The people who really control your day to day life are these people, the local legislators and executives. Way more people need to vote and vote intelligently in their local elections
The funny thing is that local and federal politics has been reversed from what I'd consider the desirable order. I think the federal government should be filled up with starry-eyed idealists and the local government should be run by pragmatic conservatives. But for some reason we've got the conservatives in power at the federal level and at the local level, at least where I live, the most useless hippies you've ever met.
I firmly believe if voting were made as easy and satisfying as hitting a "Like" button, we would have astronomical "turnout" rates.
However, I can't get over two problems with that. The ease of hacking and the failure of our democracy to create secure, open-source digital voting (see: Diebold) and the inability to prevent vote-stealing. Think about if on voting day, your employer demanded to use your phone to cast a vote using your account or you'd be fired.
> The ease of hacking and the failure of our democracy to create secure, open-source digital voting (see: Diebold) and the inability to prevent vote-stealing.
For the former, we could have verifiable votes: you get a anonymous token, and can look up your vote on a public register by that token. The only problem with that approach is that it makes voter coercion (forcing someone to vote a given way) somewhat easier. However, many states already allow absentee ballots, and some (such as Oregon) do all voting by mail with no "polling booth" option, which has exactly the same property.
So, personally, I'd suggest entirely electronic voting, verifiable votes via anonymous tokens, public lists of votes (so anyone can re-run the voting algorithm to check the result), and strong laws against voter coercion (so that employer you mentioned would get prosecuted).
Local governments severely lack the funding and resources needed to engage with the community like they should. It's really sad, but by the time the fed and state take their cut, there's not much left for the city or county.
It's not like the federal and state governments dictate taxation and revenue (entirely), take their cut and leave the rest with local governments. Local governments can raise revenue with various kinds of taxes independently of rates and schedules at the Federal or State level.
The real reason local governments typically lack resources for truly local needs is that the most vocal locals tend to be NIMBY typea and anti-tax types.
This is a great article. The DOJ needs to get more involved in keeping state and local policing in line. The civil rights lawsuit filed against Ferguson, MO, earlier this year is a good start.
Long-term, getting rid of elected prosecutors and judges at the state level would be a huge help.
This would mean more power residing in the federal government. Do we really need more power to be centralized? It seems to me that the fed is already a bit over their heads. What we need is educated voters and more alternatives to prison. We also need a more reasonable trial system; how can a low income defendant hire a decent lawyer? I think that there are things that the fed can do to better the situation, but butting in to states' jurisdiction is a slippery slope. The Ferguson suit is a case of 'good because it aligns with my beliefs'. What if the fed stepped in and did the opposite?
From what I have seen Federal is less corrupt than state, and state is less corrupt than Local. So, in terms of justice we are probably better off centralizing it.
Honestly, I suspect the only reason for local cops is they will actually enforce the little rules like what time of day people can put out their trash cans.
According to what I understood from the article, a trial is not even relevant. Lawyers are barely relevant. A prosecutor threatens someone with a life-destroying extreme sentence, and they take the short plea term. Confess to this crime you may have committed or we will destroy you. End of story. No trial, no long discussion, your lawyer will advise you to take the deal because facing 30 years in prison for a minor offense is a very real possibility. The cops will lie in court and be believed, forensic science will be fabricated, it's just not worth the risk. Federal or state.
After being in a car accident (my fault) without insurance and in which another driver broke an arm I was arrested and held in jail for two months at which point I was given the option of going to court on a charges of "assault with a deadly weapon" and related miscellany or pleading to "hit and run" and getting released immediately with time served. This despite the fact that I was arrested next to my capsized vehicle. The prosecution had completely fabricated police statements that I said I was trying to kill people. I felt terrible for causing that accident and the related damages and harm but the system truly is deeply fucked.
Considering right now it's the federal government protecting civil rights and not the cities, states, and municipalities, then yes, I would say we need this.
>...This would mean more power residing in the federal government. Do we really need more power to be centralized
Yes. Local governments have shown they care not for the rights of citizens and the Constitution in general. People like to say "what if the Fed did the opposite". but all too often the Fed is the only rescue from oppressive local regimes.
How about getting rid of absolute prosecutorial immunity, significantly weakening qualified immunity, and codifying Bivens liability (hey a guy can dream!).
I like the idea of suing bad prosecutors I really do.
