tcpip | The US Election, Australian politics etc.

There has been a number of interesting correlations between state-by-state voting in the US elections.

cptjohnc notes the votes on a
county-by-county basis. From

rumplstimskin I've picked up a correlation between IQ and the states and the
states and university degrees, although some have questioned the IQ range (all within one standard deviation). I'm currently working on a distribution based on votes and high school graduation - at least the figures seem more precise for that one.

But in general, it is fair to say that one of Kerry's main points - that America is divided - is actually an
advantage to the Republicans. The Republican states are poor, ill-educated, Christian conservative, and rural. Whilst I wish to avoid the denigrating tone of John Stuart Mill, his comment on conservatives ("Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives") does seem to be an apt electoral strategy. As democracy can only survive through informed decisions, it seems that the ancient Greek idea that despotism follows a failed democracy may indeed be apt.

Meanwhile in Australia, the fundamentalist Catholic Tony Abbot had put fuel to the fire on the abortion "debate", and John Anderson says it's out of control. Of course, these self-righteous wealthy individuals would never consider getting an abortion themselves if they found themselves pregnant and without the means to support a child. Of course not. In my opinion, these are the immoral people. These are the people who think that they have the right to determine what you do with your body.

Mark Latham, having already promoted fellow incompetent losers (Wayne Swan and Stephen Smith) is now taking an "axe to dud poll promises", including the troops home by Xmas pledge. Asylum-seeker supporters will get no joy from the recent appointment of Laurie Ferguson, and his unbelievable ignorant and divisive comments. In other words, the conservatives in the ALP, having delivered us a Howard government, want to dump the few good reasons that people voted for Labor in the first place.

On a related note, Labor for Refugees had it's first post-election meeting on Saturday. As expected there was a great deal of anger of how the Victorian branch distributed Senate preferences and how the party failed by pandering to the "aspirational voter". Sadly the meeting witnessed the departure of Kevin Peoples, the hard-working Secretary of the organization.

Outside of all this political analysis, I continue, strangely enough to have a life - although a great deal of it at the moment seems to be caught up with problems relating to land tax, the distribution of wealth in Australia and NZ political parties. I'm having a weird experience at work trying solve an otherwise simple problem; connecting a Mac to a Windows network printer (some applications work, others don't). The ICT newsletter Red Friday is now into its third issue and the Ten Thousand Islands play-by-email roleplaying campaign has reached its
second major scene.

Last Sunday was the annual Unitarian Church fete (rather uninteresting) and the chosen speaker, a natural health/alternative medicine advocate, was a bit of a conspiracy theorist. His best points were the need to regulate natural therapy and integrate it into the university system and the systematic reasons on why pharmaceutical companies - and many doctors - are so much against to the practise. Still, one practical upshot was getting some plants for

verylisa's housewarming in Altona Meadows. So far away! Deepest darkest suburbia, yet still in zone one for public transport. Spent a bit of time chatting with

cvisors,

fizit and, of course,

caseopaya. The evening concluding with a few pints with

severina_242 and friends at a dodgy faux-Irish pub (for the love of God, how many more must we have?) in Port Melbourne.

The arrival of that writing madness, NaNoWriMo reminds me that my rewritten and much reduced version of my thesis is due in by the end of the month. Better get on with it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Poor, ill-education and rural relative to rest of the population.

I'd question the junior secondary figures. The suggestion that 41 percent of Australian's only complete year 10 and 42 percent of Belgians and up to 57% of Italians, just doesn't seem to make sense to me.

Approaching electoral politics from the notion that there is something inherently wrong with people who vote differently is just not a good way to be persuasive.

I'm not attempting to be persuasive, I'm attempting to be empricial.

As for the notion that people voting differently means democracy is on the path to failure, that leads to very bad places.

As can refusing to admit that a democracy can be on the path to failure. Fifty percent plus one of uninformed prejudice is a substantive danger to democracy. Informed, considered decisions is what differentiates a democracy from mob-rule.

People really need to calm down.

Really?

http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2004/11/08/1099781320016.html

On Rove's commments, we'll see. I note, towards the end of the campaign, Dubya thought civil unions were a matter best left to the States. I strongly doubt that 2/3rds of both houses of Congress and 3/4 of State legislatures will go for a constitutional amendment.

Remember, the educational-attainment figures are for the 25-64 population, so it covers the effect of schooling participation rates starting 50 years ago. There has been a rapid increase in high school completion in Australia over the last two decades. I don't find the figures implausible.

I don't find anything in the 2004 election results which suggest any inherent problems with American democracy. Even if you think voting for a NE liberal is a sign of sanity, American voters are clearly more willing to do so in 2004 than they were in 1972, 1984 and 1988.

As for being empirical, you seem to have used the wrong adjectives.

You can take some comfort in these very cool electoral cartograms.

On Rove's commments, we'll see.

And then what? When gay marriages are illegal constitutionally, when women have to go to backyard abortions? When creationism is taught as a science in public schools?

At what point will you think it is time not to be calm about the end of the great hope to the world that America once represented?

I don't find anything in the 2004 election results which suggest any inherent problems with American democracy.

1) Lack of a proportional voting system for the electoral college.

2) Lack of a preferential voting for electoral college representative (government of the biggest minority).

3) Use of electronic voting machines without a paper trial, lost votes.

4) Use of insecure voting programs in said machines, whose source code has not been released for public scrutiny.

5) Lack of an national independent scrutineer or pollsters. Indeed, Walden O'Dell, CEO of Diebold (which ran the electronic voting in Florida in 2000) stated his commitment "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

6) International observors refused entry to large number of polling stations.

7) Over 100 reported instances of fraud and malpractise.

As for being empirical, you seem to have used the wrong adjectives.

All of the above are facts. I can also justly raise questions of the qualitative choices as well. If you do not recognize that there are serious problems with American "democracy" I would suggest that you're being politically partisan on the issue.

I would say the same things if Bush were a Democrat, that's for sure.

I have been having a long (debate?) with

thorfinn about the use of the Diebold machines. That seems fairly clearly, as they say, not good practice.

Long-term features of American democracy like the electoral college can be criticised or supported, but they have hardly stopped it functioning as a pretty effective democracy.

It is, for example, a lot harder to frustrate strong popular preferences in the US than it is in, say, Europe, which is why Europe's electoral results have such interesting features (let's discuss the support for, say, Le Pen).

My 'we'll see' comment was, in the context, expressing pretty clear scepticism that the universal gay marriage ban will actually happen.

Nor is a ban on abortion likely. Even if Roe v Wade is overturned (by no means certain) that would return the issue back to the normal political process, where it should always have been. A majority of Americans support some level of abortion rights. New laws would reflect that.

And so on. Of course democracies can fail. But American democracy survived a Civil War, two World Wars, a decade-long struggle with a rival Superpower. In fact, you can reasonably argue that it was much more democratic at the end of all that. A 51% vote for Dubya is eminently survivable.

Since I don't agree with the line 'the Christian crazies did it', I don't see the result as A New Theocracy Is Upon Us.

In fact, I suggest there is an excellent chance the next President will be a Democrat.

The US Election, Australian politics etc.

Re: By whose standards?

Re: By whose standards?

Re: By whose standards? Maps

Re: By whose standards? Maps

Re: By whose standards? Maps