Tag Archives: Voting

GOP strategy

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US Presidential Elections Dem GOP

US Presidential Elections Dem GOP (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Usually a political party crafts a winning strategy by adopting policies that appeal to 50% + 1 of the electorate. This year the GOP is appealing only to its base which is a minority of the electorate. They plan to win in November by preventing voters likely to vote for the other party from casting a ballot. If the election is close, they will try to steal it. In order to defeat the GOP strategy, we must work harder than in 2008. We must register new voters, help them get to the polls, vote early if possible and volunteer as poll watchers. This election is too important to allow the GOP to regain power in Washington, DC.

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Democracy denigrated

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Democracy and Education

Democracy and Education (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some bloggers exalt republics and denigrate democracy as mob rule. Why do they do that? I believe they show disrespect for democracy because they don’t like majority rule. They believe that they, a minority, know better what is good for the country than the unwashed majority of voters. That is one of the reasons that the representatives of the 1% in the media frequently tell members of Occupy Wall Street to take a bath and get a job.

If majority rule, with protections for the minority, is really a problem for some voters, the answer I believe, is better education in general and better education in particular in American history and civics. The media in recent years has really failed in their job to educate voters and I believe that it is the result of the concentration of media ownership in a few corporate hands. The principal purposes of the media now are the generation of profits and the support of the GOP who support the 1%, rather than the fair and balanced supply of information needed by the voters.

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Polls and debates

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Image representing PollDaddy as depicted in Cr...

Image via CrunchBase

The polls and the GOP debates are useless. They do not help the voters to make a wise choice. The only thing the polls tell us is that the voters are undecided because they don’t like their choices and because they lack the information on which to base a decision. There are too many debates and they tell us little or nothing. The media treats the polls as a horse race and the debates as boxing matches. We could as easily place the candidates in a fighting cage and select the victor as the candidate. That would only tell us who is the physically fittest, not who is qualified to be president.

I would replace the debates with TV programs in which the candidates respond in writing to written, pertinent questions. The candidates need not be on the program in person, only their brief answers which could be compared on the air to the answers supplied by all the others. Voters could study the answers later at their leisure on-line. I would require that the answers be brief and not refer to the other candidates. In many cases, answers could be limited to three choices: yes, no or declined to answer.

Please see Fools and Tools | 6 degrees/180 degrees

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Electoral College

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English: Cartogram of the 2008 Electoral Vote ...

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I favor the abolition of the Electoral College so that my vote will mean something. I live in a red state as many others do and many others of us live in blue states. Elections are contested mainly in swing states and it is those voters who decide presidential elections. I want my vote to have equal weight with theirs. I also believe that more people will vote if they feel that their votes are meaningful. It may be more difficult to steal a close election if there is no electoral college, as long as we make electronic tabulation of the vote more secure.

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Voting rights

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Voting booth

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I support universal suffrage (voting rights for all adult citizens) except for certain felons. Some want to restrict voting rights, but that involves the question of where to draw the line. I believe that elections should be fought and won on the issues. The winning side convinces 50% + one of the voters of the correctness of their position.

It appears that the GOP prefers another route, restricting the right to vote to people they believe will vote to support their position on the issues. The right of property to have a larger voice and vote is an issue that has divided supporters of democracy since the inception of democracy.

Aside: This is a discussion of voting rights. I know that the US is a republic, not a pure democracy, but that is not what this discussion is all about. We tend to use the term democracy a bit loosely. After all, we don’t fight to preserve a republic nor did we invade Afghanistan and Iraq to impose a republic. When the Iraqis and the Afghans held elections, we celebrated their democracies.

Back to voting restrictions. Picture identification to prevent voter fraud is a solution to a problem that is statistically insignificant. It does tend to restrict the voting rights of the poor and the homeless. We have not reached the point yet where one must be a member of a certain religion, denomination or church to vote, but certain politicians would move us in that direction if they could. English as a first language and ancestry from certain Western European nations are favored by some on the Right. These restrictions on the right to vote have appeared before in the US. Please see my earlier post, Know Nothings.

Please see Democracy NOW | One man/one vote

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