Politicians who refuse to retire is a huge, bipartisan problem in the US affecting both genders. Putting an age limit on the president or members of congress would probably have to be done via a constitutional amendment, because the Supreme Court has ruled in the past that states cannot add eligibility requirements that are not in the constitution. One reform that would help in Congress would be to modify the seniority system. Right now, members of Congress gain seniority as long as they keep being re-elected, so you end up with a situation where all the most powerful committees are headed by ancient legislators teetering at death's door. Since those committee chairs are very powerful, they get lots of campaign donations which help keep them in office until God calls them home. I think modulo arithmetic should be used to calculate seniority. A member of the House should have their seniority set to their time in office modulo 10 - after five terms they are reset to seniority zero. For senators, maybe modulo 18 could be used.
We have a built-in filter for this already, which are the primary and general elections. The problem is not politicians refusing to retire, but voters refusing to vote them out.
The Democrat/Republican party system is what gives incumbents such a lead over challengers. I don't think term limits are the fix, I think we need to change how campaigns are financed - because right now, the parties pick who gets money in downticket races, and incumbents have their own war chests. That leads to challengers being outspent.
I just keep thinking about how the national party rolled over for Dianne Feinstein in the 2018 senate election, even though she lost the support of the state party. No big democrats were willing to drop their support of her, and the national party wasn't going to spend money on a primary/general challenge to a seat that would stay blue.
US states are rapidly banning ranked-choice voting †, in efforts to prevent loss of their two-party systems. Campaign finance reform is definitely necessary, but so is the fundamental nature of how citizens choose representation.
This is naked anti-democratic power-mongering. The only reason to ban it outright (rather than, say, letting people try it and switch back if they find it "confusing") is because you're afraid that people might get the hang of it and think it should be used for state and national elections as well.
Voters do find it confusing. Not all of them, but enough that it matters. E.g.: In San Francisco, Chesa Boudin only won as District Attorney in the final stage of the final vote count because his supporters were more likely to know about and use RCV than moderate, conservative, and/or low-information voters.
1. How much of that is due to its inherent complexity, and how much is just due to its novelty? If they had grown up in a society where RCV was the default, how many of those people would still have been confused?
2. People misunderstand that FPTP requires tactical voting as well; are the number of people who will continue to misunderstand RCV if it were to become common higher than the number of people who currently misunderstand FPTP?
Consider that anyone who suggests you to vote third party to "end the two-party system", before the voting system has changed, fundamentally misunderstands how FPTP works as well.
It also completely blocks extremists. They are ranked first by their supporters but last by every single other voter. This effect is mostly visible in a 3+ party system though.
> Since those committee chairs are very powerful, they get lots of campaign donations which help keep them in office
Incumbency is a huge thumb on the scales. A functional system needs to have certain checks on those in power that balance the playing field, otherwise democracy is a sham.
The two party system is a problem, but term limits are meant to solve a different issue.
Maybe not even modulo but something like seniority increases monotonically for five terms but decreases monotonically for each subsequent term after the fifth term.
Senate: 1 Term. 6 years. Not able to then serve in the House.
House: 2 Terms. 4 years. Not able to then serve in the Senate.
1 Term House + 1 Term Senate. 8 years total.
Gives power to the permanent committee staff members and lobbyists who have institutional memory and social networks. No legislator could possibly understand all the nuances of policy with such short limits. Four terms, say, as a Senator and eight as a House member would be more practical.
Exactly this. California has enacted term limits and it hasn’t gone well.
Lobbyists run everything because the politicians are all too new. It also completely disincentivizes long-term thinking because the system guarantees they will be out of office by the time the chickens come home to roost.
I heard an interview from a state rep in Florida complaining about term limits, something like "your first term is like your Freshman year, you don't know anything, your second is like your Sophomore year, etc" and her point was that you can't get anything done without being able to serve at least 6 years or so.
I think that's kind of bogus. If you can't figure out how to be an effective politician in your first term then you don't deserve to be elected for a second!
I heard AOC talk about this and it does make sense. There's just a lot to learn about how things actually get done and only so much time in the day. It's not as simple as "Write bill, pass bill, job done". You have to figure out who are the people who actually have power in an agency, what their priorities are, how to word the bills so they will actually achieve what you want, etc. There's a lot to it.
I disagree with POTUS term limits. If the citizenry want someone to stay in office, like we did for FDR, we shouldn't be forced to pick someone else.
Furthermore, having term limits on just one branch of government decreases the power of that branch without decreasing the power of the other branches creating a new balance of power (or imbalance).
Imagine having to vote for someone other than FDR in the 1940 election. Germany had swallowed most of Europe that year. I couldn't imagine being forced to vote for President Wendell Willkie or James Farley to lead us into war because the guy I want can't serve due to term limits.
Term limits are a dumb way to enforce change where there are definite benefits to institutional knowledge by the members, otherwise they are targets for capture by staffers and lobbyists.
Have a minimum (25 for House, 35 for Senate, POTUS, Judge) and maximum (75) age for all positions.
Term limits are actually bad for democracy. The most effective politicians are the ones who have learned how to do it over time. There's this bizarre American idea that being an elected official shouldn't be a job. It definitely should.
The problem here wouldn't even be solved by term limits, because Joe Biden has only been president for <4 years. The problem is that he has started to rapidly decline. Unless you institute some kind of Logan's Run Rule, you can't avoid elderly people in positions of power.
The actual, less fun solution, is for the party apparati to start elevating younger people to positions of power and influence. And that only happens if the members of that party start to demand it. It worked on Joe Biden, and he stepped aside.
Democracy is not there to be effective. It was meant to be a sociopath shredder, a wannabe kings and nobles grinder. But they reached critical mass and defanged the tax system, the most important containement vessel.
That's not true. Democracy is an end in and of itself, a system of government that at its best accurately reflects the will of the people. Preventing tyranny is a means to an end (preserving democracy) not the final goal.
And democracy is most certainly not a sociopath shredder. It runs on the power hungry. There are just supposed to be enough checks and balances to prevent any one person or minoritarian cabal from amassing too much power.
A whole generation is unwilling to acknowledge their mortality, step aside and make room (although unlike politicians many aren’t because they can’t afford to)
Hypothetically, but parties are also incredibly weak right now.
In California, we run an Open Primary system for every partisan office outside the POTUS so parties can’t even guarantee they’ll get a candidate into the general election even if they are otherwise eligible to put nominees forward and sometimes it’s Democrat vs Democrat (this has been happening for US Senate elections) or in some legislative districts Republican vs Republican.
Then coming from the opposite direction, you had a complete outsider in Trump effectively takeover the Republican Party in 2016 and he’s still holding the reins in 2024. Bernie Sanders almost managed something similar with the Democratic Party and they just barely held strong enough to keep that from happening. Twice.
Frankly political parties are incredibly unlikely to come together to impose any restrictions that would impose any kind of extra burden on their elder members, let alone age-gate them.
I missed the part where you explain how Bernie Sanders is a meaningful analog to Donald Trump, such that his primary defeats should be hailed as “holding strong” against an insurgent candidate?
Well the unknown variable is whether like Trump he would prove to be more popular than the party he ran under after a successful Presidential election effectively taking it over so you got me there; but they were in 2016 both outsiders who came into their parties to run for President under an already successful Party-brand and made a helluva run, one more successfully than the other.
Either way, neither of them should have gotten as far as they did.
And you can't even get hired -- by law -- if you're over 30 years old. It's absurd. The FAA is complaining that they don't have enough ATCs, but have done absolutely nothing to broaden the hiring pool.
"We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!"
It's because no other profession has the combination of (1) forcing people out of a highly trained role so young (with no options to reuse those skills in any other roles - forcing folks to go have to go back to square one and get a new professional education to move anywhere else), along with (2) the peculiarities of a government pension.
Unless you overhaul the way government workers earn retirement, or we decide that it's safe to employ older air traffic controllers, any other choice would be highly exploitative.
Shouldn't it be up to the individual to determine whether they want to take that bargain? What about those people who did well enough in their previous careers for retirement not to be a concern and desire a new technical challenge that serves the public?
