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US politics - sometimes political jokes get elected


Rippounet

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Apparently the Iowa Democratic party is doing "quality control" on results "out of an abundance of caution." That coupled with this shady phone app is making this a bit of a clown show.  Are they trying to project that there is fuckery going on?

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3 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Okay.

I knew caucuses sucked ass for representation and availability and whatnot, but I was not prepared for the INCREDIBLY STUPID SYSTEM that Iowa has in their caucus. This whole thing is the best actual representation of Simpson's Paradox I've ever heard of.

  • Let's see. For starters, delegates in some places can be decided in as few as 40 people per value, others over 200, depending on the size of your district - but they are EQUALLY VALUABLE. 
  • Because of the weird breaking out into tiny groups, you get actual delegates decided by coin flips because that one small gym is tied. 
  • Because of the system, the total vote count does not translate into actual delegates, and thus someone could win the popular vote in Iowa and actually not come out with the most delegates - quite easily (this would be that paradox thing I mentioned above)
  • Anyone who cannot come and stand in a gym for hours on a weeknight is basically automatically fucked. Disabilities? Job? Kids? Sorry, you're fucked, fucked, and fucked. 
  • Viability is decided not statewide, but in individual districts, so you can be forced to go to second choice for a candidate even though your candidate is doing just fine statewide.
  • It's also this great fuckery of non-private voting. You not only stand up where you want to vote, you can get yelled at to come to someone else's side. 

And no, before folks ask - it has nothing to do with whoever is doing well (I heard Sanders and Buttigieg are doing okay so far in really early results, but that's about par for the course). This is fuckwittery, and a giant peer pressure game of red rover across the state is not a good way to choose representation. 
 

The one good thing is that it has this pseudo-shitty version of ranked choice voting, except that it's only 2nd choice and that's it. And that's good and all, but literally everything else about it is complete garbage. It's expensive, time-consuming, crowd influenced bullshit. 

Yeah this sounds like a pretty shitty and undemocratic process.  

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18 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

By this time in a Presidential election we'd already know who won.

A state that allows Steve King to be elected should not be first in anything.

It's pretty remarkable that it manages to be both absurdly time-consuming AND bad at representation at the same time. At least if you're gonna fuck with people's actual choices, do it quickly!

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36 minutes ago, GrimTuesday said:

Apparently the Iowa Democratic party is doing "quality control" on results "out of an abundance of caution." That coupled with this shady phone app is making this a bit of a clown show.  Are they trying to project that there is fuckery going on?

Eh. Don't ascribe to malice what could be easily explained by incompetence. 

And (SHOCKING) using a private, non-vetted app to do the results without sufficient testing in a time-constrained way was going to SUPER FUCK UP. Like, seriously, the main reason that no one should ever consider using apps or websites to do voting is because WE ARE COMPLETELY ASS at writing quality apps for things that don't even matter one little bit - why would we be good at writing apps that actually care about things like security or privacy? 

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Just now, Kalbear said:

Eh. Don't ascribe to malice what could be easily explained by incompetence. 

And (SHOCKING) using a private, non-vetted app to do the results without sufficient testing in a time-constrained way was going to SUPER FUCK UP. Like, seriously, the main reason that no one should ever consider using apps or websites to do voting is because WE ARE COMPLETELY ASS at writing quality apps for things that don't even matter one little bit - why would we be good at writing apps that actually care about things like security or privacy? 

The most insane part is that everyone saw this app thing coming, and did absolutely nothing about it. I heard a lot of talk on twitter about issues with the app in the lead up.

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31 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

This is not a good look for the DNC and the whole transparency thing.

Or the competency thing. They can't run a vote in one of the smallest states in the country - and you want to trust them to run a country? 

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If there's any way to get either party to change the absurd primary schedule, making the political media wait for first contest's results until (at least?) midnight EST is about the best method I could possibly think of.  I've given up checking in much.  Just watching Justified reruns now.  Gotta get up in 7 hours.

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32 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

If that's the case, we're all winners tonight.

Haha. This reminds me of that old USSR joke. Though I can't remember the exact wording.

 

Stalin, Molotov, and Beria are on a crashing plane with no parachutes. 

Who is saved?

 

The Soviet people

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Just now, Kalbear said:

Once again, real politics proves that it is far closer to Veep than it is House of Cards or West Wing. 

Hey Kal, we may disagree on who should get the nod, but I think we can probably agree that whoever was running the caucus this year should be sealed inside a pyramid.

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Hot take from Matt Grossmann at 538:

Quote

The reporting of three types of results was partially a response to Sanders’s complaints about 2016 (when he may have done better with first preferences). If he wins but does not get the expected bounce due to delays, it is possible that the increased complexity could hurt him. We may also get to tests the effects of other changes, like reducing the number of caucuses and superdelegates.

 

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I think this crystallizes my deep but previously vague sense of dread from watching the whole Dem primaries unfold, where its now absolutely clear that the Dems are running the kind of grasping, self-serving incompetent clown car excuse for a political process that, say, oh, the republican primaries were the last few times, while those dudes still had primaries. Up to now I would sort of try to disregard the slight uptick in respect I had for every candidate as they quit, or try to tell myself that this what a lot of people really caring about a process looks like, etc. Its not, its just incompetence and dread at irrelevance. Four more years, y'all.

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29 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Once again, real politics proves that it is far closer to Veep than it is House of Cards or West Wing. 

Never forget that the reason Iannucci decided it was time to wrap up Thick of It (the original UK equivalent of Veep) was that on multiple occasions he wrote something intended to be completely outrageous satire only for something almost identical to happen within weeks of the episode airing.

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