So who's going to prosecute them for it? If the government, police and judiciary are all in on it, who can stop them?
There's only 2 political parties in the US and they're both in on this, you can't even vote for a party to reform this...
There's only 2 political parties in the US and they're both in on this, you can't even vote for a party to reform this...
So why civil forfeiture is not an issue that effects change? Not because politicians are bad - they are bad in different ways, but at least in the US, their badness still can be controlled to a large measure. But because US citizens are not threatening to kick their politician's asses if they don't fix it. Like they do with many other hot topics of the day, quite successfully, one way or another. Why is that? I'm not sure. Maybe because civil forfeiture is something that usually happens to people that either linked to the criminal world or live in the places which are "sketchy" or don't have money and connections to raise the hype. Maybe because people are reluctant to criticize law enforcement. Maybe because it is served as a part of "war on drugs" and "think of the children", etc. Maybe there's another reason I completely miss - but whatever it is, the problem is not the politicians, the problem is that this issue is not taken as a serious problem by the society. If you want to blame somebody who could effect the change - blame the press. They probably could raise the profile of the issue if they wanted to. But they do not.
So the answer to the question of "who can stop them" - US citizens can. If only they'd want to.
I'm almost tempted to think that all the gerrymandering they've been doing could be a good thing because it takes the parties out of it. If your district is 80% one party then the primary is the election. Then you can vote for a primary candidate from that party who wants to fix the things you want fixed over the ones who don't.
The problem is then they go to Washington and end up in a Congress which is approximately half of each party and everyone has a safe seat but there are no moderates, so instead of compromising somewhere in the middle you get winner take all and screw the other guys. But when you need House, Senate and President to pass a bill, that means unless one party controls all three nothing gets passed and if one party does then we get some kind of unaccountable shit tornado that one way or another kills thousands of Americans and adds five trillion dollars to the debt. So I'm going to have to say the gerrymandering is net negative (and half of the problem).
The other half is that the federal government is doing things that it shouldn't. Even if you think recreational drugs should be illegal, how is that a federal issue whatsoever? There are still dry counties in this country and there is nothing wrong with that, because that's what the people of those counties want. And judging by recent referendums, federal drug policy is not uniformly what the people want.
Yes there is: it is not in anyone's rational self-interest to bar others from consuming alcohol.
The voters who ultimately determine these policies are simply acting irrationally.
Prohibition may be immoral and/or counter-productive, but to those who have experienced the worst elements of alcoholism (personally or societally), the drive to outlaw it is at least understandable, whether or not it is irrational.
I strongly recommend Ken Burns' documentary series on the subject: http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition
Just want you to put a little more meat on your argument
But my point was the US needs a proportional party system, which better represents (in aggregate) the wishes of the people. The two current parties don't represent the wishes of a lot of people right now, especially when it comes to issues like foreign policy and surveillance.
A proportional party system would also make it easier for new parties to rise up and become the "major" parties, while the current "major" parties like the Republican and Democratic Party to die off.
For example, a more libertarian party could kill the current Republican Party, which is very little libertarian, especially when you consider the conservative Republicans pretending to be libertarians, but still are pro-surveillance, pro-police state, pro-"tough on crime", pro-wars, pro-christianity, pro-coal - which have nothing to do with libertarian-ism.
Also a more progressive party could kill the Democratic party, with a much bigger push for renewable energy, civil liberties, gun control, campaign finance reform, stronger bank regulations and prosecutions, and so on.
It's all about competition, even in elections. Right now there's no competition to Republicans on the right side, which is why they can afford to vote for bigger budgets for the military and pro-surveillance, despite pretending to be a party of "small government", while on the left side, the Democrats also have no competition when it comes to ensuring banks get punished and are well regulated, and so on.
A proportional party system together with a really good voting system (perhaps approval voting or range voting) could fix most of those problems.
I'm not saying it's all going to be perfect, but for example, if the Republican party wins with a 40 percent share, and the Libertarian Party takes 12 percent, the Republicans will most likely have to ally with the Libertarians to control Congress, otherwise Democrats and Progressives will have a bigger majority than them. And if they do that, then they'll have no choice but to compromise with the Libertarians. They may agree on some issues, such as lower taxes for everyone, but the Libertarian Party could force them to cut military spending or backtrack on surveillance.