If you can make an exception to the rules to force them to retire early, you can make an exception to the rules to let them earn pension benefits faster.
> Hiring someone older would be setting them up for a very bad time later in life.
If they spend 20 years there, and get 20 years worth of pension, what's the problem? They can combine it with whatever savings and pensions they had before being hired at 36.
Unless you're saying they don't get any pension, in which case stop screwing people over that way and cut the pension qualification to 5 years or less.
I've heard that the bottleneck is apparently the the number of students that can be admitted to the FAA Academy to be trained, not the number of applicants.
I don't know what the state of the art is, but in the 2010s there was a huge mess where a 'biographical evaluation' test was required of ATC applicants, with the timing such that you took it after the FAA prep courses. The evaluation was thinly veiled racism, utterly uncorrelated with ATC performance, and one of the big outcomes was that anyone taking the prep courses was very likely to get weeded out by the biographical evaluation and thus suffer a total loss of his time and financial investment in the course.
So ,that was another problem they were causing themselves in manning.
The real reason is that pilots work in shitty conditions and their education is expensive. And skills are not transferable making it all pretty bad deal.
It's really difficult to game timed and proctored aptitude tests. We've refined these systems pretty well over time. I can't imagine how anyone would game a test like, say, the LSAT unless they had the answers in advance or fraudulently substituted someone to take the test for them. And both cases are pretty easy to detect nowadays.
From a somewhat low-paying job that has no transferable skills? How big is the pension? If it's not nearly as large as the person's prior paycheck, it doesn't sound like a good deal at all.
You are joking, right? You cannot seriously claim that NATCA is anything but a paper tiger if you knew anything about the history of ATC unionization in the USA. President Regan fired all 11,000 members of the actual strong ATC union, PATCO, and barred them from government jobs for life. NATCA never bothered to negotiate their rights back. Some REALLY strong union.
They collect pensions in their 50's. I'm not sure what metric you judge a union by, but most people look at things like pay and medical and when they collect pensions.
Their ability to collectively bargain effectively. It doesn’t matter how good their current compensation is - they aren’t getting the fair market rate without the ability to bargain as a union. Its an example of government and corporate interests colluding to suppress labor wages.
Median pay is $127,805 and by law the salary is capped at $221,900. Training salary starts at under $67,000 in the Bay Area and is much lower elsewhere. They can't strike and are actively being outsourced. Look up the KSQL controller on youtube to see how well that's going.
They have an incredibly valuable and high stress job, and should be compensated appropriately. We don’t know their actual value, because as stated, they are not allowed to negotiate on even terms thanks to Ronald Reagan and the conservative anti-labor movement.
The president has a large support staff to keep the lights on most of the time. Unless the nation is physically under attack, the president's day-to-day job is probably physically less demanding than that of pilots. They have plenty of time for golf.
> Unless the nation is physically under attack, the president's day-to-day job is probably physically less demanding than that of pilots.
Having worked in the White House, this is 110% wrong. The Presidency is an extraordinarily demanding job. The cognitive demands and the and physical toll it takes on you is tremendous.
None of that support staff is constitutionally allowed to make the call to respond to an imminent or ongoing attack. We need a commander in chief and we need to know who that person is -- which was the whole point of the Presidential Succession Act and the 25th amendment. This isn't even a Biden thing -- we had similar issues with Wilson, FDR, Kennedy and Reagan, and I'm sure that some administrations had similar issues that were never reported or written about afterwards.
Isn’t that true of airplanes as well? In theory support staff in the flight control room could instruct e.g. a flight attendant or even a passenger to land an airplane. However it is still not a good idea, chances are it will fail, so you do as much as feasible to prevent both pilots from becoming incapacitated in a large commercial plane.
Ironically, FDR pulled a Biden but succeeded. By early 1944 he was already dying of cancer and hid it, as he hid his disability. He made it through the election, and then died a few months after his inauguration leaving Truman in charge. Of course, FDR was more popular than Biden, but I do believe it was his closest election.
I heard just last night that domestically it’s now 68 years (or somebody is trying to make it 68), but this sucks for pilots who’ve been flying for a long time and are now doing mostly international flights, because the intl age is still 65. The upshot is they have to fly only domestically from 65-68 (and this can require retraining on smaller planes they don’t have currency with).
It's still bad, because at that age, close to retirement, they surely don't want to deal with all the nonsense and mayhem that US domestic passengers cause.
It's measurable biological certainty that reaction times as measured in milliseconds and fine motor control degrade with age. Vision and hearing also degrade. The nature of hands on control of flying a plane means there are no ways to compensate for this.
None of this applies to a politician making decision in a time span of hours, days or months and who can delegate tasks as they wish.
Yet Biden (and for some reason not Trump, who's well documented to have the same kind of senior moments but they rarely make it to the news) is raked over the coals for them all the same. Why do we ask the president to be able to walk a stairs, remember pointless ceremony, and all the other things that have nothing to do with performance in office (on which there has been next to zero discussion this cycle)?
I can see that age is a risk factor you don't want for a commander in chief, anymore than you want it in fighter pilots. If so, age limits seem reasonable.
Donald Trump doesn’t need to be nuanced, or even marginally informed, so his cognitive decline is hardly relevant to his role as Head Performatively Outraged Xenophobic Tax Cutter.
A counter argument for no, or better a higher age, limit is experience. I'm talking President. But some kind of limit, maybe 80 or 75, with some kind of fitness check up at Walter read Military hospital required for any over 40, 50, there are cases or 'early dementia'.
With a better voting system (e.g. Approval or Condorcet) and nothing preventing a dozen candidates from running, that would be much more feasible.
These go hand in hand: our current voting system breaks down if multiple candidates draw votes from each other, but a better voting system would be immune to that failure mode and could give people a free choice of several reasonable candidates without having some of them withdraw and throw their support to others.
why is it that there are not the best 5, 50 or 500 people on the ballot and I as a voter can mark any and all that I think I know will do the job the way I want them to
Only (relative) nerds would be able to figure this out in practice. Using a voting system that “the common man” doesn’t fully understand is unfortunately kind of elitist/classist in its effects even though i understand that’s not the intention of the many who wish for it.
> Only (relative) nerds would be able to figure this out in practice.
"Check the box next to anyone you approve of" is not hard to figure out.
"Write down the candidates you find acceptable, in order of preference" is not substantially harder, either, and provides additional benefit (the ability to express a preference among the candidates you approve of).
This is just the thing you “voting system optimizers” miss!
Yes, “check each one you approve of” is easy if you the voter aren’t meant to understand how it works. “If you just shut up and do what you’re told by the political scientists, it’ll all work out.”
It’s the ‘how it works’ part that loses people. Strategies employed by those who understand it fully can even advantage more savvy voters over the ones just strictly following instructions. For instance, manipulating ranked choice by strategically not choosing any second or third choices. People know that they don’t know fully how systems besides FPTP work, and it makes them feel like these are a way to cheat them.
The instructions are simple, the mechanism and the possible ‘optimization strategies’ are more complex.
I’m not saying people are stupid, just not experts in this flavor of nerdery, and suspicious.
> manipulating ranked choice by strategically not choosing any second or third choices
This is not a useful strategy for good preference-ordering systems. "strategically" not making a second or third choice is on balance much more likely to cause you to fail to get your preferences, because the scenario you thought you were hedging against didn't happen.
> Yes, “check each one you approve of” is easy if you the voter aren’t meant to understand how it works.
It's easy to understand how approval voting works, as well. That's the primary advantage of approval over Condorcet: ease of understanding. "Vote for anyone you approve of and would be satisfied to see in office. This way, you can vote for candidates you like more, as well as candidates you think have a better chance of winning, and you don't have to choose whether to vote strategically to keep someone you don't like out of office or to vote for your favorite candidate. We tally all the votes, and the person with the most votes wins, which means they're the person approved by the most people."
While Condorcet is a bit more challenging to understand (the easiest explanation being based on "who would beat everyone else in a head-to-head race", leaving aside the cycle-breaking mechanisms), it's much more resilient against the need for strategic voting. In Condorcet, there isn't an incentive to vote strategically; just write down your preferences.
