Election 2016

[DSMatticus]

And really that's been the narrative all along. The democratic primaries are messy, imperfect and sometimes a bit unfair. And every time the Sanders camp interacts with that Clinton supporters are screaming bloody murder and every time the Clinton camp does Clinton supporters are "Meh whatever, our guys are allowed to do that.".

Uhh, no, that's not actually happening. Team Clinton has been losing caucuses to this sort of bullshit the entire race, and there are no stories about police being called to control the crowd at those caucuses because when Team Clinton got bent over and fucked by undemocratic bullshit they went home quietly - disappointed, but quietly. When Frank says Team Clinton is better behaved than Team Sanders, he is fucking right. Part of that is because Clinton is massively ahead and does not need our collective outrage in order to clinch the nomination, and part of that is that there is at least a vocal minority of Team Sanders that are genuinely fucking manchildren who cannot look at the race in the big picture and understand that nearly (but not quite) half the time they're the bad guys. Throwing massive fits if and only they lose means they are not the defenders of our democratic rights, but are in fact only interested in Sanders 2016!!1! by any means possible - the voters be damned.

Indeed, the few of these people I'm fucking stuck dealing with I have genuinely watched switch (from the start of the race to the finish) from bitching about superdelegates to telling me that the superdelegates need to give it to Sanders because he has better odds in the general. There is a faction in Team Sanders that are basically Fox News-tier Orwellian assholes.

I don't know who to trust here because everyone on both sides have lied out their asses on the forum in the past about what their candidate did or did not do. It seems like the Nevada convention was not rigged, but given that there are no unbiased sources on what happened, there's really no way for me to tell. So back for dismayed indifference wrt who wins the primary for me!

Hey, fuck you. I have been pretty god damn honest and impartial. I am a Sanders supporter who is very angry at the race's undemocratic bullshit while acknowledging that there hasn't been anywhere near enough undemocratic bullshit to flip the race and ultimately voters are getting exactly what they asked for. And that means earlier in the thread I bitched about New York's draconian election laws, which excluded a bunch of would-be Sanders voters. And that means right now I'm bitching about a bunch of Sanders supporters throwing a fit at a caucus, because it's fucking hypocritical as shit. It's not only hypocritical in the broad scope that caucus hijinks have, on the whole, favored Sanders. It's hypocritical in the narrow scope that the only reason Team Sanders thought they would walk away with those delegates in the first place is because they undemocratically stole them at the Clark County convention last month in the same fucking state! Both teams fucked eachother by an equal amount in the same state one month apart. Last month, fucking crickets. This month, the hotel called the goddamn police on the convention. It's insane and disgusting.

It's not a principled stand. It's "WAAAH MY GUY SHOULD BE WINNING MORE!"

My skin only skin in this game is that I would really rather that Trump not get elected, so what I care about is that someone decided to play hardball for Nevada, and that whoever it is presumably wants Hillary Clinton to get elected, and I do not see how this helps Hillary Clinton get elected. Did someone really think those two delegates would be the pivot on which the primary would turn?

Well, for one, the point is that most of the shit people are even bitching about was not at all worth bitching about (including you). There were more Hillarites than Bernites, so the Hillarites won the fucking procedural votes, they won the fucking delegates, and that's the fucking end of it. And the Bernites don't understand that because "we were booing so loud, how could we lose? They must have rigged it, like they rigged everything else!" The only point of contention that is remotely valid is that a number of Bernites were rendered ineligible because they were not members of the Democratic party. And that rule was probably on the books the entire fucking time, and just like a bunch of people who should have attended the convention just didn't fucking bother to show up, a bunch of the people who did attend probably didn't bother to do their due diligence or fill out the paperwork. Remember that bit where caucuses are disenfranchising as shit because they take considerably more work than filling out a ballot (and are also several steps of unbound representatives removed from the popular vote)? Yeah, there ya fuckin' go.

It's not at all clear that anyone involved in this process ever even "turned on" their rig-the-caucus machine. It's more accurate to say that the Bernites intercepted two delegates (because the Hillarites did not show up to the Clark County Convention), fumbled them (because this time the Bernites did not show up to the Nevada State Convention, and also a very very very very small fraction of them forgot to file a party registration), and their failure to carry those two delegates into the end zone made them so angry that they started crying foul at... everything, no matter how little sense it made. And the truth is they probably did it to themselves and no one actively fucked them over by abusing their control of the party proper. And the end result is the entirely inoffensive reversal of the Clark County Convention upset, giving us back the original projection derived from the raw popular vote.

