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defrost | 4 days ago

"Obsolete" is pretty strong, clearly it's still limping along and hasn't quite yet succumbed to Benjamin's Franklin's expectation that it would fall to Despots if not vigoriously maintained.

But it was absolutely seen as "a good first effort" that could be improved upon in the 1890s.

Evidence of that is the new Australian Federation used the UK Westminster system and the system straight of Washington as inspiration to create what was considered "better" .. a Washminster system of government.

The current degeneration of a system founded by people opposed to Party Politics into a Hotelling's law quagmire of two parties, neither particularly broadly representative of general population, should be sound evidence that something went wrong along the way.

That's the emergant behaviour of discrete iterations of the US electoral system as was and as is for you.

Still, absolutely thumbs up for effort and intent those bold founders.

Shame it didn't scale well and got captured by corporations.

discuss

order

Zigurd|3 days ago

Seems like an easier problem to attack than, say, slavery, women's suffrage, the draft, etc. Once you look just a bit deeper, the US system hasn't been stagnant monotonically over the long-term. Not that originalists would ever admit it.

defrost|3 days ago

Sure, it's morphed from the original in various ways .. but perhaps not substantially enough to protect it from being gamed.

Transparency, limiting campaign funding, taking away corporate lobbyinging, universal suffrage (including everyone), indpendant commissions for electrol boundaries (stop parties directly dicking about with boundaries), ranked voting, more room for independant blocs, no "presidental" elections, cicada like co-prime terms for justices / other heads of non-p[olicy arms, ... many ways to improve the current system to increase broadly democratic representation.

The original point by the green account stands though, "problems with the US system have been known for a long time" .. perceived or otherwise, as evidenced by many others looking at the US system and picking and choosing what they use.