Approval does have scenarios in which strategic voting may be desirable, notably when a less mainstream candidate is close to overtaking the mainstream candidates and enough people are willing to drop their approval of the closest mainstream candidate. That's a dangerous strategy to try, because it also gives an opportunity for the most popular opposing candidate to try to win. The existence of that strategy is one of the biggest arguments for Condorcet over Approval.
So, the massive tradeoff here is:
Do you want a system that's trivial to explain to people with no additional complexity under the surface, trivial to adapt existing voting procedures and ballot designs for, and is better than FPTP along most axes, but still retains one of the notable flaws of FPTP, namely having particular scenarios that still encourage strategic voting? That's Approval.
Or do you want a system that's better than FPTP along pretty much every axis, encourages and benefits from honest voting with no "strategy" required or desired, but is a bit harder to explain to people and has some additional complexity under the surface, and is harder to adapt existing voting procedures and ballot designs for? That's Condorcet.
Also, frankly, if you're going to talk about systems that present voters with something easy to understand on the surface but have complexity under the surface that most people don't understand and that does cheat people, we already have that system in place: FPTP with the Electoral College, gerrymandering, myriad forms of voter suppression... Compared to that, both Approval and Condorcet are simple.
Yeah I do find the commenter you responded to is, shall we say, overly concerned about the mental capacities of the average voter. "Mark each one you like" is not that hard and not substantially harder than "mark the one you like most".
I am concerned tho that preference voting (is that the right word?) gives people too many opportunities to screw up—there are too many things that can go wrong on the ballot (ones I've seen have three columns for 1st, 2nd, 3rd preference, and there should be at most? exactly? one mark in each column). Also vote counting has too many ifs and whens and seemingly arbitrary rules how my ballot will be counted in case my 1st choice doesn't clearly make it on first count.
Writing down candidates names will make for some fun days when it comes to counting. Plus, what if multiple candidates have similar names? And, a ballot with a scribbled "Miller!!1!" on it, do you mean Ms Annie Miller from Portland Oregon? That one? Lastly, when was the last time another person was able to read your scratches?
>I am concerned tho that preference voting (is that the right word?) gives people too many opportunities to screw up—there are too many things that can go wrong on the ballot
Here in Australia you number the box next to the candidates name from 1 to N this is not normally an issue for the local seat in the lower chamber (house of representatives) where there are a manageable number of candidates, but in the upper chamber where senators are elected on a state wide basis you end up with sometimes farcical situations like the infamous "tablecloth ballot paper" which had 264 candidates.
There has been some attempt to reform this such as forcing people/party's to pay a registration fee in order to appear on the ballot (this is done to cut down on so called nuisance candidates but it is arguably undemocratic, although I believe you are eligible for a refund of the fee if you poll above some threshold % of votes which is a fair compromise in my opinion).
The deposit system in the UK seems to work fine for us.
It's not enough (£500 currently) to be a meaningful expense to any candidate actually trying to win, but it's enough friction for 'fun' campaigns that we get enough to be funny but not enough to really interfere with anything.
And, yeah, ours is called a deposit because if you get 5% of the vote you get it back - and the phrase "lost their deposit" to reference a candidate who thought they were real utterly cratering on election day is pretty widely known.
Of course the UK's system of government is largely a patchwork of oddities that, put together, mostly work for us, so how well any particular oddity will work in another system is invariably debatable.
Fond though I am of ranked choice conceptually, there are a lot of people I would not enjoy (nor be particularly successful at) talking through voting under such a system.
Given especially US multi-race ballots, I find it a lot harder to see the incremental complexity of approval voting having a noticeable effect (though note for calibration that there's plenty of criticism out there for how confusing many multi-race ballots are as is).
Your assessment may be swayed when you discover that the current de-facto bipartisan state of US politics is a logical and near-inevitable outcome of a first-past-the-post voting modality.
Yeah, ballot design for preference voting is an interesting UX problem. Any design needs to be obvious for voters, reasonable to count unambiguously, and support mail-in paper ballots (tangent: which ideally 100% of people would have the option to use).
You could list the candidates in random order with a number next to them, and then have people write down those numbers in order. That, like anything else, would have failure modes, though.
An NxN matrix for N candidates allows using "marked or not" detection, but it creates a huge ballot even with just a handful of candidates.
Voting is already a pricey endeavor. Simply do the UX studies and find what works. Than publish the studies, and after a couple of cycles run a meta-analysis, and we should have close to optimal strategy.
Dowdall's method assigns 1, 1⁄2, 1⁄3... points to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd... candidates on each ballot, then elects the candidate with the most points. Ranked voting systems vary dramatically in how preferences are tabulated and counted, which gives each one very different properties.
Ranked voting systems are usually contrasted with rated voting methods, which allow voters to indicate how strongly they support different candidates (e.g. on a scale from 0-10).[1] Rated voting systems use more information than ordinal ballots; as a result, they are not subject to many of the problems with ranked voting (including results like Arrow's theorem).
That's a bucket full of problems. I remember that I had a similar problems years ago when I wanted to consolidate several lists about the "daily usefulness" of Chinese characters. How much does it weigh when you put A, B, C in that order? is A=1/1, B=1/2, C=1/3? or maybe A=0, B=-1, C=-2? To quote the above, "Ranked voting systems vary dramatically in how preferences are tabulated and counted". This should be a red flag! I'm happy to see that alternatives to first-past-post are tried out in some locations such as Alaska, Maine and Australia, but why ranked voting?
Ranked voting is only good when you think of yourself as a sole, lonely voter. You put the candidates into this order: A, B, C. But there will be other voters with other preferences. Let's say you're three people and the rankings are ABCD, EBCD and FBCD. Now you have three favorites A, E, F that are preferred choices, and there's that also-ran B who only was second best. But B got three second-best votes whereas each of A, E, F only got one vote.
So answer my question: how many second, third, fourth votes will it take to surpass a given number of first votes? If there's another ballot in the same election with GCBD on it, now you have B with 3x2nd and 1x3rd place. You cannot add, subtract, multiply or divide these numbers. There's no clear answer (although practical procedures can and have been proposed and used) and that bugs me. The entire thing looks like a game of Bridge, Skat or Poker to me, full of justifiable but ultimately very arbitrary rules, hard to explain and tricky to get right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method says that much to me. One also has to account for unranked candidates and decide whether it should be possible to give one rank to several candidates, and then whether (as done in sports) the next rank must be left empty.
It just goes on and on, the list of options to do the ballot and to do the counting is truly mind boggling. This is the reason I've come to much prefer preference voting over ranked voting. Ranked voting is much too complicated for general use in a general election whereas preference voting is simple and clear and the number of "design choices" as it were is drastically reduced when compared to ranked voting.
"preference voting" and "ranked choice" are largely used as synonyms, as both involve an ordered list of preferences. When I mentioned writing out a list of numbers in order, I was talking about ballot UX design here.
The ordinary case of preference voting is extremely explainable: if more people prefer A to B than prefer B to A, A beats B; pick the candidate that beats everyone else. "It's like running a bunch of head-to-head elections all at once."
They're also really easy to tally into a table: "A ranked above B" is a point for A over B; "B ranked above A" is a point for B over A; A and B ranked equal relative to each other doesn't add anything to either of those two cells.
The corner cases like cycles almost never come up. And even then, it's relatively easy to explain a high-level understanding of the most common methods: "if there's a loop of people who each beat the next one in the loop, ignore the one with the smallest margin of victory". If A beats B in a landslide, B beats C in a landslide, and C very narrowly beats A, A wins.
Also:
> Let's say you're three people and the rankings are ABCD, EBCD and FBCD.
Every ballot implicitly ranks every option, and the usual assumption is that if someone doesn't even care enough to list a candidate, they prefer every candidate they did list over any candidate they didn't list. (There are UX design ideas that could let someone say "this candidate is last" without ordering every candidate, but that adds complexity.) So these ballots are:
A > B > C > D > E = F
E > B > C > D > A = F
F > B > C > D > A = E
Writing it out that way shows that B beats A by 2:1, B beats E by 2:1, B beats F by 2:1, B beats C by 3:0, and B beats D by 3:0. No corner cases or cycles here; a majority of people prefer B to every other candidate.
