Voting is wrong

Stockholm wrote:

There is nothing to stop any crackpot from running as an Independent and if people want to vote for that person - so be it.

Ahh yes, "back to if you are smart why aren't you rich"? Or are you just reaffirming for us, in that charitable liberal "the poor don't know what's good for them", that anyone who makes less tha 40,000 G's a year is by definition a crackpot. Never mind Belinda Stronach, who simply can't be a crackpot because she can throw away $1000 dollars on a new suits, as soon as have her maid go down to the elections office to drop of the tip for elections Canada.

As I said before, there is already a requirement that someone get 100 signatures to witness their candidacy, and as such, I guess you are really saying 101 crackpots? Even then such an economic justification is countered by instituting a sliding scale based on economic ability. But you are interested in no solutions that in anyway do anything that might undermine the NDP's roll as the representative of the marginalized of our society. You would rather they be sheeplike voters, or pounding the streets handing out your flyers.

These crackpots must be good for something, eh Stockholm?

 One thing that has always struck me about you Stockholm, is how much respect you have for the people your party is supposed to represent.

Stockholm wrote:

Crackpots can be rich or poor, highly educated or highly uneducated. The point is that if people wanted to elect a Communist or a Marijuana Party government or a Rhino Party government - all they have to do is go out and vote for it.

 Running a country is a difficult job and it requires some skill sets. I suppose that you could call it discriminatory if I say that if i need open heart surgery it should be performed by someone who is a board certifies cardiologist - not someone who once worked in a butcher shop cutting steaks for a month. I'm glad that so many Americans concluded that being mayor of a town with a population of 2,000 in Alaska and having hgalf of a community college degree from some two bit school no one has heard of in Idaho - does NOT make you qualified to be President of the US either!

The only point I see is that you don't like or respect the people your party is supposed to be representing, and really only care about what they want as far as it serves the interests of promoting the personal power of you and your friends.

You are perfectly fine with Belinda Stronach being able to buy her way into the political realm, and raise no observable objection to that, and when poor "crackpots" are involved, you are prefectly happy with the status quo.

Kloch wrote:

I believe the requirements within the Charter for holding elected office, are that you be a Canadian citizen and over the age of 18.  There's no special requirements or skills.  It's an old enlightenment era idea, now sadly forgotten, that people, including people that earn less than $40k a year are the best judges of their own interests.

Personally, I'd still put a financial restriction on, but make it income adjustable. 

Yes Stronach should have had to pony up 10K at least.

Conveniently, your principles only go as far as they advantage your faction, in the case where it prevents the economically marginalized, such as welfare mothers, from being able to compete directly against the elitest and sexist doctrine you stand for.

But please don't let that stop you. I wouldn't want you to stop making my case for me.

Please. The government has no problem assertaining the general income status for people, and measures the capability of the family to pay, or their failure to do so when determining eligibility for student loans. Opposition on these technicalities is spurious.

But my best option would be eliminating the fee altogether. 100 signatures should be enough.

Actually, I think that you are just being obtuse and obstructive because you don't like me. That's just a feelling.

But ok, all kinds of adminstrative systems exist within the present structure of government. The reform I am proposing is relatively mild and determined within the existing reach of the present legal and adminstrative systems at hand. Obviously, my ideal system is far and away divorced from the present system of government, in all areas.

 But give the tools at hand, and seperated from any ideal I may have and any you think you have, it is you who proposes that an Anarchist can be part of a formalized political party for pragmatic reasons, and it is precisely on pragmatic grounds, within the context of the existing state structure that I have proposed fairly mild reforms that address some of the issues that clearly and demonstratably bias the system against poor people.

In that context, your objection, based on the present circumstances surrounding how student loans are adminstrated is entirely a technicality. Surely someone who was serious about volunteering themselves as a candidate would have no problem with making their tax information available to a government registrar, or some such -- that is quite another thing from the government using forced voting as a system for data mining its subjects. There is already a substantial auditing process in place for candidacy, or perhaps you are unaware of that.

Far better you say to do nothing at all about the exclusionary electoral system?

Bottom line is that neither the NDP or anyone else is going to stop the process of the corporatization of the education process or the government loans system with the system as it is now. The only possible means that this can be achieved is through doing what is simple and feasible within the existing structure to further enfranchise the electorate.

Then maybe these marginalized voices would have a shot at making other changes as well.

That is, pragmatically speaking. What is not pragmatic is throwing away time and energy trying to get the NDP elected so that it can put its worn out brakes on run-away globalization and privatization in the education sector.

Look at Doer, and tuition fees.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

 Your idea is irrelevant because the fee for candidacy is so small a part of what it costs to run a real election campaign that it is not the real barrier. Printing out the policy you are trying to get people to accept would be far more expensive let alone trying to run ads in any medium to let people know who you are and what you stand for.

Your ideas about my ideas are irrelevant, because obviously you haven't actually bothered to read them. Some day, scroll up and read what I actually wrote. The $1000 deposit is only one among a number of election expenses that are not recovered if you do not crack the 10% threshold of and become elligible for a return on your expenses. But even to start, assuming one wanted to run a bare bones grass roots campaign, as part of building an individual reputation or found a new force in the electoral sphere $1000 dollars is a lot of money, especially for those who would be most likely to use such a grass roots approach.

Quote:

If a candidate is elected or receives at least 10 percent of the valid votes cast in his or her riding at an election, the Chief Electoral Officer will authorize the Receiver General to send the candidate's official agent (or a designate) an interim reimbursement of 15 percent of the expenses limit for that riding shortly after the return of the writs. If the amount of the first payment is more than 60 percent of actual paid election expenses and paid candidate's personal expenses, the official agent will be required to reimburse the excess.

