During the Libertarian National Committee online meeting of June 4, 2023, Michael Pakko, Chair of the Libertarian Party of Arkansas (“LPAR”), reported that about 2,000 signatures have now been gathered in that petition drive, almost all done by volunteers. The signature validity percentage rate is running in the high 70’s, he reported. Two paid petitioners have been hired, with possibly two more to be hired in the near future. This petition drive, in which 10,000 valid signatures of Arkansas registered voters are required, with a deadline of February 13, 2024, was necessitated by the LPAR candidate for Governor in 2022 getting less than 3% of the vote. If successfully completed, the petition drive will qualify the LPAR to be able to run a candidate in all partisan elections in Arkansas in the November 2024 General Election.
INDIVIDUALS ARE ON BALLOTS –
NOT *PARTIES*
DISASTER FAILURE TO BRING UP BROWN V BD OF ED 1954 IN WILLIAMS V RHODES 1968
https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/06/justices-take-up-trump-too-small-trademark-case/
TRUMP TOO SMALL – TRADEMARK CASE 22-704
—-
ANY TRUMP = TYRANT CASE [YET] ???
AZ keeps up the idiotic drumbeat of candidates are (he means should be) on ballots, not parties. It’s impossible to get AZ to logically defend any of his assertions, but that’s to be expected, since a guy who doesn’t understand that there are much more significant differences between Hitler and Trump than the fact that Hitler spent time in jail is obviously incapable of logical thinking of any kind.
Then there’s Jim Riley, who appears to be a logical, rational, and knowledgeable man as far as I can tell. However, he ducks real discussion or debate of what he hopes to achieve or why. If nonpartisan elections are in fact better, why aren’t their defenders interested in actually having a real discussion on the relative merits of partisan and nonpartisan elections?
Besides those two, are there any other advocates of nonpartisan elections here, or if not, anyone willing to take that case on for the purpose of debate and make your best case for why they are better? Is there any intelligent life in this forum?
SIMPLE – NO TIME FOR TROLLS AND THEIR ASIAN TYRANT MONARCH SCHEMES IN PRECINCTS.
@Max,
You misunderstand the difference between when candidates qualify as individuals, and when they qualify as the “nominees” of government-regulated parties in government-organized and paid for primaries.
The individual candidates will obviously have the support of groups of individuals who might call themselves a party or friends of the candidates.
AZ THE TROLL WE HAVE NO TIME FOR YOU.
Right, except that I’m European, not Asian, am not a troll (or, you can provide your definition of troll and why you think I am one, or why you’re not), oppose both monarchy and tyranny, and am explicitly not asking for your time. I’m asking for rational discussion or debate, which explicitly does not include AZ (a scientifically proven fact at this point). So, as usual, AZ gets not one single thing right. As is to be expected.
Why is it that even when I explicitly ask for opinions from people other than AZ, AZ is almost invariably the one who answers? I’m not talking to you, AZ. Go away and stop trying to prevent the already remote chances of actual rational discussions from taking place just because you are so painfully insecure in your qyasireligious political faith. Your unwillingness, inability, or most likely both to rationally examine why you believe whatever you claim to believe is not my problem.
Furthermore, even if you think my proposals are wrong, or even catastrophically wrong – and maybe they are, although no one here is doing much to help me discover how or why they are or are not – I wasn’t asking for evaluation of any of my proposals per se in this particular case. Here, I am asking for opposing arguments from different sides about the relative merits of partisan and nonpartisan elections. Those arguments can be wrong or right quite independently of whether my set of proposals is right, wrong, partially both, genius, or completely insane and disastrous.
My proposals are quite obviously at best either very long term or perhaps testable on a local scale after some massive government and probably social/economic collapse. Proposals for rapid and extreme changes, particularly unprecedented ones, should,rightfully, be examined very carefully, rigorously, and skeptically. Thus, for my proposals or anything closely approaching them to become anything like reasonably possible to practically implement, a lot of that will have to take place between now and then.
The fact that virtually none of that happens even here and no one here is willing or able to suggest possibly better venues doesn’t exactly bode well. That, however, doesn’t mean I’m wrong. It may just indeed be the wrong venue, or I may be too far ahead of my time. Or I could actually be wrong. It sure doesn’t look like we are going to get any closer to discovering which of these is true in this particular forum, at any rate.
Nevertheless, at least some people here believe in nonpartisan elections. Maybe even more than only the lunatic AZ and the rather coy and guarded Jim Riley. So, how about at least an open and logical discussion of the relative merits of that proposal? Which, again, does not mean AZ, given that he at best has a severe misconception of what open and logical discussion means, or fails to see why such a thing could even potentially ever be beneficial. So, just to be clear, none of this is addressed to AZ.
I obviously can’t prevent him from chiming in with more nonsense again anyway, and I have no interest in curtailing his freedom of speech, but his response or lack thereof has zero to do with what I’m asking, other than possibly distract anyone who I am in fact trying to ask from seeing the question.