Pleas do not google preferential voting, no country has ever implemented it. Definitely not Ireland.
The current system is the best thing in the world.
On serious note.
This will never be allowed in US as the whole 3rd candidate is wasted vote argument goes away. And suddenly there is a crack in the door for a other candidate to win.
Sure or some simplified version of ranked choice voting. Perhaps where only the top two choices get counted instead of having unlimited ranked choices (which can get messy and be harder to audit).
Once you've already had people rank their choices, why ignore meaningful information they've given you? In particular, models like IRV encourage people to continue ranking a compromise candidate on the top, to avoid the scenario where the compromise candidate is eliminated.
In models that ignore some of people's preferences, voting "1 Preferred, 2 Lesser Evil, 3 Greater Evil" is dangerous, because your preference for Lesser Evil over Greater Evil is ignored. This creates an incentive for people to keep voting the way they do now, with the compromise candidate on the top.
Approval makes sense because it's easy to explain. Condorcet makes sense because it's relatively close to ideal at the cost of making it slightly more complex to vote. Any model of the form "Ranked choice, but ignore some of the preferences" is the worst of both worlds: more complex to vote, but doesn't produce as good of an outcome.
I think the poster's point above was a form of ranked choice voting where you get exactly 2 choices, instead of 1 choice as in the current system. So you can vote "I like X best, I like Y second best" and that's it. This doesn't ignore anyone's choices, and is easy enough to understand. Details can be quibbled over (maybe 3 would be better than 2, for example), but it's quite clear in practice that any ranked choice voting system has to have a limit on how many choices you can express.
All this is moot though - the states can't agree on creating a popular vote for the president, even though the system to do it is already being used, and there is overwhelming support. They're not going to overhaul the voting system when they can't agree on the national vote even mattering.
It ignores preferences below the top 2, just like the current system ignores preferences below the top 1. It's probably an improvement, but the minor advantage in ballot design doesn't seem worth rolling out a half-measure.
> but it's quite clear in practice that any ranked choice voting system has to have a limit on how many choices you can express
In practice, 99% of ballots will only include the candidates listed on the ballot. Perhaps set a limit of N write-in candidates for some reasonable N, to avoid someone playing edge-case games like "you are legally obligated to count my ballot containing 200 million names!!!1!". But there's no obvious reason not to allow as many rankings as candidates on the ballot plus number of permitted write-ins.
> All this is moot though - the states can't agree on creating a popular vote for the president, even though the system to do it is already being used, and there is overwhelming support.
There's widespread opposition from the party that regularly loses the popular vote. I do hope it passes someday, though; it'll be a first step towards serious voting reform.
The distinguishing and necessary result of democracy, practically unique when compared to any other form of government, is that it provides a nonviolent means to remove aggressively incompetent people from office.
> Sadly, this has never
> happened, anywhere, ever.
Didn't this literally just happen?
If Biden hadn't suffered in the polls after the nature of his debate performance, I don't see how we'd be here today.
However indirect the mechanism by which he was ousted, it ultimately comes down to an assessment of what candidate voters would have been willing to back.
Polls are not an election, indirectly or otherwise. The people who care most about polls are a) pollsters, and b) hacks writing tedious process stories.
My point includes the suggestion that there is never a "best"; the optimal outcome is to elect the least worst candidate.
ALI: I shall stay here and learn politics.
LAWRENCE: That's a very low occupation.
ALI: I had no thought of it when I met you.
The paradox of government is that the people most qualified to hold office - almost any office - are deterred from it by the sheer awfulness of the jobs. Someone deselecting themselves is in the general category of the dissuaded, even if they've done it before.
I've recently wondered what a sortitionist democracy would look like, something were the legislative and executive branches are randomly selected throughout the popukation much like a jurry to serve for a few years. I'm not aware of any places in history that had something like that.
I've actually had a few runins in my past with some US senators where I got to actually sit and listen and converse about some problems. I was always unimpressed with the caliber of the man, to be honest, in terms of both their emotional and cognitive prowess. Having random people vote on the issues probably wouldn't yield worse results.
Something I've come to believe is that US democracy doesn't naturally select for anyone based on leadership skills, credentials, or any virtue that is needed in such a role. It seems to select for people who can get votes, which can mean a lot of things. I think that is a key issue.
A very important point in politics that doesn't often get discussed is that simply holding a legal office doesn't give you any actual powers. The most likely result of a sortitionist system would be that the bureaucracy controls the state, and that the officially appointed leaders are strictly figureheads.
Despite what the law says, people in the administration don't actually have to follow the orders of their appointed superior. If they feel that the senator/congressman/president/etc can be fooled, or simply that enough of their colleagues are on their side, they can just ignore even direct orders. What's the senator going to do? Call the police because their subordinates are ignoring them?
So one of the most necessary qualities in an official is being able to control the levers of power - through connections, charisma, physical power in ages past, money - whatever it is, you need your subordinates to actually do what you tell them. Government isn't a boardgames where people follow the law just because those are the rules of the game.
>I've recently wondered what a sortitionist democracy would look like, something were the legislative and executive branches are randomly selected throughout the popukation much like a jurry to serve for a few years. I'm not aware of any places in history that had something like that.
Me neither, but it reminds me of the Arthur C. Clarke novel "Songs from Distant Earth". In it, a distant colony of Earth has a very small population, since the planet is all a big ocean, except for a few small islands. The small society has a mayor, who's randomly chosen from the population for a limited term. The only disqualification (other than obvious things like age) is that the post can't go to someone who actually wants to do the job. It's similar to how no one in their right mind actually wants to sit on a jury, but people do it because of civic duty.
>Didn't this literally just happen?
>If Biden hadn't suffered in the polls after the nature of his debate performance, I don't see how we'd be here today.
No, this didn't happen at all. There has been no election yet, and polls are not elections, they're just random-ish samplings. The polls showed voters weren't very enthusiastic about Biden, but back in 2015, the polls showed that Trump was absolutely certain to lose in a landslide to Hillary, and that didn't happen. I do agree with the poll results this time around, but that's just my opinion and not at all backed up by an actual election, which we now won't have (since the election will have a different candidate). We'll see how well the new candidate fares.
>However indirect the mechanism by which he was ousted
This "mechanism" was not part of the government at all, and not really part of "democracy". It was just a bunch of opinion polls organized by mostly the press, and they influenced Biden to stop his campaign, but again this is not some central feature of democratic systems at all. The only way of truly assessing what candidate voters choose is to have an election. Everything else is just guesswork.
From an outsider perspective, the US bipartisan system seems to be a big problem. There are almost no meaningful choices. Moving to transferable vote would perhaps improve things? But I doubt that would happen anytime soon, because the current system is a live-lock of two wrangling powers that don't want more competition.
First we have to git rid of our ludicrous electoral college system. This requires a constitutional amendment, which must first be approved by 2/3 of both houses of congress, then ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures.
Since that is the only thing that has enabled Republicans to barely win presidential elections since 2000, we will not get anywhere close to passing such legislation, let alone get it approved by 3/4 of the state legislatures.
As a side note, the last attempted constitutional amendment was the Equal Right Amendment, giving equal rights to women. It was proposed in 1972, and is maybe close to finally being approved.
> This requires a constitutional amendment, which must first be approved by 2/3 of both houses of congress, then ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures.
The NPVIC is a fucking awful solution that would backfire on the idiots supporting it eventually. Talk about vote disenfranchisement on a massive scale—it could literally invalidate entire states worth of votes just because California, Texas, Florida, and New York decided to vote the same way. Which means that candidates would ignore literally every state except the 4-5 with the largest population because they are the only ones that would matter.
California might be 60/40 but that 40 would matter a lot. Republicans would go to Bakersfield Dems to Santa Cruz. Right now you only campaign in a handful of swing states vs getting whatever you can.
