The replies here arguing we should publish it all are wild in the worst kind of first-order thinking way.

It’s a census: it just asks questions.

If you start publishing and weaponizing the data against people with various attributes, they’ll just lie or not answer. And then you are left with worse than nothing: bad data people try to act on.

You first gather the data while people don't know or care. Then you weaponize it later. It happened at least once not long ago in another country, seems not overreaction to be concerned about it

It happened a year ago in this country, with IRS sharing data with ICE (breaking a longstanding policy of keeping taxpayer data private within the government).

If this is a Nazi reference, Census data was used to send people to concentration camps here during the same era. Less awful than death camps, at least.

The US Government is the entity that weaponizes the data. The most obvious example is the Census Bureau compiling lists of people of Japanese descent to imprison during WWII. That's just the most obvious one that I know of without looking up more.

The real push for this now is to form lists of people to disenfranchise.

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

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.

Why would a conservative want to pretend that? When was the last time you actually talked to one?

What an utterly ludicrous thing to say.

Those "conservative circles" don't exist anymore - if they ever. MAGA ate them, chew them and spit them.

MAGA is conservatism. Political factions evolve over time.

It's not the entirety of conservatism, however the Tea Party evolved into MAGA and got what they wanted. Generalisations lead to fallacies, have a nice day.

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).

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.

Oh he is, but the “swamp” he was talking about the entire time is impartial civil service.

What they’re doing to people at the front lines of our government is very sinister and intentional. They’re using a whole host of (legally dubious or plainly illegal) methods to remove lifelong experienced workers with expertise in their field and replacing them with political appointees.

It is the purest form of anti-intellectualism as policy. They don’t want civil service to have the correct answer - they want it to have the answer that matches the ideology they want.

>Trump was never ever going to drain the swamp.

Doesn't matter for the point of the argument, he was elected on that promise, and others, that he eventually broke.

If you want to argue the problem is he got "assimilated" then you have to argue he originally would have made a real attempt to fulfill the promise. My assessment is: no way.

It was so transparent that it was going to happen, I really question if anyone legitimately believed it.

Might as well have literally voted for the fox to be in charge of the hen house. ‘Oh no, but they promised they wouldn’t do that!’

If only there had been clues he might be a liar... Really, it was completely unexpected, he used to be so honest.

But a count of what?

A count of people.

All people or citizen people?

Population in a city?

Wouldnt that hurt the conservative cause though?

Count of people - brown people removed = success

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

Canada also did this to its Japanese

Interesting to see this downvoted. The mechanism was different - not a tax scheme, but rather the Canadian government directly liquidated their property and put them into camps.

> Canadian government directly liquidated their property and put them into camps.

While the mechanism was different that was what _effectively_ happened to US Japanese people, too. The taxes part is more like a separate mechanism of discrimination against anyone "new" which "happened" to overlap with this (and tbh. I have no idea to which degree this overlap was intentional or just "tolerated").

--

But if I have to guess why someone down voted the comment (not me) ti might be because it feels a bit like trying to downplaying how bad and against the values the US claimed it stood for, this was. And doing so by pointing at some random other country and saying "they also did bad things so we aren't that bad" which is a really bad argument.

Just because others also have done bad things doesn't mean anything is less bad, or more reasonable or more excusable.

I mean a lot of countries did some pretty bad things in the past, especially the past 200 years.

When I post about stuff like that it's isn't about saying "hey they are bad". It's more because I think people from countries should be aware about all the bad stuff their country did/was done in their country. So that they can learn from this.

But sadly most countries try to bury most mistake, atrocities, large scale crimes etc. in history or at least exclude them from anything thought proactively, e.g. in school. And the only way to know about them is to go looking for them by yourself in your free time. Which doesn't work well even if you care as it's hard to learn what you don't know you don't know.

Like as a random example the tulsa race massacre should be required teaching in middle school with focus on the dynamics which lead to a mob of people including people in governing positions to thinking it is okay to try to lynch a whole district (more or less, simplified).

Or e.g. in Canada there is the genocide of indigenous people (which by now might be through about in school, not sure).

Or in Germany the genocide against Jews (which is thought a lot in middle school as required teaching material).

Or the crimes Japan committed against China in WW2 and before (which they still bury very deeply AFIK).

Or a pretty long list of atrocities in China science 1900.

