It seems some people are surprised that they were able to buy data on who voted and how they lean.
I wasn't surprised because I worked on a campaign before. It's ridiculous how much information you can get about voters for not a lot of money.
You can get their phone number and email address that they provided with their voter registration, and the do not call list does not even apply (nor the do not spam list). You can call and email with reckless abandon.
It's kinda crazy how basically every law meant to protect people from spam has a special carve out for political campaigns.
> It's kinda crazy how basically every law meant to protect people from spam has a special carve out for political campaigns.
Electioneering is a golden goose of money. There are billions in Ad spend every election cycle and everybody is in on it - Facebook, Google, Twilio, Sendgrid, the telecoms, phone banks and call centers, nonprofits, for profits. Nobody wants the money to stop because is pure margin what they charge the campaigns for.
TV companies too, getting that sweet sweet ad money. I remember feeling in the 2008 Democrat primary race that TV had a split agenda. The nomination was definitely Obama's, but the TV reports kept talking about a race, because (my guess) it keeps viewers tuning in...
Mainly the one that establishes the Do Not Call list (it exempts political campaigns from any penalty) and CAN-SPAM which exempts political emails from any penalties.
Some political campaigns are relentless. I was able to get a local city council candidate’s campaign to stop calling me but I had to threaten to run against their candidate in the next election. Haven’t heard from them since, YMMV.
Sure, and like other targeted ad buyers being sold bullshit, you simply take it for granted that the data you get is accurate. Meanwhile, looking through my SMS history, I have 8 texts from this week addressed to either my grandmother, who is 86 and recovering from a stroke, or her last boyfriend, who is dead, telling me about GOP candidates in Nevada. I have never lived in Nevada. She no longer lives in Nevada. He no longer lives at all. I haven't voted since 2004. If you're just going to go by my "mood affiliation" or cultural leanings or whatever, voter or not, I'm sure as shit not a Republican. Thankfully, Nikki Haley finally stopped bugging me when she dropped out.
I don't really care about US elections in general, but your rules are broken. Here are interesting bits:
How do you know who didn’t vote?
We formed a Super PAC and bought the personal voting records of every American citizen from a data broker we found on the internet. It’s pretty fucked up.
How do you know who’s “blue leaning”?
We got your partisan lean from the same data broker who sold us your voting history. You wouldn’t believe how easy it was for us to get this stuff. So fucked up!
This rules. Can I give you more than $7.99?
If you agree with us that this is a pretty good idea, you can donate as much as you want during checkout for your 2024 Election Pack. Literally no limit, because we’re a Super PAC. This is the kind of crazy shit that happens when the Supreme Court rules that “money is speech” and corporations can spend unlimited amounts of cash influencing elections. If you want to make a very large donation, please email us and we'll work it out.
> bought the personal voting records of every American citizen from a data broker we found on the internet
The way they phrase this, it sounds like they physically bought a file containing these records, not e.g. access to some API that lets them send targeted messages.
If that is the case and that file can be bought so easily, I'm surprised some version of it hasn't leaked on the internet yet.
An email address, phone number, address and political leaning for every voting American? That would be the breach to end all breaches, probably both figuratively and literally.
I didn't work with election data but I dealt with Data brokers and they worked both ways. They offered API as a service access or a single bulk download for special pricing. I was surprised how relatively cheap it was considering all the data they offered.
it'll be breach of contract. Musk is promising that he will pay every valid voter in the swing states $47 if they fill out his form and certify they will vote for in the interest of the first and second amendments, if a eligible voter fulfills their part of the bargain and says to send their check to CaH, it's their right to do so. Musk can't just decide he doesn't like what they're doing with (now) their money and not pay up on his end of the bargain.
Huh. If this is true, I'm surprised this "program" hasn't yet caught on as a Tiktok "here's how to get $50 for free if you live in one of these states" trick.
Musk is running a similar program for people in swing states, paying them $47 to refer potential Trump voters. If he doesn't pay, or pays selectively, he's violating various campaign finance laws.
He’s paying a person $47 for every registered swing state voter that that person refers to the SuperPAC and that follows through on signing a petition to support first and second amendment rights.
It appears to be lawyered loopholes around paying people to register to vote directly. Which is illegal as you mentioned.
Sure plenty of people will sign it for the money and then forget about it, but some sliver of people that sign will feel some sliver of obligation to vote for the candidate that the petition obviously wants them to vote for. A sliver here and there could be enough to turn this currently close election.