Yes and that would be a good thing, if people stopped thinking that by-state voting for the presidential office is a good thing in the first place. The way it is now means that your vote's weight depends on your street address. You can't move to to upstate New York to improve your influence because New York City will weigh you down. But you can move to New Hampshire and then of course the weight of your vote will improve much.
> The way it is now means that your vote's weight depends on your street address
Say huh? It is literally the same thing as now but in reverse and much much worse. At least now your vote has a chance of counting for something if only influencing your elector. If you live in a state that has agreed with the compact and has a small population, your vote doesn’t mean a damn thing even if you vote for the popular vote winner. Your vote is not yours, it’s the mob’s.
Your whole argument rests on the historically accidental choice that and how states should be apportioned seats in the electoral college. Everything about these procedures is arbitrary, much more so than the principle of "one man, one vote". Of course others have—of late in this forum—also aksed why it shouldn't be that big landlords get several votes. That's how they did it in Prussia in the 1800s. Commenters at they time remarked it is not clear whether it's the farmer or his many pigs who are allotted first class in elections. To sum it up, I'm for the simple and clear rules.
Oh and of course if you're for a small-state bonus in presidential (i.e. federal, nationwide) elections why is it that geography of all factors should be the one distinguishing point? How about skin color or profession? You as the artisanal baker that you are by vocation, don't you feel that artisanal bakers are always underrepresented in parliaments? Shouldn't your vote as an artisanal baker be given more weight, just like the way that citizens of New Hampshire get preferential treatment the Way God Intended?
I understand fully that states can choose to allocate their electoral votes however they want, but the geography factor is what is in the constitution. The current method of democratic influence of state electors to keep is simply better than waiting to see what your neighbor has done before you act in my opinion.
If you don’t believe that geography and states is the correct framework we should use, go work to amend the constitution. Why “break it from the inside”? Go make your case and let your argument win on its merits and get the votes. Stop trying to game the system, go change the system.
What? I sure propose to change the system, not to game it. I hate gaming systems, one should always be upfront and tell the truth. I clearly state, and if not before I do now, states and electoral districts should not be able to influence the outcome of presidential elections.
In a national vote, your vote is exactly as strong regardless of where you live: one person, one vote.
In the current system, some people's votes, those of the least populous states, count for far, far more than some other people's votes (those in the most populous states).
Plus, today, if you live in a state that is overwhelmingly in favor of one party, your preference for the other party doesn't count in the slightest. If you're a blue Texan or a red New Yorker, there is 0 point to you even going to the polls. In a national voting system, your votes would truly matter as well.
The logic is the same regardless of how it is implemented. If the majority of electors are guaranteed to vote according to the result of the national(federal) popular vote, than all voters are equal, and it also then matters if a million people voted R in California or 10 million did (whereas today that is entirely irrelevant). And this all includes the voters of the states that don't join this coalition.
It may feel nice if your state casts its votes for your preferred candidate even if they lose the general election. But it is absolutely 100% entirely irrelevant rationally. And this is the only thing lost if the law change goes through.
People who advocate a national direct democracy should work to change the constitution. States are the selection entity for the country’s executive office.
No, they are not. Not anymore than anyone else's vote who voted for a candidate who didn't win.
You are only disenfranchised if your votes can't affect the outcome in practice or in principle. Like, say, the votes for president of Republicans in California or those of Democrats in Texas in practice. Or the votes of those in Puerto Rico even in principle.
First of all, a direct democracy is something else, it is a system where citizens vote for laws and other issues directly instead of appointing representatives such as congress or the president. France is not a direct democracy, even though they elect their president through a direct vote (like all other democratic nations that exist today except the USA).
Second of all, the constitution leaves it up to the states to decide how to appoint their electors. It follows that any system chosen by that state is as constitutional as any other system.
I would also add that a major improvement to the current rotten system would be for states to appoint their electors proportionally, instead of winner-takes-all. That would solve by far the biggest problem with the current system, which is not that Maine gets more representation per citizen than California, but that voting Republican in California is entirely useless.
I asked you for a justification on why the states deciding to decide their electoral votes based on the national popular vote should only happen through a change to the constitution.
Your reply was that the constitution doesn't say that the USA is a direct democracy.
So, I explained that adopting the national vote wouldn't make the USA a direct democracy. I also explained that the constitution doesn't say that the states need to decide the electoral votes based on local popular votes only.
So, I refuted your argument in two different ways. I'm not sure where you feel I didn't respond to it.
That is a work-around for the worst flaws of the EC, but keeps in place the unfair distribution of EC votes that favors small states. It also will not allow any meaningful alternative to first-past-the-post voting, which is what people here keep asking for. We can't have ranked-choice voting for president without a constitutional amendment.
No, the majority of electors are bound by law to vote a certain way based on their state's decision. The electors themselves are manifestly irrelevant to the whole process, and have been for maybe a hundred years.
The real problem of the system is the state based system, where winning a narrow majority in a state is equivalent to winning a landslide, since you get the same amount of power. Also, the fact that different people get different leverage based on whether they live in a smaller or larger state is highly unfair.
The electors themselves have not actually decided an election in a hundred years or more (as in, electors deciding against the official choice of their state). While they legally could, I would bet you however much you want that they would get literally lynched, if not arrested and replaced, if they tried to. For all practical purposes, the USA has a weighted state-based popular vote system, where the president is the one who wins a majority in states with enough weight.
Edit: researching a little bit more, the electors have never changed the result of the presidential election. The closest they ever came was in 1836 when enough electors ignored their state's vote for vice-president, and still the VP who won the by-state popular vote got elected later in congress. The president was separate and won the electoral college per the popular vote as normal.
So, this concept that electors serve some purpose to safeguard democracy from populism is a pure fantasy. It may be a fantasy that the founders shared, but it has never panned out in reality.
Yeah it's bizarre to think about, but a lot of royalty lived until their 70s and 80s, even in ancient times.
Turns out just having steady access to food, living a low stress lifestyle, and not having to wade through literal shit on the streets was all it took for some lucky ancient humans to have the same lifespans as modern humans.
Also, food in general wasn't poisonous. And if those royals actually lived even a modestly healthy life (not drinking too much, not using lead based makeup, or their doctors poisoning them with mercury etc), then they could easily live a lot longer.
The common man wasn't running for president back then. The first person approaching anything of the sort had the most contested election ever up until that point, and also almost kicked off the civil war 40 years early. That age limit was not written with a yeoman farmer president in mind.
Citation needed. That claim seems clouded by today's standard of living.
Before there was clean drinking water, alcohol was much more widely consumed. Were people demented, drunk, or experiencing alcoholic dementia?
Before OSHA, jobs could cause similar symptoms. "Mad as a hatter" referred to hat-makers commonly getting mercury poisoning, as one example of job-induced dementia.
Before the FDA, we have examples from food and medicine.
This is flawed. How are is a voter supposed to be able to pick the best, with inaccurate/no information? It's impractical. Like a laws passed to protect a person by name would be impractical. It doesn't scale.
The US has suffered for the lack of information. How can this be addressed, in the next 20 years, is a much more interesting question.
Seems more like a competition issue. In general if both parties weren't entrenched to this degree, they would be out competed by a group with increased transparency. "Vote for the black box behind the curtain!" vs "Vote for the person who's talking to you!" should be a pretty easy win at the poll. IMHO what we are seeing is a systemic result of the lack of competitive elections and winner-take-all and how it interacts with parties. The parties are far too comfortable. If they expected to have to compete, they wouldn't select vegetables.
I highly recommend Australia's ranked choice voting. We still have two party politics, but if a party goes too far from the electorate they'll lose to an independent or minor party. It allows candidates to target the reasonable majority instead of encouraging fishing for the votes on the fringes.
We'd have to replace our first past the post voting system if we wanted to make more parties viable and unsurprisingly most of the people our flawed system keeps in power aren't very eager to change it.
Very ironic coming from the same party that claims they need to "protect democracy". They aren't even allowing "open and fair" elections in their own candidate selection process, yet we're supposed to believe they will do that on a national level?
As Maya Angelou once said, when people show you who they are -- believe them.
> No one is required to vote for a party's nominee.
How primaries work is entirely up to the party. They may require votes, weigh some votes more than others, or whatever other scheme they choose internally.