The problem is the signal to noise ratio in lawsuits against public officials. I saw dozens of these filed pro se when I was a clerk and they were all garbage. Convicts have absolutely no disincentive to file these suits, and getting rid of prosecutorial immunity would grind the system to a halt.
One approach might be a setup where an EEOC-type organization could issue "right to sue" letters against prosecutors on the basis of informal complaints when there was something potentially meritorious.
That would be grossly unconstitutional. Congress tried to mitigate this problem (which I agree is one) with the administrative exhaustion rule in the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995, but SCOTUS significantly defanged it in Jones v. Bock. SCOTUS can sometimes be insensitive to the problems faced by lower courts -- it hears a tiny handful of cases a year on a fully discretionary docket that are almost always briefed and argued by top notch specialist attorneys. Vexatious litigants aren't a problem for them, so it easy for them to wax poetic about equal access to justice.
That said, as part of a compromise in eliminating absolute proscutorial immunity Congress could write some kind of screening procedure to allow for early dismissal of bad cases and/or some kind of administrative gatekeeper.
Are you talking about the same organization that prosecuted Bond for chemical weapons, and Yates for throwing fish into the ocean under an "anti-shredding" law?[1][2]
The civil rights lawsuit against Ferguson is an entirely political gesture, transparently motivated by a need for the administration to 'do something'.
Coming from a country with non-elected state attourneys and compulsory prosection the American approach to this seems rather weird. Wouldn't electing prosecutors essentially make them politicians?
Afaik the idea behind elected prosecutors and judges is to make sure that the law represents what the people want, since a prosecutor or judge that fails to convict when the people want a conviction won't get re-elected.
So yes, they are politicians, and I'm not convinced that's a good thing.
Of course, being north of the border, I'm not exactly versed in American state politics.
I believe that's the idea, yes. However it's very easy to see that it doesn't actually work that way. Unseating an incumbent candidate in local governments is damn near impossible, barring "scandals" or obvious extremes (but not even then, depending on the area we're talking about).
This is actually a big deal in America and a fundamental change in how our government operates. Your idea is right, but since the 1960s judicial authority has grown in a way that increases their responsibility to the point where they're almost legislators themselves.
Because there's a lot of different ways to interpret laws, judges have a fair amount of flexibility in sentencing, and elected judges aren't by default just cronies of whoever appointed them.
The trend to elect anyone and everyone was part of the American Progressive Movement backlash against the spoils system. Under that system every job in government was given to a crony of the chief executive.
Unitary executives and plural ones each have their pros and cons, but on the balance given the limited attention span of the electorate, I think unitary is better.
Yes. In the US, members of the judicial branch are either elected or appointed (by politicians). The rules vary by state and by position and both have problems. Right now there are several areas where there are open judge seats but any election of new judges has been blocked (I think PA has/had this problem). Either way, prosecutors and judges are beholden to politics in order to advance their career path and/or even keep their current position
Compulsory prosecution puts all the power in the hands of the lawmaking branch. In the USA we have a traditional separation and balance of powers. Prosecutor's discretion is considered one of the balancing forces.
Well I live in a country with non-elected attorneys and they become marionettes of the politicians quickly. As long as they do as the regime is saying they will be there and they don't care.
85 percent [of prosecutors] ran unopposed in general elections.
I would speculate the remaining 15 percent were assistant running against their boss -- which even in America, is a huge career gamble.
"One of the most baffling aspects of the US criminal justice system is that incarceration rates continued to rise even after crime began dropping in the 1990s. If crime was dropping, it stands to reason that there should have been fewer criminals to lock up."
That isn't necessarily correct. Crime rates and prosecution aren't directly coupled. It could be that we are simply incarcerating a larger proportion of criminals.
Chicago, for example, had a murder clearance rate of 26% in 2015 compared to the national average of 64%. There is clearly an opportunity (a need in my opinion) to incarcerate more murderers especially in Chicago even though the murder rate has been decreasing in recent years.
Voting for a prosecutor or judge is tough to do, speaking from experience. I tend to rely on outside authorities for this sort of thing - namely, the local papers' endorsements.
The lack of data mentioned in the article is a big deal.
Another thing that's probably underrated in a lot of districts is the lack of competition. Where I live, if you're not a Democrat, you don't really get a relevant primary vote for people on the municipal or county level. The article notes that "85 percent ran unopposed in general elections", but many of those might have had a much tougher primary fight, which excludes the other party and independents.