The important part here isn't teaching "that" it happened, but "why/how" it happened, so that if stuff goes in the same bad direction again people realize it and (hopefully) stop it.

If we don't learn from the past I really don't know how humans as a species expect to not accidentally collectively press Alt+F4, given the increasingly higher stacks/larger powers involved.

No, I don’t mean to downplay - it was horrific and exploitative terror in both countries with terrible lasting effects. I just mentioned it because it’s less well known than what America did and because even Canadians might know what their country did to indigenous populations but not to its own citizens in this case (over 90% of Japanese in the country were sent to camps and most of them were Canadian citizens). Canadians sometimes forget the demonstrated capacity for their own country to do violence on its own people (not to downplay indigenous issues either of course, which are better understood), with a smugness about how much worse American government behaves.

Databases are neutral until someone asks them for a list.

Remember “leftist “ and transgender activists are terrorists now.

First they came for…

What's the actual antidote to this? 5calls.org?

Voting and getting everyone you know to vote

And civically engaging. Less than a fifth of voters regularly contact their electeds.

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.”).

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.

> a fairly narrow class of credentialed bureaucrats, entry into which is gatekept by elite universities and professional organizations.

Now take the next step: Explicitly state, and then defend, your implied premise, namely that it's bad to be governed by people who, from education and experience, have come to know something about their subject areas — and that we should be happy to invite the ignorant, the misguided, and the charlatan to exercise power and authority.

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.

Your model doesn’t eliminate politics, it just entrenches the particular politics of the kind of people who go to T10 schools then get jobs as division heads at federal agencies.[1]

There is no such thing as “following the rules” in an apolitical way. Congress writes very broad laws, and the executive branch exercises a tremendous amount of discretion in enforcing and executing those laws. The founders understood that, and their solution to the problem was frequent elections, not the fiction of neutral, apolitical credentialed bureaucrats.

[1] A good example of this is the bank bailouts in the first Obama administration. Even though the voters were outraged at Wall Street, Obama followed the bailout strategy developed by Wall Street. He replaced Hank Paulson (Goldman Sachs) with Tim Geithner (NY Fed then private equity), but everyone underneath stayed the same and the bailout strategy stayed the same.

It's not a fiction. People do their jobs even if they don't like the current or past President. I'm sure you can pull out a long list of people who didn't, but unless you name everybody, it simply isn't a fiction. My claim isn't bureaucrats are always apolitical, it's that they mostly are. Showing that some aren't doesn't show that they mostly are.

Take the executive assistant to the American diplomat to, say, Sweden. They file paperwork and schedule appointments for the diplomat. Their role is operational. Logistics stuff. Coordinating what goes where. Setup a meeting between three very important busy people and juggle their calendars. Does that position really need to be someone we vote for? They do operations, not make policy.

‘Because I say so’? Really?

I understand this argument that by establishing these agencies with career technocrats, you are giving them agency to make up rules in a bubble. with a revolving door and active steering by invested parties. it is in fact antidemocratic. net neutrality shouldn't be a rule published by the FCC, but a serious policy issue that gets chewed up by the congressional sausage machine.

what I don't understand is the remedy you seem to support makes these decisions autocratically, with more external steering by the ostensibly regulated parties. instead of a bunch of little independent fiefdoms with hysteresis and oversight, now we have a giant unitary federal fiefdom, and the only democratic input is a red or blue ever 4 years, if that.

maybe you could put some framing about how you think federal enivironmental/financial/communications/health/housing policy should be managed? because I don't see this shift as being in any way more empowering to the taxpayers.

I think we should eliminate the filibuster so Congress can do actual policymaking. Your example of net neutrality is a great one. Congress should be doing this, perhaps based on recommendations from the executive agencies. There’s thousands of examples of that, such as EPA regulation of CO2 emissions. The executive branch has way too much discretionary authority, especially in the area of rule making.

But I also think that, whatever discretion has been allocated to the executive, it should be exercised by the President and political appointees who are directly accountable to voters. I want Democrats to emulate what Trump did in 2024: get on stage with their proposed appointees to key positions, who can speak about what they want to do in particular areas. The executive runs a huge fraction of the government, and voters should get to see who is going to be in charge. And once they vote, their vote should be effective. These appointees should actually be able to make the big changes they promise.

