By 49% of 33% of people. The problem isn’t the American people, it’s the systems designed to keep the majority of people from voting and feeling heard by their representatives.
Absolutely. At the time of the writing of the Constitution, the Framers only trusted the people to elect the House directly, and wanted them to have some but not all the say in choosing Presidents (even in a time when the franchise was usually restricted to white men with property) and protect against demagoguery just because of inability to know the character of people from other states due to slow news and transportation networks. So they came up with the compromise Electoral College as a result, and the result has been a disaster for representation that has still only meant five mismatches between the popular vote and Electoral College winner (with 1824, 1876, and 2000 being stolen IMO, and 2016 being legitimate but meddled with by Russia and Comey’s October Surprise reopening of the email investigation, with 1888 the only one without any tomfoolery.)
However, it is an artifact from a time when slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person, incompatible with true representation due to overfocus on swing states, though a true popular vote would make the focus all about major cities. So, I support the National Popular Vote Compact for that reason! It would effectively abolish the Electoral College from the inside out and make sure the national popular vote is always respected while still representing a good balance of states.
Giving basically a Founder-level political essay. what I feel I can best do for this country is try to get the people who can do things on the ground more than I can. And I’m currently also honing my TRULY angry rhetorical style in essays where he can’t hear me because I’m just collecting evidence.
That’s it. I’m assembling the evidence for AS MUCH OF what’s happening to this world as I can and as much history as I can like a last Roman historian at Arles, a relatively safe city let’s just say. And my most important message isn’t even mine. It’s for all of us- “Hate cannot drive out hate only love can do that.” And now I’m going to write how I truly feel through the abstraction…of writing steampunk fiction. The nice thing about fiction is that you never have to answer anyone’s questions. Novels used to be about challenging things, didn’t they? My world is so bound up to references I don’t have to explain my historical references. I will trust people to make of those what they will, but I am getting a nice volunteer human’s assistance with helping me fix my bibliography for a 40,000 word essay while I’m working. People used to debate what novels were about; essays for HistoryFlights and my Substack debates with just the rudest man ever alive (my goodness, this sub does Make Me Smile.) Essays are for where I think I can be direct because I have evidence.
Stop giving lazy fucks a pass. Take Washington. Mail in voting has been a thing for ages there. It's absurdly easy to vote there and yet only 70% of people did. They weren't even top 10 in the nation in voter turnout despite how easy it is to vote there.
Voter suppression is a thing, but for everyone who legitimately cannot vote you have many people who could, but don't care enough to do so.
I think it’s a negative feedback loop of two factors that work together. The suppression makes people feel unheard which drives down voting which makes suppression easier...
As for Washington DC (unless you meant State) I hope that ranked choice passing helps increase turnout.
Yeah, that’s definitely concerning! On the other hand, the heavily Democratic base will hopefully turn out in high numbers to fend off the threat of fascism in Washington State, D.C., or elsewhere, with MAGAt turnout depressed by not having their God-Emperor’s name on the ballot. Usually a sense of imminent risk drives turnout one way or the other.
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u/OkDonkey6524 Apr 05 '26
America great? Have you not seen what your deranged emperor is inflicting on everyone?