See, that’s the thing. Neither naughty ol’ mr car, nor the card game, are paying people to vote. Not technically. US election law is… not great. Note the digs at Citizens United in the FAQ.
The formula is this: YOU learn all by yourself what all electable candidates say they want to do. YOU figure out all by yourself which ones LIE. One lie is enough, if they do it they keep doing it.
And then YOU chose which election program you want to vote for.
Ideally you chose what is best for the country but this is rather challenging for people. We can forgive them for being stuck thinking only of themselves.
Why would it be perfectly obvious if one is ordering food but not for elections???
Food might taste bad and you might get food poisoning. A bad choice doesn't mean years of suffering.
Does one not look at the menu card? Or do you ask your mum what to order? Do you roam around the restaurant looking what other people are eating? Do you order what CNN is screaming at you?
If people scream at you from all directions that you should order the snails in garlic butter, does that mean you will never have to look at the menu the rest of your life? You can just eat snails every day, everyone else is eating snails every day???? Why are you not eating snails?? It is the nr 1 most sold food! Don't you want snails to be the nr 1 food?
Then the restaurant switches to the cheapest worse possible snails because people will order it anyway because other people will order it.
Is this a display of good taste?
I hate apple but I buy iphone because they are good enough for what I need. I might get an android phone some day. They are good enough too.
I did actually look.
With elections no one is looking. People have no idea. Non of them! There is not one journalist who knows anything.
For each million voters one or two have watched a single video from a candidate other than the top 2. A video by a 5 year old on tiktok gets more attention online than the entire list of election programs.
I could see logic in getting advice from an expert on something or from your mum but if they know absolutely nothing about the topic?!?!
The voter is therefore brainwashed into irrelevance, she won't influence elections in any way.
All that means is that we don't have a one-person one-vote system. Some people's votes matter more than others. What we have is a case of civil inequality.
If we build a system where everyone's votes count the same (radical and extreme idea, I know), then each person will have the same fundamental incentive to vote.
Direct election of the US president would be an improvement. Expanding the House of Representatives as originally formulated, or similarly, would help. Making the Senate reflect the population better by dividing populous states, and/or a statehood option for Puerto Rico and DC would help. Striking down gerrymanders would help.
More contested down-ballot races would help. No excuse for the parties to not have strong organization and candidate recruitment at that level. No changes to laws needed for this.
No, devolving powers to the states is what makes it a federation. Having a state-representative legislative chamber makes it a federation. Electing a federal president via popular vote does not indicate defederation any more than the existence of the House of Representatives does.
Electing a president via popular vote would give populous states disproportionate influence over the country compared to other states. That is important because the president could do obnoxious things against the best interest of any particular state, especially ones with less influence. The stuff happening to your home state is way more relevant to your life than your political party or special interests.
> Electing a president via popular vote would give populous states disproportionate influence over the country compared to other states.
It would give every human, who has the right to representation, exactly proportionate influence. The weird fashy retired cops in Idaho will have to settle for having the same number of senators as Californians have.
That is not a good argument. People have a right to self-determination. The same logic of populism can be applied on a trans-national scale, even. There is no limit because under your logic, any person's vote is as good as any other's. The fact is we have states to provide a level of autonomy and independence to geographically separate groups of people, so they can live with more freedom. I don't care if the entire state of California is against how I live, because they are thousands of miles away and deserve less say in how I live than my neighbors. The federal system we have strikes a balance between the two.
A president of a federation such as the US must represent the individual states equally, because there can only be one president and that seat has disproportionate power. I really think people flip flop on the popular vote issue based on whether they think it helps their particular party or not, which is unbelievably short-sighted.
> The fact is we have states to provide a level of autonomy and independence to geographically separate groups of people, so they can live with more freedom.
On this specific point- do you contend that unitary republics, such as France, are inherently less free than federal entities? How are provinces less free than states? Is Canada less free than the U.S.?
Did the EU get less free after Lisbon when it transferred power from the commission and council of ministers (each state has similar influence) to the parliament (each person has similar influence)? Like, that was about the least contentious part of Lisbon; it was broadly popular. Very few people would think they lost freedom through it.
