Why don't we vote?

[werepossum]

Actually direct democracy scares me almost as much as it did our founding fathers, being mob rule and greatly empowering the media. Regarding your specific point, we did a long thread on gay marriage but although the Internet pretty much loves the idea, all the polls I've seen in America are solidly 75-80% against it. That's why even liberal Democrat politicians don't support it unless they are in very liberal, very safe Democrat states or districts.

I like the idea of referendums on new laws, except spending bills. Much of our problem is that we've finally discovered that we can vote ourselves benefits - that is, we can empower the government to seize someone else's property and gift it to us. And of course, everything has to go through the courts, who have for the most part abandoned their traditional role as arbiters of law and seized power as creators of law, effectively legislators without the need for public approval. As someone mentioned about California's experiences, there's not much point in having public votes if a few men and women have the actual power.

 

[SenseOfTumour]

Yeah, it terrifies me that in the UK people believe every headline the papers print, that immigrants now make up 98% of the UK's population, that 83% of all people working in schools are paedophiles, and anyone with access to the internet is working for Al Qaeda.

Oh and that if we don't get every child in the country eating only brocolli from now on, we'll all die.
(My opinion is that the real problem is parents have been too scared by the media into letting their kids leave the damn house to go outside, because of the paedos and the gang violence and knife crime.)

The idea that they should get a direct vote on anything is worrying, with the current setup I can at least HOPE that my MPs have some kinda opinions and research done on the topics.

As it is , it seems Labour throw a new policy out about 2 days after the press print one for them, which is worrying. Just look at the backlash against the sick and unemployed, I'm sure its actually quite a minority abusing it, and when you consider the average MP costs us more than about 10 sick people, and seems to be slightly less useful to society, perhaps we could point the angry mobs in a new direction.

 

[SenseOfTumour]

As for the US situation, I'm with crossing off all names from voting papers.

Surely the only question is do you want to vote Democrat or Republican?

It shouldn't be do you want to vote mixed race or woman?

Should I vote for the nice hair or her with the nice glasses?

If it was a pure 'vote for the party' line, people would have to know something before they ticked a box, instead of picking the one either that was most like them, or they secretly wanted to sleep with.

Fortunately, in the UK, every single person in politics is a grey man in a suit, even if they're a woman or black.

 

[RufusMcLaser]

Wow... This is a pretty intelligent thread. I'd like to invite all of you over for dinner and Rock Band.
To answer the original thread question, we don't generally vote for issues because that's not how the Constitution was written. End of story. The system we have in place now has proven very robust, very resilient, and been good enough at expressing the will of the people that I see no strong argument for changing it. The inherent "error correction" of the U.S. system allows a range of political expression which many parliamentary democracies cannot tolerate, for example.
As has been pointed out by Razzle B., referendums are a chancy thing and should be used sparingly if at all.

 

[WhiteHowl]

I mine as well make this first post on the forum as a reflection of my intellegence (or lack there of)

The US voting system is more or less a popularity contest between people who are conservatice and people who are liberal (basically between people are office workers and people who are hippies). Though this year the media are trying to cram down are throats how one party is better than the other by saying that they are both liberal and conservative, while the other isn't. Facts are often blured based off of polices that they have agreed to or not agreed to, rather than their sides on issues like gay marriages and abortions.

In any case we have 2 political parties: Republicans and Democrats. The decision is either do we support rich people or poor people.

Getting to the voting process, all the US citizens really do is tell the people who are actually vote who we the people want in office. I haven't spent enough time or invested enough energy to understand why we need this long and complicated process, but I'm going to assume it has to deal with the fact that citizens aren't informed enough to actually vote for the person who we want in office, and as sad as it may be for me as an American, it's actually true.

It would be a perfect world if we can vote on issues that affect our lives. The problem is, the fact that there are stupid pricks in any country in the world, and in the US, about 1/3 of the populace is that. The remaining 2/3 consist or people who don't belong in this country, people who are retarded, people who are serial rapists and murderers, and people who have brain cells, the lowest of that population being the people who do have brain cells. (come on, you've seen 4chan, you can't really believe that the majority of the people who post on there are from the UK)

If you've ever see the news broadcasted in the US, you'll understand what I mean. Seeing as it is a presidential year, 1/3 of the report is going to be about politics, but really it's about nitpicky tightwads who have their nose shoved up their ass, and unfortunately the fact that whether or not Obama wars an american pin on his lapel making him an elitist, or Palin has a 17-year-old daughter who is pregnant and is bearly a govenor, or the fact that this news is more important than any polices supported or approved or anything that these people have done in the government is less important, actually shows the limits of the intellegence of the US.

That being said, I would like to say that we really are too stupid to vote for any politics and that the people running this god-forsaken government (and this can be considered ironic because in our pledge of allegience we have the words "under God," which was for some reason also an issue) do have slightly more brain cells then us idiots, enough to run a country anyway.