> In 2018, the Democratic National Committee reduced the influence of superdelegates by barring them from voting on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention, allowing them to vote only in a contested convention.
There was a primary, every state except Florida held one. Dean Philips is the only notable person who ran against him, but you did in fact have a chance to vote/caucus for someone other than Biden if you were a democrat.
Like a lot of things never codified into law or the constitution — 250 years ago it seemed obvious that the voters wouldn’t do things that seem utterly insane, and that surely nobody who’s very openly, shamelessly corrupt would be elected and still maintain that support even when exposed. So here we are.
So the Framers figured nobody on the cusp of senility would run, and if he did, he wouldn’t get the votes. Because both would be ridiculous.
Especially considering that the only democracy they envisioned was the House, since everybody else was to be picked by nondemocratic means (essentially then, by an aristocracy, who would surely be wise enough to make a good decision).
> it seemed obvious that the voters wouldn’t do things that seem utterly insane, and that surely nobody who’s very openly, shamelessly corrupt would be elected
Credit where credit is due, it actually seemed obvious to Benjamin Franklin that such a thing was inevitable .. hence the need for close attention to the machinery of government and regularly updating the constitution.
See:
I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government, but what may be a blessing to the people if well-administered; and believe further, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it,
It seems similar to the construction in the phrase, "When two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it." I'm also reminded of Jefferson's quote, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure."
I think I agree with you/them - eventually, the stochastic processes of politics will yield despotism, that natural attractor from which we may break away only with difficulty.
I'm all for it. But when the average senator is over 60 and rising, and the majority voter base themselves are generally 60+, it'll be a hard law to pass from both fronts.
And as others mentioned, this is a bipartisan stance, so it's not a matter of political leanings. Old people represent most of our voter-base and thus most of our represenatives.
> But when the average senator is over 60 and rising, and the majority voter base themselves are generally 60+, it'll be a hard law to pass from both fronts.
I have less problems with boomers in general than a lot of people do, but honestly this is one of those things that's going to improve as time goes on and boomers die off.
The thinking at the time was: how can someone under the age of 35 ever have enough accomplishments to be elected president? They believed that would only happen if they were the child of a famous person or former president.
The Constitution was largely written as a departure from the monarchical British system. By not allowing presidential candidates younger than 35, this would prevent hereditary transmission of the presidency. Past 35, a candidate is more likely to stand on their own merits rather than their family or connections.
Quite right! We can only regret that similar minimum-age limits weren't put in place for other offices.
Here in ye olde Europe (and I believe the same for the U.S.), it is unfortunately common to see extremely young, as in literal college students, parliamentarians -- most of them handsome, well-spoken and opinionated; and some also coincidentally the children of famous politicians or businesspeople :-)
Because those "«people»" choose it for everybody else
I.e., your statement is translated to "that large masses of possibly unqualified people choose wrongly qualified people as having power over other people, with important regard to people in their right mind". It is not a value; it is a concern tackled in systemic planning.
Sometimes. On the other hand a surprisingly large number of women are raped and dont fight back because they are overwhelmed with various forceful factors. I imagine being raped feels quite unhappy, possibly even more so than missing 3 meals.
I'll have to look more into the 'seasoning' islands full of slaves in the Caribbean during the slave trade years. IIRC they were treated as bad as you can get, were the majority, and didn't consent yet practically didn't overthrow their dictator in most circumstances (Haiti might count as an exception).
For the same reason that the president needs to have spent at least 14 years in the USA prior to be elected: so that the people can know the candidate.
The minimum age requirement was intended to provide a safeguard against the election of individuals who might lack the maturity and experience needed for such a significant role.
The obvious argument on the other end of the age spectrum is the lack of personal stake. You are making policies that will not affect your own life much at all.
Additionally, we all make decisions collectively in society even though many of them do not affect us personally. I'd argue old people do have interests in many decisions, but perhaps you are not aware of them
If you have 5 maybe 10 years left you cant create a plan for the next 20 years and be around to defend it, explain it or refine it. You cant discourage or encourage to take risks.
An old person may have accumulated tremendous valuable experience in their field but it is increasingly hard to start over in a new field.
This is even before our mind and health decays and some of us get to walk the earth as shadows of our former self.
Also, there is no required experience or competence. There should be but there isn't. Aging to 35 helps very little.
And in fact people who have greatly declined and are still leagues above most of the rest - because the rest was what it was -, are very real.
So, no, decline is fully independent from state, just like a derivative, a trend, does not determine a value. There exist GDP growth of 15%/yr: they do not indicate a big GDP.
We are’t picking random people from a Walmart parking lot.
Nobody has greatly declined and is still among the best choices. I’d happily set the same standard at say 75-80 for Congress and Judges here, but Presidents need to be able to quickly deal with complex and novel issues. That’s exactly the kind of problems where age has the biggest impact.
Would that occasionally reject some still capable people? Yes, but there’s over 330 million people in the US, we can pre filter and still have plenty of options.
Your statement seems to indicate that you cannot see that some people are more competent, lucid, capable, effective, wise etc. than other: such blindness disqualifies from discourse.
Big reason for that is that the requirements also have age requirements, which ensures that nobody who is even 35 is electable today.
So the end result of those age requirements is that you prevent people from getting the necessary experience to become good leaders, resulting in way older politicians than most countries. Politicians being too young isn't an issue anywhere, politicians too old however...
35 doesn’t guarantee anything, neither does does 70+. But in the real world Trump would be 82 at the end of his term, and he was the younger candidate.
I mean to me it seems like that argument can be exactly applied to maximum age which makes it similar consideration.
If you're too old and your memory is faltering, you're "loosing experience". If your conginitive function is declining, your maturity is also essentially declining, all but in pedantic "maturity=age(ageism)" sense
> Why don’t they have an age limit on the president (or any elected office)?
Because age is no indication of fitness for any kind of activity or role. It sure would be nice, if persons with high responsibilities would periodically undergo a fitness test. I'd think the founding fathers saw the election process as such fitness test and the electoral college as the judge of fitness of the presidential candidate.
> age is no indication of fitness for any kind of activity or role.
This is a generalization that overlooks the nuanced reality of human aging. Physical and cognitive functions become more pronounced in advanced age, such as above 70 or 80. Sure, age alone does not universally determine fitness for activities or roles, but it is a very important factor to consider. I am fine with fitness tests.
Because the Founders didn't think of it, and though it would obviously be a good idea now, it's no longer possible to get enough consensus on literally anything to amend the constitution.
This mess has shown that you don't need an age limit for the presidency? He was going to lose the election exactly because of his perceived cognitive decline related to his age.
The DNC is at fault for selected him as the candidate.
I've made that argument. Someone that agrees with it is Jimmy Carter.
My opinion is if the voters are happy to send a geriatric congressman to Washington to sleep through meetings that's fine. But he shouldn't be chairing committees and other offices.
That said Reagan was suffering the beginnings of dementia during the last year or two of his presidency and the world didn't end.
That's not to say it couldn't have. The Constitution and its new SCOTUS interpretation places such a heavy emphasis on the executive branch that even with safeguards and a 25th amendment, maybe protecting the electorate from itself is warranted.
The same reason we don't have a race or sex limit on the Presidency. We should only have competency limits regardless of any other factors. My grandfather died at 101. He was extremely sharp until he was 98 and on no medication. I'd vote for that 95 year-old over either of our current choices without hesitation.
“Competency” is hard to evaluate, especially objectively, and that raises a whole host of other issues because it can’t be resolved expediently. Who raises a competency question? Who decides on it? When can the question be raised? What happens if we don’t have an answer by the time of the election, because it’s tied up in appeals?
Objective qualifications are much simpler. We could argue for months about whether a president is competent, but it takes like 7 seconds to decide whether they’re older than some arbitrary bar.
And at 98 did your Grandfather lead a country? How about a company? Manage a store? A team of employees?
All these anecdotal superhuman tales fail the smell test.
There is this hyped longitudinal study, but it doesn't say what roles these "superagers" were in, only that they had slightly better cognitive outcomes than their peers.
