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| ▲ | dnautics an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | There is a significant movement in conservative circles that "the census should literally only be a count". this could be a wedge to prevent detailed demographic data collection by the government | | |
| ▲ | Alive-in-2025 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | If you don’t count people of different races, nationalities, origin, then you can pretend there are only white people. You don’t know if there are any marginalized people gathered in say an extremely poor neighborhood, because they are all people. I see it as a way to pretend there’s just white people. | |
| ▲ | Arodex an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Those "conservative circles" don't exist anymore - if they ever. MAGA ate them, chew them and spit them. | | |
| ▲ | coldtea an hour ago | parent [-] | | The problem is not that MAGA "ate them, chew them and spit them", but that the traditional neoliberal shit GOP circles "ate, chew and spit" the MAGA movement and what people voted Trump for. Instead Trump was fully assimilated to the Borg/Swamp, with a big fuck you to the MAGA promises (except the show he put on about immigration). | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 14 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Trump was never ever going to drain the swamp. And I wouldn't say he served existing entrenched interests very well either. To the extent he touched the swamp it was to put in worse people only he liked. |
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| ▲ | boppo1 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Wouldnt that hurt the conservative cause though? | | | |
| ▲ | xnx an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | But a count of what? | | |
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| ▲ | Dylan16807 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The US Government is the entity that weaponizes the data. Pointing at an example from so long ago to find "the" misuser is turning a blind eye to lots of active misuse. | |
| ▲ | dathinab 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | yeah, and implicitly force them to sell the land they own for less then it's worth, which in combination with setting up very messed up tax related laws in some states (1) which highly benefit you if you bought land longer in the past effectively "killed" a budding, wealthy, land owning Asian community and made sure it can't really regrow in that form. (1): I think it was mainly California, but don't remember full | | | |
| ▲ | willXare 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Databases are neutral until someone asks them for a list. | |
| ▲ | conception 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Remember “leftist “ and transgender activists are terrorists now. First they came for… | | |
| ▲ | whattheheckheck 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What's the actual antidote to this? 5calls.org? | | |
| ▲ | estearum 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Voting and getting everyone you know to vote | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And civically engaging. Less than a fifth of voters regularly contact their electeds. | |
| ▲ | vjulian an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Many of us find voting insulting, given very low marginal power in a vote; it’s akin to throwing breadcrumbs to the poor. The structure of governance (the reality, not the mythology taught in schools or pushed forth as propaganda) is not in support of ‘the people”. Right or wrong, this is how many of feel. Voting is silly and futile. | | |
| ▲ | vjulian an hour ago | parent [-] | | Civics is a kind of religion, and it is difficult for people caught up in it to approach discussion from a logical and external perspective. This kind of civics is dangerous to society. |
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| ▲ | rayiner 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes more people should vote: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2... (“Projecting onto the full voter file, if every registered voter voted, it’s likely that Trump would have won by even more.”). | | |
| ▲ | estearum an hour ago | parent [-] | | Yes, more people should vote. Always funny when Trumpers try to this out as a gotcha lmao. As a believer in democracy, I think it's better that our government is more responsive rather than less responsive to the public. | | |
| ▲ | rayiner an hour ago | parent [-] | | High turnout brings out the low-information voters and changes the composition of the viable coalition for both parties. If we restricted the franchise, we might be able to sustain something closer to the Romney GOP versus the Mayor Pete Democratic Party. And that would make the government a lot more orderly and competent. I doubt the top 10-20% of either side wants a democracy. The difference is in where we want the filtering to happen. I want it to happen up front at the voting stage, but have the government be highly responsive to the people that do vote. The “Mayor Pete” neoliberal democrats favor mass voting, but that the actual governance is done by highly credentialed career bureaucrats that aren’t directly answerable to voters. I’d argue the Mayor Pete model is even less democratic than mine. Because although everyone votes, the effect of that vote is filtered through a fairly narrow class of credentialed bureaucrats, entry into which is gatekept by elite universities and professional organizations. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede 14 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I don't know who the > The “Mayor Pete” neoliberal democrats are, but yes, you want career bureaucrats running the show that follow the rules as set forth by Congress, with appointed officials that pass vetting at the top. Otherwise every position becomes political and the laws themselves go further out the window. |
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| ▲ | YeahThisIsMe 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The people in power now are doing everything they can to make that as hard as possible by any means necessary. Good luck. | | |
| ▲ | patrick451 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting. | | |