And if Republicans continue to be generally Evil Incarnate, then Libertarians could take the Democrats and Progressives' side on civil liberties or renewable energy issues, even without a formal alliance, and could pass strong civil liberties laws even if some Democrats (like now) are against them.
Look at mid-20th century politics. The democratic party had a liberal, labor/machine, and southern machine wings. The Republicans were half western libertarian, part monocle-polishing "business". The southern democrats flipped republican after being frustrated by civil rights reforms, and basically took over the republican party.
At the state level, there are often more parties or more evolution within the big parties. For example, New York has a bunch of minor parties that represent sub-groups. These parties don't elect anyone, but can drive votes and the agenda.
You might like Proportional Score Voting. http://ScoreVoting.net/RRV.html
It can be easily conducted in a spreadsheet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jS7b-0PV9E
The liberty movement is growing as demonstrated by the success of Ron Paul's campaign in 2008 vs 2012. It just takes time.
Legally change their name to "Libertarian"?
So in practice, this doesn't get you anywhere.
What we need is a nationwide NOTA (None of the above) vote option, wherein if the NOTA vote gets a plurality, the race must re-occur with different candidates. Like in Brewsers Millions.
Yes, favorite betrayal is possible, but it requires a very specific set of circumstances, and the only gaming of the system is people throwing their top vote to the opponent, which is very risky and requires a freakish amount of insight into the race to know if the conditions of a spoiler are even possible.
To me, strategic voting seems much more likely with approval voting than it does with IRV, and it's that strategic voting that is maintaining the two party system. I think the possibility of a possible spoiler effect under IRV is small, and that its chances of actually allowing 3rd party victories are much higher, and thus worth the risk, especially because, to me, approval voting doesn't really remove the spoiler effect, but just delays it.
I like approval voting, but IRV seems like a better solution, overall.
Also, I disagree that approval voting is much easier to understand. IRV isn't significantly more complicated than approval voting, and neither are significantly more complicated the current plurality/FPTP system.
TL;DR - In my opinion, IRV's rewards outweigh its risks and IRV > approval voting > FPTP.
In approval voting you are always best off voting your preference. The only thing you have to decide is your cutoff for how many people you want to approve. From what I've read, people are pretty good at that intuitively.
I actually think splitting parties into which ones you like or dislike is a far more natural process than ranking them. Especially when you start getting more variety.
That said, I tend to prefer Range voting, since it gives people the most flexibility to actually express their relative preferences.
>Yes, favorite betrayal is possible, but it requires a very specific set of circumstances
I don't think they're that uncommon circumstances. But more importantly, even the possibility of a spoiler is enough to make people think twice about putting their actual favourite first. It's nowhere near as bad as FPTP, but there's still some pressure to choose a popular party.
In particular, IRV satisfies the important "majority criteria," e.g. if the majority of people vote for a candidate, that candidate should win. Approval / range voting fail this criteria. See, again, Arrow's Theorem. http://archive.fairvote.org/monotonicity/.
Additionally, voting so as to strategically take advantage of non-monotonicity using IRV/STV/Ranked Choice Voting is NP-Complete- see http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.127....
Your link also discusses the later-no-harm criteria for Approval/Range leading to strategic voting, but all the examples I've seen for this seem to talk about giving a marginally preferred candidate an advantage in the absence of any truly disliked candidates. I think in practice, people will be far more interested in keeping disliked candidates out than furthering their marginal preferences.
Meanwhile, IRV suffers from Favourite Betrayal, which is a much more obvious incentive for strategic voting IMO. (Your link about NP-completeness of strategy only talks about STV.)
www.electology.org/approval-voting-vs-irv
IRV can elect X even if Y was preferred to X by an arbitrarily huge majority and got more first-place votes than X.
www.electology.org/core-support
Regarding favorite betrayal, you might enjoy this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
If I love candidate B and C, kind of like D, and hate candidate A, but all of candidate A's supporters are bullet-voting, how should I vote? It's ridiculous.