No one has cognitive capacity or neuronal volume of a 35 year old at 65, not to speak of 95.
It is delusional to think anyone can escape the effects of aging at this point in time.
There's a constitutional requirement that the candidate must be at least 35[1], which seems arbitrary to me. That was decided in 1787. I wonder what age they would have picked as a maximum age back then. I say that because (at least these days) it seems almost impossible to change, and people live a lot longer. Like we might be stuck with "Any age between 35 and 57" because people died young in 1787 relative to now.
It's worth noting that the age requirements selected then were less about wisdom and experience, and more about residency in the US. The chief fear at the time was a European power manipulating the country to put a puppet in charge, so to avoid this they wanted to limit power to those who had resided in the US for a long time, but they also didn't want to preclude themselves from holding offices in the future. These numbers (35 for president, 30 for senator, and 25 for house representative) represent a compromise - note that the constitution's primary authors were 36 and 31 at the time it was signed, and the youngest signer was 26.
There is an argument that in a well functioning democracy voters should be able to decide who is qualified to lead them. It shouldn't matter if the person is 20 or 80 if they are able to fulfill their obligations and win the support of voters. With a well informed population and an electoral system that fairly represents voter preferences there should be no need for arbitrary rules.
Setting aside the argument if any electorate is really capable of making that decision - the world has elected many questionable leaders - the big question is "what if the conditions change halfway through".
That likelihood increases with age, and even the most well-informed population does not have the ability to withdraw their consent if it does.
How does a primary help with the "conditions changed" part?
As for electing questionable leaders, no, primaries don't necessarily address that either. If you look back through US presidents, you can find a good sampling of really bad choices. (Season according to party preference).
I don't think that second part is completely fixable in democracies. I do think some systems are more vulnerable to it than others, and primaries in a first-past-the-post world are one of the worse systems.
Bear in mind that your life expectancy is higher as you get older. E.g. the life expectancy for a 72 yr old is not 73, its higher. But I agree with the general point about an age cap.
Hey, I resemble that remark! (Even if I am younger than Biden or Trump.)
But all seriousness aside, what makes you think that matters? I'm not going to vote for someone because they're old, in fact to some extent the opposite--I'd rather have a 50 or so year old as president. Are there polls that say old people vote for old people just because they're old?
Put simply: it would require a constitutional amendment, and those are hard to come by. The Constitution only sets a minimum age for offices — no maximum ages.
the glib answer is that every election is a decision on that politician’s age or term limit, which is almost certainly the position SCOTUS would take here.
in reality, the advantages of the incumbent in an era of safe districts, where the real election is a primary with poor turnout composed mostly of older voters, are almost insurmountable.
and we are currently witnessing what happens when someone hits an age limit the national electorate is unwilling to accept.
Because it's ultimately a distrust of people. You do not trust people to realize that the candidate is old ? Where would you draw the line on limits? Age, IQ, gender, weight, height ?
Of course, we should find the balance between all these limits and "intellect of the crowd".
> Why don’t they have an age limit on the president
In fact there is an age limit for an American president. They should be >= 35 y.o. We need to augment it with an upper limit. My choice would be <= 75 y.o.
If there's to be an age limit, I think it should be tied to the average retirement age plus 7 years. This accounts for changes in life expectancy while also allowing representation for retirees.
IMO, on evidence for when the brain starts to age in a significant way, and supplemented individually based on a robust battery of tests that represent cognitive fitness (something more demanding than n-back and stroop tests).
Unfortunately, I think fantasies about living forever and politics around ageism will prevent this from ever being implemented in our lifetimes.
(No really, you cannot conclude anything from circumstantial states that only increase chances of some conclusion, but not determine it as true, strictly. It is also one of the basic principles evident past consideration of prejudice and racism...)
I see little reason to believe "democracy" is in any way designed to be optimal (for citizens anyways), and lots to believe it is not (and it would seem intentionally not).
Because it doesn't solve a real problem. If you try to articulate why it is that a particular old person is president and then dig in a little bit, it quickly becomes apparent that the real problem is something else. For example, in this case, the problem isn't the Biden is old. The problem is probably somewhere in how the Democrat party of the US is picking candidates.
> Putting politics aside …
I admire your optimism in saying that then putting a political question to the room.
> Why don’t they have an age limit on the president (or any elected office)?
In a democracy we let the pleb decide if they want a 81 year old as president (or a 18 year old). It works as intended. Putting age limits on fixed-term elected officials would go against the spirit of free elections.
> you must be younger than
> the average life expectancy
> (currently 73yo) - while in
> office.
As an aside, it's a common error to think that overall life expectancy is relevant to this sort of thing, it's not. That number includes those who die in infancy, etc.
If you wanted to limit it by "life expectancy" you'd want to limit it by the statistical expected remaining years of life at the candidate's current age.
For example, while the overall life expectancy in the US is around 73, for an individual at age 50 it's around 80[1].
Edit: Even if you pick the "right" life expectancy it's still pretty weird. You want the candidate to "only" have a hypothetical 50% chance of dying due to old age before their last day in office?
Then imagine something like COVID-19 happens again. Now a candidate on the cusp of being ineligible is suddenly ineligible because the latest life expectancy statistics shifted?
There's a reason political systems tend to prefer boring and predictable arbitrary limits.
> For example, while the overall life expectancy in the US is around 73, for an individual at age 50 it's around 80
Small but important note, you picked life expectancy for males, not all individuals. For females the life expectancy at birth is over 79 years. The average life expectancy for someone in the US without specifying their sex at birth is north of 76 years. And life expectancy is trending upwards and has for a long time as we eliminate more early mortalities.
No what? What part of the data I posted are you contradicting? Parent and I were talking growth rates, not absolute numbers. Sure, after a few years of slightly negative growth, the absolute numbers might be lower than at the very end of the negative growth. But the growth rate is now positive (for several years in a row) and expected to climb higher over the next few decades. If you think you’ve got something the CBO, SSA, CDC, and Census Bureau don’t, please share it.
Still, people age very differently. Some octogenarians are completing triathlons. Medicine also seems likely to increase longevity.
Think of the many who through their 80s were cogent, even masterful. Examples include Warren Buffett, John Searle, Hubert Dreyfus, George Soros, Henry Kissinger, Clint Eastwood, and with women it’s probably even more common, and we can look to Nancy Pelosi, or indeed my own grandmother. Whatever memory slowdown there may be is compensated for by depth of experience.
Then there are those who lose it in their sixties.
In many ways it seems that ageism is one of the last acceptable prejudices.
In Biden’s case, I was struck by the difference in him before and after his son Beau’s death. It seemed like he never recovered. Charisma gone. Eyes turned beady and body stiff. Despite that he was an active and successful president (should be admitted no matter one’s politics), though unpopular.
Yea people do. Some of the more recent interviews with Jimmy Carter is a good example. Recent as in pre his wife passing away. I havn't seen any interviews of him since then, so I am not sure if he is declining. It is often that in a long marriage, when one partner dies, the others start slipping. But the ones before, he was in his upper 90s and outside of the fact that me may not move particularly fast, he was (still is?) still sharp as a whip.
from my perspective, the reason to consider age limits for politicians, while using Biden as an example, is not the chance that he will die in office; it's rather the chance that he won't die in office.
he's showing signs of having trouble doing a good job
As if he didn't show those signs when he took office.
Presidential age limit restricts mostly the right of the people for who to vote for. If you can't trust your people to distinguish candidates abilities to perform their duties, maybe a different political system altogether would be more appropriate.
Now, when media start covering up, maybe the problem also lies elsewhere
The electoral college picks. They don't have to vote for who most the people their state wants either (although state law may punish them if they go rogue).
President is only semi democratically decided as a courtesy.
Oddly (or not it'd definitely selection bias/survivorship) there's 4 people over 70 on my ski patrol, all of them re-certified on the toboggan this year, 3 of the 4 on black diamond. They're some of the best skiiers I've seen and their bedside manner and health skills were amazing. The main issue for most of them is just hearing which makes them seem more off than they are. All of them had transitioned to management / dispatch and back to patroller they've been doing it so long. One literally wrote the book.