The effect I just described is just one factor affecting the freedom of a group. Sometimes you do need to have a larger entity around beyond your local government for various reasons. I would think that the potential for the worst tyranny is smaller in geographically smaller countries or units, because people can leave. For example, people who don't like a city or county can leave it. Provinces and states are also possible to leave behind if you can't stand the laws. Countries are trickier to leave because of international relations, but it is still possible. I also expect small countries are easier to leave than big ones. It's not ideal to have to move, but at least you can move away from localized issues. Some localized issues may also be avoided by seeking input from only the people who will be affected. All in all, I think it is easier to find consensus among smaller groups, and the larger a group gets the harder it is to make rules or policies that everyone is happy with.
The lines on maps are not arbitrary. People decided them by choice and in some cases by force. You might feel no particular attachment to your state, but if another state decided that your state should be exploited in some way, your primary source of support would be your neighbors within those so-called arbitrary lines.
I sense some sarcasm. But you ought to know that the founders, along with Aristotle and other Greeks (basically, the inventors of democracy), were afraid of mobs and sought to temper the whims of the people.
States are given representation proportional to their populations, and also equal representation (in the Senate). The EC and House seats aren't just based on voter turnout, voter population, or even the actual number of citizens in the state (which is rather problematic). So this whole push for direct democracy in the presidential election is stupid. Yes, swing states are a thing, but only because the other states vote consistently in a particular way.
Another problem with using the popular vote to decide the presidential election is that it inventivizes fraud. If someone managed to corrupt a few populous states, they could generate extremely high numbers of fake votes to drown out every other state.
I think it's different. In any case, you can imagine a scenario where different states have wildly different voter turnout. That could even happen due to a natural disaster such as the hurricanes we've seen in the past few weeks. How messed up would it be for a state ravaged by a hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, or whatever to have its influence diminished because people were unable to vote? It is already bad enough that the votes could be skewed based on specific counties. But imagine the whole state losing its actual representation because of power outages and stuff. It might even encourage some states to sabotage other states, to reduce turnout.
The presidency is not the only election on the ballot.
And if you ask people who don't vote why not, very few of them are going to mention the electoral college. I would wager most people who don't vote couldn't even explain what the electoral college is.
In many districts, your vote for US House and Senate seats largely doesn't matter, either. For many people, those are the only elections they are thinking about when it comes to November.
Senate seats are elected state-wide, so they largely go the same way as the presidential vote. If you're in a deep-red or deep-blue state (i.e., nearly all of them), your individual vote isn't going to make a difference.
House seats are district-specific, but:
a) the re-election rate of incumbents is over 90%
b) districts are often drawn to lock-in control for a specific party
State senate and house seats are often no better.
However, much to the credit of the sibling response, there are all kinds of local and regional races as well as ballot initiatives that are important.
Setting aside gerrymandering (which is a huge issue), the reelection rate doesn't tell the whole story. By what margin are House candidates typically winning? I'm sure there are plenty of landslides, but also lots of districts that were decided by a few percent -- and those who don't vote could be a deciding factor in those races if they chose to vote.
Or if we analyze this from an opportunity cost perspective, IMO voting is always the right choice. Maybe there's an 80% chance your vote "doesn't matter", but the cost is only 15 minutes of your time every 2 years. Isn't the 20% worth the risk? (OK, I am lucky enough to live in a state where voting lines are short. I understand it takes more than 15 mins for some people.)
Bottom line: Turnout reflects the odds that an individual vote will impact the outcome.
In most races, there is little doubt (more than 80% odds) as to who will win. And this extends all the way down to the local level. And voters, candidates and political parties all know this.
Probably they couldn't explain it, but many of them will have taken to heart the idea that "my vote doesn't matter". Which is especially sad, since like you say there are potentially all kinds of local and regional races and ballot measures their vote could in fact have impacted.
It's interesting how Occupy Wall Street was ridiculed by the press. I think they were onto something even though I don't agree with almost everything else they also believed in.
For the same reason CPAC would have a banner saying "We're all domestic terrorists". Dark satire. Whether you find it appropriate or funny is an exercise left for the reader.
It's a game. the rules are here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/cah/CAH_Rules.pdf
I'm personally playing the "god is dead" rule with my friends. I don't care about the US elections but this is a really fine game.
[edit] i know it's bad etiquette to comment on votes, but parent's question seems legitimate and can have usefull answers, it doesn't deserve downvotes imho.
Thanks. Not sure why some people were so triggered by the question. Never heard of this game before. If we can't ask questions about what we don't know, and if you're not willing to share what you know, what kind of place is this?
