You will Vote for Kay Hagan, else you will answer to ME!
Posted on 10/28/2014 1:13:59 PM PDT by reaganaut1
I live in North Carolina where, for months now, the airwaves have been filled with attack ads. If you believe Kay Hagan’s ads, victory for her Republican opponent, Thom Tillis, would be disastrous for the people of the state. And if you believe the Tillis ads, keeping Hagan in the Senate would be equally horrible.
Each candidate assumes that persuading the voter that the other is a terrible choice should translate into a vote for him or her. That is largely how our electoral system works – voters are mainly dragooned into casting their ballots for the lesser of two evils.
That is not ideal.
Election laws are the province of the states, but only Nevada gives voters an option other than casting a vote for a particular candidate. Nevada has a “None of these candidates” alternative on its ballots. It is not a choice that finds only miniscule favor. In the 2002 gubernatorial election, 4.7 percent of the voters preferred that option.
Nevada has the right idea, but doesn’t take it far enough. While some voters are happy to go to the polls (or send in an absentee ballot) indicating that they do not favor any of the candidates, many more, I suspect, would like to register their opposition to a specific candidate.
What if we changed our electoral system by allowing the voter to cast a negative ballot? That is, the voter could choose to cast a vote in favor of the candidate he likes the most, or against the candidate he dislikes the most.
We have lots of negative ads (sometimes accurate, sometimes misleading, but that’s beside the point), so why not let voters cast their ballots negatively? After all, an individual’s strongest political desire might be to see a particular candidate defeated.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
“Instant runoff” would be better,
but, as it breaks the two party monopoly,
it’ll never be allowed.
I’d settle for an honest voting system.
I wish all states had runoff elections, so that we don’t see a Libertarian or other 3rd party drain votes and tip the balance to a Democrat.
Yep, that’s another reason they won’t allow it - 3rd parties invariably drain repub votes and put rats in power.
Just look how hard it’s been to try to get some sort of voter fraud prevention into the election process,
and the resistance has ALL come from ‘rats.
crazy
how about we ban non-citizen voting, dead voting, multiple voting and stuff
You will Vote for Kay Hagan, else you will answer to ME!
Let’s not get carried away with “None of the above” satire in Forbes by George Leaf.
As would I.
There is no way that the Republicrats would let that happen because the GOP and Dem candidates could easily receive a very low net positive total or even a negative total which would allow a third party candidate to win.
It is an amusing proposition though.
You are right about our two party monopoly.
The Tacoma area in WA had instant runnoff.... for a while.
But it was repealed a few years ago.
Both state dem & gop parties recommended against it.
Their reason.... they said it violated the “one person, one vote” rule. And the low info voter population up here bought that lie.
Rep party in WA is disgusting.
"That is largely how our electoral system works ..."
FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument
Regarding how the electoral system is supposed to work, please don’t overlook the following. The Founding States had decided that the Senate was to be the voice of the state legislatures in Congress. In other words, only state lawmakers could vote for a federal senator as evidenced by the Constitution’s Clause 1 of Section 3 of Article I.
But as a consequence of inexcusably widespread ignorance of the federal government’s constitutionally limited powers by 1913, state lawmakers ratified the ill-conceived 17th Amendment (17A) which gave general voters the power to vote for federal senators, effectively repealing Clause 1 of Section 3 referenced above.
Sarcastically speaking, a possible reason for the ratification of 17A is this. Given that one of the very few powers that the states had delegated to Congress, expressly via the Constitution, to regulate an aspect of intrastate commerce was the power to decide policy for the US Mail Service, such power evidenced by the Constitution’s Clause 7 of Section 8 of Article I, one is inclined to ask the following question about 17A. Was the price for a postage stamp so high in the early 1900s that voters felt that they needed to be able to vote for their state’s federal senators in order to keep the price of postage stamps reasonably low?
Mea culpa. In my previous post I got the wires crossed between Constitutional rules for electing president, the electoral college, with state lawmakers uniquely having constitutional authority to vote for federal senator.
On the other hand, the pro-unconstitutionally powerful federal government Progressive Movement has needed to politically force the Oval Office and the Senate to mob rule in order to advance its agenda.
I support none of the above if it would leave the seat vacant.
They are simply refusing to participate.
They are also according neither legitimacy nor respect to the pre-selected mannequins who "win" elections. This would be a very dangerous thing for the American Republic - if we still had one.
None of the above...
You must not post such graphic, too-hideous-for-publication, ugliness without offering some eye bleach for amelioration.
“None of the above” should be on every ballot, and it should be coupled with a 50% or higher requirement for election
Here is some eye bleach for Amelioration.
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