Rostere

... which is idiotic and completely and utterly unneccessary. And which opens up for arbitrary changes in the end result. This is about comparing "vote on X" versus "vote on X through a proxy, which might or might not invalidate your vote depending on a particular randomized property of your proxy". One of these systems is retarded, the other is OK. Nobody votes for anyone because they are in a particular party. You vote for a person, then pool together votes with other party members to determine who gets elected (although you can possibly vote for just a party, in case you add your vote to a pool which is distributed among party members on your district's ballot according to some scheme). As long as you are guaranteed that your representative is not stripped of their vote because they happen to not be able to be present or something similar, anything that your representative does is OK. If the above is guaranteed, a Nevada situation cannot happen by definition. No, I'm not keen for other people to vote for elected representatives (although anyone should be able to have a list of seconds), I'm keen for them to not be required to be physically present, which is entirely arbitrary and a pointless obstacle to democracy. Since votes occur by non-secret ballot, this is a rather trivial issue in this case. A second round voter in Nevada has only one purpose with regards to the candidate nomination: to vote for the candidate he/she has been elected to vote for in the next round. That should ideally be the case anyway, in reality they can actually change their mind. Since the vote is only about one issue (nomination), there is no point in electing a representative and having a second (and third, and so on) round, since you have already made your choice. When you elect a representative for parliament, the idea is the opposite: that you might not at all know what your representative will vote about, but you trust in his/her ideology and moral conviction. A system like Nevada's would make more sense if the first round voters didn't know anything at all about the different candidates. As it stands now, it's just a completely redundant step which will inevitably change the will of the voters randomly. It is stupid dumb****ery and should be removed.

So, you're essentially saying "Yeah, your examples were VERY stupid. This is only a little bit stupid". That's still not an argument for allocating delegates at repeated levels of conventions. Can you really not see that requiring elected delegates to turn up to different levels of conventions is the "unrelated guff" you speak of? It has nothing to do with democracy in any way and is completely unrelated to voting. The only function it adds is that some delegates might not show up, because they are lazy, because they have work to do, or because of ill intent. This is exactly equivalent to voters being required to fold their votes into paper planes and hit the ballot boxes for their votes to count. It is a completely and utterly arbitrary layer of randomness added that will invalidate some people's votes. Just because all people must obey the same rules does not mean the system is not arbitrary and undemocratic. I realize that you probably know nothing at all about cryptography, but to give a pedagogical example everyday folks can relate to: have you ever wondered why nobody is (practically) able to make counterfeit bitcoin? You should think about that for a while and then maybe you realize that you shouldn't so eagerly blurt out opinions about things you know nothing about. If someone should be unavailable at any time, having a chosen second cast votes for them is strictly better than them casting no vote at all. What would be sinister is that votes could be decided by people being sick or at the toilet. He is only obliged to vote for his own positions, as usual. Also, lol at "arranging for them to be absent" when this is also possible to exploit - tinfoil hat on! - when absence would mean you cast no vote. By this logic, you could exploit any modern parliament by just arranging for your political opponents to be absent. I have no idea in which democratic system this hypothetical question takes place. Anyways, the answer is very simple in the system where I live - the individual representative votes completely as he/she sees fit. Parties are responsible for who are on their lists, people are responsible for which individual representatives are chosen, and representatives are simply themselves.

From the best page on the Internet: http://harddawn.com/uno-spreading-carnal-knowledge-for-the-antichrist/

Unfortunately, no part of our election system, from Congress to party primaries/caucuses to presidential elections is fully proportional, either... Yeah, that was the point.