I think bureaucrats that can’t be voted out are a bigger risk than anything else. You raise the concern about steering by regulated entities, but that happens with bureaucrats too. The department heads of these agencies have a revolving door relationship with the regulated agencies. It’s just not out in the open.

The people in power now are doing everything they can to make that as hard as possible by any means necessary. Good luck.

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.

You are creating an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and not attempting to falsify it.

Why do you believe what you believe? What would be true if it were false? Is that a thinkable alternative? If not, do you really have a hypothesis, or do you have a political belief being presented in the guise of a claim of fact?

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 you still don't know which one it is -- it could even be both.

Not really. You can audit ballots and match their ballot signature to the registration signature.

In fact this is done regularly.

We know for a statistical fact that there is no meaningful amount of this type of fraud (unless you're also supposing that these people somehow also acquire a copy of each person's signature).

> 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.)

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.

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.)

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.

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.

You’re describing an attack that entails both hacking the SSN database, 1 to 50 of the state voter databases, then physically following mailmen around and stealing ballots…

I think he’s referencing the doge boys getting access to social security files and taking them

> If someone mails in my absentee ballot and I don’t complain, how do you detect that voter fraud?

You get followed up in an audit, if anyone asks. This happened like three million times in Arizona.

> there are currently many ways to vote illegally that don’t get detected

There are. None of the proposed plans limit them. (No county requires scanning and biometrically verifying passports. You could buy a wrapper on eBay and inkjet the pages in most counties.)

There are also lots of ways to blow up public buildings. We don’t require ID to enter DC because the frequency of the harm isn’t matched by the cost of enforcement.

We already handle all of that, comrade. Every corner case floating around your brain was floating around someone else's brain a long time ago. Most of this is covered in high school in the US, and it's all enforced by volunteers from across the political spectrum.

Our documented examples of voter fraud come from a time when in-person voting was the only option, again something we teach in school, while the modern concerns from security professionals focus almost entirely on electronic voting machines.

You have sign the ballot, and it gets checked.

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.

Okay so in this scenario, if this woman wanted to actually vote on behalf of these people, all she had to do was pay a bunch of people to register with her address, get 10, 30, 100, or 1000 ballots mailed to her address, then fill out all of those ballots and mail them in and hope no one noticed dozens or hundreds or thousands of ballots coming from an address that would clearly and directly implicate the person who lives at/otherwise controls that address?

And the trade off here is this person gets 10, 30, 100, or 1000 votes in a single county and at the minuscule risk of the rest of her life in prison?

(To be clear, this isn’t what DOJ is alleging, they alleged she was just collecting petition signatures, but I’m extrapolating out your proposed mechanism for actual voting)

>hope no one noticed dozens or hundreds or thousands of ballots coming from an address

So what? If it was illegal to register multiple voters at the same address then it could have been detected at the registration time.

>And the trade off here is this person gets 10, 30, 100, or 1000 votes in a single county and at the minuscule risk of the rest of her life in prison?

Did not you notice that this person has not been charged with voting with other people ballots (even though she was able and most likely did that) and only with paying to register? Such a charge would be very hard to stick.

> Did not you notice that this person has not been charged with voting with other people ballots (even though she was able and most likely did that) and only with paying to register? Such a charge would be very hard to stick.

Huh? There is literally no evidence or even allegation of that. The person was paid to collect petition signatures, so she fraudulently obtained petition signatures. Which obviously are way less closely tracked than actual votes.

> So what? If it was illegal to register multiple voters at the same address then it could have been detected at the registration time.

Well it's not illegal to register multiple voters at the same address, obviously. It's illegal to vote under someone else's name. A bunch of votes coming in from a single residence would be flagged. Should voter registrations from a single address get flagged? Sure! And they probably do! But as you say, that's not a crime. Voting fraudulently is, which is not even alleged here.

Not sure what you are doing now. You asked for a scheme, you got it and now are appearing to be saying that such a scheme would not work because people would get busted even though you admit yourself there would not be any evidence.

Here was my request:

> Can you describe the specific chain of events required to create a fraudulent vote that is "impossible" to detect?

You literally just described a scheme that is possible to detect in any meaningful amount. 10, 100, or 1000 ballots coming from a single address is, obviously, trivially detectable.

What...?

