How much knowledge is needed to vote?Follow

It'd be nice if it mattered.

Then the question would be "How much knowledge should be needed to vote?"

The sooner you get compulsory voting, the better.

About 30 minutes, during the last Federal Election.
Only one candidate in the Federal Electoral seat, I vote under, knocked on my door and spoke to me personally. None of the other candidates did this...

He got my vote. Was also nice, that he was a member of the Labour party.

Sadly, he didn't win the seat.

This country is commonly called a democracy, but we all know that it isn't. It's more a representative goverment. On every level from local to national, you are represented by people you vote for, or in some cases people appointed or hired by persons who were voted for somewhere down the line.

Your task, as a voter, is to vote for the candidate who comes closest to representing your idea of how things should be done. But it doesn't end there. You also have to TELL the people that you voted for what you expect them to do for you.

What, you ask? They don't already know? That guy just said a bunch of things that sounded EXACTLY like my opinion on those topics. Yes, he did. He wants to get elected. Truthfully, he'll probably do anything that doesn't compromise his sense of 'self' if it achieves that goal. Including voting either way on a lot of issues that aren't dear to his heart. The things that really matter to him, he won't likely stray on. The others....well, they're tradeoffs. He'll do what he thinks the constituants want. Which means he WILL be swayed by exterior pressures. Money, advocacy groups, the press, his wife, lots of things can sway a person. Including your visit, letter, email or phone call.

Any business manager in the world worth his salt can tell you that one thing you have to do with any work force is to set expectations. Elected officials ARE public employees. They, like any employee, will do about what's expected of them.

Tell them what you want, what you expect, and what the priorities are and you stand a LOT better chance of getting it out of them. Tell them to just show up and 'umm, go do some work,' and you'll get all sorts of shenanigans and yes, even SOME work, though it may not be on the project you wanted work done on or the type of work you wanted done on that project.

Do you have to sit down and study hot topics for each election?

Nope.

You should study each candidate running in the races you vote on. Get their voting history, if they have one. Find out if the guy who's running for City Finance Manager has 4 bankruptcies. you don't have to study their DNA. These are human beings. Some of them (ok, just about ALL of them) will lie during the campaign process.

Just pick the puppy you think will grow into the dog you want. Then, don't lock him in the back yard with 500 lbs of feed and an auto-waterer and come back next year to see if he did or not. Look in regularly enough to understand what he's doing, and pop him on the nose if you need to. Give him a pat on the head if he did something clever. Let him know what you like and don't like.

It will NOT always work out like you want it to. But sometimes it will. And that's a lot better than none of the time.

I don't care if the people in office are Republicans, Democrats, Independants, or even Green Party. I just want them to do things MY way. That's who I vote for; the one I think will do things closest to MY way.

I will cite GWB as evidence. He's a chimp. But I voted for him. Given the available choices, I decided he was the chimp for the job. I expect maybe 2-3 decisions out of him that I'll really 100% agree with. Maybe. It was down to him or John Kerry. I expected maybe 2 out of Kerry. Maybe. So I put my money (vote) with the best odds in my favor. As every voter should. Now I'm just hoping he pays off with my 2-3 decisions.

During the Clinton years, he paid off better than I'd hoped. The 1st four years of Bush he paid off less than I hoped. That's how it goes; you work with what you have.


I never claimed to be able to type.


Edited, Wed Jan 26 23:05:38 2005 by TStephens

Tstephens

I really appreciate your time. I have to say that was a very well broken down and very well written. I did not expect something this in-depth. That really was the best response I have ever received on a question I had. Thank you! That’s been bothering me for a while now. I was tired of running around with no direction. That really moved me. =)





Edited, Wed Jan 26 22:56:52 2005 by toxicmoon

big fat 0.... ZERO knowledge is needed. not with some of the F**king retards that this world has allowed into the gene pool...



anyways...i thought pools had skimmers to filter out the unwanted ****

You're welcome :) Good luck and blessings, Prana

We are only loosely "democratic" in that we vote, but we are by no means a "pure democracy". Thank God. The founding fathers studied many different forms of government and failed w/ their first attempt at ours (organized under the Articles of Confederation). The Constitution we now have came a bit later.

