this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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A democracy where you vote against a candidate is a failed democracy.
I agree! But it is the state of the federal government in the US. Then again, at the point they included the Electoral College and the 3/5s clause in the Constitution, the democracy of the US was made in bad faith anyway, at least it was founded as a means by which aristocracy ruled without a permanent king.
But any election system that uses first-past-the-post voting is going to ultimately fail as a democracy, since they always reduce to two party systems. One-person-one-vote means you'll always be voting against the worst evil by voting for the next guy, and it is an indictment of the US that we've not been able to get any election reform through. At least not in federal elections. Some states have made a little bit of progress.
It's also telling that SCOTUS is able to veto anything or even legislate from the bench when a group controls a majority of the judges, such as the Federalist Society. Yes, the US system sucks, which is why we're stuck surviving it, rather than striving to change it for the better.