Virtually every type of fraud is first detected by detection of a nominally legal but abnormal behavior, then it's investigated to figure out whether fraud actually occurred. That would – obviously – be exactly how any voter fraud detection scheme works, but I guess you're saying that because the initially detected abnormality is not itself illegal, it wouldn't be investigated?

This is like saying "it's not illegal for all the numbers on your tax return to end in $xxxx.00 and $xxxx.50, so therefore tax fraud is undetectable by means of analyzing numerical patterns."

You seem very confused.

Here's how it's detected: "There are 1000 ballots from this one address that has never had more than 3 ballots sent from it. We should look it up in our GIS and tax records and see how many people reside there. We should also make sure that the affiliated registrations are fully documented as having individual residencies there from e.g. their drivers licenses or utility bills at time of registration."

Sorry but you are naive beyond words if you think voting systems don't flag even a dozen ballots sent to a single residential address, or you don't think there's any investigative capability to look further into flagged cases.

Which do you believe? There are only three options:

1. You believe that 1000 ballots sent to a single address will not be flagged

2. You believe that it would be flagged but not investigated

3. You believe it would be flagged and investigated, but not actually result in any prosecutable offense

"Sorry but you are naive beyond words" that made me actually chuckle, coming from you. I am really done with your fantasies, you obviously have no clue how voting registration works (you are not required to live at your registered address for example) and what "checks" are in place yet imagined yourself an authority on the subject. It's so ignorant that makes me think you have not voted in the US and project your home country system.

> even though the detection would not lead to charges

Didn't you cite a charging document upthread?

Yes I did, did you read what I cited upthread?

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.

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).

100% -- RCV is a super important part of this equation in the long run.

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

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.

> 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 people complain about it. If you were trying to make a change from some other status quo to that, it would be a significant impediment.

> 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.

Approval voting is the range compressed version of score voting. Instead of scoring each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10, it's score each candidate on a scale of 0 or 1. Use score voting and you can give your favorite candidate a different score than your second favorite without giving them the same score as your least favorite.

Both of them are still better than RCV.

> Approval voting is the range compressed version of score voting.

I'm not thrilled with score voting to begin with, and compressing it down doesn't change much.

> Use score voting and you can give your favorite candidate a different score than your second favorite without giving them the same score as your least favorite.

That doesn't solve my problem. Take exactly what I said before, but replace "check" with "give the maximum score to".

> Both of them are still better than RCV.

I don't see how.

> I'm not thrilled with score voting to begin with, and compressing it down doesn't change much.

Compressing it makes it slightly worse, but some people think it makes it easier to understand. I tend to think that's silly; people can understand "score each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10" perfectly well. But approval voting would still be a significant improvement over FPTP, and even over RCV.

> That doesn't solve my problem. Take exactly what I said before, but replace "check" with "give the maximum score to".

RCV doesn't solve that either, because it's subject to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. It's actually even worse, because it makes you give a lower rank (rather than an equal one) to your most favored candidate to prevent an even worse candidate from winning.

Suppose your favorite candidate is the first choice of 20% of the population, your second favorite is 25% and the two candidates you hate are at 25% and 30% respectively. RCV makes you give your top pick to the second candidate so they can beat one of the two candidates you hate and ensure the runoff isn't between both of the candidates you hate.

Meanwhile with score voting your favorite candidate might have won, because they were the first choice of only 20% but the second choice of everyone else, and then end up with an average score of e.g. 6 when all the others are at 4 and 5.

RCV tends to do the opposite of that. If you have two opposite extremists and a moderate, the moderate can get knocked out in the initial round and then you get a coin flip between the two opposite extremes, even if the moderate would win one-on-one against either of the extremes. Or, in a district that skews to one side, give the district to the other side, because the minority party makes it to the runoff with 40% of the vote, the majority party splits between two candidates each at ~30%, but then if the majority party's extremist goes to the runoff instead of its moderate, they could lose the runoff to the minority party's moderate and give the district to the minority party.

> Suppose your favorite candidate is the first choice of 20% of the population, your second favorite is 25% and the two candidates you hate are at 25% and 30% respectively. RCV makes you give your top pick to the second candidate so they can beat one of the two candidates you hate and ensure the runoff isn't between both of the candidates you hate.

Let's call those candidates A B X Y.

I don't see the issue. I vote my actual ranking, A is eliminated. If this scenario isn't super weirdly convoluted, more of those votes shift to B than X, so X is eliminated next. Now it's B versus Y. If I vote for B instead, the same thing happens and we also get B versus Y.