It doesn't allow voters to express their preferences without strategic voting -- it's totally baked into the process. The range voting folks have come up with various metrics that say their system is the best, but completely ignore the most obvious reasons why its flawed.
For the record, though, I'd vastly prefer any system over the current plurality elections (including range voting).
Just to be clear, you're not imagining people have to share their vote between parties are you? Range voting means you can give every party 100 if you want to.
>If I love candidate B and C, kind of like D, and hate candidate A, but all of candidate A's supporters are bullet-voting, how should I vote?
If you really hate A so badly that you think any one of B, C or D would be vastly better, then go ahead and give them all 100. If A not getting in is that important to you then your "strategic" vote is in fact, an accurate representation of your preferences.
www.electology.org/bullet-voting
> (100/100 points for candidate A).
Score Voting (aka Range Voting) does not limit the number of votes. That's WHY it's so resistant to tactical voting. If you give Ralph Nader a "perfect 10", you can still help Gore against Bush as strongly as you want. You could even strategize to give Gore a 10 and Bush a 0.
I would expect approval voting to reduce the polarization of politics and allow moderate candidates who are reasonably liked by everyone to enter political office. Rather than see our laws and policies flip-flop every 4-12 years due to one or the other party taking control, maybe we would actually have politicians focus on the mutual good of society rather than the parties' individual power.
I've hung out with Arrow in his Palo Alto retirement community condo by the way.
http://scorevoting.net/RichieRV.html https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/fact-check
That first link is written by Warren Smith, a Princeton math PhD who's the protagonist of William Poundstone's book Gaming the Vote, and arguably the world's foremost expert on voting systems.
Voters, thanks to mainstream media, understand the concept of 'voting off' or expressing whom they have the most dis-approval for.
Thus get voters to construct a ranking from least to most liked; which you can invert to get the most to least liked. IRV also has poor behavior in the process for selecting whom to remove. My personal solution for that is to remove 'winners' until all that's left is a single candidate; that is the candidate that failed to win any election possible in that round and the one to drop. Re-calculate until there are the target number of candidates left and you have the set of IRV plurality winners (I wasn't even aware of the term plurality until CGPGrey's wonderful series on voting brought up the methods of voting in Robert's Rules of Order).
First, it is simple to implement. Aside from the special election in the case of NOTA getting a plurality, it requires no change to the existing voting system except for the addition of a NOTA option for each position being voted on in an election.
Second, it is very easy to understand. IRV, Approval, other schemes are not that difficult to pick up once you've seen an example, but just about everyone already has experience with None Of The Above selections, and often on ballot-like forms, no less.
Third, it encourages [the segment of non-voters who abstain from voting due to feeling that there is a lack of viable candidates] to make their positions known, resulting in a better understanding of the wishes of the public.
Fourth, due to the other reasons listed above, it is very hard to argue against. What good reasons are there to NOT have this? The only place I can see a strong argument taking hold against the adoption of this measure is that a special election is required if NOTA wins, and that's a non-trivial change to the system.
In order to see this get widely implemented, I would explore the idea of starting out with NOTA being non-binding. I do not know if this is a good idea. If it starts out "toothless" (in the sense that whichever candidate gets the most votes still gets in even if the candidate is outranked by NOTA), will the realization of the public that the plurality does not approve of any candidate provide enough pressure to update it to something more powerful once it's established? Does the risk of that not being the case outweigh the benefits we get from seeing just how little approval there is for the candidates selected for us before the voting starts?
We know that public pressure is one of the best tools that citizens have to rein in their governments. I believe that starting with a narrow wedge--implementing a non-binding NOTA option at state levels--makes it more likely to be adopted in a larger number of states than otherwise. Seeing in hard, official numbers how disappointed the public is with the choices they are continually offered should be enough to enable further action. Of course if there is a strong enough public will for it, the binding law is better to have from the start. It just seems to me that there won't be enough support for something like this until there's more widespread awareness of how abysmal the current situation is.
Politicians are lucky that the population is not organized enough and/or doesn't care enough to do that. And they make sure to keep it that way.