Voting for judges is also in conflict with the notion that they are supposed to be impartial. Maybe we should change the system so that judges aren't elected by the public, but they can be ousted by the public.
If I had better, more unbiased ways to get information, I'd happily take them. At least endorsements are in the editorial section, so you know what you're getting. Pittsburgh has a right-leaning paper and a left-leaning paper, so if they both endorse the same candidate that's pretty telling to me.
I search online for literally every name on the ballot. I take notes and base my decision off what they write about themselves. I would say 80% of candidates have a website. Sometimes there are local-level debates you can watch on Youtube between candidates. Sometimes there will be news stories about a candidate, either good or bad. The bad ones help weed our the crappy ones, but I take them with a grain of salt.
Democracy as a whole is kind of illusory at this point; the world has grown to such a scale and the general public so distracted that they often can't make valid decisions at the polling booth because they are so disconnected from the issues. In the old days, there were only so many things people had to understand before they were given a vote and, while those issues were more impactful on everyday life, they were also less complicated.
Today, the real issues have gotten complicated and nuanced, but the average human IQ and curiosity level has not caught up. As a result, we are handed lots of small and barely-relevant decisions to give us that illusion of choice, both for practical reasons and to shut us up. Local elections certainly have more impact on one's life, and really aren't hard to understand, but life is too good for most people to care enough. And, with people more infantilized than ever, the more they want surrogate mommies and daddies to make the tough decisions for them, just as their own parents did for them in childhood. So, when we are handed a piece of paper so we can say who we want to be our surrogate parents, most of us say "meh" and vote for the incumbents because, well, we have our smart phones, TV, Starbucks, and gourmet restaurants, so the current politicians can't be doing that bad, right?
Grassroots campaigns (Sanders, Trump) this election cycle raised general awareness of a lot of important issues. I'm not sure the fundamental issues are any more complicated today than they were yesterday.
This is why direct democracy doesn't work, and it is also why representative democracy is good.
We have just gotten ourselves into a position where decades of "let the people decide" has led to your ballot including a dozen citizen choices you do not care about.
In a saner world, we would be focusing on the representative part of the republic - why am I directly electing judges, magistrates, and prosecutors when it would be significantly better to select representatives to make all these electoral choices for me?
Political parties have become a bad proxy for true representation. People just start voting party line and the powers that be love that kind of model - it means great persons cannot rise independent of them, and it means you can blame the bad on the individuals but the success on the party as a whole. And party affiliation has always been a horrible proxy for effective leadership.
Instead, we are in a situation where our "representatives" are representing millions of people individually, while we vote for dozens of esoteric local elections for things that aren't particularly representative. What we should have is much more localized elections of representatives that then make such bureaucratic appointment decisions themselves, including for the higher levels of government beyond them. IE, you can have a representative for every 3 thousand rather than 3 million people, and that representative will join a local council that appoints the judges, city council, higher level reps, etc.
Yes, which is one reason why I think of the system in the US as being very much closer to a fascist system than many or most are comfortable contemplating.
"[...] why am I directly electing judges, magistrates, and prosecutors when it would be significantly better to select representatives to make all these electoral choices for me?"
>In a saner world, we would be focusing on the representative part of the republic - why am I directly electing judges, magistrates, and prosecutors when it would be significantly better to select representatives to make all these electoral choices for me?
>Political parties have become a bad proxy for true representation. People just start voting party line and the powers that be love that kind of model - it means great persons cannot rise independent of them, and it means you can blame the bad on the individuals but the success on the party as a whole. And party affiliation has always been a horrible proxy for effective leadership.
The problem is that these two ideas conflict with each other in a first past the post system. Representatives are motivated to band together to help secure their election and with first past the post the largest group is the only one who benefits. The end results will always be two large political parties.
The situation you're describing is exactly what exists in a huge number of municipalities: a city manager, an appointed official who runs the city, while the elected officials (city council members) basically do nothing but pass toothless resolutions.
It isn't that great. Representation isn't that great, and why should we expect it to be? How the hell is one person ever going to represent the perspective of a million people?
A representative is not some sort of averaging function; they are just a person, and the demands on a process for matching this person to the desires of the electorate are nearly impossible to satisfy.
I tend to think that the problem is not the system of representation or the ballot at all; the problem is our individual abdication of responsibility to be involved in the process. We surrendered our control of democracy to managers - officials - to decide for us and make laws for us. Well, guess what happens if you do that? The government fills up with venal people who respond to the interests of powerful elites.
