It is mid-term election day in the US!
I am acting excited, but I don't really care, nor do I really understand how it all works. The US election system is a bit like that game "Bamboozled" that Joey hosts in Friends, where it is super complicated and utterly ridiculous, but Chandler and Ross were fully into it once they felt they understood it. And not only is it complicated, but there is so much room for doubt, that no matter the result, people will claim it was rigged, or stolen, or Oompa Loompas were voting twice.
And if you are wondering why I am using a picture of a donkey and not an elephant, it is because I don't have a picture of an elephant that I have taken. I searched and searched, but I can't find one I took back in 2006 from the Adelaide zoo. However, since I am occasionally interested in learning about things, I discovered that both the Elephant and the Donkey symbols came from the same political cartoonist satirist, Thomas Nast. And since he was a satirist, both symbols were used to show stupidity, gullibility and confusion of the parties and respective supporters.
And both sides live up to the comparison.
So anyway, there are 435 house seats (all of them) up for election, and 35 senate seats. Why only 35 senate seats? Well, apparently only one third of them come up for voting each public election, in order to keep the government stable and running smoothly.
Working like a dream....
It was funny that when I looked for what percentage vote in the mid-terms, the first hit was from AlJazeera, and since the graphic for the count was there and I could have it in dark mode easily, it gets used.
Right now people are voting in the US. Well, some people are voting, because the expected turnout for mid-terms is around 40% or maybe a bit more when Trump is there. It is about 60% for the presidential elections. Coming from Australia where voting is compulsory and also realising that our votes are largely meaningless, I still find it strange that so few vote in countries where they are so politically orientated. It feels like everyone in the US has an opinion, but voter turnout is lacklustre at best, even for president.
It would be interesting if it was compulsory voting in the US though, because that would mean there would be no benefit in designing polling stations in some areas to keep people from voting. Instead, it would be about doing it efficiently and accurately. But the more interesting thing with compulsory voting is, there would be that the campaigning would change too, since it wouldn't be there to convince people not to vote. And of course, if everyone had to vote, the true representations of different communities would be relevant. For instance, the massive Hispanic community in the US has about a 50% turnout in presidential elections. What happens if they all vote?
And speaking of campaigning, I was reading somewhere that because the Republican party raised a lot more money, they could spend more than the democrats on attack campaigns. I read that and though, hang on .... Shouldn't that be illegal?
Drink Coke, because Pepsi tastes like shit and they want to take your guns.
There are rules in advertising that stop these kinds of unprovable comparison claims, but they are allowed in political campaigns? Maybe, there should be a rule where a political party can only create advertisements that tell what their policies are and what they plan to do if they are elected. They can't mention the opposition at all, nor what the opposition is campaigning on. This is especially relevant now, where people live in digital compounds getting fed the content they want, which means that if for instance they are republican, they will get fed the worst views of the democrats, and republicans telling what the democrat policies are.
They want all children to transition, whether they want to or not.
As far as I can see, there are major flaws in all of the election processes globally, no matter which country. I think the entire system is broken, because people are voting for parties, not policies. A better system would be a weighted questionnaire that everyone fills out so that a collation of all views can be gathered and then, depending on what people want, professionals are picked for the roles, like in a company. They don't know each other to begin with, they have KPIs to keep them productive and measured, and every four years or so the people vote again based on their importance, and some who are doing a good job in the role might stay, those who are not or are no longer in an area that is needed, will go and be replaced. In this way, to affect who is there means affecting policy by influencing the people to change what is important to them.
And then of course, a flat tax system could be introduced where everyone pays the same percentage no matter what they earn, and each gets to allocate say 50% to begin with to the areas of society they deem important enough to support, while the government uses the other 50% for general running of healthcare, schools, infra etc, and defence - but they can't go to war with it. If they want to go to war, they will have to convince the people to choose to fund it with their allocation. No more war by using debt from future taxes.
Or something like that.
Nearly anything (other than what is currently happening) would be a better system than what we have around the world. And what we have is getting increasingly volatile, because the system is flawed and is easily corruptible, which means that it is becoming more corrupt, with money and power in the hands of less and less people, despite the population increasing.
Whatever happens in the US elections...
We are all still screwed.
Taraz
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