And what happens here in score voting could be basically anything. Not enough specifics.

> If you have two opposite extremists and a moderate, the moderate can get knocked out in the initial round and then you get a coin flip between the two opposite extremes, even if the moderate would win one-on-one against either of the extremes.

Yeah that's a real issue, and I'd want to use condorcet methods to fix that.

> Or, in a district that skews to one side, give the district to the other side, because the minority party makes it to the runoff with 40% of the vote, the majority party splits between two candidates each at ~30%, but then if the majority party's extremist goes to the runoff instead of its moderate, they could lose the runoff to the minority party's moderate and give the district to the minority party.

Meanwhile with approval or score voting, a lot of people pretend not to like the other party's moderate because they're trying to get their side to win and it gets really messy. Is there a need to have multiple candidates per party? If there is, a two stage election that picks party first and then picks probably-the-moderate is probably better than anything.

> If this scenario isn't super weirdly convoluted, more of those votes shift to B than X, so X is eliminated next.

It doesn't have to be that convoluted, all it takes is for the eliminated candidate to be a moderate so their votes go in two different directions. But you're right that I messed up that example; the percentages are wrong.

The problem case is when your second most favored candidate would otherwise be eliminated first and you need to prevent that by causing your most favored candidate to be eliminated instead, because the second best candidate has a better chance in the next round.

Suppose the candidates you dislike, X and Y, are the first choice of 40% and 25% of people respectively, and then A and B split the remainder evenly. X and Y are the two extremists -- on opposite sides of each other, with the moderates A and B in the middle. You favor A but A leans in the direction of X and B leans in the direction of Y.

If B is eliminated first then half of B's support goes A but half goes to Y, Y is still ahead of A and then A is eliminated next. If A -- your preferred candidate -- is eliminated first, half their support goes to B and the other half to X but Y gets nothing. Y then loses to B and the final round is X vs. B rather than X vs. Y. And the elimination of Y puts all their support behind B since X is the opposite extreme. But only if you rank B above A even though that's not what you'd have preferred.

> Yeah that's a real issue, and I'd want to use condorcet methods to fix that.

But now you're no longer using RCV/IRV. Score voting is a Condorcet method.

> Meanwhile with approval or score voting, a lot of people pretend not to like the other party's moderate because they're trying to get their side to win and it gets really messy.

Except that doesn't really help them because doing that also makes it more likely that their least favorite candidate wins, which is a significant incentive not to do it. The only reason to do that is if you're confident your favored candidate could only lose to your second choice, in which case it was really a two candidate race to begin with.

> Is there a need to have multiple candidates per party? If there is, a two stage election that picks party first and then picks probably-the-moderate is probably better than anything.

It doesn't matter if they're in the same party or not. If you're using a voting system that allows more than two parties to be viable then you'll have similar candidates running from similar parties. "Force the election to be one candidate from each of two major parties" is FPTP and it's terrible.

> A B X Y

It's very unlikely that the two candidates I hate are on opposite extremes and both popular.

> Score voting is a Condorcet method.

That gains it a point but there are much better methods. Ones where I don't feel the need to balance risk versus reward for candidates I moderately dislike. Then the guarantee of the pairwise winner coming out on top is actually using accurate information on what everyone wants.

> Except that doesn't really help them because doing that also makes it more likely that their least favorite candidate wins, which is a significant incentive not to do it. The only reason to do that is if you're confident your favored candidate could only lose to your second choice, in which case it was really a two candidate race to begin with.

If I'm moderately confident then I'm likely to do it despite the risk.

> It doesn't matter if they're in the same party or not.

The whole framing of the problem was that one of the candidates in the minority party wins. If there are four unrelated candidates that problem goes away. The more popular moderate won, not a big deal.

> It's very unlikely that the two candidates I hate are on opposite extremes and both popular.

It's easy to hate the candidate on the opposite extreme from the way you lean, so all this really requires is for the extremist on your side to be a corrupt populist who gets support by telling people the lies they want to hear or is paying off the right people to get favorable media coverage or valuable endorsements. Or is just more extreme than you can accept but you're in a district with some people who want that.

Notice also that neither of these candidates are the first choice of the majority. They just have enough support in a >2 candidate race to not be the first knocked out.