The solution is not a change in representation, it is engagement from the public. That means you, as an individual, probably spending 12% of your time actively working on improving your municipality and your country, being informed and engaging in a deliberate process to study and express opinions - in both measured and unmeasured ways. If the public is so removed from the process, does not participate in democracy, then it is no surprise that the process - whatever it is - has drifted so far from what we need it to be.
Agree completely on voting for one person to act on my behalf. I absolutely loathed needing to mark yes or no for two pages worth of judges when I voted in Chicago.
I always promoted a plan of voting no for every single judge. I figured if every judge failed to be retained during one election cycle, the powers that be would finally take the power away from the people for good!
I would like for there to be a greater discourse on "true representation". When I look at citizens per representative I absolutely don't believe it's representative.
I think for congress it's near 600,000 or something now. In LA we have the county board of supervisors, and that's a group of 5 people running a city of 10,000,000
I find these numbers mind-blowingly unrepresentative, nowhere near "true representation".
Juries - chosen at random and vetted from a representative sampling of the population - choose whether a defendant is guilty or not. It's part of the civic duty of a US citizen / resident.
Could we make choosing people to choose whether a law should be passed or not a similar responsibility? "Oh I have to take a week off to go to Washington DC, there's some law I have to hear testimony on and decide the outcome."
Since you mention 10,000,000 people, you are confusing Los Angeles County with the City of Los Angeles. There may be 5 County Supervisors, but the city has a mayor and 15 council members. The other cities (Burbank, Santa Clarita, Glendale, Long Beach, etc.) also have their own mayors and city councils and whatnot.
> This is why direct democracy doesn't work, and it is also why representative democracy is good.
The indirection of electing a representative that may or may not represent all of your views proves quite frustrating, compared to individually deciding on various issues. Representatives are a package deal: you can only pick from the available choices. If none of those representatives represents your views, you have no recourse.
An individual voter will almost never find a representative that exactly represents their views, so they have to determine which ones they weight more heavily and focus on those. Successfully elected candidates thus focus on issues that the most people care the most strongly about, nearly to the exclusion of all else, which then produces polarizing candidates.
Representative democracy has two advantages: people don't have to deal with day-to-day issues, and representatives can have discussions and negotiations and work out novel solutions in ways that large numbers of individuals cannot.
As an alternative model, suppose that instead of an all-or-nothing election of one representative, all legislative issues (above a certain adminstrative level, such as things Congress would normally vote on) were directly voted on, but people could choose to delegate their vote to a proxy so they didn't have to deal with it themselves. Any proxy, and not necessarily all the same one, or for the same issue. So a sufficiently motivated individual could vote on every issue, but they could also choose to pool their vote with many others, and the vote of those representatives carried exactly as much weight as the number of proxies they represented. Representatives holding enough proxy votes would then carry enough weight to have discussions and negotiations.
I've seen many different proposals for that kind of process. While it would require some new infrastructure to handle, it still seems vastly preferable to the current approach. All the people who want to argue over a tiny handful of polarizing issues can go fight over those, but that doesn't disenfranchise all the people who care about everything else.
> What we should have is much more localized elections of representatives that then make such bureaucratic appointment decisions themselves, including for the higher levels of government beyond them. IE, you can have a representative for every 3 thousand rather than 3 million people, and that representative will join a local council that appoints the judges, city council, higher level reps, etc.
At one time, the expectation in the US was that the states could determine their electoral college votes arbitrarily, not necessarily by popular vote.
I agree, I've been thinking about this issue myself quite a bit.
If decisions are recorded and perhaps represented in more simplistic terms then the process of choosing a proxy can be simply comparing a proxies past votes to ones own votes over a number of decisions and finding one or more matches - making choosing a proxy a simple multi choice process.
Representatives are a good way to create specialists who can investigate, and care about the decisions that need to be made.
Democracy is a pretty horrible way to select representatives.
In the US, democratic selection tends to select white male lawyers at a rate way above their presence in the population.
It means that our representatives are really only representing some sort of average ideology, not the actual distribution of beliefs.
I think a lottery (like long term jury duty) would be a much more effective methodology of selecting representatives who are representative population they represent.
On the flip side, it has never been easier to research the issues. If you want to be an educated voter, it isn't that hard of a process. The problem is that very few are motivated because on average we all have pretty nice lives. That doesn't mean there is nothing to be improved upon, just that we all have lots to lose by joining political movements like the ones that existed in the past.