[Chamomile]

Okay, listen, you see this bit right here?

Both teams fucked eachother by an equal amount in the same state one month apart.

This is you conceding fully 100% of the relevant facts. My question is why Clinton supporters would bother with any amount of fucking when they have already won the primary.

[Koumei]

Watching this at the same time as the Australian election campaign is fascinating, because it really brings up the pros and cons of the whole "You decide who the party leader is" thing.

With it, the election process takes twice as long, and it can damage a party by turning it against itself, and also you run the risk of Trump being a thing. Were it Australia, you'd have Hillary vs Jeb! and you'd fucking like it. Worse case scenario (Republican victory) would be more likely but less destructive than with Trump at the helm, and a Democrat win would still be most likely.

When the party itself decides and tells you to go fuck yourself, you have two changes within one and a half terms and then another change afterwards (when that very type of thing helped them lose power). And then another change partway through the next title reign. And then you're stuck with Shorten leading Labor, and when the media is pushing a Lab vs Lib narrative and trying to pare it down to two parties only, you don't want "the less bad party" to be stuck with fucking Shorten. Under the American system, Rudd would have flat-out had two terms and wouldn't have had his weird "I've learned my lesson" change, instead telling people like Shorten to suck his prime ministerial balls if they didn't like his proposed policies.

Overall I think America might have the better system on this one? It helps make people feel like they have more of a choice in the process (which can help people bother turning up to the actual election), even if their choice doesn't become candidate they might (barring certain Bros or "I only vote for outsider anti-establishment underdogs, I won't be part of your system, I THREW IT ON THE GROUND" hipsters) say "Hey, I'm already invested, the party is listening the bare minimum amount necessary to get my interest".

[DSMatticus]

It's not at all clear that anyone involved in this process ever even "turned on" their rig-the-caucus machine. It's more accurate to say that the Bernites intercepted two delegates (because the Hillarites did not show up to the Clark County Convention), fumbled them (because this time the Bernites did not show up to the Nevada State Convention, and also a very very very very small fraction of them forgot to file a party registration), and their failure to carry those two delegates into the end zone made them so angry that they started crying foul at... everything, no matter how little sense it made. And the truth is they probably did it to themselves and no one actively fucked them over by abusing their control of the party proper. And the end result is the entirely inoffensive reversal of the Clark County Convention upset, giving us back the original projection derived from the raw popular vote.

fumbled them (because this time the Bernites did not show up to the Nevada State Convention, and also a very very very very small fraction of them forgot to file a party registration)

The Hillary campaign cannot actually hunt down all the Bernie delegates who failed to show up and drag them to the caucus so that they can finish the job they started in April. That's absurd. If you want me to rephrase, I'd be perfectly happy to say that both teams fucked themselves by an equal amount in the same state one month apart. Actually, I wouldn't, because at the core I blame the extent to which caucuses are inherently disenfranchising piles of shit.

But the part where I said "it's really hard to actually point to any wrongdoing on the part of the Hillarites" stands. Because it fucking is. There is no big scandal here. There are a bunch of people who are really angry that their candidate lost, and it's the same faction that has been consistently angry everytime their candidate loses. And sometimes they have a point, and sometimes they don't, and this time not only do they not have a point, but they're being complete scumbags.

[erik]

Okay, listen, you see this bit right here?

Both teams fucked eachother by an equal amount in the same state one month apart.

This is you conceding fully 100% of the relevant facts. My question is why Clinton supporters would bother with any amount of fucking when they have already won the primary.

Stop being a child who thinks he had a clever "gotcha" moment. We use fucked and fucking as fillers here and you fucking know it.

[name_here]

Overall I think America might have the better system on this one? It helps make people feel like they have more of a choice in the process (which can help people bother turning up to the actual election), even if their choice doesn't become candidate they might (barring certain Bros or "I only vote for outsider anti-establishment underdogs, I won't be part of your system, I THREW IT ON THE GROUND" hipsters) say "Hey, I'm already invested, the party is listening the bare minimum amount necessary to get my interest".