You know. Implicit in my comment was the fact that the US has low voter participation because of inherent disenfranchisement in the winner-takes-it-all system. Saying that this is a matter of compulsory voting is misrepresenting the issue. The issue is that the US has a system which is stuck 200 years in the past, which disenfranchises a lot of voters due to game theory. If your voter turnout is lower than 50% and you try to convince yourself that 50% of the population are just uninformed voters who should not vote anyway, you're basically just the same as the Colorado Republicans who ban Trump delegates from their convention. Still. Name one country which has been destroyed due to it being too easy to vote. All other democratic countries have higher voter turnout than the US, so it shouldn't be hard for you to find an example if you really think that is the case. No, what you talk about would basically not change anything at all. If you increase the number of people in a legislative body to make everyone "get a voice", you might allow some representatives for opinions which would otherwise not register, but the increased number of representatives would also devalue their importance. In an proportional democratic system, any vote is just as important as any other vote. For a large enough number of representatives in a legislative body, there is no issue of people not being represented, because every vote contributes to the final distribution of representatives. Every vote contributes to your total share of representatives, and so you can't completely piss on people of other opinions if you're sure that your party will get a plurality in your district or whatever. In fact, tying representatives to particular districts (in FPTP) ensures that representatives have zero reason to care about the interests voters in other districts, while in a proportional system 10000 votes are always 10000 votes no matter where they are located, and so will always be a carrot for the politicians. I assume you are referring to the problem which arises in the FPTP system when you have a "permanent" majority of either party in some district. Then, if you can count on getting 200000 votes for party R, it doesn't matter if party D gets 100000 votes or 0 votes. By design, the system completely disenfranchises the permanent minority. But this only has to do with your system, not with how many representatives there are. In the FPTP system, more districts would only lead to the exact same balance in the legislative body (if districts are split with equal voter distribution as their parent district) or disenfranchisement of the other side (if voters are split by opinion, giving the other side a district where they have a permanent majority). And if you try to create a new district with 50/50 distribution, then voter disenfranchisement will only be even greater in the parent district! Surprise surprise, there is no way to fix a fundamentally retarded system.

This all depends on how you organize your vote. Note also that I was talking specifically about voting by non-secret ballot in parliaments. It's practically impossible to fake votes in elections by non-secret ballot where only a few hundred people participate. This is especially rich coming from an American. The US has lower voter turnout than any other country I know of. What do you say about the countries which have 80-90% voter turnout? Has their democracy been destroyed by too many uninformed voters participating? The answer is no. Besides, don't you think that if more people would participate, that politicians would be more eager to reach out to - and inform - more people? You do realize that it is far easier to fake absentee mail-in votes than it is to fake votes which are certified by cryptographic protocols?

That's completely absurd. America is trying hard to become the Soviet Union, I see. That's not a real argument. Just because something is "fair" - theoretically equal to both sides - does not mean it is not stupid. Here are some examples of "fair" systems: Caucusgoers are to sit in a sauna for an arbitrary time decided at the caucus by the local party committee. Everyone who wants to vote first has to swim over a river filled with crocodiles. There's only one place to vote per 100000 likely voters, and it's only open during working hours on a Tuesday. Anyone can change the voter registration of other people. You can only vote in the primary for the party you are registered as half a year before the actual primary. Known rules. Equal to both sides. Still stupid systems which should be scrapped if they existed. No, MPs are elected as political representatives of the people and letting democracy be subverted by arbitrary minutiae like whether or not MPs can move their lard asses to a particular building should not be allowed. An MP can suffer from a debilitating disease of be hindered by accidents or traffic jams. Letting this have any bearing on important decisions is a farce, not democracy. 200 years ago, democracy would have required people to meet in person for votes. Technology allows for remote voting today. The only reason we still insist on the old ways is inertia.

Bought a package of this yesterday:

Clinton team blasts reporters with noise machine during Hillary fundraising speech So Hillary Clinton holds fundraiser for Big Money and does not want journalists listening to what is said. Move along folks, nothing to see here. EDIT: Stupid rules are allowing Bernie to "win" over Hillary in states who have already voted. Bernie has now officially won Missouri in terms of elected delegates, and might end up winning Nevada as well later on (he's already eliminated some of Hillary's lead there). This thanks to rules which were designed to favour well-organized campaigns. If this continues, Hillary might be facing wipeout in Alaska and even heavier defeats in other states such as Washington. Whoever makes up these silly rules shouldn't even be allowed to organize an election for class treasurer. Embarrassing beyond reproach. Franz Kafka on LSD couldn't come up with a more pants-on-head retarded system.