>the average human IQ and curiosity level has not caught up
The lowest IQ humans who are also functional are concentrated in prisons. The crime rate is highest amongst 80-90 range individuals, and it is hard to believe that freeing them wouldn't retard your intellectual catchup. In fact, the French IQ has fallen by almost four points between 1999 and 2009 so if anything we must increase the number of people incarcerated, among other policy decisions.
" In the old days, there were only so many things people had to understand"
Most of them were illiterate, had very little access to any real news.
The very concept of 'unbiased' news is a modern American phenom. Of course all news is still biased, but they try/pretend not to be.
In the 'old days', newspapers were propaganda tools of the owners and their political peers - if you wanted to get elected to 'Senate' or whatever, the best thing to do would be to 'buy a newspaper' - which many of them did.
Have a look at 'old timey' news - it's really almost funny - it's all mockery and slander. That said - it had a lot of wit! At least some of it was smart :).
But yes - the world is very complicated today - I agree with that sentiment.
It's also partially because the "upper crust" of intelligent, wealthy individuals is far less locally invested than in the past. They're more mobile and tend to connect with others and communities less because of geography and more because of shared experiences (e.g. university alums), shared industries/professions, and similar economic statuses. These are the people who, in the past, would have had strong investment in local politics and the intelligence to problem solve issues at that level.
The issue here is win rate. Ask any lawyer or prosecutor and they take pride in that win rate and how many people they have "put away". To get that rate up, they often go after the poor and people who have committed petty crimes while ignoring real white-color and blue-collar crime because it is laborious to prosecute.
If you want to lower the rate, you have to lower the industry incentives for this type of thinking.
1. I love how this bilthely leads with, "The electoral process is thoroughly corrupt, here's George Soros pushing money through the system to pursue his agenda," and then jumps aboard the train of said agenda with no further questions asked. Good lord, you want us to participate in THIS? Par for the course for Vox.
2. As the article itself makes clear, prosecutors are actors who will respond to whatever incentives we create for them. The evidence and arguments in THIS VERY ARTICLE undercut the notion that we should focus on the role of the local prosecutor, who is basically just a law enforcement officer, and rather focus on changing the laws to reflect the already-shifted moral substrate.
3. Why doesn't Vox ask us to focus on changing the laws? Our only role in their vision is as fodder - herd voters responding to the signals of a billionaire-funded campaign to harry local prosecutors (to what end? who should we elect instead, and why would they act differently?). This, again, is in line with my (limited) understanding of the Vox perspective - "Trust the experts to figure it out, just nod and sign your name here." We, the vox populi, would obviously never be involved in the actual construction or framing of laws. Just vote.
Growing up in Tennessee, the practice of electing low-level judicial positions like prosecutors and local judges always seemed like a bad idea. Incompetent or corrupt judges who apply the law in bad or farcical ways create real harm and grief[0][1].
Appointments don't prevent incompetence or corruption, but at least it uncouples local popularity or a lack of voter knowledge from deciding who ought to have the authority to apply the law. It seems like vetting experienced lawyers who have a real understanding of not only what the law is, but also how it should be applied, as happens in the UK[2] can't help but produce a more legally sound criminal justice system at the very least.
But then, I suppose it depends on your priorities. If holding judges accountable to the electorate's sense of justice is a higher priority than holding them accountable to what the law actually is, then this is a fine system.
This is a good reminder. I should check up on my local prosecutor's position on "innocent until proven guilty." This is not directly enshrined in the US Constitution. Rather, it is inferred from several places. Apparently, this leaves some room for local jurisdictions to soften or abrogate this principle for the sake of enforcement/deterrence.
> Over the past few days, news has trickled out that liberal billionaire George Soros has poured millions of dollars into local election campaigns against "tough on crime"
Because of lack of education, awareness, care and time, along with the easy with each elections (especially local and state) can be manipulated, we are left at the discretion of benevolent billionaires to fight for us.
I remember first becoming aware of this issues after watching Hot Coffee documentary. There is a large part there around how corporate interests can easily manipulate state Judicial branches -- by sponsoring judges which are more favorable to them (in that case it was capping maximum damages people could win during corporate settlements on appeal, and yes, lawyers knew to always appeal).
> But that's not the case in much of the country, where prosecutors don't file records that would explain why, for example, they pursued prison time instead of probation for a defendant. "We don't really know why prosecutors do what they do," Pfaff said.