The part where the actual voters have a say in what candidate the party puts up is a plus, but the actual implementation is a disorganized mess. Not having them all simultaneously does have the advantage of having a winnowing phase and more time for the candidates to publicly fuck up mid-debate so we know if they're incompetent before nominating them, but there's just no good reason they aren't all proportional primaries instead of caucuses or winner-take-all or whatever the fuck is up with California. Also, during every hard-fought primary people threaten to walk or defect if their preferred nominee loses and most of them don't, in part because on some level people do understand that the US voting system means that third party runs are almost inevitably doomed, and the primary system is in fact the mechanism by which they make the party leadership listen to them. Like, you know, eight years ago when the party leaders wanted Clinton and the voters decided they'd rather have Obama.

[PhoneLobster]

Watching this at the same time as the Australian election campaign is fascinating, because it really brings up the pros and cons of the whole "You decide who the party leader is" thing.

Er. Two corrections for your post there.

1) The American President is to some degree more equivalent to our governor general than to our Prime Minister.

2) As one of his last actions in leadership Rudd changed the Federal Labor party rules on how they select their leadership so NOW the grass roots members DO vote for the party leader. Shorten was elected leader of the federal labor party... the first ever under this system no less... but...

I'll remind you of the story again since I'm sure I have mentioned it before. The labor party's new system is one where the whole grass roots vote counts as about equal with the whole vote of the party MPs etc... Effectively making the party MPs and such on equivalent to the super delegates in the American... mess... only much simpler.

Shorten LOST the party grass roots vote something like 40/60 (don't recall the exact numbers) but he WON the MP/whatever party leadership mob vote like 61/39, and took his title by a hair's breath of super delegate equivalent effects.

Despite that disaster for the labor party and Australia of allowing the guy who lost the grass roots members vote as leader, lets point out the positives.

1) The biggest surge in recent history in labor party membership.
2) More democratic than it used to be.
3) Significantly simpler and less arcane than the American system despite obvious similarities.
4) Significantly FASTER than the American system. It happened virtually overnight nation wide.
5) Not a stupid giant never ending circus. It was a big deal for the party, it's membership and people who actually follow politics closely, but most Australians don't even know it happened. Because no giant never ending needlessly drawn out media circus for no fucking reason.

You CAN do the good bits of the American system with significantly less bad bits. And ONE of our major parties in this country now does. It isn't a comparison of "well you have these pros and cons and we have these cons and pros". We actually do JUST have the pros compared to US democracy on a LOT of levels.

It would be just nice if we had some actual fucking rule of law for the fucking criminal conservative aristocrats.

[Prak]

Just heard that mail-in ballots cost extra postage. That seems reasonable, because they're a larger piece of mail than usual, but is it true?

[Maj]

Ouch. I should know this, but I'm not 100% on it. I think you do have to pay postage, but it's no more than normal.

But there are ballot drop boxes all over the place that don't require postage, and since it's just as easy to drop it by the post office to mail as it is to drop it in the ballot box, I drop it in the ballot box.

[name_here]

Checking the post office website, apparently it usually isn't treated specially and will take the standard amount of postage for mail of that size, which will obviously depend on how much stuff is on the ballot. For national elections, overseas absentee ballots do not require any postage.

[Prak]

Yeah, it was one of those "well, I can see why that is believable, but the idea of 'nullification due to improper postage' sounds fake" things.

[name_here]

I expect that if they don't pay proper postage it just isn't delivered or whatever as opposed to officially invalidating the ballot itself. Anyway, the website says that states are obligated to clearly communicate with citizens to make sure they know stuff like the proper postage and addresses and such, so this shouldn't come as a surprise, and postage is pretty cheap and paying it is almost certainly a better financial deal than taking an hour off of work even at minimum wage.

[Prak]

Yeah, it's ultimately not a huge deal, as "fake" things go, because if it is fake, people who are "duped" are just out another stamp.

[Kaelik]

No, you are a fucking idiot. Hillary won the Nevada convention because she had more eligible delegates at the convention. Sanders supporters got pissed off and rioted because they had more delegates total but like 1% of them were ineligible because they didn't file their paperwork on time and like half of them just didn't show up.

You should probably explain who you are talking to...

[Maj]

Checking the post office website, apparently it usually isn't treated specially and will take the standard amount of postage for mail of that size, which will obviously depend on how much stuff is on the ballot. For national elections, overseas absentee ballots do not require any postage.

https://www.usps.com/ship/preparing-dom ... pments.htm

I don't think my ballot exceeded the maximum measurements there. So it counts as a normal sized envelope. And my biggest ballot has been a double-sized piece of heavy paper folded in half (so it ended up being the equivalent of four pages - two, front and back). There's a really thin half-sheet security cover that you're supposed to place over the ballot before you put it in the envelope.

