US Election system v. Australia

[Delarage]

I was talking with people at work today about our need for election reform in this country. It's crazy how "democracy" is pretty much supposed to be our thing---and how messed up it looks every 4 years.

Voting is compulsory in Australia, so there's no need for scientific GOTV operations.

And the voting process is the same everywhere there. On a Saturday.

And, as the article below notes, another nice addition would be a national popular vote.

Not sure if they use ranked-choice voting, but that would be another nice addition that would lessen the potential horror of voting for a 3rd party candidate (like voting for Nader and ending up with Bush). And getting rid of gerrymandering would force people to moderate and work together more.

RE: GOTV:

We're talking huge amounts of sophisticated statistics and data, opening store fronts and down to the "neighbourhood level", literally knocking on people's front doors to remind them to vote, organising buses to get them to polling stations.

"It's difficult for Australians to envisage what that looks like," Professor Jackman said.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-03/us-election-vs-australian-election/7968490

[beachbumbob]

1. We have our system and that's set by constitution and comparing

to Australia is plain silly.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

3. I do not think it is silly to compare and also to consider improvements.

[Enoki33]

2. Explains why an Australian friend jokes we have auctions here.

[Delarage]

4. That brings up another point!

Campaign finance rules

We have a lot of work to do here to become a paragon of democracy. The founding fathers must be rolling in their graves....

[Thyla]

5. As an Australian I can confirm a few things

Yes, voting is compulsory. You can never register in the first place but to be honest it's not really a issue as pretty much everyone does register.
I used to be against this mainly because I don't like being told I have to do anything, I have softened my stance these days as I realize it is actually a good thing to have total input.
I do feel though that it does create a sense of voter disengagement.

And yeah, voting on a Saturday. Seems crazy to do it any other day no matter the excuse. Plus we have sausages so that is nice.

Ranked voting too is in place and I have a love/hate relationship with it.
In theory it's a good thing and can give smaller third parties more of a chance.
However it bugs me that you may have a choice of say 6 candidates as an example, but 3 of them are racist cockwombles. Now how the heck is one supposed to rank which one is better than the other.
Best case scenario is it has absolutely zero effect on the vote and you just feel dirty after, worse case you live in a really crappy electorate with questionable public voting habits.

It can, but rarely lead to the candidate who secured the most first place votes not being declared the winner due to second place preferences.

Also here is where the voter apathy kicks in, while you have a choice to individually rank the candidates using your own free thought you also have a choice of following your party of choices preferred ranking which last time I checked well over 80 percent do. Personally I really dislike that and would do away with party preferences altogether as I feel if people had to choose themselves it could change quite a lot.

Finally it's all paper votes, this is a good thing. Not sure why you'd use any other method. Also did I mention the sausages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_sausage

[Delarage]

6. Very interesting link!

I've been to Australia a couple times and I have some friends of friends from Australia but we never really dove into the election system.

I had to confirm that vegan sausages are available before I endorsed the "Democracy Sausages" (they are in places)

I'm trying to weigh the concern about voter disengagement due to compulsory voting versus a small minority (us & the Trump flag truckers) getting all fired up and trying to drag people to the polls, knock on doors, spend lots of money, etc.....all the while a large percentage of Americans couldn't give a shit / don't know shit.

I was hoping ranked choice voting would take out Susan Collins. It didn't seem to work there so still not sure about its effectiveness.

And no political parties might be a good thing. Either that or more real viable parties, since not everyone agrees on all issues, even within parties. Just having two makes people make hard hard choices.

This is all in an ideal world of course; we would do well to just eliminate voter suppression, gerrymandering, and foreign interference. We could also use a healthy dose of campaign finance reform.

[Thyla]

7. I wonder how many Aussies really understand the election system there

I know for a fact it´d be of little use asking my parents to explain it. But they would have their personal choice and stick by it.

For me I don´t feel the disengagement is particularly from the compulsory thing entirely, it more comes down to the ranked voting and failure to utilize your own choices. For example you turn up on voting day, usually you know who you want to vote for so you take an ´How to Vote´ card from your preferred candidate and then rank your votes down the list following the party line. Overwhelmingly that is the way most Aussies vote instead of taking the time to really understand who is on the ballot and just why you may want to put some people below others. It´s even worse in the senate as there are more options so people naturally take the lazy way out.
Maybe I over think it but that is just me.

I´m not sold on ranked voting but it does seem to be a good fit for a parliamentary system where there are more than just 2 parties in play.
I think having more options keeps the main parties more in line, they neither stray too far left or right. AT least in Oz anyway.

I would guess these days there are more vegan options or their may be a bake sale or something like that too. It´s just a nice quirk to election day and profits generally go back to the local community or charity so that is good too.

I do get that it´s vastly different in the US and yeah your right, never thoughgt about the amount of money that is spent on just campaigning to get people to actually vote. Normally I look at the money spent on the actual campaigns and think wow, we don´t do that either. Your last two sentences are really something seemingly unique to the US and I would as an outsider, hesitantly say they could all do with being reformed.

Fingers crossed Joe and the rest of the party can start to repair things.

[BSdetect]

8. And we have plenty of polling stations on election day.

Mail in voting is easy too.

Electoral boundaries are not gerrymandered as they often are here.