| ▲ | JoshTriplett 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You should carefully examine the evidence you have supporting that belief. Start by observing that this is a partisan issue in which the official positions of the two major parties disagree on a factual claim, not merely the policy. A disagreement on policy can (sometimes) be chalked up to a difference in values, even though those do sometimes arise downstream of factual incorrectness. But a disagreement on facts is one with in which someone is right and someone is wrong. (Or, more complicatedly, someone is closer to accurate and someone is cherry-picking.) If what you believe to be true is in fact true, then you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it. Either way, I hope that you desire to find the correct answer rather than the one that would be convenient for your political position, and that whatever hypothesis you have has not set itself up to be unfalsifiable. | | |
| ▲ | SadErn an hour ago | parent [-] | | > you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it. The system is confidentially designed to provide little to no evidence of the fraud it allows. Even simple signature and ID checking is banned in California. The system itself is the evidence of the fraud. It is purposefully designed to hide evidence and prevent detection. You are obviously an intelligent person but you've allowed your curiosity to be subjugated by propaganda. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 4 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The fun part about this is that it depends on facts that nobody actually knows. If you don't check ID then anyone with a list of registered-but-unlikely voters (or who registers unlikely voters ahead of time without their knowledge) could be voting multiple times and there is nothing to detect it. If you check ID then that doesn't happen as easily, but you still have no way to know if it would have happened in the alternative. The closest thing to knowing would be if apparent turnout declines in response to checking ID, but a) different elections have different turnout anyway and b) even if you could detect a significant change, one party would then argue that it's a reduction in fraud and the other would argue that checking ID is reducing legitimate turnout, and there is still no way to know which one it is -- it could even be both. |
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| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting Illegal voting is so rare that almost every time folks go looking for it they come up empty handed. Examples of voter suppression, on the other hand, are trivial to fine. (And both parties do it, particularly around primaries.) In my state, we’re trying to enact a citizenship-proof requirement which penalizes women who change their name on getting married and those who can’t afford a passport. In effect, a marriage and poll tax. Ironically, this will disenfranchise the MAGA voters who are themselves pushing for it, but I’m not really going to point that out aggressively. (That said, a legitimate fraction of American politics right now is in convincing the other side’s likely voters that elections are rigged, the oligarchs are in charge, why even bother calling your electeds or voting, eat an ice-cream sundae and talk to your AI girlfriend.) | | |
| ▲ | prepend 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If someone mails in my absentee ballot and I don’t complain, how do you detect that voter fraud? Or if someone knows their friend is sick and votes without an id, how do you detect that? It seems like there are currently many ways to vote illegally that don’t get detected. | | |
| ▲ | otterley 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Perhaps so, but you still have to show that it is happening, not merely that it is possible. Moreover, you have to show that whatever cures you propose are both 1/proportional to the harm and 2/minimize undesirable side effects. (One challenge with the latter is that for some people, those side effects are actually desirable.) | |
| ▲ | estearum an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Can you describe specifically how someone finds enough complaint-free absentee ballots and sick friends to vote at any meaningful scale? Doing this even 10 times seems unbelievably hard. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede 9 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It seems less hard if you datamine the shit out of everything, exfiltrate the social security database, and feed it into a computer. Get the historical voting records. SELECT address FROM voters that haven't voted in 10 years. Send someone to follow the mailman and steal ballots from that address. Or simply don't mail them out in the first place. They're not likely to notice to complain in the first place. Not that I think the election was rigged, but if you think it's "unbelievably hard", I think that's a failure of imagination. |
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| ▲ | Jiro 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Illegal voting is "rare" because the system is set up so that it is in most cases impossible to detect. | | |
| ▲ | estearum an hour ago | parent [-] | | Can you describe the specific chain of events required to create a fraudulent vote that is "impossible" to detect? Surely if you can confidently state the system not only is this way, but is purposely designed this way, you should have zero problem describing it exactly step by step. Extra credit if you can describe a method that can produce 10, 100, or 1000 votes. |
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| ▲ | p-e-w 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high. Clearly this isn’t the answer. And neither is protesting, considering that 4 of the 5 largest demonstrations in US history happened in the past 10 years and achieved nothing. | | |
| ▲ | estearum 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Well right... you also need to vote for the correct ("less-bad") people and get your friends to do the same. Voting for the worse people makes things worse. | | |
| ▲ | rectang 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Ranked Choice Voting makes it easier to vote for “less bad” candidates. RCV also tends to work against polarization, since it rewards candidates who are at least acceptable to a broad swath of the electorate. It may not be the “answer” for all that ails the American political system, but it would help. ETA: Unlike many other reforms it's also doable within the constraints of the current constitutional order and is hard for SCOTUS to torpedo (though I suppose I shouldn't underestimate SCOTUS). | | |
