r/Cascadia • u/russellmzauner • 11d ago
They are becoming absolutely terrified of the citizens.
Oregon is seeking the right legislation - we voted down cannabis legalization twice before we got something everyone liked. A bill failing "three times" when it was different each time is not failure, it is resiliency and determination and if it fails a fourth time, well, if that's what's needed to get good legislation hammered out and polished to a fine sheen, then that's what's needed.
Yeah. Work is needed. Actual people doing their actual jobs of supporting the other people instead of stuffing their pockets and seeing how far they can skeedaddle with their lucre.
When did people start entering politics just to be a scammer? When was that normalized?
And understanding what has and is happening will help us guide what happens in the future so we can then ignore it while we stroll on by working on normalizing instead a general shift in the thinking that management and governance is pork barrel graft game with sociopathic disregard for the general public health and welfare is NOT the actual plan but rather perform service and civic duty then maybe go home and have dinner instead of having to live in a constant state of paranoia and persecution fetish instilled by the culture of victimhood a good swath of the USA has adopted for whatever reasons.
Keep voting for intelligent things, or even submit some yourself! As long as the work is honestly put in there should be some reasonably acceptable results. If anything we can certainly outwork lazy politicians; rash assumption anywhere but Cascadia where our continued existence is proof of our fortitude and labors.
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u/darkwater427 10d ago
Why the heck hasn't WA even tried?!
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u/TheNorthernRose 10d ago
Because despite how it’s presented, WA state is unironically one of the most regressive governments among the liberal states on the west coast. Maybe even worse than California at this point.
It has coasted on its woodsy hiker hippie reputation since the 1990s when tech sector and industrial trades moved in. This has both co-opted in image, but simultaneously largely suppressed, sincere attitudes of that culture (ie, genuine progressive sentiment) in lieu of a ‘commerce above all else’ liberal politics that favors corporations.
RCV is not of any benefit to democrats playing for power in such a place, as the key to power is courting the business interests above while attempting to not alienate the legacy voter attitudes that were that original cultural reputation, albeit less and less as their interests diminish in overall relevance to the state with each election cycle.
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u/GarthVader45 10d ago
Yep, lots of rich people and powerful corporations buying influence in Washington.
For decades up until just last year Washington literally had the most regressive tax structure in the entire country. Now we're the second most regressive after Florida.
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u/darkwater427 9d ago
That's... depressing, really.
I'm no progressive (I mean philosophically; I'm quite the opposite) but very often what you call progressive (graduated income tax, for example, or RCV) aligns very well with my political ideas (politics of course being the fourth branch of classically-described philosophy).
I have a deep, burning hatred for VC and billionaires in general. Not the people per se (that would go against my ethics) but the principle of being a billionaire or being a venture capitalist. It's morally wrong.
</rant>
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u/Piwx2019 8d ago
As you rant on a publicly traded VC funded platform owned by billionaire. Oh the irony.
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u/darkwater427 8d ago
I'm well aware. I've actually been building an alternate space for such rants but it's nowhere near feature-complete. I don't think I've even parked the domain yet...
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u/Quick-Math-9438 8d ago
And when you do you will park it with a domain on a platform owned by a billionaire
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u/agapoforlife 10d ago
So while I support RCV, I voted no on Arizona’s prop 140, because the legislature would get to decide how many candidates would advance to the general election. We also rejected the legislatures attempt to ban RCV (prop133), so there’s that.
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u/hazelquarrier_couch 11d ago
We didn't vote for rcv last time because it didn't address the primaries. We only belong to a party because we want to vote in the primaries (and I know I can choose independent but that's not for me). If you don't address the primaries being controlled by the parties rcv is kind of pointless because it will always be a Democrat or republican who actually wins.
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u/romulusnr Washington 11d ago
That's not a thing. Partisan primaries simply choose who a party runs. It doesn't decide everyone who runs. Primaries being operated by the state is just the parties colluding to pass the complexity and cost of their group decisions onto the state coffers. There's no actual legal necessity for a primary at all.
People who want to run who do not want to be endorsed by parties can simply just run.
Heck, until 2020, the Democrats in Washington didn't even use a primary, just caucuses, which they have to run themselves. (It was held, because it's in law that it has to be, but its results were disregarded.)
The reason you are almost always going to get either a Republican or Democrat winning isn't because of primaries. It's because they have way more money (and loyalty) than anyone else. Support publicly financed elections.
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u/Quick-Math-9438 8d ago
And have manipulated every aspect of voting to gain that outcome. Not that we’ve seen a real debate even between the two parties for a while the limits they have to keep others out of a debate ensure that only democratic republicans are heard
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u/romulusnr Washington 7d ago
There is no law mandating that people vote for a member of any party.