You might want to go look it up before making a bunch of assumptions based only on the name. Sure, you might feel a bit silly after, but hopefully you can have a good laugh over it.
Gosh, you have gone pretty far down into the kool-aid.
Cards Against Humanity is a card game, it was a Kickstarter in 2011. The name is a joke with "crimes against humanity", it's a politically incorrect game where you complete sentences from a card with the sentences/words you have in the cards on your hand.
You've created a whole 5 paragraphs strawman out of the name of a game...
Please, reconsider the stuff you read, you're deeply chronically online. And I don't mean this to put you down, it's just that the vicious way you went into a tirade against a creation of your own mind is concerning.
Or you know, you can google it and find it's a play on word with "crimes against humanity" because a lot of the combination result on really dark or politically incorrect humor.
It seems some people are surprised that they were able to buy data on who voted and how they lean.
I wasn't surprised because I worked on a campaign before. It's ridiculous how much information you can get about voters for not a lot of money.
You can get their phone number and email address that they provided with their voter registration, and the do not call list does not even apply (nor the do not spam list). You can call and email with reckless abandon.
It's kinda crazy how basically every law meant to protect people from spam has a special carve out for political campaigns.
> It's kinda crazy how basically every law meant to protect people from spam has a special carve out for political campaigns.
Electioneering is a golden goose of money. There are billions in Ad spend every election cycle and everybody is in on it - Facebook, Google, Twilio, Sendgrid, the telecoms, phone banks and call centers, nonprofits, for profits. Nobody wants the money to stop because is pure margin what they charge the campaigns for.
TV companies too, getting that sweet sweet ad money. I remember feeling in the 2008 Democrat primary race that TV had a split agenda. The nomination was definitely Obama's, but the TV reports kept talking about a race, because (my guess) it keeps viewers tuning in...
Which laws have special carve outs for political campaigns?
TCPA and CAN SPAM.
https://www.fcc.gov/rules-political-campaign-calls-and-texts
Neither of those laws mention political campaigns at all - both laws are directed at commercial activity.
Exactly. They specifically omit political campaigns so that they aren't covered.
Mainly the one that establishes the Do Not Call list (it exempts political campaigns from any penalty) and CAN-SPAM which exempts political emails from any penalties.
Some political campaigns are relentless. I was able to get a local city council candidate’s campaign to stop calling me but I had to threaten to run against their candidate in the next election. Haven’t heard from them since, YMMV.
Sure, and like other targeted ad buyers being sold bullshit, you simply take it for granted that the data you get is accurate. Meanwhile, looking through my SMS history, I have 8 texts from this week addressed to either my grandmother, who is 86 and recovering from a stroke, or her last boyfriend, who is dead, telling me about GOP candidates in Nevada. I have never lived in Nevada. She no longer lives in Nevada. He no longer lives at all. I haven't voted since 2004. If you're just going to go by my "mood affiliation" or cultural leanings or whatever, voter or not, I'm sure as shit not a Republican. Thankfully, Nikki Haley finally stopped bugging me when she dropped out.
I don't really care about US elections in general, but your rules are broken. Here are interesting bits:
How do you know who didn’t vote?
We formed a Super PAC and bought the personal voting records of every American citizen from a data broker we found on the internet. It’s pretty fucked up.
How do you know who’s “blue leaning”?
We got your partisan lean from the same data broker who sold us your voting history. You wouldn’t believe how easy it was for us to get this stuff. So fucked up!
This rules. Can I give you more than $7.99?
If you agree with us that this is a pretty good idea, you can donate as much as you want during checkout for your 2024 Election Pack. Literally no limit, because we’re a Super PAC. This is the kind of crazy shit that happens when the Supreme Court rules that “money is speech” and corporations can spend unlimited amounts of cash influencing elections. If you want to make a very large donation, please email us and we'll work it out.
> bought the personal voting records of every American citizen from a data broker we found on the internet
The way they phrase this, it sounds like they physically bought a file containing these records, not e.g. access to some API that lets them send targeted messages.
If that is the case and that file can be bought so easily, I'm surprised some version of it hasn't leaked on the internet yet.
An email address, phone number, address and political leaning for every voting American? That would be the breach to end all breaches, probably both figuratively and literally.
I didn't work with election data but I dealt with Data brokers and they worked both ways. They offered API as a service access or a single bulk download for special pricing. I was surprised how relatively cheap it was considering all the data they offered.