> Ones where I don't feel the need to balance risk versus reward for candidates I moderately dislike.

This is Arrow's Impossibility Theorem again. All of them do that, because in the rock-paper-scissors triangle where no candidate can beat both of the others, you then need something equivalent to a score to choose the winner. At which point degrading your second choice hurts them against both your first and third choice and whether or not you should do that is influenced by how likely you regard it that other voters will favor your first choice over your third but not your second.

It's also a dangerous game because the error bars on polls are huge and it's more often than not that the final results are very different than anybody's wild guess from the day before they started counting the votes.

> If I'm moderately confident then I'm likely to do it despite the risk.

Suppose your true ratings would be 10 for your most preferred candidate, 7 for the second best and 1 for the inhuman monster the opposing tribe somehow supports for no explicable reason. Polls say your first choice is expected to score ~5, your second choice ~6 and your vile enemy ~4, but all of these are plus or minus 2 points or more because polls are practically random number generators. What are you going to do?

You have the option to try to tank your second choice to give your first choice a better chance, but it's still a very real possibility that your first choice ends up at 4 and the hated enemy at 5.

> The whole framing of the problem was that one of the candidates in the minority party wins. If there are four unrelated candidates that problem goes away. The more popular moderate won, not a big deal.

It's still the same, and the minority party candidate isn't necessarily that much of a moderate, they're just not a far extremist.

Suppose it's California and a Republican, a Democrat and a member of the Green Party are in the race. The district is 40% Republican and under the old system correspondingly 60% Democrat, but in a system with more than two viable parties, it's 40% Republican, 29.9% Democrat and 30.1% Green.

If you hold that election with RCV and the Democrat gets knocked out first, the moderate Democrats (which, with the Green candidate in the race, was all of them) have to choose between a California Republican and a Green Party candidate who proudly wants to raise the gas tax to $8/gallon and pull out of NATO. More than a third of the moderate Democrats choose the Republican over that and under RCV that becomes a Republican seat.

The same race with score voting only does that if people vote the way you seem to think they would, which is exactly their incentive not to.

> This is Arrow's Impossibility Theorem again. All of them do that

They do not. There are voting methods where I feel they work well enough that I don't worry about strategy, and I don't worry about what threshold to use for approval, I just rank choices honestly and then I'm done.

> Suppose your true ratings would be 10 for your most preferred candidate, 7 for the second best and 1 for the inhuman monster the opposing tribe somehow supports for no explicable reason. Polls say your first choice is expected to score ~5, your second choice ~6 and your vile enemy ~4, but all of these are plus or minus 2 points or more because polls are practically random number generators. What are you going to do?

In this situation the strategy play is that I rate both of the first two at 10. I'm not risking #3 by being strategic, I'm risking that I get #2 when I could have gotten #1.

For the situation where I might strategically lower the score, it's when there's a 10, there's a 7, there's a 4, and there's a 1. Do I give the 4 an honest rating that might help them win over the candidates I like, or do I give them a 1 and pray really hard that neither of the two guys I hate win? It's a tough choice.

> Suppose it's California and a Republican, a Democrat and a member of the Green Party are in the race.

This is a totally different situation. In the last version there were two moderates and one of them won. It was fine. In this version there's one middle candidate and they lose. But we already did this scenario earlier. I said "Yeah that's a real issue, and I'd want to use condorcet methods to fix that." So not just an instant runoff, but keeping the ranking system.

RCV completely solves the “spoiler candidate” problem, which is a huge issue limiting choice and innovation in the two-party-dominated US. Approval Voting remains susceptible to spoilers.

In the US there are already people who complain that any election they lose must been “rigged”, including the current occupant of the White House. Choosing Approval Voting over RCV is not going to bring such people around; it’s rhetorical advantages are inconsequential.

No, approval voting effectively solves spoilers. For example, the Green Party can't be a spoiler for the Democratic Party as people who like both will simply vote for both. RCV has its own novel form of spoiler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_squeeze

The 2022 Alaska special election is a great example of RCV failing where approval voting wouldn't. And FairVote had the nerve to say it showed Alaskans understood and could use the system.

> Choosing Approval Voting over RCV is not going to bring such people around

It's a lot easier to claim the system is rigged when the voting system is much more complex in a way that most voters will not understand.