| ▲ | estearum 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 100% -- RCV is a super important part of this equation in the long run. | |
| ▲ | nerdsniper 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Approval Voting would be an easier pill to swallow for most americans. It’s hard to explain “yeah Trump got the most #1 votes but still lost” and easy to explain “this other candidate got the most checkmarks”. https://www.rangevoting.org/CompChart.html#votsysts | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 5 minutes ago | parent [-] | | We already have a system where the person with the most #1 votes can lose. A third party candidate that only got a couple states would be able to prevent a majority. And that's electoral votes. Counting actual people has the most voted candidate lose all the time. Approval voting would be an improvement over the status quo but it makes it a lot harder for me to influence the choice between candidates I like less. If I do check my third choice I risk helping them beat my top two. If I don't check my third choice then I risk them losing to even worse options. |
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| ▲ | gs17 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You also need the option to vote for "less-bad" people. Where I am now, my vote doesn't matter, even if it means the "less-bad" people win with no competition (as opposed to where I moved from where things were skewed the opposite way). | | |
| ▲ | godelski 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Vote strategically. Candidates notice btw. So if you're in a heavily red state but you're blue, then vote in the primaries for the more centered Republican. If you're in a heavily blue state but red, do the opposite. Either way this actually helps because more people are centered and we're getting wilder and wilder candidates because there's increased tribalism. They go to the extremes because they get more voters that way. They figured out that the mainstay voters will just end up voting left or right regardless, and that by catering to the extremes it actually pulls the mainstream voters too. (Both Reps and Dems are using this strategy) Remember, you don't have to vote for the person you actually like. And keep doing this until we get a sane voting system which can embed actual preference (any of the cardinal systems: i.e. Approval or STAR). This strategy still works with ordinal systems (i.e. Ranked Choice) because a weak spoiler is still really good at splitting the vote (happened in a pretty famous Alaska election). | | |
| ▲ | usefulcat an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Totally agree. I did exactly this in the recent primaries, and then got to vote again in a runoff. I think of it this way: in a state where one party is clearly dominant, most offices will end up being held by members of that party. That means that the primaries for that party actually matter more than the general election. | |
| ▲ | dubya an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Republicans in my state, TN, having eliminated the last Democrat congressional district, now want to close primaries, precisely to prevent strategic voting. |
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| ▲ | Retric 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Somewhere between just going out to vote and revolution sits moving to an area where your vote counts. I’ve not quite reached that threshold, but I avoid moving to DC due to the lack of voting rights. |
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| ▲ | dgellow 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Protesting one weekend day every 6 months will obviously do nothing. The pressure needs to be non stop | |
| ▲ | intended an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I highly recommend the research done by Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Yochai Benkler. In a nutshell, you have an issue where part of the information economy/market is captured. To the point that agenda can get set by theories or podcasts that have little truck with reality. Any checks or reviews of the claims, simply do not get surfaced within that ecosystem. This creates a more efficient system for political messaging. You cannot have an effective democratic system when your consensus building mechanisms have been (intentionally) compromised and weakened. | |
| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | deaux 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high. In a sense, this in itself is the issue. It's long-term _worse_ to vote for the "lesser of two serious evils". This extreme "long-term pain for short-term gain" attitude is what's gotten the US to where it is. If in 2016 of 2024 even 20% of the dems would've stayed home or voted third party, the DNC's continuous forcing of awful corpocrats with zero charisma would've become completely untenable and Trump would've been limited to one term. Yet instead they were rewarded for it, so you'll see Newsom get the candidacy and presidency in 2028 (if 2028 even happens at this point), and then in 2032 you'll get something like Hegseth or Thiel winning and it's all over. There is an answer: relentlessly vote, but only for candidates who are actually slightly decent - including third-party - and otherwise stay at home. "Relentlessly" means "at every level", including locally from the very bottom, all the way up. The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote. It shows the others that there's a voter there who can be convinced if catered to, if they select a better candidate. The powers that be have done a fantastic job of brainwashing the entire population of the myth that anyone who _doesn't_ go out and vote for either major candidate is a morally bankrupt person, because it directly benefits them. The reply to this will be "well it's too late for that now!". It's wrong because the alternative doesn't help you one bit. You're just wishing for a miracle, that in 4 years something happens, kicking the can down the road making things worse long term. And that's actually what's got you here. It's a symptom of the terminal disease which has infected all layers of American society and has gotten it to where it's at: short-termism. Everyone just looks at the next quarter, the next election. China's ascendency is 1:1 tied to doing the exact opposite. Some smartypants will now point "but zero Covid", great you found a potential exception, now look at the other 90% of policy. Every time I've explained this I've gotten instantly downvoted without a single reply making an argument against it, because it's too painful for people to admit that they've been part of the road to where the US is at. And again, short-termism: rather feel the short-term tiny dopamine hit by slamming that downvote button than thinking about it. Let's see if this happens again. | | |