Not a lot of people just how much voter data is available out there and how easy it is to check if someone voted and their party affiliation.
On a side note, if folks are interested in US politics humor/election party card games, I'd also check out democrazy.com
Can someone explain what law forces Musk to pay them $47 for everyone that fills out a form?
it'll be breach of contract. Musk is promising that he will pay every valid voter in the swing states $47 if they fill out his form and certify they will vote for in the interest of the first and second amendments, if a eligible voter fulfills their part of the bargain and says to send their check to CaH, it's their right to do so. Musk can't just decide he doesn't like what they're doing with (now) their money and not pay up on his end of the bargain.
Huh. If this is true, I'm surprised this "program" hasn't yet caught on as a Tiktok "here's how to get $50 for free if you live in one of these states" trick.
> Musk can't just decide [to] not pay up on his end of the bargain.
Have I got a list of times he's done exactly that.
Granted he also loses a lot in court. He even had to go through paying $44B once...
Musk is running a similar program for people in swing states, paying them $47 to refer potential Trump voters. If he doesn't pay, or pays selectively, he's violating various campaign finance laws.
Isn’t it flat illegal to pay people to vote? Otherwise Trump or Harris could just… directly bribe people to vote for them through a cutout.
He's not paying people to vote. He's paying people to register to vote.
I believe that too is illegal. Isn't he just paying them to "sign" a petition that they'd vote to support the 1st and 2nd amendments?
He’s paying a person $47 for every registered swing state voter that that person refers to the SuperPAC and that follows through on signing a petition to support first and second amendment rights.
It appears to be lawyered loopholes around paying people to register to vote directly. Which is illegal as you mentioned.
Sure plenty of people will sign it for the money and then forget about it, but some sliver of people that sign will feel some sliver of obligation to vote for the candidate that the petition obviously wants them to vote for. A sliver here and there could be enough to turn this currently close election.
It's not if its a superPAC, apparently.
That seems to be the work around.
See, that’s the thing. Neither naughty ol’ mr car, nor the card game, are paying people to vote. Not technically. US election law is… not great. Note the digs at Citizens United in the FAQ.
This has always been one of my favorite questions to think about.
If votes could be legally sold how much would it cost to buy the US Presidential election?
There is really any mystery as to why half the voters don't vote?
Unless you live in one of the half dozen "swing states", your vote is just a symbolic gesture with little chance of impacting the overall outcome.
The problem is brainwashing.
The formula is this: YOU learn all by yourself what all electable candidates say they want to do. YOU figure out all by yourself which ones LIE. One lie is enough, if they do it they keep doing it.
And then YOU chose which election program you want to vote for.
Ideally you chose what is best for the country but this is rather challenging for people. We can forgive them for being stuck thinking only of themselves.
Why would it be perfectly obvious if one is ordering food but not for elections???
Food might taste bad and you might get food poisoning. A bad choice doesn't mean years of suffering.
Does one not look at the menu card? Or do you ask your mum what to order? Do you roam around the restaurant looking what other people are eating? Do you order what CNN is screaming at you?
If people scream at you from all directions that you should order the snails in garlic butter, does that mean you will never have to look at the menu the rest of your life? You can just eat snails every day, everyone else is eating snails every day???? Why are you not eating snails?? It is the nr 1 most sold food! Don't you want snails to be the nr 1 food?
Then the restaurant switches to the cheapest worse possible snails because people will order it anyway because other people will order it.
Is this a display of good taste?
I hate apple but I buy iphone because they are good enough for what I need. I might get an android phone some day. They are good enough too.
I did actually look.
With elections no one is looking. People have no idea. Non of them! There is not one journalist who knows anything.
For each million voters one or two have watched a single video from a candidate other than the top 2. A video by a 5 year old on tiktok gets more attention online than the entire list of election programs.
I could see logic in getting advice from an expert on something or from your mum but if they know absolutely nothing about the topic?!?!
The voter is therefore brainwashed into irrelevance, she won't influence elections in any way.
All that means is that we don't have a one-person one-vote system. Some people's votes matter more than others. What we have is a case of civil inequality.
If we build a system where everyone's votes count the same (radical and extreme idea, I know), then each person will have the same fundamental incentive to vote.
Direct election of the US president would be an improvement. Expanding the House of Representatives as originally formulated, or similarly, would help. Making the Senate reflect the population better by dividing populous states, and/or a statehood option for Puerto Rico and DC would help. Striking down gerrymanders would help.