But people simply just do and it's mostly seemingly because it's all they know. Or because, I fear, some think it actually IS required. Mostly, the argument has been "if you do that, you'll weaken the strongest opponent of the bad people" and that's largely a self-perpetuating thing, especially since we have no concept of coalition in this country.
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u/hazelquarrier_couch 11d ago
The parties are so powerful and well funded that no matter how many candidates run there will always be a Democrat or a republican as the winner. So I'm standing by my original statement.
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u/RedditIsFiction 10d ago
Or, they win because people are afraid to vote off party because doing so under first past the post means the greater of two evils could win. Under RCV or STAR you can't "throwaway a vote" by voting off party. You'd just put [third party person] as your first choice, then the democrat as your second. No more risk of the greater of two evils winning and the result is a more realistic democratic compromise that represents the will of the people.
RCV would weaken the parties.
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u/PlsDntPMme 10d ago
I’m a bit surprised about Colorado.
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u/WobbleKing 9d ago
Ballot measures do get rejected for valid reasons. An attempt with a rejection is not necessarily a bad thing
California famously blocked legalization of marijuana several times despite being California.
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u/WutAboutThisOne 9d ago
CA also voted to keep prison slavery.
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u/Quick-Math-9438 8d ago
Well it does take a present day statistical improbability to change the US constitution
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u/Gh0stTV 10d ago
I agree with your assessment. I remember talking to my Oregon friends when Washington passed both our (grocery store) liquor tax and our cannabis bills. In our defense, most of us truly believed this was something that we could ratify and fix later- but once legislation is passed on the state level no one working in government wants to touch it again… especially when it’s bringing in record tax dollars. The result meant 1) craft beer prices skyrocketed to bring in cheap liquor, and 2) a heavily regulated cannabis market where home-growing is still illegal, and the early licensed distributors and growers were able to get rich. WA has one of the most regressive tax structures which is only further increasing income inequality and affordable housing throughout the state. Oh, and a lot of the flower is super dry now.
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u/Picards-Flute 10d ago
Alaskan here:
We kept Rank Choice by like a 500 or 1000 vote margin
Every. Vote. Counts.
Interestingly though we kicked out Petola in favor of Begich (extremely dumb imo), so there must have been not a small number of conservatives who voted for Begich what wanted to keep rank choice
As much as I hate Begich, I think him winning might actually be a good thing for RCV in general, because it shows that a Republican can actually win a RCV election
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u/xesaie 11d ago
RCV is such a weird thing. It absolutley won't do the thing that 3rd party advocates have convinced themselves it will, but it's still a good reform.
So we have folks mostly on the left who think it will make them relevant (it won't) and folks on the right who are only against it because folks on the left like it.
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u/Wild_Pangolin_4772 11d ago
Folks on the left liking it doesn't mean the Democrats like it though, does it? They're one of the two parties of the two party system that stand to lose from it.
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u/xesaie 11d ago
They’re mostly indifferent to it, outside of meta reasons (eg people being obnoxious online about it). The whole point is that they know they have almost nothing to lose from it because the fringe parties aren’t actually sitting on a silent majority but are pretty unpopular
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u/russellmzauner 11d ago
Actually, if people take 10 minutes to actually read what they are, there are several methods that better represent the will of the people than systems that couldn't have been designed more exactly if they tried to evolve/emerge as a two party system. Everything after that was just patch on chewing gum on baling wire because it's the way it was always done and social memory was soft on a lot of topics, back in the days before internet.
Sorry about the internet. That really ruined a lot of people's day. Neda Agha-Soltan in 2009 - Iran blacked out the cell towers in a hurry but everyone had already seen; now if a country powers down its cell towers, the whole world knows what's up.
I don't advocate for any specific one because I believe that all of them are far better at representing people's sentiments towards politics and governance than what we're doing now. The data is the same but used in a smarter way than just dividing it into three piles that are really only two, ultimately - R, D, and "other".
I use STAR/RCV/IRV in that order because technically STAR is marginally better than a couple of the other methods and still pretty easy to understand once someone draws a picture - I am more of a visual learner and it was hard to break my programming and make sense of it until I sketched the path out a few times and it was like...this is so simple and makes so much sense that I had just be flying right over it the whole time. My brain was trying so hard to make it as complicated as it should seem, but it wasn't, not at all, and it took my ego a few seconds to back off and let my regular brain have the space to work it out.
I would probably get something wrong if I tried to explain it but the models exist, have been used, and are statistically solid. Even if I don't get the person I wanted to win it ensures that at least some of what I wanted was included in who did end up winning because. I put the issues and the candidates in order, knowing there is no perfect solution, and you're not forced to vote for all candidates on the ballot or even more than one at all; you can just list the one you want if you want and then be perpetually angry when you never get ANY of what you want instead of at least SOME.