| ▲ | gs17 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote. Yes, but with a caveat, if you had a strong preference between the top two actually-likely-to-win candidates (assuming the third party wasn't competitive), it's at least not voting the most in your interests for the outcome. Which is why we really need approval voting, so we can actually vote for the candidates we like, rather than needing to "strategically" hold our noses. But I agree with the rest of it, if none of the candidates represent you, the third-party vote at least allows you to send a signal of "I vote, but you need to make me want to vote for you, and this is what I want". | | | |
| ▲ | mullingitover 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Every time I've explained this I've gotten instantly downvoted without a single reply making an argument against it, Ok I'll break it down for you. > If in 2016 of 2024 even 20% of the dems would've stayed home or voted third party Parties cater to their bases, and putting yourself out there as an unreliable voting bloc is exactly how you get your demands ignored. > The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb It's not incredibly dumb, it's simple mathematical reality. This doesn't change unless the first past the post system changes. Why do you think the GOP backs the Green Party? | | |
| ▲ | SmirkingRevenge 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Parties cater to their bases, and putting yourself out there as an unreliable voting bloc is exactly how you get your demands ignored. I wish more people understood this. Instead, there's this mistaken notion that you give away leverage by supplying votes. It's literally the opposite. Your coalition will have more influence and leverage within a party by supplying votes, not withholding them. | | |
| ▲ | mullingitover an hour ago | parent [-] | | Really the hack to get outsized influence in a party is to show up in the primaries. NYC has a DSA mayor because people used that one weird trick. The other important one is showing up in local elections. |
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| ▲ | zimpenfish 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 2024 [...] the DNC's continuous forcing of awful corpocrats with zero charisma would've become completely untenable and Trump would've been limited to one term. You mean the 2024 election cycle where incumbents all around the globe were beaten because the economic situation was strongly anti-incumbent? Are you positing that the US election was somehow a unique outlier and solely down to Harris being the Democrat candidate? Even though a swing of 115k votes would have handed the presidency to Harris instead? It sounds like you have a particular issue with the 2016 and 2024 elections and I'm wondering if there's something in common that might explain it... | | |
| ▲ | fugalfervor 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Democratic candidate, not "Democrat candidate". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_%28epithet%29?w... Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. People didn't want Trump in 2016, they wanted her. But he won the electoral college, He won the popular vote in 2024, but the tight margin in the electoral college suggests a democratically elected Democratic candidate (i.e. one selected by a primary, not one appointed by the sitting president) could have won instead. Other potential candidates were polling better than Harriss. I personally think Gretchen Whitmer could have successfully distanced herself from the Biden administration and defeated Trump. |
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| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | kgwxd 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Every time I've explained this I've gotten instantly downvoted Because it's dumb. People don't want to hear dumb ideas, or take the time to try and convince someone that would spend however long it took to type that, apparently multiple times, without realizing it. Throwing away votes will never be the reasonable thing to do. I know you don't want to hear that, because it's too painful for you to admit there's no simple answer. | | |
| ▲ | t-3 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Please, explain to me how voting for a candidate you don't like is not throwing away your vote, but voting for a candidate you support is. |
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| ▲ | dualvariable 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote. It shows the others that there's a voter there who can be convinced if catered to, if they select a better candidate. Tried that in 2000, voting for Nader as a protest vote against Clinton/Gore third way neoliberalism. I did that in a state where the electoral votes for Dems were 100% safe. Still just got blamed for Bush and there was zero self-reflection on the part of the Democratic Party. ... I would urge everyone to stop fixating on the Presidential vote as the only fight to win and everything being win/lose based on that outcome. If the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the House exceeds 50% of Democrats in the House, then we can start thinking about a world where e.g. AOC might be the speaker of the House rather than Nancy Pelosi. > It's a symptom of the terminal disease which has infected all layers of American society and has gotten it to where it's at: short-termism. Everyone just looks at the next quarter, the next election. Yeah, and the Office of the President is 4-8 years and is just more short-termism, along with individualism / cult of personality / CEO-leadership. If you want to make lasting change in the DNC, start by flipping more and more House seats to progressive from neoliberal. | | |
| ▲ | DrewADesign 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The legislative seats are barely more malleable than the executive ones, and they’re a lot cheaper to buy off. Even with grassroots efforts to elect local candidates and move them up, it takes a perfect storm to actually get someone that’s even modestly different than the empty suits that largely fill those seats already. I have zero faith in this system to execute anything other than purchased policy agendas, or empower any more than a tiny symbolic collection of people who oppose them… just enough to give the illusion of agency and stop any real organizing. I have no idea what could possibly break this pattern. | | |
