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Polititian admits he used ChatGPT to generate new Law
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themadhippy:
usa has a strange type democracy when the choice of around 170 million voters is decided by just 538 people
TimFox:
At least we don't have one house of our bicameral legislature totally unelected.
themadhippy:


--- Quote ---At least we don't have one house of our bicameral legislature totally unelected.
--- End quote ---
True enough,and our elected house aint much better when you can gain power with less than 30% of the electorate ,and less than 1% get to chose the replacement  pm mid term.
TimFox:
If you read the US Constitution, you will find no mention of "democracy", but Article IV, Section 4 reads "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government".
At the end of the 18th Century, the word "democracy" seemed to imply the excesses of the French Revolution and Reign of Terror.
Other parts of the main body of the Constitution include (Article I, Section 9): "No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States".
Further evolution started with the first ten amendments ("Bill of Rights").
Yes, political history and practice is messy, compared with simpler topics such as quantum mechanics.
vk6zgo:

--- Quote from: themadhippy on December 08, 2023, 05:17:50 pm ---

--- Quote ---At least we don't have one house of our bicameral legislature totally unelected.
--- End quote ---
True enough,and our elected house aint much better when you can gain power with less than 30% of the electorate ,and less than 1% get to chose the replacement  pm mid term.

--- End quote ---

It is hard in a representative democracy to safeguard the interests of less populous areas, whilst at the same time, trying to be as representative as you can be.
"Single member electorates" try to achieve the former, but then run into trouble with the latter, as one party may have a very high vote over the whole country, but as it is mostly concentrated in the electorates of very popular members, doesn't count for seats won.

In Australia, as a Federation, we have the additional complication of compromises that became necessary at the time of Federation.
As an attempt at  sorting out such problems, we have both Compulsory Voting  & "Preferential Voting".
The former is self explanatory, but the latter seems to bamboozle some people.

Preferential voting is an attempt to avoid the situation where , say, 34 % of the electorate vote for candidate X, with 33% each, for candidates Y & Z.

With "first past the post" candidate X is the clear winner--all good!
But wait a minute, 66% of the electorate did not want candidate X, so they have no say in the outcome.

With Preferential Voting, if a voter really wants, for example for candidate Y to win, but will accept Z ---"Anything but X!!", they can record a preference for that candidate & put X last.

All quite simple, but along comes Political Parties to screw things up, by issuing "how to vote cards" which show how they would like voters to vote.
They are basically meaningless, as the voter can choose any combination they like.

The media, being in a hurry as always, love to print that "Party A has preferenced Party C above Party A".

People whose head aches if they try to think leap onto these comments & think that, in some magical way, Party A can actually
give the preference votes away to Party C.

They then look at what we call the "primary vote" (the total numbers of votes for each Party throughout the whole country), and scream "Unfair! We should have won!" & advocate a change to "first past the post", which still wouldn't deliver the result they desire.
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