With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.
If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.
Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think we stress out too much about this shit because terms are too long. If we had Presidential and Congressional elections every six months people would be a lot more chill about it all. People would argue that such terms would be too short for the winners to develop any sort of continuity once in office but you know what, it's not the 18th century anymore, they have access to much more powerful tools than before. And in any case, that's their problem.
Shorter terms would also give us more opportunity to see how different politicians handle relatively similar issues. So much changes in four years that there's relatively little way to get a feel for how two politicians would handle the same issue.
I believe that most things that effectively reduce the impact of each particular politician have the net effect of transferring power to what we would call the "deep state", all of the unelected aides, assistants, bureaucrats, etc that actually stay in the same jobs for long times. This is usually in reference to tougher term limits, but I think it would apply to dramatically shorter terms too.
There is tremendous power in having long experience in a system, knowing what has and hasn't worked in the past, all the ins and outs of all the little rules, who knows how to do what, etc. The more we limit the amount of time actual elected politicians spend in office, the more we transfer that power to their unelected aides who actually know how to get things done, and can slow-walk anything they don't like while accelerating anything they do.
I don't think any "tools" can fix that problem, because it's about power. Tools that actually increase a politician's power effectively versus the system will never be built, because it's not in anyone's interest to make it easier for any newcomers to accumulate power. Power is only effectively increased at the expense of other people with power, who can't be expected to cooperate in the process.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link