I think aside from padding the stats and pleasing voters with "tough on crime", there is a very good reason for prosecutors to prosecute more. It helps prison guard unions (keeps them employed), private prisons, state prisons (cheap labor). Each one of those interests can spare a good amount of cash to sponsor the "right" prosecutor. It is like a long term investment. In fact, they'd be stupid not to do it.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadI don't know how it got to be that way.
However, I can't get over two problems with that. The ease of hacking and the failure of our democracy to create secure, open-source digital voting (see: Diebold) and the inability to prevent vote-stealing. Think about if on voting day, your employer demanded to use your phone to cast a vote using your account or you'd be fired.
For the former, we could have verifiable votes: you get a anonymous token, and can look up your vote on a public register by that token. The only problem with that approach is that it makes voter coercion (forcing someone to vote a given way) somewhat easier. However, many states already allow absentee ballots, and some (such as Oregon) do all voting by mail with no "polling booth" option, which has exactly the same property.
So, personally, I'd suggest entirely electronic voting, verifiable votes via anonymous tokens, public lists of votes (so anyone can re-run the voting algorithm to check the result), and strong laws against voter coercion (so that employer you mentioned would get prosecuted).
The real reason local governments typically lack resources for truly local needs is that the most vocal locals tend to be NIMBY typea and anti-tax types.
Long-term, getting rid of elected prosecutors and judges at the state level would be a huge help.
Honestly, I suspect the only reason for local cops is they will actually enforce the little rules like what time of day people can put out their trash cans.
Restating for emphasis: These deals work because you'll be in jail longer if proven innocent than if you falsely plead guilty.
Yes. Local governments have shown they care not for the rights of citizens and the Constitution in general. People like to say "what if the Fed did the opposite". but all too often the Fed is the only rescue from oppressive local regimes.
The problem is the signal to noise ratio in lawsuits against public officials. I saw dozens of these filed pro se when I was a clerk and they were all garbage. Convicts have absolutely no disincentive to file these suits, and getting rid of prosecutorial immunity would grind the system to a halt.
One approach might be a setup where an EEOC-type organization could issue "right to sue" letters against prosecutors on the basis of informal complaints when there was something potentially meritorious.
What if there were a disincentive, such as an increase in sentence if they lose?
That said, as part of a compromise in eliminating absolute proscutorial immunity Congress could write some kind of screening procedure to allow for early dismissal of bad cases and/or some kind of administrative gatekeeper.
The civil rights lawsuit against Ferguson is an entirely political gesture, transparently motivated by a need for the administration to 'do something'.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_v._United_States_(2011)
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yates_v._United_States_(2015)
So yes, they are politicians, and I'm not convinced that's a good thing.
Of course, being north of the border, I'm not exactly versed in American state politics.
Unitary executives and plural ones each have their pros and cons, but on the balance given the limited attention span of the electorate, I think unitary is better.
That isn't necessarily correct. Crime rates and prosecution aren't directly coupled. It could be that we are simply incarcerating a larger proportion of criminals.
Chicago, for example, had a murder clearance rate of 26% in 2015 compared to the national average of 64%. There is clearly an opportunity (a need in my opinion) to incarcerate more murderers especially in Chicago even though the murder rate has been decreasing in recent years.
I'd like to see city council votes when I check the weather in the morning, for instance.
The lack of data mentioned in the article is a big deal.
Another thing that's probably underrated in a lot of districts is the lack of competition. Where I live, if you're not a Democrat, you don't really get a relevant primary vote for people on the municipal or county level. The article notes that "85 percent ran unopposed in general elections", but many of those might have had a much tougher primary fight, which excludes the other party and independents.
Recall votes would be just as motivated by politics; they'd just be more favorable to incumbents.
By which it is meant, the recommendation of whatever mega-millionaire owns the paper.
Today, the real issues have gotten complicated and nuanced, but the average human IQ and curiosity level has not caught up. As a result, we are handed lots of small and barely-relevant decisions to give us that illusion of choice, both for practical reasons and to shut us up. Local elections certainly have more impact on one's life, and really aren't hard to understand, but life is too good for most people to care enough. And, with people more infantilized than ever, the more they want surrogate mommies and daddies to make the tough decisions for them, just as their own parents did for them in childhood. So, when we are handed a piece of paper so we can say who we want to be our surrogate parents, most of us say "meh" and vote for the incumbents because, well, we have our smart phones, TV, Starbucks, and gourmet restaurants, so the current politicians can't be doing that bad, right?
