this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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Presumably you’d allocate the votes and announce the propositions at the same time—so for instance in one election everyone would get a ballot with twenty propositions and instructions to vote yes or no on up to ten of them.
Or come to think of it, here’s a procedure that might simplify things for voters and avoid the issue of fakeout dummy propositions, too:
So they know you get 9 votes, they slap in 10 laws, each slightly different.
Now say they also added a few laws. Maybe played the same games. Do you add more total votes?who decides how to allocate votes?
No matter, the underdogs will never get enough votes to pass their competing legislation.
It would become an unmitigated disaster as it gets too complicated, and turns people off voting.
That’s the object of steps 1 & 3 above: everyone casts a (potential) vote on all propositions, and votes not required to counter opposing votes keep rolling over. So you can’t force anyone to waste a vote by dispersing them among duplicate propositions—the end result is identical either way (assuming everyone votes consistently).
Why are you making it more complicated, just to ultimately limit the voice of people who are participating in government?
Like. Seriously.
It doesn't matter what you do to make it less unfair. it's still going to unfairly disenfranchise people from voting on all the issues. There's nothing in your proposals that solve that. All you're doing is making it even more complicated, and making it harder for anyone who has.... a job, a family, goes to school or any combination thereof. I haven't not worked in some capacity (school+job/career) less than 40 hours in my life. Most of it I've been working 2 or more jobs 60-80 hours a week. and lets be honest, people who are retired aren't usually able to stay informed either.
how many bills do you think congress is currently votes on in a month? and that's ignoring all the steps leading up to it (like committees and sub-committees. i assume you'd retain congress to draft the legislation and handle all that.)
in 2023, The senate had 351-some roll call votes, the house of reps had over 421. that's just votes. With specific bills frequently being lumped in for shared votes. 30 and 35 a month, on average. and last year was low, because of the bipartisan ship fucking everything over.
Lets say you create a monthly ballot system with every thing on it. That's still- probably- going to be more than 50 proposed bills up for voting. Some of them are quite large, like spending omnibus bills that are hundreds or thousands of pages. and that's ignoring people playing games or putting up competing bills.
Do you really expect people to be able to actually be an informed voter while doing all the things necessary to maintain our lives and family in good health? Are you going to pay me- and everyone else- a full time wage to actually do that? because that's the kind of effort you seem to think people can do.
Nobody has that kind of time on their hands. This is why we have representational governance in the first place.
To play devil’s advocate, the chairperson can deny these motions as frivolous and disruptive.
so... how do you decide who gets to make that decision?
What about emergency measures? If there's a bill that would've failed had it not underwent this measures, won't people who oppose it just decide to make sure the next one doesn't contain anything too important and make a proposition to repeal the bill, minorities be damned?