Here’s what it looks like:

Amazing accomplishment. Though, does anybody else think it looked like somebody mixed some pepto bismal in a blood bag? I find it a little funny.

From wikipedia:

Lev Parnas is a former associate of Rudy Giuliani who was involved in the Trump–Ukraine scandal and the Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory. He was convicted of illegal donations to Trump’s campaign and sentenced to 20 months in prison in 2022.

In 2019, Parnas served as a translator for a legal case involving Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin and self-admitted Russian mob connections, who is fighting extradition to the U.S. to face bribery charges. Firtash has been free on bail in Vienna since 2014.

Strikes me as somebody who has a vested interest in adding more fuel to the fire. Either way this is scary and fucked.

I’m not in the same boat, but I empathize. I want the fuck out. Best of luck, and I hope you’re safe.

Don’t need to, Trump is actively stopping federal progress on climate change. Kamala having zero policy on it, doing literally nothing and maintaining the status quo is always better than accelerationism under Trump.

I also mentioned immigrants, and etc. Etc because there are lots of other people being targeted that I don’t have the energy to list.

Trans people, immigrants, etc fearing for their lives, being kidnapped to a foreign death camp, and going full conservationist on climate change is a lot bigger of a difference than 1.3%.

Idk I kinda like being able to take a shit without having to fill out a form every time.

Simplicity tends to sell better than complexity, and RCV is the one that’s known of already.

Agreed. And that’s why I think approval is such a big improvement over ranked choice.

“Tell us who you approve of, candidate with the most approval wins”

Is a hell of a lot simpler than

“Rank every candidate without ranking multiple as the same level, then we check if any candidate has a 50% majority, if not, the lowest candidate gets booted and the next wave of second choices comes in, repeat until there is 50% majority.”

And that’s before the peripheral benefits.

So far they’ve been more than happy to ignore everything except the status quo, unfortunately.

Agreed. It’s honestly sad.

My city/state has been warming up to these kinds of talks and candidates at least, which gives me a glimmer of hope. But for now it is not enough.

Arguably, RCV is just as complicated as STAR, and approval is simpler than RCV. And part of the difficulty in the heavy lift to get RCV is that it has some pretty rough flaws, flaws that don’t exist within the alternatives.

And the political environment is easing up to the idea of moving towards better voting methods. I’m not saying we should let perfection be the enemy of progress. All I am saying is that if we are going to be making changes, we should at least attempt the better options.

I absolutely agree with pushing the issue at a local level, however we should probably be aiming for approval or STAR voting:

https://dividedwefall.org/star-and-approval-voting/

RCV is way better than our current system, but even RCV has flaws.

We also need regulation requiring election reform within party primaries, because as of right now it is a clown show.

I will not vote for the party of genocide supply. Aka the dems.

They’re both supporting the ongoing genocide. This isn’t helpful for deciding who to vote for.

Local candidates are not going fix the two party system. That’s a national issue.

Which is why I specified local/congressional. It’s going to take all levels of government to unfuck us from a two party system.

I don’t know the solution, but buying into the Dems bullshit “lesser of Two evils” AGAIN is not it.

Only one of these choices is actively trying to turn our country into a theocratic hell hole.

The “lesser of two evils” is fucking awful, but it’s true.

Have fun being the same chump you were 8 years ago.

If you can’t talk about politics without resorting to personal insults then you must know how weak your argument is.

Like it or not we are stuck with a two party system. As fucking awful as Biden is, and he is, Biden is the lesser of two evils by far. And that applies to democrats/republicans as a whole.

Both parties/candidates are to some degree cool with genocide and privatization, but only one of the two stands out as the worst, and the worst by a lot.

Don’t like it? Vote for local candidates/congressional candidates in primaries that will fix the two party problem. But in the mean time the better presidential option will be anything with a D next to their name.

Our electoral system is inherently biased against 3rd party candidates due to the spoiler effect of first past the post voting. The only solution is election reform that regulates election finances, a switch to approval/STAR voting, and regulation on political ads.

They actually get the opposite, support from their party. Because if you’re the minority party and you’re able to kill legislation that the majority party wants, it’s seen as a victory.

You can’t wait out an indefinite filibuster. And it gets to become indefinite because they don’t actually need to talk at all.

You cloture the person

And that essentially isn’t an option at times due to how difficult it is to reach the 60 vote threshold, which means nothing gets done, which means congress is basically useless.

Agreed. It’s just a disaster all around honestly. It can change, but it’s not easy.

That’s how it used to work, not anymore:

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/17/1072714887/filibuster-explained

A filibuster raises the vote threshold, so it’s not something you can just wait out. And thank to how the filibusterer works nowadays, congressmen don’t actually need to get up there and talk, they can merely threaten to filibuster to raise the vote threshold.

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/17/1072714887/filibuster-explained

Congress can’t do anything because of the filibuster, two party system, and republicans though. The whole thing honestly needs an overhaul.