"How to hack an election" BTW. Apparently the AZ voter database is vulnerable to simple SQL injection. Go figure. No wonder so many people had their party affiliation mysteriously changed.

They wouldn't be left out of the voting process. They would be given an amount of influence equal to their population, which is the least unfair way of representation anyone have come up with so far. But the entire way of electing president through the electoral college is pretty retarded for other reasons. The fact that electors are won through winner-takes-all elections means that you disenfranchise a huge amount of voters, create the problem of pandering to "swing" states, and effectively hand the election to that party which has successfully gamed the system by having their voters in geographically favourable locations. It would be passable 200 years ago but today it is a disgrace. Great idea about making the votes of people who live in sparsely populated areas worth more than other people's votes! They are clearly a minority which need to have more say in order to ensure fairness, or else they will be eaten by the wolves. I like your idea about making the votes of geographical minorities worth more. But here are some other minority groups whose votes should be worth more than than others: Black people Jews Sikhs Redheads People with disabilities Right? Don't you see, “Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch”. So we need to make the votes of the sheep worth more! Everybody should be able to register which minorities they belong to, and then their votes can be scaled accordingly. So for example, the vote of a black redhead disabled homosexual transsexual Jew should probably be worth the same as at least a hundred white heterosexual Christians. Don't you see that you have just picked a completely and utterly arbitrary minority group who you like to designate as "sheep", while others are "wolves"? You are no better than the crazy far-left types who say that black people's votes should be worth more, or whatever. The only difference between you is that you have different favourite minorities. You could even draw the argument even further, and say that your own vote should be worth more, because you are afraid of being eaten by the wolves. If all people were like you, complaining that some groups of people should have more powerful votes than others, democracy could never work. The truth is that you need a basic law or constitution which contains the rights of people and the limitations of governments of different levels, and from there let one person equal one vote, which no shenanigans or "gamey" systems to disenfranchise arbitrary groups of voters. People who live in sparsely populated areas don't play "no role in the election of a Senator". People in these areas play exactly the same role as people in other areas. Which is indisputably fair. Let us assume that all the problems you state are indeed there. Why would making state governments elect the senators make then serve their state better? Why would making senators subservient to state governments rather than the people make things better? Seriously, having the state governments elect senators would only enable more rampant party insiderism, corruption and cronyism. Suppose that the guy the state government would elect is the same as the one the people would elect, then it would make no difference. The only difference between the two systems is that state government could potentially elect people who would be wildly unpopular among the public. You are really just suffering from the "grass is greener on the other side" syndrome. It's no coincidence the EC is the most corrupt, non-transparent and dysfunctional part of the EU. That's because they are not responsible to the public in any way. Trust me, you do not want what you describe. No, it would not empower the state. The state would have the same power, the only difference would be that the state governments could hypothetically elect people who are hated among the public. That would only lead to the opposite of what you want. Why would the government of Tennessee be more responsive to voters than a congressman from Tennessee if they are elected on the same basis? I suspect your argument for that being the case has to do with the government of Tennessee being elected in some other way than proportional "one person, one vote". Then this just boils down to something I've already responded to above.

3 in 10 Americans have faith in the election system. EDIT: Summary of the recent hearing on voter suppression and election fraud in Arizona.