That site promotes range voting, and rather superficially dismisses approval voting: "Why Range Voting is Better than Approval Voting": https://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVapp.html

We've got MMP here in New Zealand, which is a fantastic improvement over what we had. However the list vote does give politicians some weird power.

Comment moderation is voting too.

> 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”

As a non-US-American, it is hard to understand for me why this is so hard to explain: the amount of #1 votes is rather a measure for the number of "ultra-fans" that the candidate has.

I think it should be rather easy to find an example in US-American pop culture of some C-list celebrity who has a respectable base of very devoted ultra-fans, but is hated by basically everybody else.

This example should make the fallacy obvious to most people.

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).

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).

That still requires the options. The next election for me is a primary, with only one race that both has more than one candidate and is competitive AFAIK. The two viable candidates (who will both move on regardless) are similar enough that I don't have a preference. WA has an interesting, non-partisan, top-two-move-on system for the non-presidential primaries.

Republicans in my state, TN, having eliminated the last Democrat congressional district, now want to close primaries, precisely to prevent strategic voting.

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.

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.

Protesting one weekend day every 6 months will obviously do nothing. The pressure needs to be non stop

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.

> 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.

> 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".

> 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),

Fully agreed, I vaguely implied this by talking about the "lesser of two evils" scenario but good to make it explicit.

> Which is why we really need approval voting,

Agreed here too, but it's not happening so people better wake up and realize that even without it, continuously voting for the "lesser of two evils" is the opposite of strategic.

> 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.

Approval voting would not end strategic voting.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Strategic_voti...

Yes, but it specifically ends the "vote for a candidate you dislike instead of the one you do like" type. Strategic approval voting is simply setting a higher/lower threshold on your approval. Your favorite is always included in your vote (assuming you like at least one candidate).

> Strategic approval voting is simply setting a higher/lower threshold on your approval.

The strategy of this is no simpler than the strategy of a single vote system.

> Yes, but it specifically ends the "vote for a candidate you dislike instead of the one you do like" type.

> Your favorite is always included in your vote (assuming you like at least one candidate).

Ranking candidates would express preferences more than approval voting. But you advocated approval voting solely.

> 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...

> Are you positing that the US election was somehow a unique outlier and solely down to Harris being the Democrat candidate?

There is never a sole factor. The problem by talking about 115k votes is, once again, not taking into account the strength of the opposition. The US losing in hockey to Canada by a tiny margin is not the same as losing to Spain by the same margin.

Ironically, in a sense you're only strengthening the point that an even moderately better candidate would've won.

> 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...

What a vile implication. Selectively ignoring my mention of Newsom in the exact same bucket. I'm wondering if you're a state-backed operator, that might explain the trying to rile things up through FUD.

I mentioned 2016 and 2024 because they lost, and the candidates were indeed awful.

> 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?

> Parties cater to their bases, and putting yourself out there as an unreliable voting bloc is exactly how you get your demands ignored.

Reality shows the exact opposite. Why do campaigns and candidates put an incredibly outsized effort into swing states? Those are the exact "unreliable voters". Yet they get the most attenton. In policies too, it's all about convincing those who otherwise might stay home or might swing. What you're saying doesn't reflect reality whatsoever.

> It's not incredibly dumb, it's simple mathematical reality.

This isn't an argument, or you struggled to read. It's not a wasted vote because of its secondary effects, as explained. Voting on someone who loses isn't a wasted vote.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

The Tea Party had the support of the Koch brothers, Fox News, the Heritage Foundation, et al. They had a VP puppet on the bill, Palin, almost immediately after their inception, despite McCain being a center-leaning Republican. It was not a grassroots movement. Make any unfounded assumption you like about my motivation, and construct and straw men you want between you and that reality, but it is reality. It was bought and paid for before anybody had even heard of it. The closest thing the democrats have seen to a national-scale grassroots political initiative was Sanders, and the DNC torpedoed it reflexively.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

The Kamala thing was unfortunate, but I'm not sure what else they could do. Biden bowed out too late to rerun the primaries, and the whole purpose of the vice president is to take over when the president can't perform any more.

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.

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...

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.

If somebody runs as a Democrat then they're running as a Democrat. At that point the entire point of democracy is that it should be up to the people to decide if he is true to the ideals of the party - and the preferred candidate, not the apparatchiks. In practice that is not what happens which makes the entire notion of democracy just farcical. On top of this the apparatchiks are often living in a bubble disconnected from society, which can lead to them regularly making self destructive decisions.

