Republicans going full anti-democratic. Want to get rid of one man one vote.

say something worth listening to, maybe?
you're a contrarian imbecile, contradicting yourself in this very post.

easy to feel like a big fish in a brandy glass, I suppose.

it's that you think this is somehow insightful or astute on our part is what's truly adorable. Frankly, I'm not sure it's worth noting more than rain gets stuff wet.

am I gonna pay rent and buy food? obviously.

am I gonna be concerned at the rate in which the cost of both outstrips wages? also, obviously.

That said, I'm a little lost by what the fuck this word salad is supposed to mean?

"insisting that no meaningful change will compromise their accustomed lifestyle or inconvenience them in the slightest."

The pertinent question would be "Why haven't I demanded society provide me with an agrarian lifestyle?" The answer is that I recognize the fact that it is nobody else's job to tailor my lifestyle to my pleasure. If I want something to change, it's my job to put my back into it and MAKE it happen.

Advocating is bitching. You're either laboring and sacrificing towards the goal, or you are pissing in the wind.

It means if you want something to be different, you do more than fucking make noise about it. You put your time, effort and resources into it.

There is no contradiction. Only your blisteringly stupid insistance that there is no difference between "real possibility of seeing your interests taken seriously" and "guarantee of success."

I guess that’s it. Bring on the fucking asteroid because Uncle Albert says there will never be change and advocating for it is bitching

So, let’s just shut this board down. There’s no point. Good bye.

says the guy who screams "virtue signalling" every time anybody tries to do anything.

fuck off Al. nobody is buying it anymore. you're a fraud.

What incentive does a Californian have to vote, knowing we have the least amount of representation of any state in the Senate for all practical purposes?

If you think that conservatives can't win without stacking the deck, that an issue with your party's message or their delivery of such. Either way, not my problem.

Oh, so you're gonna vote this year for the first time in your adult life, then? That's pretty cool. I disagree with your views, but I served my country to defend your right to vote and you should definitely do that instead of just bitching on Wordforge

for a guy who bitches about others "whining", he's not much beyond than sound and a pretense of fury, is he?

Ummm....no.

Ooh, ooh, my turn! Fewer states in the Union probably means no or reduced entrance to WWI, which means Germany probably wins, which means no WWII at all.

Oh, I could totally see former US states with high German populations joining the Germans in that war. Wonder what would happen if they bordered a state that supported England?

Toledo, Michigan?

Michigan and Ohio are both heavily German, along with most of the Rust Belt, Upper Midwest and Great Plains, so Toledo's status would likely stay where it landed in 1836.

If World War I allegiances in a history with a United States that had been fractured from the beginning were decided by ancestry, those states would probably side with Germany and the Southeastern states would probably side with England. (The largest ancestry group in the Southeast is actually African-American, but in this timeline Jim Crow or something like it would probably be a major force, and the largest white ancestry group in the Southeast is English.)

I don't know enough about English/Irish relations at that time to predict what the Northeast would do. English and Irish ancestry both would have been major, and the political power of people with Irish ancestry would have been on the rise. Also, since Irish immigration was more recent, people of Irish ancestry probably had a stronger allegiance to their national history than people of English background did (even today, I think there's a stronger sense of ethnic consciousness among Irish-Americans than among English-Americans). Plus, the New Englanders of English ancestry might well feel closer ties to their relatives who had moved west to Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, etc., than to their ancestral homeland. All of these things could push the Northeastern states to side with Germany instead of England, although the Francophone populations of Maine and New Hampshire could be a wild card.

Since there would not have been a strong federal government to wrest the Southwest away from other colonial powers, the Southwestern states would probably be part of Mexico, and would have their own problems to deal with during the 1910s.

This comes up, but I don't think it turns out to be true.

1. There are only 4 states where less than half the population lives in urban areas as of 2010: Maine (3 of the 399 campaign stops in 2016), Mississippi (1/399), Vermont (0/399), and West Virginia (0/399). 94% of those 399 went to 12 states, the least urban of which is New Hampshire, at 60.4%. What the electoral college helps is not rural voters, but urban voters in small states.

2. Every single city over 50,000 people (780 of them) contains a mere 39% of the population. Meanwhile 11 states control 268 electoral votes (as of the 2024 election), so that 11 plus any 12th can win. So let's look at the cities or counties it would take to win them. I'll ignore counties in CA because most are very large by county standards further east, and some counties with large cities have large rural areas as well, so they're not super relevant, and in New York, because New York City is spread over 5 counties. For Georgia and PA, I'm going with only counties because unincorporated does not mean rural in GA there are unincorporated places with hundreds of residents per square mile. PA has similar plus hundreds of tiny towns that make up a continuous urban blanket around the major cities.

California: 70 cities. Texas: 51 cities (7 counties). Florida: 122 cities (7 counties). New York: 4 cities. Illinois*: 62 cities (3 counties). Pennsylvania: 10 counties. Ohio*: 140 cities (9 counties). North Carolina*: 115 cities (13 counties) . Georgia: 13 counties. Michigan*: 84 cities (6 counties). New Jersey*: 73 cities (6 counties). DC: 1 city (1 district).

*these states have a similar issue to Georgia, but less drastic, to the point where it's at least somewhat meaningful to talk about cities as most of what constitutes urban places.