| ▲ | dualvariable 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The Republicans were successful with the Tea Party in taking over the House and the Presidency, that's a model which I'd argue is really proven to work in our two party system because we all just literally watched it play out in real-time. Arguing against that, probably comes from a cynical neoliberal perspective where the Democratic Party can't change because the argument assumes that the Democratic Party can't change. And the alternative is definitely outright fascism and the suspension of Democracy. They've told us what they're planning on doing, just like we knew they wanted to get rid of Roe vs. Wade, we just accepted the lies about it being settled law and a political football. If you're not willing to vote against that, then you're comfortably middle class and don't think you'll be one of the ones that are going to be hurt. I've voted against Trump 3 times and threw money behind trying to get Sanders the nomination in 2020 instead of Biden, so when all the horrible stuff has been going down this term I don't have to tie myself in knots with rationalizations about my actions. |
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| ▲ | amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You are saying the candidates are forced on us by someone else. But that's just wrong, we choose the candidates. Anybody can run, there is no secret cabal that decides who can run and who can't. | | |
| ▲ | ipaddr 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Didn't happen last year when Kamila was selected by the leaders. But in normal years candidates are successful because of the amount of money they can raise. The more they can raise the more brainwashing ads they can buy. The non so secret cabal is the donor class. Anyone can run? You must meet requirements on age and how long you have lived in the US. You must pay fees and provide signatures for each state. If doing it through a party you have to meet their rules. Cost to get on most states ballots at a basic level is a million. You could do it for free if you dont want to appear on any ballots. | |
| ▲ | gs17 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The ideal is that anyone can run, but it's not that easy to just start an independent campaign that has a decent chance of winning. Local races are the most realistic "anyone can run" arena, but once you need a lot of travel and logistics in a large region, you either need a lot of your own resources or the support of an existing large political organization. | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You do know the former head of the DNC was forced to retire after the leaked emails outed her, and basically all of the top of the DNC, extensively conspiring against Sanders in favor of Clinton? [1] You're right the cabal isn't secret - it's literally the DNC, and who they want to win is who will win, one way or the other. Just reading over that source - it's insane how blatant these people can be: "In May 2016, MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski accused the DNC of bias against the Sanders campaign and called on Wasserman Schultz to step down. Wasserman Schultz was upset at the negative media coverage of her actions, and she emailed the political director of NBC News, Chuck Todd, that such coverage of her "must stop". Describing the coverage as the "LAST straw", she ordered the DNC's communications director to call MSNBC president Phil Griffin to demand an apology from Brzezinski." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi... | | |
| ▲ | cyberax 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I mean, why wouldn't they? Bernie is not a Democrat, he's independent. Winning elections for their own party is the whole reason DNC exists. | |
| ▲ | SmirkingRevenge 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A primary role of political parties has traditionally been to filter candidates. It's literally their raison d'etre Sanders wasn't even a Democrat. He switched solely to run in the primary. It's neither scandalous nor surprising that the DNC would try to put up barriers between him and the nomination. If the RNC had done it's job, Trump would never have been allowed into the primary in the first place. | | |
| ▲ | JoshTriplett 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > A primary role of political parties has traditionally been to filter candidates. It's literally their raison d'etre Yes, that's exactly why they shouldn't exist. |
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| ▲ | SmirkingRevenge 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The trend has been going that direction, where low turnout elections favor Ds and high turnout favors Rs. But only kind of... that holds when Trump is on the ballot. Trump seems to activate a segment of low-info, low-propensity voters who stay home when their guy isn't on the ballot. Things will probably get scrambled again once Trump is gone though. And don't discount protests. It's crucially important to have big public and forceful displays of united opposition. The regime is unlikely to be toppled by protests, but they will weaken it. That really matters. In an authoritarian take-over institutions are the front-lines, not the masses. Think colleges, media, industry, courts, legal firms, local governments, etc. The dilemma those institutions will face is to follow rule-of-law or submit to authoritarian corruption. Authoritarians win when those institutions decide it's safer to submit than it is to follow the law. And when institutions (and the people within them) feel like they are twisting in the wind alone and nobody cares, they are more likely to buckle. Protest movements help reinforce the rule-of-law side of that calculation. (The rise and fall of Orban is a great lesson on all of this) Also see: https://essayx.substack.com/p/the-35-percent-rule-just-made-... |
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| ▲ | sosomoxie 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Definitely not, you may, at best, shift the problems to someone else. Both of "our" political parties are beyond redemption and cannot be reformed (if they were very not terrible in the first place). The only thing that will change outcomes is direct action and I'm including limitless scaling of that including the armed defense of your ideals. |