Why do I say "thank God" we are not a "pure democracy"? Wouldn't that be the best? Well, some ancient cultures had something reasonably close to a "pure democracy", and the founding fathers found them to be far from perfect. The basic problem w/ a pure dem is called "the tyrrany of the majority" - or basically 51% can get together and essentially enslave the other 49%. Take a look at ancient Athens. They were closer to a pure dem. than we are, and they did a whole lot of really NASTY things to each other - all by perfectly legal vote.

The founding fathers didn't like this and instead decided to work out a system that would buffer - that would provice layers of checks and balances to prevent "bad" laws from being passed.

But Athens were the good guys of ancient Greece, right? They were the best democracy, right? Er, maybe not. While I would NOT wanted to have been born in Sparta, perversely aspects of Spartan government did provide models for our government. Yes, Sparta who enslaved the Helots and mistreated them horribly, who exposed "non perfect" babies on hillsides (infanticide), who defeated Athens in the Peloponesian War - aspects of their gov't inspired aspects of our gov't.

One example is that they had ... dangit my memory is fuzzy now. I can't remember if they elected a King and another official, or two kings - or what. The point is that this elected official had a lot of power - but he had a term of office limited to x years. A lot like our Presidency. The thing I like about Sparta - and that we missed (I wonder why) is that the moment this elected official left office, he was put on TRIAL. If the trial concluded he abused the office for personal gain - or to help his friends and family at the expense of Spartans in general - he was severely punished.

Anyway, the founding fathers not only hit on a system of checks and balances AND using a representational democracy - rather than one of, say, referendum voting. Why? Because the average voter is ... stupid. Okay, they didn't say that. But ... er, well they did. Not using that word, but... it wasn't only stupid - it was ignorant, unwise, too easily led astray, etc.

It was thought that a system where the people voted for representatives would mean that "above average to exceptional" people would get these offices - and that they would run the country in the best interest of the people.

Well, but that was for the late 1700s - we're different now, right? We have public education, TV, newspapers - and we're far more sophisticated than those people of way back then, right? So we should just throw this all out, right?

Well... I'm not so sure about that. By definition, half of all people are "below average" (if you define average to satisfy that - pls forgive my circularity). But if "average" is instead given a subjective value, this number could rise tremendously (meaning it's possible that more than half of all people are below average - because you define average a different way).

We're what, almost 300 million strong in the USA now. That's about 150 million "below average" people. You want them running your life? I sure as heck don't.

But... there used to be all sorts of requirements to vote in the bad old days. You had to be white, male, and 21. In many areas you had to own property in a county to vote in that county. Some areas made you pass a reading test (if you can't read you can't gather good information and therefore you can't possibly vote, right?). Except these were used as tools to protect the status quo in these areas and to keep certain people "down" - like nonwhite people - and white people (like the Irish).

Well, I'm running out of gas. But I do want to advance another idea. A German feelawfuller, er, philosopher named Schopenhauer said ... well crud, I can't remember if he invented this model or if someone invented it to explain what he was talking about. But it goes like this:

a little monkey rides on a big elephant. The elephant does precisely what it wants, but the monkey convinces itself it wanted the elephant to do those things (to step on that cart, smash down that fence, and scare those people, whatever). So, what is the monkey? What is the elephant?

THe monkey is our "rational mind". The elephant is what the German feelawfuller's of that period (1800 idealists) called "the Will". The will is hard for me to define - but in the sense they mean it, it's basically the unconscious mind. It's similar to (but not quite) Freud's "id". The sex drive, e.g., is probably part of the "will", but it is not the entire will either (er... or maybe it is the will, who knows). Well, careers have risen and fallen in feelawfully depts over what the will actually is, so let's skip it. Basically it is unconscious urges and feelings and whatever that highly influence us.