Elections Canada -- Reimbursments

The idea of running a more sophisticated campaign is obviously out of reach for people who might budget on a first run return at 3% of the vote share, and so afford themselves the potential of some return. The way it is now, the official state organs take all of the tax payers money, and the candidates, not to mention the people who vote for them and rips them off to pay NDP election expenses, when the established parties divvy up the proceeds.

Its hard to imagine a system that is more biased toward maintaining the status quo, and exclude anyone other than the rich and the middle class from being fully enfranchised.

One of the most disturbing pieces of partisan hypocrisy I witnessed on this board were NDP'rs crowing gleafully at the large sums of the tax-payers money that was returned to them, at a 1.85 a vote, coupled with more glea at the loses sustained by the Green Party candidates who failed to cross the magical threshold of 10% whereafter one goes from "crackpot" to worthy political force, and this then being blamed on the Green Party leader's remarks on "strategic voting", when it was in fact the fault of the dubious election financing rules that are specifically designed to quash new party formulations to the advantage the NDP and the other state funded political organs.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

Your two ideas have some limited merit for a small number of people who want to be involved in the political process every four years but want to do it strictly as an individual.  However they are modest proposals that while worthwhile are not system changing. 

But that is not what you want to make this about. Some how you think that it is okay to go from a modest proposal to this diatribe.

If the NDP were truly interested in benefitting those who most need the support of our society, they would first and foremost take on those issues that directly affect their ability to enter the political arena as full enfranchised participants by demanding the election deposits be pro-rated for income, or dropped altogether, and making the elimination of the FPTP the central theme of its policy platform

 What happens for me is you come up with a reasonably good idea and then wrap it in an anti-NDP messgae when the two are not connected.

 Your last post did it again. You explained your two points well but then have to go on this rant:

 One of the most disturbing pieces of partisan hypocrisy 

Get over yourself and discuss issues who cares if you are morally outraged every time a NDP supporter says something you disagree with if you cut the fucking pathetic moral outrage rhetoric you might even get your ideas debated respectfully.

Actually, Kloch and I and some other persons were having a perfectly civilized discussion, with a little bit of flack from KenS, until you dropped by with this immediate ad hominem dismissal:

kropotkin1951 wrote:

Your arguments seem to me on many days to be akin to; cigarette smoking is bad. Now that is something almost all people would agree with however you then decide that smoking one brand is worse than smoking other brands and set your self up as the person who will vilify a particular brand every time smoking is raised. So to the people who smoke the brand you hate you sound like a self righteous person whose views are not only the right ones on the main issue of whether to smoke but whose views on the choice of brands is also relevant. I have heard you long an loud. You don't like electoral politics and your view of the world is the only righteous one. If you just stuck to your anti-smoking crusade you would be far less bothersome to me than your unrelenting attack on one brand because that is the brand you are most attracted too and therefore it must be the worst of all. If you want to say anything about my handle then read Mutual Aid first and come back and discuss the Prince's legacy.

That was the conclusion of your first entrance into this thread. Sure it has precedents, and I am certainly not going to go through the process of discussing who started what where, but your entry into this thread was hardly diplomatic, so once again, if you are going to put out, don't bellyache when people come back at you. You came in here flaming in the ad hominem, and just like Ken, decided you wanted to make this thread about me. What else is new?

 But what can I really say, Brian White comes in and starts talking about the Nazis, I point out that the Nazi's were elected, and ElizQ accuses me of "Godwining" the thread, when the first person to mention the Nazi's was Brian White!

 Insult to injury was merely your completely off-base arguements against things that I did not say or that were at best gross simplifications of what I said. More of the same when I discussed the NDP earlier in the thread.

The critique of the NDP contained in this thread is not the gratuitous stab in the back you percieve it to be, but an entirely logical outcome derived from the original argument, much of which it seems you agree, except that I guess you do not want the party to which you belong to be lumped in with the other official state organs. Why the NDP should be excluded from the analysis you have yet to explain.

Must have been directing it at Remind, since your post immediatly followed hers, which came after mine. Or was it directed at no one at all, since there was no quoted respondant at all.

 Anyhow, so then:

kropotkin1951 wrote:

Your two ideas have some limited merit for a small number of people who want to be involved in the political process every four years but want to do it strictly as an individual.  However they are modest proposals that while worthwhile are not system changing. 

How does the massive financial losses caused to the Green Party by the completely aribitrary 10% threshold for reimbursements, which were theoretically the fault of Elizabeth May's oblique statements about "strategic voting" according to NDP pundits in these parts, square with your statement that my ideas have "limited merit for a small number of people"?

He isn't responding to anything I am saying. He's just using my post as a launching pad for some "theoreticals".

Benoit wrote:

Cueball wrote:

You might as well ask me to vote in a sham Soviet election. A federal election in Canada is basically a referendum on the mandate of the state. Voting is a vote for the state, and any one of the political organs it manages and funds, not voting is opposing corruption.

 

When someone goes to the poll, he is automatically voting for his freedom. No one would have ever developed a spirit a resistance without formally asking (in some kinds of poll) what others are thinking. Without our democracy, slavery would become more subtle to a point where resistance would be allowed but only to be recuperated more fully.

I am sorry, none of your commentary has any bearing on the analysis I offered in this thread, which is about how economic disinsentives skew the electoral politics in this country, so that first and foremost all of the available options represent the interests of the well off, and other vested interests. It also touches upon how these economic disinsentives act to entrench the dominance of the existing state poltical organs, and undermines the emergence of grass roots opposition.

Your post is a high school civics lesson about some theoretical democracy someone dreamed up in the late 18th century. The future is now. It is 2008, and this is a thread about how "democracy" functions to entrench the power of the elite within the voting process itself, in practice, in Canada.

I agree and uniformed electorate is a happy one.