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| ▲ | esikich 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Violence. But people are still pretty comfortable so here we sit. | |
| ▲ | vitally3643 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Eat the rich. Publicly execute billionaires and politicians. Exert The People's unlimited authority over their own government and instil the fear of god into anyone who stands in the way. | |
| ▲ | dmboyd 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The actual effective strategy is “tit for tat” | |
| ▲ | otikik 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Making the wealthy scared | |
| ▲ | jrflowers an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | The other party needs to run better candidates. It’s their job to drive voter turnout in their favor (not internet argument warriors) and they’ve lost two out of the last three elections by sabotaging their own primaries and doing “Our candidate isn’t good but at least they’re not a got dang cheeto!!” campaigns. “Less bad doesn’t have to mean good” is a mantra with a current 67% loss rate, soon to be 75%, and then 80% four years after that if they keep trying it. And they’ll keep blaming the voters that they failed every time. | | |
| ▲ | bobthepanda an hour ago | parent [-] | | There also needs to be, probably, more party diversity. The fact that the current president has such a stranglehold over their party is pretty unprecedented; normally, the big tent parties have lots of little camps with power bases that somewhat insulate independence, whether that be on an issue or regional level. It's kind of odd that the disenfranchised members of that party have not started up their own party. Also, I think the current gerrymandering race to the bottom has pretty clearly demonstrated the need for a better system of voting and district mapping. The House elections are already regulated by congressional act, not by the constitution. |
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| ▲ | drnick1 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [flagged] | |
| ▲ | bilbo0s 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm pretty sure they didn't think this through in a comprehensive fashion. Because making it esy to find all the rich people just seems like a very bad idea given the direction things are going. When it was broad, the only thing you could do was locate, say, large minority groups. Blacks and latinos for instance. And even that led to problems. I can't imagine what will happen when we can drill down and tease out immigrants from citizens. Gay from straight. Rich from well to do. And so on. | | |
| ▲ | giancarlostoro 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Do you really need the census to find people of specific demographics in 2026? Pretty sure I can go up to anyone in any state and ask where all the Puerto Ricans live and get an answer (in many cases I'm sure I'll get stared at like I'm crazy, but that's still an answer). I know because my parents moved to predominantly Hispanic parts of Florida before fully settling down where we landed, I REALLY doubt they stopped to pull up census data to decide where to find Hispanics / Puerto Ricans in Florida. You can talk to any local of any area and figure out which areas are a specific nationality without census data. |
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| ▲ | joe_mamba 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >Remember “leftist “ and transgender activists are terrorists now. Have they maybe thought about IDK, NOT committing terrorist acts if they don't like being labeled as terrorists? Like NOT shooting people in the neck with a sniper rifle or NOT throwing pipe bombs at their political opposition simply because they don't like what they're saying? It's pretty easy to NOT be a terrorist. Just stop trying to kill people. | | |
| ▲ | evilsmurf 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Bit of a broad brush to be painting with. | | |
| ▲ | joe_mamba 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | There's the person who shot CK, and then there's the millions who vocally supported him for doing it (including on HN that dang had to intervene). Same people are day in day out making death threats to this day. Just check blue sky. Yes, if you make death threats and call to violence then you are a terrorist sympathizer. | | |
| ▲ | peddling-brink an hour ago | parent [-] | | Good thing that’s been the only act of political violence in America since 2024, otherwise there might be alternative viewpoints. |
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| ▲ | newZWhoDis 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Does anyone actually believe this crap? You think the census is what the government would use to mass identify and imprison people, not the NSA database(s)? You think homeland security, or the FBI, or any other alphabet agency doesn't already have access to a giant list of people? Think about what meta knows about everyone, or Google. You do realize that the US gov has read access to their core databases right? "The census" has absolutely no bearing on any of that which you're worried about. It's just shocking the level of ignorance that gets upvoted in the comments here now. | | |
| ▲ | falsemyrmidon 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You think they wouldn't use every tool available to then, including the census data? | | |
| ▲ | asdff 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The census data is probably too stale in most cases to really act on in the way people expect. They used it in the 1940s because that was all they really had. But today it would be stupid to use when you already have backdoors into cell and internet service. |
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| ▲ | awesomeMilou 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah okay fair, I was about to post a knee jerk reaction, but it's well known that the US government can obtain higher quality data by just simply buying it from the public market. | |
| ▲ | ShinyLeftPad 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Think about what meta knows about everyone, or Google. Not everybody uses it and not everybody who uses it uses it naively enough to give access to useful identity info. What's shocking is how people keep finding excuses. "what about Meta" is not one | | |