Given that, I'm pretty sure that whoever is in charge of ballot design took the first class postage rules into account when creating the ballots. I wouldn't be surprised if all together it weighed an ounce, but I think it was carefully crafted to count as a normal first class piece of mail.

[tussock]

Watching this at the same time as the Australian election campaign is fascinating, because it really brings up the pros and cons of the whole "You decide who the party leader is" thing.

Er. Two corrections for your post there.

1) The American President is to some degree more equivalent to our governor general than to our Prime Minister.

Really? President is the executive branch. Sees that the laws take effect, manages their implementation within the given budgetary constraints. All those offices of this and that and regulatory bodies are all under the President, with the Senate keeping an eye on all that and doing the investigations side of it.

That's all done by the Cabinet in the British decent systems. Parliament elects a Government which picks a Prime Minister who appoints ministers of state to cabinet posts, and so on.

Governor General is purely the signatory, signing as commanded by the executive so long as they have the confidence of Parliament. In the US system, the executive is a separate body to the legislature and also the signatory, but that's not the main job.


So the office of the President is like Cabinet, only made up of professionals from outside politics rather than folk who got voted into parliament, and appointed by a guy who won a popular vote instead of just leading the Government of the day (by leading the largest party of which government is composed).


Congress = Lower house and select committees and so on.
Senate = Upper house and royal commissions and so on.
President = Prime Minister and Cabinet ministers and Governor General.

So for the Yanks a bit like the President was also the leader of Congress and decided what laws they should be making and when and if they'd get to vote on stuff, and also did most of the Senate's job, but Congress (or the majority party) could pick a new one whenever they felt like it.

[Username17]

Because here is the actual question I am asking:

So...What the Hell is the motivation, here?

Embedded in your question is the assumption that the Clinton faction did something underhanded and anti democratic that would justify the Sanders supporters throwing chairs and issuing death threats to people's grandchildren. But they didn't. The justifications for the abhorrent and illegal behavior by the members of the Sanders campaign are conspiracy theories which are not true and easily debunked.

There was no rules change. There was no delegate purge. The delegate assignments are not at odds with the popular vote and no procedural vote was ever overturned. The Berners cannot point to any real thing that actually happened which took away any delegates they earned.

And the real bottom line is that the entire argument that the winners have to woo the losers isn't just stupid - it's fucking dangerous. That argument is the entire Tea party argument that Obama needed to give them everything they wanted even though they lost. That mindset is why our government doesn't work right now and we do not have to foster that shit on the left.

Angry white guys lose elections sometimes. And it is not acceptable for them to turn to intimidation and violence when that happens. We as a people owe it to ourselves and our republic to not blame winners for making angry white guys punch people and break stuff by having the audacity to get more votes. When angry shit stains break the law and issue threats to their opponents and their grandchildren, we need to put the blame where it belongs.

I've long been concerned that the Sanders campaign rhetoric that Hillary's wins were illegitimate and corrupt would have dire consequences. Well, it has. It has primed people to accept violence and intimidation as tools to overthrow democratic outcomes. Fuck your revolution. And fuck you too.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

Really?

Yes really.

The US head of state is president.

The Australian head of state is governor general. Or to some extent the Queen via the governor general.

There is no clean comparison between the systems for precise roles let alone selection methods because at that level things are VERY different. But they continue to be very different even if you make the mistake of thinking Australia's head of state is the Prime Minister and compare that instead.

And also this whole "purely signatory as commanded" business... the governor general is not a purely ceremonial role, not over here anyway. It is supposed to be ceremonial most of the time but there is real power in the "ceremonial" acts the governor general is responsible for and sometimes the governor general is imagined to be a neutral third party who in very rare circumstances makes very important decisions on the use of his "ceremonial" powers in a non-party political manner for the good of the nation.

You may forget this but it's a big deal over here what with us having had our greatest Prime Minister in history deposed at the command of a Governor General and what with oh I don't know the CURRENT governor general having JUST NOW issued special orders to government that facilitated the current terrible prime minister in calling an early election for his own political advantage. Something the governor general was in fact NOT required to do and in all honesty probably should have rejected as part of his (limited) duties.