Jim Riley, I did not misunderstand it at all. I’m against government having anything whatsoever to do with primaries. I’m actually against written or printed ballots altogether, but even if getting rid of them altogether is not an option, I still believe that voting by party is better than voting by candidate.
In the case of my proposal that would mean voters standing physically with their party, and the party with the most voters standing in their section at the end of the night wins and picks the officeholders as it sees fit. In the case of printed ballots, which in itself is less than ideal, the best thing would be to vote by party, regardless of whether the candidates are listed. If the candidates are listed, I still think it is better to list their party than to fail to list their party.
Regardless of any of these opinions, including my least preferred option of printed ballots which list individuals running for office without their party, I oppose the amazing American idiocy of government administered and financed primaries (I’m not particularly anti-American. I enjoyed my time living and my many visits there, and my many discussions with Americans regardless of place or formats. The USA does some things better and some things worse than other countries, and this is one case where I believe the term American idiocy is completely appropriate).
Elsewhere I’ve explained why I hold each of these opinions. I can reprise or link the arguments and Dooley’s questions yet again if you would like to have an actual discussion. I just don’t see the benefits of doing so if you prefer to sidestep a real discussion of the merits of partisan versus nonpartisan voting in general.
Any Trump = Tyrant case yet? No, not any serious case that he ever was one. That’s quite obviously ridiculous.
If it isn’t obvious to anyone other than AZ, please lay put your best case for why you think Trump was a tyrant, how it was possible to remove him from office with so little bloodshed, and how Biden has liberated Americans from tyranny, unless you think Biden is also a tyrant, in which case, OK, but then you should be preparing for armed revolution or some other way of overthrowing tyranny rather than wearing out your fingers openly condemning your country’s oppressive tyranny, a practice which lands people living in actual tyrannies in prison camps, torture chambers, “reeducation” centers, slave farms and factories, appointments with executioners, some combination thereof, or at a minimum visits and threats from regime or regime connected thugs.
Incidentally, which of these were common as ways of dealing with the millions of Americans who openly and sometimes frequently expressed their opposition to President Trump and his policies in every way imaginable? Try living in an actual tyranny before flapping your gums grotesquely about what you think one is, sans evidence or logic.
A far better case, I think, is that Biden is the mentally incompetent, senile figurehead of a family of corrupt career criminals, who came to power through an election stolen with collusion between the Chinese Communist regime and various weapons of postmodern warfare they employed against America as revenge for President Trump for standing up to and standing in the way of their nefarious plots for world domination; international globalist elites; fake news media; deep state; primarily urban political machines long engaged in corrupt election theft practices; and other such various evil and nefarious groups engaged in an overlapping set of conspiracies to remove the one American President in recent decades to seriously stand in the way of their long march to monopolize power, destroy your country’s sovereignty, wipe out Christian and European civilization, import mass numbers of third world savages into all European and European based nations, manipulate and distort every aspect of public opinion, shut down every avenue of discussion of all opinions except ones they approve of, destroy or increasingly manipulate and control market economies wherever they exist, spy on everyone everywhere all the time, and wipe out 90% of the world population while enslaving the rest under a number of false flags such as saving the environment and fighting deadly contagious diseases. In other words, actual tyranny of the most terrifying sort imaginable or not even yet imaginable, far worse than even the most horrible things humans have done to each other to date.
But, that doesn’t make Biden a tyrant quite yet. He is at best a puppet, and the treasonous quisling Chinese puppet regime be figureheads still has many obstacles to overcome to establish the actually tyrannical global government they want. In the United States, those impediments approximately center around former and future President Trump and his Make America Great Again or Save America movement, and the growing strength of traditional conservative and nationalist conservative movements all throughout White Christian countries all over the world.
Isn’t a write-in only ballot inherently a non-partisan ballot? A ballot without censored parties and candidates is also so an any-partisan ballot. Without the censorship of ballot access laws irrationally discriminating there would be no controversy over partisan or non-partisan. Voters would be free to be either unpartisan or partisan for every office on the ballot.
Demand the state government ballot cartel print content neutral ballots without any names.
@Max,
If I believed your proposals were other than satire, I might respond to them.
I don’t believe that Dooley’s theory was more than conjecture. If I understand correctly, he believes that if there are no party labels on ballots, that voters will intensely seek to determine who the real parties were, and thus give the real parties more power.
You seem to think that the one-party system in Texas was really different than non-partisan elections. But there were no party labels. If everyone is a “Democrat” then no one is not a “Democrat”. Voters were not choosing who would be the Democrat nominee for governor. They were choosing the governor, just as they choose the mayor in a non-partisan city election.
They are not satire. They are not realistic, at least certainly not in the foreseeable future, but that is not the same thing. I’d like to see incremental movement in their direction. What I tried to do is distill where I see things have gone wrong and work backwards from principles or goals, and then what direction of policy change would best meet those. The actual proposals, while in spirit serious, are far more extreme than incremental changes which are much more realistic in the next few decades that I would be happy to see along multiple axes in the directions I recommend. At times I’ve explained what problems with current ways of doing things they address.
