this
election after banging on & on that they were.
It’s only rigged if he loses.
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Steven Myers
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Posted: 14 November 2024 at 3:50pm | IP Logged | 5 post reply

Let me further elaborate. Partisan primaries only allow you to vote in one party's primary. For example, you cannot pick a governor who is of one party and a senator of another. There is no constitutional requirement for parties when voting. Everyone should always be able to vote for anyone they want. The best method is a blanket primary with one ballot (and all states doing it the same day) and you rank your top choices in each category. Then there is a runoff election of the top two. This also means the general election never ends up with a winner who get the minority of votes. But the main difference is to have representatives who best help the general populace, and not the very small partisan electorate. For example, there is a large percentage of house seats that are decided by the primary because the districts are a large majority of one party, but voters from the other party are locked out of the primaries.
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Dave Kopperman
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Posted: 14 November 2024 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | 6 post reply

@Steven: yes, I got that. But as I said, 1) closed primaries are only in half the states, and 2) the Democratic Party remains pretty comfortably center left despite closed primaries in some states.  If you're using that as a springboard to say ranked choice voting is 'the best method', I don't think your logic follows because your premise is flawed.  

Note: I'm not saying ranked choice voting is more-or-less flawed or is-or-is-not preferable to our current electoral system, but you'd need to use a better case scenario than party primaries, which, again, aren't remotely as gated as you're maintaining.
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