We need more grassroots activism, not cynicism.
We have just gotten ourselves into a position where decades of "let the people decide" has led to your ballot including a dozen citizen choices you do not care about.
In a saner world, we would be focusing on the representative part of the republic - why am I directly electing judges, magistrates, and prosecutors when it would be significantly better to select representatives to make all these electoral choices for me?
Political parties have become a bad proxy for true representation. People just start voting party line and the powers that be love that kind of model - it means great persons cannot rise independent of them, and it means you can blame the bad on the individuals but the success on the party as a whole. And party affiliation has always been a horrible proxy for effective leadership.
Instead, we are in a situation where our "representatives" are representing millions of people individually, while we vote for dozens of esoteric local elections for things that aren't particularly representative. What we should have is much more localized elections of representatives that then make such bureaucratic appointment decisions themselves, including for the higher levels of government beyond them. IE, you can have a representative for every 3 thousand rather than 3 million people, and that representative will join a local council that appoints the judges, city council, higher level reps, etc.
Very true - isn't that the fascist/communist model? Party affiliation trumps independence & ability?
Yes, exactly.
>Political parties have become a bad proxy for true representation. People just start voting party line and the powers that be love that kind of model - it means great persons cannot rise independent of them, and it means you can blame the bad on the individuals but the success on the party as a whole. And party affiliation has always been a horrible proxy for effective leadership.
The problem is that these two ideas conflict with each other in a first past the post system. Representatives are motivated to band together to help secure their election and with first past the post the largest group is the only one who benefits. The end results will always be two large political parties.
It isn't that great. Representation isn't that great, and why should we expect it to be? How the hell is one person ever going to represent the perspective of a million people?
A representative is not some sort of averaging function; they are just a person, and the demands on a process for matching this person to the desires of the electorate are nearly impossible to satisfy.
I tend to think that the problem is not the system of representation or the ballot at all; the problem is our individual abdication of responsibility to be involved in the process. We surrendered our control of democracy to managers - officials - to decide for us and make laws for us. Well, guess what happens if you do that? The government fills up with venal people who respond to the interests of powerful elites.
The solution is not a change in representation, it is engagement from the public. That means you, as an individual, probably spending 12% of your time actively working on improving your municipality and your country, being informed and engaging in a deliberate process to study and express opinions - in both measured and unmeasured ways. If the public is so removed from the process, does not participate in democracy, then it is no surprise that the process - whatever it is - has drifted so far from what we need it to be.
I always promoted a plan of voting no for every single judge. I figured if every judge failed to be retained during one election cycle, the powers that be would finally take the power away from the people for good!
I think for congress it's near 600,000 or something now. In LA we have the county board of supervisors, and that's a group of 5 people running a city of 10,000,000
I find these numbers mind-blowingly unrepresentative, nowhere near "true representation".
Could we make choosing people to choose whether a law should be passed or not a similar responsibility? "Oh I have to take a week off to go to Washington DC, there's some law I have to hear testimony on and decide the outcome."
First I've heard of such an idea!
Every input to elections is a potential vulnerability; it's best of those processes are participatory and verifiable as opposed to black-box.
The indirection of electing a representative that may or may not represent all of your views proves quite frustrating, compared to individually deciding on various issues. Representatives are a package deal: you can only pick from the available choices. If none of those representatives represents your views, you have no recourse.
An individual voter will almost never find a representative that exactly represents their views, so they have to determine which ones they weight more heavily and focus on those. Successfully elected candidates thus focus on issues that the most people care the most strongly about, nearly to the exclusion of all else, which then produces polarizing candidates.
Representative democracy has two advantages: people don't have to deal with day-to-day issues, and representatives can have discussions and negotiations and work out novel solutions in ways that large numbers of individuals cannot.
As an alternative model, suppose that instead of an all-or-nothing election of one representative, all legislative issues (above a certain adminstrative level, such as things Congress would normally vote on) were directly voted on, but people could choose to delegate their vote to a proxy so they didn't have to deal with it themselves. Any proxy, and not necessarily all the same one, or for the same issue. So a sufficiently motivated individual could vote on every issue, but they could also choose to pool their vote with many others, and the vote of those representatives carried exactly as much weight as the number of proxies they represented. Representatives holding enough proxy votes would then carry enough weight to have discussions and negotiations.