So depending on how you slice it, winning the presidency NOW is a matter of winning 149-745 cities/counties, less than the number of cities over 50,000 people. To be fair, that number suffers from the same issue - it's missing dense unincorporated areas. So let's see what happens if we go strictly by county (except CA and NY): 141-16+70-6+4=193 cities and counties. That's if they go for the big states. I don't particularly want to do the analysis on small states, but I suspect it's similar (possibly even worse in most states because smaller states have less room for dozens of cities, many of them are highly urbanized, and the 2-vote per state boost is larger). Again, only in Maine, Vermont, Mississippi, and West Virginia do they ever have to go to rural voters for votes. And they basically never do.

So there you have it. It's arguably easier for presidents to win by campaigning exclusively in urban areas NOW than it would be under a national popular vote. The fact is, rural America doesn't matter under the electoral college any more than under a popular vote. 80% of people lived in urban areas in 2010, 82% in 2020, and there are almost no states where that's trending downwards (ME, MI, WY are the exceptions as of 2010; they haven't broken it down by state yet from the 2020 numbers, AFAICT).

I appreciate the effort and the information but it was a waste of time.

We all know that when @Uncle Albert and his ilk talk about ‘cities’ they don’t mean land use or density but demographics.

You know… places full of those people.

I voted libertarian last time, for whatever that's worth. I will likely continue to do so.

Don’t you know that’s the same exact thing as voting for Trump?

more like voting for these guys (but less effective):

The Rhinoceros Party (French: Parti Rhinocéros) was a registered political party in Canada from the 1960s to the 1990s. Operating within the tradition of political satire, the Rhinoceros Party's basic credo, their so-called primal promise, was "a promise to keep none of our promises".[9] They then promised outlandishly impossible schemes designed to amuse and entertain the voting public.[10]

The Rhinos were started in 1963 by Jacques Ferron,[11] "Éminence de la Grande Corne du parti Rhinocéros". In the 1970s, a group of artists joined the party and created a comedic political platform to contest the federal election. Ferron (1979), poet Gaston Miron (1972) and singer Michel Rivard (1980) ran against Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in his Montreal seat.

The party claimed to be the spiritual descendants of Cacareco, a Brazilian rhinoceros who was "elected" member of São Paulo's city council in 1958, and listed Cornelius the First, a rhinoceros from the Granby Zoo, east of Montreal, as its leader.[12] It declared that the rhinoceros was an appropriate symbol for a political party since politicians, by nature, are: "thick-skinned, slow-moving, dim-witted, can move fast as hell when in danger, and have large, hairy horns growing out of the middle of their faces".[13]

Some members of the Rhino party would call themselves Marxist-Lennonist, a parody of the factional split between the Communist Party of Canada and the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), although the Rhinoceros Party meant the term in reference to Groucho Marx and John Lennon.[14]

The party used as its logo a woodcut of a rhinoceros by Albrecht Dürer, with the words D'une mare à l'autre (a French translation of Canada's Latin motto a mari usque ad mare, playing on the word mare, which means pond in French[15]) at the top.

I'll write in Santa Claus, if that's preferable. I will NOT be supporting the two authoritarian parties.

Santa makes use of slave labour (exclusively targeting a minority). He has no respect for national borders and he clearly breaks the speed limit.

He is clearly stalking kids if he can tell if they are naughty or nice. Probably Facebook but I'd watch out for him on Minecraft too.

AND he's a home invader.

Fuck Santa.

Notice how your well researched and laid out post completely ignored @Order2Chaos?

That’s because you were addressing what he said not what he meant so in his mind your entire post of facts was a complete red herring that in no way addressed his point.

It’s not support. It’s selection. It’s support only in a world without polling*, or non-plurality voting, or where there’s a threshold (eg races with a runoff if no one breaks 50%). Otherwise not voting or voting third party is mathematically equivalent to saying “I’m equally fine with the top two candidates.” You can never hurt any candidate in the electoral system we have for most elections without voting for the person most likely to beat them, and because of that, there's almost no feedback in that vote, unless the race is exceedingly close (which further drives down the potential feedback because people are more likely to vote when races are close).

Don’t like that? Start supporting electoral reforms to make your non vote or third party vote actually matter. The Center For Election Science is a multistate (if not national at this point) Org that backs approval voting. There’s probably a local STV or at least IRV group you can join.

* but definitely tell pollsters you’re planning on voting third party. Get their poll numbers high enough or at least trending upwards fast enough at the right time, and enough reluctant 2-party voters will jump ship to vote for the 3rd party candidate, a la Jesse Ventura. It’s only about the two biggest, whoever they happen to be, not Democrats and Republicans.

Yet you're here talking how you voted for the third, party that would privatize authoritarianism in a thread where you've also expressed a distaste for equal representation of individuals vs artificial equity between states.

whatever... doesn't matter much to me how you choose to be ineffective. Just wish you could be somewhat consistent or at least connect two dots at a time.

Supporting ranked choice voting is also an option.

The fuck do you want, a doctoral thesis? It's a pain in the ass to chop up a bunch of TLDR with quote tags on this goddamn touch screen.

No, I am saying I am dissatisfied with both candidates, and that is a perfectly legitimate position to take.

It takes more than your self-serving assertion to prove it inconsistent, sweet cheeks.

the ineffectiveness of your throwing away a vote, the anti democratic nature of the EC, or that libertarian party's 4 year plan is to go from corporate personhood to corporate statehood? (bonus points if you can explain self serving-or were you just going for word count?)

maybe that there were three dots and you got confused about the line?
tell ya what... just circle the one you mean, m'kay?