More contested down-ballot races would help. No excuse for the parties to not have strong organization and candidate recruitment at that level. No changes to laws needed for this.
Well, it's a federation of states so you can't quite do that unless you abandon that conceit.
No, devolving powers to the states is what makes it a federation. Having a state-representative legislative chamber makes it a federation. Electing a federal president via popular vote does not indicate defederation any more than the existence of the House of Representatives does.
Electing a president via popular vote would give populous states disproportionate influence over the country compared to other states. That is important because the president could do obnoxious things against the best interest of any particular state, especially ones with less influence. The stuff happening to your home state is way more relevant to your life than your political party or special interests.
> Electing a president via popular vote would give populous states disproportionate influence over the country compared to other states.
It would give every human, who has the right to representation, exactly proportionate influence. The weird fashy retired cops in Idaho will have to settle for having the same number of senators as Californians have.
That is not a good argument. People have a right to self-determination. The same logic of populism can be applied on a trans-national scale, even. There is no limit because under your logic, any person's vote is as good as any other's. The fact is we have states to provide a level of autonomy and independence to geographically separate groups of people, so they can live with more freedom. I don't care if the entire state of California is against how I live, because they are thousands of miles away and deserve less say in how I live than my neighbors. The federal system we have strikes a balance between the two.
A president of a federation such as the US must represent the individual states equally, because there can only be one president and that seat has disproportionate power. I really think people flip flop on the popular vote issue based on whether they think it helps their particular party or not, which is unbelievably short-sighted.
> The fact is we have states to provide a level of autonomy and independence to geographically separate groups of people, so they can live with more freedom.
On this specific point- do you contend that unitary republics, such as France, are inherently less free than federal entities? How are provinces less free than states? Is Canada less free than the U.S.?
Did the EU get less free after Lisbon when it transferred power from the commission and council of ministers (each state has similar influence) to the parliament (each person has similar influence)? Like, that was about the least contentious part of Lisbon; it was broadly popular. Very few people would think they lost freedom through it.
The effect I just described is just one factor affecting the freedom of a group. Sometimes you do need to have a larger entity around beyond your local government for various reasons. I would think that the potential for the worst tyranny is smaller in geographically smaller countries or units, because people can leave. For example, people who don't like a city or county can leave it. Provinces and states are also possible to leave behind if you can't stand the laws. Countries are trickier to leave because of international relations, but it is still possible. I also expect small countries are easier to leave than big ones. It's not ideal to have to move, but at least you can move away from localized issues. Some localized issues may also be avoided by seeking input from only the people who will be affected. All in all, I think it is easier to find consensus among smaller groups, and the larger a group gets the harder it is to make rules or policies that everyone is happy with.
Arbitrary lines on maps are arbitrary. North & South Dakota are far more similar than north and south California.
The lines on maps are not arbitrary. People decided them by choice and in some cases by force. You might feel no particular attachment to your state, but if another state decided that your state should be exploited in some way, your primary source of support would be your neighbors within those so-called arbitrary lines.
I used North and South Dakota for a reason. The only reason they were split was to hijack the Senate.
That is misleading. There was no state of Dakota. The two became states at the same time. Even Wikipedia says this:
>Regionalist tensions between the northern and the southern parts of the territory were present since the beginning.
So, the split was not likely about senate seats. It was about people getting along within each state.
Damn imagine if everyone's vote was equally weighted, what a disaster for democracy that would be. Mob rule!!
I sense some sarcasm. But you ought to know that the founders, along with Aristotle and other Greeks (basically, the inventors of democracy), were afraid of mobs and sought to temper the whims of the people.
States are given representation proportional to their populations, and also equal representation (in the Senate). The EC and House seats aren't just based on voter turnout, voter population, or even the actual number of citizens in the state (which is rather problematic). So this whole push for direct democracy in the presidential election is stupid. Yes, swing states are a thing, but only because the other states vote consistently in a particular way.
Another problem with using the popular vote to decide the presidential election is that it inventivizes fraud. If someone managed to corrupt a few populous states, they could generate extremely high numbers of fake votes to drown out every other state.
The current system incentivizes fraud in swing states, so the fraud is simply shifted elsewhere.
