Aestu wrote:
American politics has the unique dynamic of placing supreme power in the hands of the most poorly informed. In America, elections are won or lost on the swing vote - those who have so little information, such poor understanding, of any given topic, they haven't made up their mind until the day has come to vote or very nearly. And so we see candidates and narrow, organized interests spend enormous sums to influence those swing voters, who base their decisions in large part on these fifteen-second sound bites and appeals to the lowest common denominator. In practice, American politics is a stagnant morass with very little novel or genuine discourse, dominated by an impasse between closely balanced powers-that-be on opposing sides of issues, and the only real winner is the status quo.
For someone who is so adamant about not going with the status quo you certainly swallowed the institutional line on this one.
Both the amount and the role of independents is vastly, vastly over-rated. People are barely voting as it is, you think people who are wishy-washy on the candidates are more or less likely to vote? Motivating the base is way more important than garnering centrist votes (one only has to look at Bush's[Roves's] two elections).
And do you know what makes a candidate independent? Just asking them. Not who they have voted for in the past, not what party they registered for, but whether or not they feel independent at that time. What that means is all the polling they do is skewed, since a number of people might routinely vote d/r, but don't want to admit party affiliation, making independents seem like a much bigger block than they are.
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I can understand how some people feel like their vote doesn't matter. They elect one guy, only so another one can take the office because some campaign official "discovered" a box of ballots (oddly, all marked for the other guy) in the back of her car. Everyone remembers the hanging chads down in FL...and everyone, regardless of party, agrees that the whole fucking thing was shenanigans. How do you expect people to take the process seriously? It's not like officials in states like New York are purposely not sending out absentee ballots to troops in the field (a group that generally votes republican, what an odd coincidence) so that their ballots won't be back in time to be counted.
Whenever a republican wins a tight race, Democrats scream "VOTE FRAUD," but when someone says, "OK, let's fix that, here's some things we could do," all you hear is "LOLWTFBBQ, you can't make people show ID, it's an onerous burden."
You mean like how vote counting machines were found to be shipped with 200 votes already cast for Bush, or how they were double and triple counting votes in certain counties ending up with 2-300% of the people in the county voting for Bush? You were so close though, if you would have decided to just talk about both sides cheating instead of needing to be a cheerleader for the republicans you wouldn't have sounded like such a tool.
Oh and many people don't have ID in America (it's more common than you think), which would exclude people from voting, many of whom traditionally vote Democrat. IDs wouldn't make a difference anyway, while there may be a few people who are going to polling centers numerous times they aren't casting boxes full or votes or rigging electronic voting machines. Even if forced to show ID the 85 year olds that staff voting centers aren't going to be spotting the easily-made fakes that could be produced anyway.