According to Schopenhauer (others believed this, too), our will does precisely what it wants. It is what really drives us. The monkey, our rational mind, is at best a "spin doctor" - faking us into thinking it is in control - but in reality it is constantly "backwards justifying" what our will does.

Now, how does this apply to voting? People often claim to vote for "rational" reasons. But imo (and in Schopie's opinion) very few actualy do. Their "will" is what actually votes.

Makes you feel good, huh? Gives you a lot of confidence in the system, that it's predicated at least in part on the ideas of a whacked out bizarre society (Sparta) - and that most people do not vote for reasons ---- yet it seems to work. Of course it's not working right now - no one ever thinks the system is working at their moment in history (especially if you are a loyal Democrat). Funny, articles proclaiming the system "broken" can be found at any point in the history of this country. Yet we have not only survived, we've thrived.

Again, who is doing this "seeing" - this eye that "knows" the system is screwed up (like so many people say)? The monkey or the elephant?

Toxic, I admire that you seem to care. I wouldn't worry about it too much. The system has checks and balances - and is designed to buffer for that - and then some. If you want to keep your guns, vote Republican. I noticed that Howard Dean, however, suggested that Democrats abandon the drive to end private gun ownership - to try to regain Southern voters. Should you trust him, though? That's up to you.

Keep in mind the real strength of our system is that it is not "top downed" but rather "bottom upped". Top-downing works great in programming but horribly in governments. No one person or small group of people is sufficiently wise to adequately or fairly govern us in a top down system, and anyone who says the opposite should be sho- er, put on /ignore. To the chagrin of "those who know better" everywhere, our beautiful system is "bottom upped" - by "morons" - happy successful morons - and us morons have created what I think is the best country on earth. This is because the "will of the masses" actually does trickle up, but is measured by strong and solid ideals (and NOT ideologies) - and the net result, if you look at it honestly, is not all that bad. Not by a longshot. So go vote and vote shamelessly - for whomever you want. For whatever reason. And God bless this crazy mixed up place we call America!

Haha, nice! However, I think it takes just a little bit more than that... I mean, look at Florida. [/four years ago]

Before the last election, I looked at Bush and Kerry and said to myself, "Ewwww." So I looked up who was running third-party and looked at their websites. Spent about an hour before I decided on the Green Party candidates, mostly because they were wacky and ended up getting themselves arrested at a demonstration shortly before the election. The VP candidate spent a lot of her time living on the streets to call attention to the plight of homeless people. They seemed dedicated to their party's position and to the country, unlike the main two candidates who were more interested in the power and the position. Plus, though I agree with the libs on a lot of points, their platform kinda scares me, and Nader is just a freak. I'd have done more research, but Texas doesn't allow write-ins on any offices other than president.

A note to all you Oklahoma residents, you're not allowed to vote for write-ins at all, even for president. Even if you don't support any third parties specifically, if you've thought about taking any kind of political action in the past, I suggest this issue, just in case someone you like better ends up not getting on the ballot in the future. You should have the freedom to vote for the candidate you support the most, not the candidate you hate the least.

Lots of presidents have won without a majority of the vote, and many more have won without gaining 50% of the vote (often when a third party does well). True, Gore won a majority of the vote but lost the presidency - however, in one of the elections where he won as V.P., he and Bill won without fifty percent of the vote. They technically won on a plurality of the vote and not a majority.

This is part of the system's checks and balances.

And yeah, we all like to decry politicians as either stupid or money-grubbing pimps. And in many cases that's pretty much right. And yeah, there are huge problems - like what if you are, say, pro-life, pro-union, pro-gun-ownership, anti-corporate, pro-religion, and anti-pollution? Who the heck do you vote for? In politics we live in a big "one size fits all" world... and I hate that.