| ▲ | asdff 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Forget meta. Your cell service providor also gives data to three letter agencies. Your bank does too. Your utility companies. Every thing or concept you might engage with will probably hand over data to three letter agencies. You post on HN after all, I'm sure they do it here too. | | |
| ▲ | ShinyLeftPad 39 minutes ago | parent [-] | | my bank and cell provider and utility company don't ask for my race anyway let's stop whatabouting:) we are talking about census |
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| ▲ | esseph 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Does anyone actually believe this crap? > You think the census is what the government would use to mass identify and imprison people, not the NSA database(s)? I think, and history shows, they would use the tools at their disposal. Example: https://stateline.org/2026/01/20/ice-is-using-medicaid-data-... | | |
| ▲ | asdff 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That isn't the census. Census data is stale. These data are not stale. If you no longer qualify for medicaid you need to update medicaid office within 10 days for example. |
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| ▲ | kgwxd 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They haven't done a single thing without malicious intent. Go back and find whatever else you've defended in the past, and look at the results instead of the stated reason/goal for doing them. They won't match. They'll be opposites. You'll rationalize or shift blame, of course. But maybe this time, something decent will get through. | |
| ▲ | willmadden 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm not sure why your comment is grayed out. Cell tower data, credit bureau integration, social media scraping, palantir, smart home device surveillance, DNA database exploitation, facial recognition networks, tax, payroll, passport, visa, medicare/medicaid, immigrations and customs databases and many more... The census is a historical relic used to jerrymander congressional seats, and that's about it. | | |
| ▲ | everforward 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Census data provides a reliable source to build off of, which makes joining between data sets more reliable. A lot of what you're talking about would be partial prints of an identity that have to be joined up with others to give reliable data. Eg > Cell tower data That's just going to get you a subscriber and device ID, unless you're talking about going deep packet inspection and parsing the contents of the packets. You could, but that's a lot of effort to get something the census can hand you for free. > credit bureau integration Notoriously unreliable and identities for the purpose of credit get stolen constantly. The easiest way to clean that is against known-good info, like the census. > social media scraping Half the profiles are fake, also not reliable data unless you clean it up. Again, census data makes it very easy to cut out profiles that don't match a real person. > tax, payroll These are probably fairly reliable, although they usually won't tell you about a person's demographics. > passport, visa, medicare/medicaid, immigrations and customs databases There's an enormous part of the population that won't appear in these at all. The huge part of the country that's "working poor" but not poor enough for Medicaid probably aren't traveling internationally. I wouldn't be surprised if half the country doesn't appear in any of these. The census has value in that it contains a huge depth of information, is tied with your identity, citizens are compelled by law to answer so even the privacy folks have to respond and lying on it is a crime (enforcement is probably non-existent, though). I'm sure that can all be reconstructed to some level of accuracy given sufficient effort, but that's a lot harder and requires a ton more coordination than "SELECT * FROM census_data WHERE ..." | | |
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| ▲ | FrustratedMonky 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I have to agree. I'd like Census data to be private, but the cat is out of the bag. I'm all for keeping all of this data private. But to think it isn't already available is a bit 'head in sand'. Maybe put laws in place for 'general' privacy across all data, before getting too inflamed about Census in particular. | |
| ▲ | sieabahlpark 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [dead] | |
| ▲ | smrtinsert 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Even at a quick glance this doesn't make any sense. The census is literally how they get the data. Where else would it come from? Drones? Every computer being hacked Michael Bay style? | | |
| ▲ | cj 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Data mining companies? Don’t forget there’s an entire industry that exists solely for this purpose. | | |
| ▲ | kajman 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't work in this industry so I don't know their secret sauce, but I would be surprised if census data is not used as a baseline for what they're selling. It doesn't make sense to not want to use it if your next best sources are relying on everyone in the household having an app that sells their location to your network constantly. I see outdated data about me on the public versions of these sites all the time, so I know they don't have omniscience. | | |
| ▲ | esseph 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It is probably not a baseline for what they're selling. https://www.census.gov/about/history/bureau-history/agency-h... > Title 13 provides the following protections to individuals and businesses: > Private information is never published. It is against the law to disclose or publish any private information that identifies an individual or business such, including names, addresses (including GPS coordinates), Social Security Numbers, and telephone numbers. > The Census Bureau collects information to produce statistics. Personal information cannot be used against respondents by any government agency or court. > Census Bureau employees are sworn to protect confidentiality. People sworn to uphold Title 13 are legally required to maintain the confidentiality of your data. Every person with access to your data is sworn for life to protect your information and understands that the penalties for violating this law are applicable for a lifetime.