I've seen many different proposals for that kind of process. While it would require some new infrastructure to handle, it still seems vastly preferable to the current approach. All the people who want to argue over a tiny handful of polarizing issues can go fight over those, but that doesn't disenfranchise all the people who care about everything else.
> What we should have is much more localized elections of representatives that then make such bureaucratic appointment decisions themselves, including for the higher levels of government beyond them. IE, you can have a representative for every 3 thousand rather than 3 million people, and that representative will join a local council that appoints the judges, city council, higher level reps, etc.
At one time, the expectation in the US was that the states could determine their electoral college votes arbitrarily, not necessarily by popular vote.
If decisions are recorded and perhaps represented in more simplistic terms then the process of choosing a proxy can be simply comparing a proxies past votes to ones own votes over a number of decisions and finding one or more matches - making choosing a proxy a simple multi choice process.
Democracy is a pretty horrible way to select representatives.
In the US, democratic selection tends to select white male lawyers at a rate way above their presence in the population.
It means that our representatives are really only representing some sort of average ideology, not the actual distribution of beliefs.
I think a lottery (like long term jury duty) would be a much more effective methodology of selecting representatives who are representative population they represent.
The lowest IQ humans who are also functional are concentrated in prisons. The crime rate is highest amongst 80-90 range individuals, and it is hard to believe that freeing them wouldn't retard your intellectual catchup. In fact, the French IQ has fallen by almost four points between 1999 and 2009 so if anything we must increase the number of people incarcerated, among other policy decisions.
Most of them were illiterate, had very little access to any real news.
The very concept of 'unbiased' news is a modern American phenom. Of course all news is still biased, but they try/pretend not to be.
In the 'old days', newspapers were propaganda tools of the owners and their political peers - if you wanted to get elected to 'Senate' or whatever, the best thing to do would be to 'buy a newspaper' - which many of them did.
Have a look at 'old timey' news - it's really almost funny - it's all mockery and slander. That said - it had a lot of wit! At least some of it was smart :).
But yes - the world is very complicated today - I agree with that sentiment.
If you want to lower the rate, you have to lower the industry incentives for this type of thinking.
2. As the article itself makes clear, prosecutors are actors who will respond to whatever incentives we create for them. The evidence and arguments in THIS VERY ARTICLE undercut the notion that we should focus on the role of the local prosecutor, who is basically just a law enforcement officer, and rather focus on changing the laws to reflect the already-shifted moral substrate.
3. Why doesn't Vox ask us to focus on changing the laws? Our only role in their vision is as fodder - herd voters responding to the signals of a billionaire-funded campaign to harry local prosecutors (to what end? who should we elect instead, and why would they act differently?). This, again, is in line with my (limited) understanding of the Vox perspective - "Trust the experts to figure it out, just nod and sign your name here." We, the vox populi, would obviously never be involved in the actual construction or framing of laws. Just vote.
Appointments don't prevent incompetence or corruption, but at least it uncouples local popularity or a lack of voter knowledge from deciding who ought to have the authority to apply the law. It seems like vetting experienced lawyers who have a real understanding of not only what the law is, but also how it should be applied, as happens in the UK[2] can't help but produce a more legally sound criminal justice system at the very least.
But then, I suppose it depends on your priorities. If holding judges accountable to the electorate's sense of justice is a higher priority than holding them accountable to what the law actually is, then this is a fine system.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/12/tennessee-judg... [1]: http://www.knoxnews.com/news/crime-courts/dcs-campbell-judge... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Appointments_Commissi...
Because of lack of education, awareness, care and time, along with the easy with each elections (especially local and state) can be manipulated, we are left at the discretion of benevolent billionaires to fight for us.
I remember first becoming aware of this issues after watching Hot Coffee documentary. There is a large part there around how corporate interests can easily manipulate state Judicial branches -- by sponsoring judges which are more favorable to them (in that case it was capping maximum damages people could win during corporate settlements on appeal, and yes, lawyers knew to always appeal).
> But that's not the case in much of the country, where prosecutors don't file records that would explain why, for example, they pursued prison time instead of probation for a defendant. "We don't really know why prosecutors do what they do," Pfaff said.
I think aside from padding the stats and pleasing voters with "tough on crime", there is a very good reason for prosecutors to prosecute more. It helps prison guard unions (keeps them employed), private prisons, state prisons (cheap labor). Each one of those interests can spare a good amount of cash to sponsor the "right" prosecutor. It is like a long term investment. In fact, they'd be stupid not to do it.