NOOO TIME FOR *NOT REALISTIC* ALLEGED REFORMS– OVER DECADES
N-O-W — THIS SECOND — DE FACTO CIVIL WAR II WITH MINORITY RULE GERRYMANDERS AND PARTISAN HACK MONARCH/OLIGARCH EXECS/JUDICS.
SEE DEATH SPIRAL OF OLDE ROMAN REPUBLIC IN 120 BC -27 BC.
USA DEATH SPIRAL 1929- NOW
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P-A-T
10,000 is too high a requirement. Should be 5,000.
Well, crAZy, that’s why I’m not asking for your time. I asked for other people’s. Yours, I’ve discounted because of your consistently persistent nonsense. I mean, you’re the guy who can barely detect a difference between Trump and Hitler, possibly thinks he is God, etc. If you think whatever gibberish you keep yelling over and over to a tiny audience will change something in decades, millennia, epochs, or solar lifetimes, I see no reason to try to disabuse you of that notion, and no benefit in so trying.
Jim Riley, as I mentioned, I am interested in discussing the relative merits of voting by party, by candidate, or by combination of party and candidate. This is independent of whether or not you take my theoretical best case long term policies seriously or see merit in discussing them or not. While English is not my first language, I’m reasonably sure my English is not the problem here. I’ve used it for everything from postsecondary studies and diplomatic attache work to business and personal travel in the US and UK as well as to a lesser extent some other primarily English speaking countries for decades. I use it in person, over the telephone and in written form with native English speakers for a variety of purposes on a daily basis.
Thus, if you completely didn’t understand my case or its reasoning, or the shorter explanation by Dooley, I don’t think it’s because of any significant errors in translation. It may be because I wrote at too much length for your busy schedule. If needed, I could try one more time to condense it better and get less side tracked, but I won’t do so repeatedly to push a string up a hill. Dooley, I think, was concise enough. Or, you could try reading what I wrote fully, rather than skimming. You can of course ignore any parts that verge into my long term proposals or any other extraneous matters you’d rather not discuss.
You seem to be quite intelligent. A variety of standardized tests, opinion of a large number of people personally acquainted with me, etc over the years and various tests of language competence indicate indicate that I’m not stupid or poorly proficient in your language either. AZ is of course entitled to his view that I am a moron, as is Jim or whoever else agrees, but I don’t believe that’s the issue here.
I think you are easily capable of understanding the basic point of the argument above. Thus, you either have not read it, or you prefer to sidestep it and dance around it. If it’s the latter, that’s fine. Either someone else will defend your position, or nobody will. I’ve laid out my case, reasoning and conclusions. Anyone is free to agree, disagree, if possible explain why, ask questions, etc . If no one bothers to read it, I can only spend time to explain it again at best once.
Let me know if you seriously would like to discuss relative merits, and I might make one more attempt, perhaps. But my gut feeling is that if you did, you would have already read and understood the meat of the argument, so it seems more likely you prefer to sidestep it and feign ignorance or misunderstanding of what that argument even is at all.
Sorry, I think it was a different thread I placed most of those arguments in. Let me see if I can find it .
Actually most of the arguments I referred to are in the comments string at
https://ballot-access.org/2023/06/03/interesting-twist-on-single-winner-ranked-choice-voting/#comments
Not above
If you actually take the time to bother to read this string and that one, I don’t see how any logical individuals would fail to understand the meat of the case made against nonpartisan elections. Of course, reasonable people can agree to disagree. Refusing to acknowledge what the arguments of one side are,or some very odd and far gone sidedwipe far from the heart of those arguments, is a different matter. Avoidance of direct confrontation of an argument for better or worse generaly indicates a weak point on the avoiding party’s side.
@Max,
I should have split my previous answer.
I perceive your essays to be satirical. Perhaps you did not intend them to be. But I am not willing to discuss them as if they were serious.
@Max,
I do not see a connection between Dooley’s argument and your proposal. I don’t think Dooley even commented about your proposal.
Jim Riley, my proposals are an extreme case hypothesis of how to correct what’s wrong with the present system. Much more modest incremental steps in their direction are much more plausible, unless may be we’re talking about multiple generations in the future, or perhaps following a massive economic and civilizational collapse. The reasoning behind why those directions of movement are the correct ones is completely serious.
In any case, here I am interested in discussing the relative merits of voting by party , voting by candidate, or voting by combination of party and candidate. I’ve explained that several times. Discussion of my proposals, or even much scaled down and extreme derivatives thereof, is a separate matter. You can discuss one without the other. Slow down and actually read, or leave it alone altogether. Claiming I said something directly at odds with what I actually said, and repeated any number of times, doesn’t move anyone closer to anything optimal.
Jim Riley, I never claimed in the least that Dooley was commenting on my proposals. In fact,I said the opposite. I said let’s discuss Dooley’s point, even if you think that every single proposal I made is not only far too extreme, but actually completely in the wrong direction. Those are actually two entire separate questions. I could be right about one and wrong about the other, as could you.
I hope the libertarians succeed in their petition drive.
They get it done every two years and always fail to get 3%. THIS is going on nearly two decades now and nothing will change this time either.