Violating the law is a serious federal crime. Anyone who violates this law will face severe penalties, including a federal prison sentence of up to five years, a fine of up to $250,000, or both. | | |
| ▲ | stackskipton 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I worked for Data company for a year. We absolutely used Census and ACS as baselines and checks. In fact, there was some talk about getting rid of ACS in Congress and we got emails about "EMAIL YOUR CONGRESSIONAL PERSON, DEMAND ACS STAY. Here are talking points." | |
| ▲ | kajman 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I am indeed sworn to not reveal lots of data I knocked on doors for. My memory isn't that good, especially compared to the database it went into, anyway. I hope it's not a baseline for individual records, but my assumption was that the census data would be pretty useful as a baseline for aggregate information, especially when it comes to comparing to private sets they're working with. |
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| ▲ | SmirkingRevenge 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You’d be surprised how bad/incomplete the data usually is and how much work it takes to make those datasets really useful or reliable. That’s one reason Xoom Info was able to sell for a billion dollars and even their data has a lot of junk Having well curated detailed census data would be a major boon for the data brokers |
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| ▲ | throwawa1 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Disenfranchise who? Something I find interesting is that Europe and the United States are experiencing the largest migration in human history yet no one talks about this. Taking a step back, looking at it from a systems perspective, the migrations are working as planned. Designed to subvert Democracy. What does it mean to have a vote when you import 10 new voters who disagree with you? | | |
| ▲ | airstrike 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | How do you get the idea that migration is "planned"? You've lost the plot entirely | | |
| ▲ | ptidhomme 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Someone must be funding the NGOs organizing it all. | | |
| ▲ | airstrike 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | George Soros, probably | | |
| ▲ | mantas an hour ago | parent [-] | | I wouldn’t be surprised looking at his historical track record of funding NGOs with specific angles and what he said. |
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| ▲ | Dig1t an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The UN literally has a document on their website called "Replacement migration : is it a solution to declining and ageing populations?" >https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/412547?v=pdf You can find dozens of clips of politicians and billionaires also talking about the need to replace the low fertility population with immigration. | | |
| ▲ | lkjdsklf a minute ago | parent [-] | | Except that has nothing to do with voting which is the claim that was being made |
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| ▲ | vitalyan1234 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [dead] | |
| ▲ | throwawa1 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | One example is HIAS who runs a fully staffed Darién Gap facility. As soon as there is a friendly administration to mass migration - they just flip a switch and we will have 10 millions of migrants. I don't want to come across as MAGA, because I am a non voter - the Republicans fuel the fire with forever wars. Its really two sides of the same coin. Companies benefit, because when there is no social cohesion workers are less likely to Unionize. | | |
| ▲ | cyberax 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | "Tens of millions"? Really? Even if we take 20 million, that's 75% of the total population of Venezuela or half of the population of Colombia. There simply are not enough people in South America for these kinds of numbers. | | |
| ▲ | Dig1t an hour ago | parent [-] | | Chuck Schumer: >“We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants – the Dreamers and all of them, because our ultimate goal is to help the Dreamers but [also] to get a path to citizenship for all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here,” Chuck Schumer, who is massively understating the number of illegals here, puts it at at least 11M. So yeah tens of millions is a realistic ballpark. |
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| ▲ | LPisGood 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | As planned by whom? | | |
| ▲ | throwawa1 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The Epstein class. Bankers, Zionists who lost their civilization and Temple 2000 years ago: A good google search to view art owned by one family: "Artist funded by de Rothschild's depicts racial violence and rape themes" | | |
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| ▲ | youngtaff 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Immigrants don’t get a vote in many countries For example Europeans were excluded from the Brexit vote | | |
| ▲ | Dig1t an hour ago | parent [-] | | Voting in these countries takes place largely along ethnic lines. Go look at maps of "if only X demographic voted", there is a clear incentive for certain parties to import people just because changing the ethnic makeup of the country will give them political power (immigrants have kids who are citizens and will vote along their ethnic lines). Additionally there are efforts to naturalize refugees and illegals: Chuck Schumer: "We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants – the Dreamers and all of them, because our ultimate goal is to help the Dreamers but [also] to get a path to citizenship for all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here" "Path to citizenship" here implies that he wants them to be able to vote. https://cis.org/Arthur/Schumer-Calls-DREAM-Amnesty |
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| ▲ | watwut 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 1.) Migration is constant and big topic. 2.) Democracy happens to be destroyed by local far right movements, composed of people who were there for years and did not migrated anywhere. The extend of foreign destruction is Vance trying to destroy democracy in Europe openly, Putin doing it secretly and Musk openly enciting pogroms. None of them immigrated to EU. | | |
| ▲ | mantas an hour ago | parent [-] | | Mainstream parties could take a hard stance on immigration and destroy „far right movements“ overnight. But somehow they are not interested in saving the democracy, instead they prefer to ignore hot topics and pretend they don’t exist. Hmmm, maybe it is this ignorance destroying the democracy? | | |
| ▲ | watwut an hour ago | parent [-] | | > Mainstream parties could take a hard stance on immigration and destroy „far right movements“ overnight. No they would not. It would just empower far right to make further demands as everything shifted toward them. And you can even see it practically, each time mainstream parties move toward right, far right becomes stronger. Meanwhile, anti-far-right voters end up without anyone to vote for. Becoming far right yourself does not cure far right, it makes far right stronger. Far right voters wont vote for you, why would they? And voting for you achieves nothing, you wont oppose far right anyway. > Hmmm, maybe it is this ignorance destroying the democracy? No, it is far right who is openly trying to destroy democracy. And helping them wont save the democracy. Blaming mainstream or left for what far-right does also does not help democracy. |
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