[name_here]

The US President is Head Of State and Head Of Government. It's sorta like being both Governor-General and Prime Minister.

[PhoneLobster]

The US President is Head Of State and Head Of Government. It's sorta like being both Governor-General and Prime Minister.

But also a lot like neither.

[tussock]

Really?

Yes really.

Fair enough, then.

You may forget this but it's a big deal over here what with us having had our greatest Prime Minister in history deposed at the command of a Governor General

The leader of the opposition can approach the Governor General and ask that the government be deposed and an election held because they no longer hold the confidence of the house and there is no other government able to be formed. It's not like you can trust the PM to do that themselves.

The problem there was the PM and government totally did hold the confidence of the house, the GG simply refused to allow parliament to convene and show that, which is one of those loophole things that has since been closed. They cheated, big time, but they did win the election thanks to all the media support.

and what with oh I don't know the CURRENT governor general having JUST NOW issued special orders to government that facilitated the current terrible prime minister in calling an early election for his own political advantage. Something the governor general was in fact NOT required to do and in all honesty probably should have rejected as part of his (limited) duties.

That's completely the GG following the instructions of the Prime Minister as they are required to do. You guys are allowed to call early elections if the government cannot pass legislation through the upper house after several tries, including bullshit legislation designed specifically to not pass so they can call an election, they just have to say it's important to them.

If you think about it, if the Government was really paralysed, and there was shit needed fixed in a legislative sense, and the people of the country supported that change by clear majority, but the GG just said, "eh, whatever, nah, tough it out, I don't think that's important" you could end up in a bad way. Countries with fixed terms get in a lot of shit now and then because they can't just call elections.

So stop winging about how it's not fair and just vote them out.

[PhoneLobster]

That's completely the GG following the instructions of the Prime Minister as they are required to do. You guys are allowed to call early elections if the government cannot pass legislation through the upper house after several tries, including bullshit legislation designed specifically to not pass so they can call an election, they just have to say it's important to them.

You see that last bit there?

Now it's not precisely the only part where you are wrong. But it's certainly the key part of where you are wrong and on which basically everything wrong you said in that paragraph hinges.

And also, since you don't seem to follow the full details, the current governor general has used more than one of his powers on the pretext that construction union bashing legislation is a matter of utterly urgent and vital national importance.

Typically these powers would be reserved for urgent war time legislation and blocked supply. And if the conservatives wanted blocked supply they actually pretty much could have arranged it. I mean fuck, they haven't actually successfully passed a budget. But they didn't want to use the actual legitimate pretexts at their disposal, they wanted what they wanted and our democratic institutions can go fuck themselves.

[Ancient History]

Meanwhile, in the United States...

I searched for "Trump Legion of Doom" and this is what came up. FML.

...I'm actually slightly concerned that Bernie Sanders' campaign is going toxic, and that might hurt the Democrats a bit. I still think Hillary Clinton will win over Trump, but now is really the time when they should be absolutely crushing their enemies...

...actually, I tell a lie. It's all no-news-is-news until the conventions. We have so much more of this to go before we're even into the official general election. I cannot even imagine the shit that's going to come out of Trump's mouth during the debates, with Clinton on stage, and there's going to be at least two debates. Lots of people really want a third option but that's not in the cards unless Trump or Clinton get arrested/have a stroke.

[Kaelik]

There will certainly be lots of time to forget this incredibly terrible few months where the craziest people in the world not supporting Trump become violent maniacs who call for revolution, and Clinton supporters declare war on leftism, because they think leftist people are all white racists or something, and Sanders completes the transition from being an old crazy person to being so high on LSD he lives his entire life inside of a Russian Doll Set of nested delusions.

But god, could you imagine if that beautiful golden time from 4 months ago had lasted forever? You know, back when Sanders understood that Trump is the enemy, and the 15% of Sanders supporters that believe Clinton is the devil were too embarrassed to say so, and Clinton supporters weren't calling for Clinton to Lower Taxes and Take Those FreeLoaders off Welfare to spite 40% of the Democratic party for the crime of being young and white.

Those were good times, I miss them.

[hyzmarca]

Meanwhile, in the United States...

I searched for "Trump Legion of Doom" and this is what came up. FML.

That's really a terrible pic.

I mean, really. Poison Ivy is openly bisexual and Apocalypse believes in evolution.