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[Phil Stracchino]

Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> The problem with your idea on voting is that voting only works if  
> there are valid choices to vote on.
> 
> I can't remember the last election where I had the chance to vote on  
> a politician with a spine.  Most of the time it is very difficult to  
> tell any real differences between them.
> 
> What *would* allow us to change things is to be able to vote no  
> confidence, or vote that none were acceptable.
> 
> Until we can reject the choices, we will be limited to choosing the  
> least crappy one, which is not going to yield good results.
> 
> In the last 20 years, I've been able to vote about 6 times for a  
> candidate that I thought was a good one.  I almost always vote, but  
> most of the time my vote doesn't mean a damned thing, because they  
> are all the same.


The majority of the problem is voters who, no matter how bad the
Democrat candidate is, will vote Democrat to keep the Republican out -
or vice versa - and the system that encourages them to continue to do
so.  Voters convince themselves that even though the candidate they
voted for stinks, they're doing good by keeping an even worse candidate
out, and that the third-party or independent candidates don't have a
chance anyway.

This last is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Third-party and
independent candidates will continue to have negligible chances of
winning in US elections as long as voters keep refusing to vote for them
because they have no chance of winning.

The bottom line is, no matter how noble your intentions, a vote for the
lesser of two evils is still a vote for evil, and crappy candidates will
continue to be elected as long as the mass of the electorate remains
either conditioned to vote a straight party line, or willing to vote for
the lesser of two evils because the independent "doesn't stand a
chance".  (Recent changes in "campaign finance" law have had the effect
of marginalizing independent and third-party candidates still further,
and I don't doubt for a moment it's by design.)

What US politics needs, more than campaign finance reform, is election
reform, and a change away from the current antiquated single-vote,
first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all system to a transferrable-vote or
vote-ranking system, designed not to keep power firmly in the hands of
the two entrenched parties but to see to it that the winner is the
candidate most acceptable to the greatest number of people.


>>> Activist Judges are bad, period.
> 
> It's also illegal.

Well, that depends.  An activist judge, in most cases, is one who made a
ruling the speaker doesn't like.



-- 
        Phil Stracchino                CDK#2
 Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
 phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net   alaric at caerllewys.net
 Landline: 603-429-0220           Mobile: 603-320-5438
        It's not the years, it's the mileage.