I'll just leave this here:

What? In most places with a prime minister local elections are separate from national elections. I think what you mean to say is that the legislature elects the government. A system error? Did you watch the video I linked before? Someone had submitted a new form with the same copied signature but with no party allegiance for a woman. I don't know how much you know about how databases typically work, but the notion that a "system error" consists of scanned documents being edited and re-submitted is absurd. Do you even think they have a system in place for automatically visually editing scanned documents? This kind of thing just can't happen. But surely you must always try to change what you can? Inertia is the only enabler of corruption.

Update on the most interesting story this primary season. Apparently the AZ Democratic party has already been contacted by at least 4000 people whose party affiliation was changed without their consent. Seeing how most Democratic caucuses/primaries ahead are closed and how irregularities are already reported in other states such as Oregon, this looks like massive election fraud.

More on the situation in Arizona. Apparently roughly 2/3 of Democratic voters on primary day could not be found in the database or had been re-registered without their knowledge as Independents, Republicans or Libertarians. So they got to cast "provisional ballots" which, as it turns out, are not counted. It turns out this is very widespread in Oregon as well. Because of the awareness of this problem from the Arizona primary, people in other states where this is also happening have written a lot about it on reddit (here and here) also there are reports from New York that the same thing is happening there. Here's a must-see video of a woman who affiliation was changed to "Independent". You can see in the video how she is shown another scanned form, where her signature is copied from the previous one she sent in (to register Democrat) but with Democratic party affiliation erased. Someone else has clearly made a conscious effort to make her primary vote null and void.

What can I say? I will buy this.

You would be surprised how easy it is to make decent explosives. Although it might not be easy to procure all components if you seem suspicious.

Allegations of Hillary supporters joining the Bernie campaign and sabotaging it from the inside. Known Hillary supporters have joined the Bernie campaign, gotten into important positions, shut down their own events, bankrupted their local campaign offices through negligence and ignored important endorsements. This guy gives his account of what happened in North Carolina. Apparently Robert Dempsey has since been promptly fired from his current work as organizer in Wisconsin.

The pro-Israel camp is split on Trump. I know Sheldon Adelson is sympathetic to Trump, and Netanyahu likely is as well. I think they see in Trump not a person whose foreign policy is for sale (like Hillary and Rubio) but one who thinks as they do (remember Trump's comment about Israel's wall). Next on the Israeli agenda is likely a new war on Lebanon, and blowing up the al-Aqsa mosque, possibly some kind of unilateral arrangement in the West Bank. It would help if the person in power in the US was very anti-Muslim and a bit crazy, and not just a bought shill, because money can only get you so far (remember both the GWB and Obama regimes have criticized Israel at times). It's no doubt Rubio was their preferred candidate, but it's fully possible they will now rally behind Trump. Meanwhile, the classic neocons are either spending all of their twitter feed bashing Trump (Kristol) or have already jumped ship to Hillary (Kagan).

I thought partition of Syria was the US' plan all along.

Amazing after Hillary's role as secretary of state should leave absolutely no confidence what-so-ever in her ability to lead the military that she got even 10%. Combine that with the email situation which shows that she is dangerously uninformed about modern technology, and her poor track record of understanding the unintended consequences of military intervention (Iraq for example). It really is amazing that 31% people would trust her with something that even casual research on her should show she is definitely not able to handle. Literally the first thing I thought when I heard of Hillary's email server was that her staff had been infiltrated with agents of a foreign country who wants to monitor her conversations, and made the recommendation of the current arrangement. Nobody in their right mind would do such a thing. It's a pity the public in general also is very unknowledgeable on these matters. But as I understand things you can be convicted of espionage if you are criminally incompetent, no intent is needed.

At least this is some good news. So polls say that Bernie is more electable than Hillary, he is more trustworthy leading the military (among ALL American voters!), yet people still vote for Hillary. Truly astounding...

RIP Bernie Sanders. Well, no need to bother reading news about the rest of the Democratic primary at least.

Probably a RPG where you play the "bad guys" destroying stuff and generally being evil instead of the good guys (similar to the premise in Dungeon Keeper but a RPG). Probably also set in the PoE universe.