I think it's different. In any case, you can imagine a scenario where different states have wildly different voter turnout. That could even happen due to a natural disaster such as the hurricanes we've seen in the past few weeks. How messed up would it be for a state ravaged by a hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, or whatever to have its influence diminished because people were unable to vote? It is already bad enough that the votes could be skewed based on specific counties. But imagine the whole state losing its actual representation because of power outages and stuff. It might even encourage some states to sabotage other states, to reduce turnout.
> But imagine the whole state losing its actual representation because of power outages and stuff.
What you are describing would be a problem regardless of the presence of the electoral college.
The presidency is not the only election on the ballot.
And if you ask people who don't vote why not, very few of them are going to mention the electoral college. I would wager most people who don't vote couldn't even explain what the electoral college is.
In many districts, your vote for US House and Senate seats largely doesn't matter, either. For many people, those are the only elections they are thinking about when it comes to November.
Senate seats are elected state-wide, so they largely go the same way as the presidential vote. If you're in a deep-red or deep-blue state (i.e., nearly all of them), your individual vote isn't going to make a difference.
House seats are district-specific, but:
State senate and house seats are often no better.However, much to the credit of the sibling response, there are all kinds of local and regional races as well as ballot initiatives that are important.
Setting aside gerrymandering (which is a huge issue), the reelection rate doesn't tell the whole story. By what margin are House candidates typically winning? I'm sure there are plenty of landslides, but also lots of districts that were decided by a few percent -- and those who don't vote could be a deciding factor in those races if they chose to vote.
Or if we analyze this from an opportunity cost perspective, IMO voting is always the right choice. Maybe there's an 80% chance your vote "doesn't matter", but the cost is only 15 minutes of your time every 2 years. Isn't the 20% worth the risk? (OK, I am lucky enough to live in a state where voting lines are short. I understand it takes more than 15 mins for some people.)
Bottom line: Turnout reflects the odds that an individual vote will impact the outcome.
In most races, there is little doubt (more than 80% odds) as to who will win. And this extends all the way down to the local level. And voters, candidates and political parties all know this.
Probably they couldn't explain it, but many of them will have taken to heart the idea that "my vote doesn't matter". Which is especially sad, since like you say there are potentially all kinds of local and regional races and ballot measures their vote could in fact have impacted.
It's interesting how Occupy Wall Street was ridiculed by the press. I think they were onto something even though I don't agree with almost everything else they also believed in.
There is more on your ballot than the president, you know.
Unless you happen to live in a swing area, the results for most other races conform to well known and even pre-determined trends.
There are very few such areas. Voters, candidates and the political parties know this.
Couldn’t they pay out after the election to anyone who leans left and voted or anyone who leans right and didn’t vote? Just an idea I guess.
They’re not technically paying for votes. That’s illegal. They’re exploiting the same loophole as Musk to, for practical purposes, pay for votes.
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Think you might be projecting just a little?
Why would an institution or group of people call itself cards against humanity?
For the same reason CPAC would have a banner saying "We're all domestic terrorists". Dark satire. Whether you find it appropriate or funny is an exercise left for the reader.
Dark satire is perhaps more appropriate in a party game than at a supposedly-serious political conference.
It's a game. the rules are here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/cah/CAH_Rules.pdf I'm personally playing the "god is dead" rule with my friends. I don't care about the US elections but this is a really fine game.
[edit] i know it's bad etiquette to comment on votes, but parent's question seems legitimate and can have usefull answers, it doesn't deserve downvotes imho.
Thanks. Not sure why some people were so triggered by the question. Never heard of this game before. If we can't ask questions about what we don't know, and if you're not willing to share what you know, what kind of place is this?
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You might want to go look it up before making a bunch of assumptions based only on the name. Sure, you might feel a bit silly after, but hopefully you can have a good laugh over it.
You are reading way too much into the tongue-in-cheek name of a satirical card game.
Gosh, you have gone pretty far down into the kool-aid.
Cards Against Humanity is a card game, it was a Kickstarter in 2011. The name is a joke with "crimes against humanity", it's a politically incorrect game where you complete sentences from a card with the sentences/words you have in the cards on your hand.
You've created a whole 5 paragraphs strawman out of the name of a game...
Please, reconsider the stuff you read, you're deeply chronically online. And I don't mean this to put you down, it's just that the vicious way you went into a tirade against a creation of your own mind is concerning.
Or you know, you can google it and find it's a play on word with "crimes against humanity" because a lot of the combination result on really dark or politically incorrect humor.
I think you're reading way too much into a satirical card game dude...