I recently learned it's called "Cardinal Voting" but I think they don't use that term often because, myself being raised Catholic especially, can confuse it with a non-secular term; if the use became widespread it could cause some stoppage later. But it requires that one grades the candidates and if you don't think of anything but a single candidate that's gonna really piss you off.
Surprising how many people would rather not think and just march to their vanishing point, their vanishing point being where they're no longer useful because everything has been extracted from the human assets (as the government now calls them, check it out - terrifying in itself).
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u/xesaie 11d ago
You're misconstruing the entire issue.
Yes there are several superior systems, but all this "If they just understood" or "Just read 10 minutes" is the old "low information voters" canard. People who don't agree with you must definitionally be bad faith or ignorant because if they were good knowledgable people they'd naturally agree with you.
But yes there are superior systems, and the major barrier honestly is inertia (The GOP banning it places seems to be mostly their weird contrarian ways)
The bigger thing around alternative voting models is that they're popular not so much because they're better per se, but because they feed popular myths:
- The populist myth of the elite duopoly
- The specific myth of "My beliefs are secretly popular and the only reason I don't see them is because the system is holding them down" (which relies on the first myth.
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u/russellmzauner 10d ago
Unless you have a different angle, we're done discussing this one.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
The phrase apparently originates with physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who used the phrase (in the form "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!" — "That is not only not right, it is not even wrong!") to describe an unclear research paper.
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u/xesaie 10d ago
I mean the discussion is about the meta-issues I mentioned above.
Other electoral methods are improvements, but people mythologize RCV and use it as an indictment of people that aren't even that against it.
RCV won't make Greens or DSA suddenly successful, it will only reveal that they're the second choices of more people. It's still a superior system, but the fantasies are going to dissapoint people.
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u/xjustsmilebabex 10d ago
RCV is truly like if we all went, "What if the primaries were for keeps?! That way, all of the best and worst & least qualified candidates got to suck up airtime and campaign funds?"
Nah, that's wild. I'd be far more on board with a do over with a parliament instead before federal RCV.
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u/Merfkin Salish Sea Ecoregion 11d ago
The vast majority of people I know/encounter that vote Democrat do so begrudgingly out of an unwillingness to give ground to the party they find more outright repulsive. Frankly a lot of Republicans do so too, if not always for good reasons.
I'm not gonna say that it'll work out to be some massive flight of the democratic party, but I don't think it would be nearly as fringe as you're characterizing. If also concede that it could still end up close to that with enough fearmongering from the established parties.
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u/xesaie 11d ago
The problem is you conflating your own personal and social media bubbles for reality. There is no real evidence that these groups are secretly popular. Social media especially gives a twisted vision
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u/romulusnr Washington 11d ago
laughs in Bernie crowds
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u/xesaie 11d ago
If rallies were voters he would have won more non-caucus states.
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u/RedditIsFiction 10d ago
If we had RCV in 2016 and Bernie was on the ticket as independent against Hillary we'd be living in a different timeline.
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u/xesaie 10d ago
Yeah because Clinton would have gotten some of those bitter-ender votes. They would have put Sanders first and Clinton second instead of staying home.
Sanders wasn't popular outside of very small very white states, and situations (like caucuses) that explicitly favored activists with a lot of free time.
And the socialism self-label is absolutely electoral poison. The internet pulls you out of touch with most of the active reliable voters.
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u/RedditIsFiction 10d ago
No, polls at the time favored Sanders. He was very popular. Clinton getting the nomination and backing of the DNC was an upset to a lot of democrats. Hillary was wildly unpopular.
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u/xjustsmilebabex 10d ago
Yeah exactly. I can just as easily say, "Every democratic voter I know votes enthusiastically every time! How did Kamala lose?" or "Biden couldn't have won! I don't know anyone who liked him!"
Your sample size is mostly going to look like you if you're choosing who you're polling.
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u/xjustsmilebabex 10d ago
For Portland mayor, it absolutely worked to pick the best candidate for the role. Would I feel confident about RCV for non-local elections? Not very. It turns into "which candidate have I even heard of out of these top 10,000 people who are running?" Which isn't a great system when choosing a senator, but absolutely works for a small city like ours where everyone kinda knows everyone.
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u/romulusnr Washington 11d ago
I'm reading about the Oregon measure and how opponents cited the 2022 Alaska election as an example of RCV gone bad, because supposedly while a majority of people preferred a Republican, they got a Democrat.
But looking into the numbers, what actually happened was, when the third place candidate (Begich) was removed, only about 50% of his supporters put the other Republican (good ol' Sarah "Pallin Around") as their second choice. 30% put the Democrat and 20% put nothing (wasted second round vote). That was enough Democrat second-choicers to boost the Democrat into a majority.
If those Begich supporters really wanted a Republican at any costs, they should have put Palin as their second choice. Half of them didn't, which implies that's not what they wanted.