So for instance Sanders would almost certainly have beaten Trump in 2016 - the polls showed him ahead by double digit margins, whereas they had Clinton in for a very close election. Had the DNC listened to their own voters, the country would likely look very different today, and in a way far more favorable to DNC interests, at least if they even believe in their own platform.

> 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.

I don't know about that, but if they exist, they need to be stronger institutions that take more of an active role in picking/filtering candidates.

The introduction of the partisan primary has been an unmitigated disaster for our politics, by massively empowering the most zealous fringes within parties

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-...

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.

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.

Ironically, the way to change this is by voting. One election at a time, we can trend towards the better or worse.

We have to remove the power the current political duopoly has had for generations.

Fuck the Republicans. Fuck the Democrats. Rally behind a third-party candidate and blow up the establishment with your vote

Hell yeah. And disregard anyone who says you’re “wasting your vote” or “splitting the vote”; they’re part of the problem and their defeatist thinking will get us nowhere.

Not voting is much more insulting, by far.

Edit: "civic religion" aha. Sorry, I should have guessed you were trolling. Can't wait to see what kind of revolution you cook up.

Civil religions and in particular an American Civil religion, are a real thing[1]. Not sure if that’s what the guy meant however.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion

Huh. Thank you! I had no idea. Prior to your share, I would have lumped all that stuff into "culture formation".

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.

Conversely, I think civics where anonymous people tell you voting isn't effective and promote a kind of resentful powerless nihilism is dangerous to society.

Reform is preferable to revolution which is preferable to oppression.

Violence. But people are still pretty comfortable so here we sit.

The actual effective strategy is “tit for tat”

Making the wealthy scared

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.

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.

Ranked choice voting and the implementation of independent impartial redistricting are very urgently needed reforms.

I think rather than redistricting in the narrow sense, we should consider

* repealing the cap on house seats, which has been stuck at 435 arbitrarily * requiring that metropolitan areas consist of multimember districts that get allocated by proportional voting

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.

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.

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.

You think they wouldn't use every tool available to then, including the census data?

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.

> 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

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.

You think they wouldn't use it? They're using all the things they can get their hands on. The census also has side effects on the franchise.

> 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-...

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.

You act like anybody is actually following that.

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.

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.

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 ..."

It's gray because people downvoted it.

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.

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?

Data mining companies?

Don’t forget there’s an entire industry that exists solely for this purpose.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

* ZoomInfo

> 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.

The easy solution is to just reduce the resolution and scope of the data to the degree it is absolutely necessary. The census exists to inform representation decisions. All other concerns are addons. You can have all the data on the county or voting district level and strip data as you increase your resolution, to the point you only keep population number at the neighborhood, block level.

Knowing the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic background of the residents of a single building block is only useful to discriminate against them.

Demographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items.

The current admin doesn’t need it to discriminate, you can just access cameras and license plate readers and target easily that way.

The purpose is to scare people into misstating or obscuring data to reduce total house representation for an area. It’s to win votes, there are much better ways to do all these things than use this data, but effecting the vote with limited impact is a huge money savings.

The whole thing is over noise introduced to publicized documents to disguise the specifics of people in specific addresses, and malicious actors misrepresenting that as fraud.

For example census data was and probably is available on the block level but in order to avoid exposing the data of people living in these blocks that might be a few families, the publicized data aggregated and smoothed the data over blocks so you had cases where a block with a few single family residences reported over 100 people living in them. Obviously certain actors shouted voter fraud over the top of their lungs.

So now the law says no fudging of publicized data to preserver privacy, the government always had the actual accurate data.

The obvious solution to this problem is to just hide the sensitive data instead of fudging them.

In the above example the block would now report 10 people living there, but not their racial, religious, ethnic, or socioeconomic conditions.

> Demographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items.

What does this have to do with the census? A doctor would know the race of their patient without needing to deduce it statistically from their neighborhood.

Also, don't we not want financial institutions using demographic data decisions in making loans etc.?

How do you show that financial institutions aren't using demographic data unless you have it and run statistical analysis that shows they aren't? Banks aren't the government and can use methods that are illegal for the government to do in order to collect data. Let's say a bank manager is racist in giving out loans, how do you prove it unless you have the data to show it?