You said it yourself: they can’t do the more demanding parts of the job anymore and transitioned to management.
The president is a very special role that requires a lot of stamina. It’s also a role where there’s only one in the whole country. The travel schedule alone is extremely difficult.
If there is only one role to fill it’s logical to be selective. Why hire an 80 year old when there are a dozen qualified 50 year olds who are physically better equipped to handle the rigors of the job?
The president is the commander in chief of the military. The military forces retirement at a certain age, why don’t we do that for the president?
Let’s not forget that the American president is a massive presence as a global figure that impacts the whole world. If they die in office, get ill, misspeak, etc, it negatively impacts the entire nation if not the world.
Biden accidentally calling Zelensky “Putin” in public was an example of something that could have been a disastrous foreign relations blunder if Zelensky or other allies to Ukraine were less understanding and took offense.
> I don’t really know any 70 year olds who are “all there.”
You are almost certainly wrong, but it's also possible that your thereness measurement scale is still calibrated to the briefest and least knowledgeable period of your life.
"But global IQ is an amalgam of different kinds of intelligence, the most popularly studied being fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence which together—along with abilities called working memory and processing speed—are combined to yield global or Full Scale IQ. Fluid intelligence or fluid reasoning (abbreviated Gf) reflects the ability to solve novel problems, the kind that aren’t taught in school, whereas Crystallized intelligence or crystallized knowledge (Gc) measures learning and problem solving that are related to schooling and acculturation. And they have very different aging curves.
Gc averages 98 at ages 20-24, rises to 101 by ages 35-44, before declining to 100 (ages 45-54), then 98 (55-64), then 96 (65-69), then 93 (70-74), and 88 (75+).
The decline with age in Gf—solving novel problems—is even more precipitous. Gf peaks at ages 20-24 (100), drops gradually to 99 (25-34) and 96 (35-44) before starting a roller coaster plunge to 91 (45-54), 86 (55-64), 83 (65-69), 79 (70-74), and 72 (75+).
These values are just averages for the entire US population of adults, with the mean IQs for each age higher for more educated individuals. But the same rate of decline across the age range seems to occur for all adults, on average, whether they are semi-skilled workers or university professors. "
When it comes to solving novel problems, the population of 81 year olds is more than two standard deviations worse than the population of 22 year olds. Alternately, the average 81 year old is poorer at solving novel problems than 95% of 22 year olds, and the average (100-IQ) 22 year old is better at solving problems than 95% of 81 year olds; I am including the 22 year olds that you rarely meet because they are silo'd off in a special needs caretaking system.
There is an EXTREMELY PRONOUNCED decline of global IQ with age LONG before dementia, that it is almost completely verboten to admit exists because it combines our fear of our own mortality with our fear of a corporeal self with our fear of being alone with our fear of being useless with the minimum baseline of respect for our elders. Nobody wants to say, or be forced to admit, "I am not as smart or capable as the man I used to be," and many of us would rather eat a bullet or put our fist through someone's face, but it is true nonetheless. By the time any of us have the authority to start forming conventional wisdom (eg, writing textbooks, or doing interview shows, or helping our children raise our grandchildren), this story is not one we want to tell others or ourselves, and so most people cannot accept it.
Sure, but how relevant or predictive of performance is IQ for the "being president" task beyond some functional baseline?
The user interface for a president to influence the operation of a country is people and relationships. The president doesn't need to solve novel problems, they need to select the right people to identify, prioritise and solve problems (occasionally novel but probably mostly boring and universal human problems), bounded by political constraints.
I guess there is also a major performance element to the role, where "thinking on feet" is very important. Probably something like "IQ" is very helpful with that.
Politician is an interesting role because it's selected primarily by emotions rather than how a large corporation would go about selecting an executive officer.
That being said, I really hope we'd all agree a high IQ president would be favorable to a low IQ president.
Basically you’re calling me young and dumb, charitably. You don’t know how old I am.
I know that I was far more capable when I was younger. I have gained wisdom but that wisdom wouldn’t help me if I was fighting jet lag on a global diplomatic mission aboard Air Force One.
I know that my retired parents who are still intelligent shouldn’t work a day job. They can barely operate Google Maps let alone be commander and chief to the most technologically advanced military in the world. And they’re about 10 years younger than Joe Biden.
Being president is supposed to be a really special job. And there’s only one role to fill, so there’s no reason not to be highly selective. It should have more stringent requirements than jobs like airline pilot.
Being incredibly sharp isn’t enough for the most demanding job in the US government. We are talking international diplomatic trips with jet lag, situation room in the middle of the night military operations, basically being on-call 24/7 for any major event.
Joe Biden would have been 86 upon his last year in office if he won the election this year. That’s barely 4 years before my grandmother decided she couldn’t clean her own house and cook for herself anymore and moved to an independent living facility. That’s someone who had no other job besides cooking and cleaning for herself. And she’s a member of the gender that lives longer. And she’s one of the older people in the independent living community! She’s lucky to not have transitioned to assisted living.
The odds of dying as an 81 year old in any given year are 1 in 15. If you’re older than 85 your odds are 1 in 7.
An 81 year old president is someone who has basically a coin flip probability of dying before the end of their term.
Joe Biden is older than radiocarbon dating (so we can't be sure exactly how old he is).
[it was an idea for a novelty website: things Biden is older than; including all the common computer stuff, but also ejector seats, SCUBA aqualungs, basic oxygen steelmaking, Velcro, the float glass process by which all common flat panes of glass are made, hairspray, spray paint, hovervrafts, LASERs, microwaves, mass production of Penicillin...]
i’ve been seeing this comment float around today, and assuming you aren’t a russian troll or bot account, here’s why it’s flawed:
there’s no _coup_ (not coop) because primary processes are not part of the constitution. candidates can step down (as biden did for the good of the country, and LBJ had done before him). there was no real choice to not pick biden, either, as the incumbent.
the party will now have an open nomination process where delegates will pledge based on how people of their state best want, and keep in mind that most americans did not want biden OR trump, so they really are doing what is best in the interest of american democracy
compare this to the RNC and GOP which has done nothing but embrace one criminal authoritarian crook for the last decade, and you’ll see why your comment doesn’t really make sense.
Hasn't the number one thing anti-biden people have been saying is that he isn't fit for office due to his mental state?
Its bizarre seeing them flip to calling this a coup as if biden stepping down is suddenly an illegal/unconstitutional thing.
I consider this "concern trolling".
They said for 4 years how he's barely mentally there / can barely speak / not fit for office, and then when the Democratic party pressures him to step down, they go all surprised_pikachu_face.png.
Are the same people saying both things? “Anti Biden” people are a wide swath of Americans and not required to agree with one another on any specific point.
Your response sounds like it was written by KJP. But seriously, here's why your reply is flawed according to Politico.
>“Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” said one Democrat familiar with private conversations who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.” [1]
This was not Joe Biden's decision to drop out. He was forced out by the people that pull the strings in the democrat party.
There is a lower limit but not an upper limit. Who knows how old we can be in the future, there are coherent smart people over 80 today. But hey, it’s a democracy and if you want to change it you can try…!
Agree that there are plenty of coherent smart people but you also have to think about the workload, my dad is in his 80s and is perfectly sharp on any issues you care to discuss but he also stays in bed until after 9 and enjoys a few naps during the day.
As I said in a post above, I resemble that remark--at least sleeping in, once in a while a nap. But I tend to stay awake until close to midnight. (I'm also not in my 80s, at least not yet--just hoping to get there.)
Read as "who knows how much more entrenched future politicians will be able to be? who knows how many more favors they will owe, how many more donors will have their ear?"
Civilization progresses one funeral at a time, but maybe if we knew we would live to four hundred we would take up longer term thinking and work for projects that took 100 years. Nod to Kim Stanley Robinson.
Putting politics aside? Ironic that the link you gave is a .gov site. So that would turn "life expectancy" into something political, and lobbyist would all over it.
Why don’t they have an age limit on the president (or any elected office)?
E.g., you must be younger than the average life expectancy (currently men: 73yo / female: 79) - while in office.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html