I didn’t become leader to transform the Liberal Democrats into an enlarged form of the Electoral Reform Society. It’s not the be all and end all for us. There are other very, very key ambitions in politics, not least social mobility and life chances, that I care about as passionately if not more.
If the Democrats want to make an efficacy or merit-based argument with respect to the Electoral College, then by all means make it. It ought to be based in history and fact not fanciful revisionist history, and it should be made not just during an election year because of discontent with the electoral outcome.
I don’t for the life of me understand how anybody could contemplate the results of the 2000 election in the US and say that electoral politics doesn’t matter any more, and that Ralph Nader was right when he said there is no difference between the two parties.
Time and again a close election leads to hand-wringing about the need for Electoral College reform; time and again, politicians and parties respond to the college’s incentives, and more capacious and unifying majorities are born.
The Town Clerkship, however, was the means of giving me a lesson in electoral methods.
Believe it or not, we all share the same values in the Labour party, but there will always be differences of opinion on policy – that is in the nature of the broad-church political parties we have under our flawed first-past-the-post electoral system.
When I see something like Russian intelligence services interfering with our electoral process, I find that incredibly offensive.
My government is committed to carrying out electoral reforms. It is our firm resolve to keep criminal elements away from power.
Census data is used to determine more than $675 billion in federal funding; it is a demographic Rosetta Stone that is referenced in the drawing of congressional districts, each states number of Electoral College votes and the application of civil rights laws, including the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act.
Political professionals on all sides of the Ottawa aisle understand the same basic fact: given the electoral realities in this country, there is no path to victory without the support of urban centres and/or Quebec.
Nothing is more unreliable than the populace, nothing more obscure than human intentions, nothing more deceptive than the whole electoral system.
I think I’ve had my fill of electoral law.
There are three critical ingredients to democratic renewal and progressive change in America: good public policy, grassroots organizing and electoral politics.
The opportunism of electoral politics makes people lie to each other.
Language has historically stood as a barrier for some voters seeking to participate in the electoral process.
Even as evidence mounts that immigration is bolstering the British economy, the political consensus seems to be that bashing immigration boosts electoral fortunes.
They divided the city into three electoral wards, and in one ward there was 70 percent of the people, the Catholic population, and they elected eight representatives to the city council.
When given the chance, women have proven they will participate in the electoral process.
In many parts of the country, like South India, people don’t bother much about the nationalist passions that BJP was attempting to rouse for electoral benefits.
It is rarely the quick fix that goes the farthest. So don’t get tempted by political cycles and the lure of electoral wins.
America’s demographic shift was obvious to everyone in the 2010 Census – but Republicans stubbornly rejected math, facts, and polls to their electoral peril. While Republicans tailored their platform by and for the pale stale and male, among us, Obama and Democrats are embracing America’s diverse mosaic.
Election funding is one of the biggest fault lines in our electoral system.
Electoral contests have nothing but polls, which is why people have grown so obsessed with them; we’re desperate for an objective rendering of what is happening and what may happen.
Democracy is about electoral competition.
The first job of the Brexit Party is to make sure Brexit’s delivered and if that involves electoral pacts, that might happen.
Of course, Trump will always take credit for positive developments – even those he didn’t cause, create or do – like the economy he inherited, an electoral ‘landslide’ that never happened and the Christmas holiday he didn’t need to save.
Since 1988, successive governments have treated education as an electoral asset: theyve come up with endless slogans and projects to supposedly solve what is supposedly a crisis.
I think it’s very important that the United States keeps out of the local electoral process in Mexico.
I was surprised that when you get into electoral politics how scientific the analysis was in the electorate. You can identify on a state-by-state or district-by-district basis fundamental building blocks that behave in different ways. I was impressed in general with the sophistication of polling.
There have been a lot of questions since the 2016 U.S. election about Russian interference in the electoral process.
Let’s not give the electoral process so much importance. We have to be cynical about it. Let’s give importance to the real democracy that’s constructed on a day-to-day basis. That’s my hopeful perspective on it.
Among my generation, there was a purist position that any contact with electoral politics was an unforgiveable compromise.
The Framers of the Constitution expected the presidency to be occupied by special individuals, selfless people of the highest character and ability. They intended the Electoral College to be a truly deliberative body, not the largely ceremonial institution it has become today.
Opinion polls often suffer on account of unexpected developments once the electoral process starts, such as the death of a political leader (as in the case of the late Rajiv Gandhi).
American elections should be for Americans. And the idea that we would have foreign nation-states coming into the American electoral process, or the information surrounding an election, is really, really bad.
Abraham Lincoln once noted that ‘the ballot is stronger than the bullet.’ Foreign adversaries, who can’t match the military, economic or diplomatic power of the U.S., understand Lincoln’s wisdom. They seek to sow chaos and confusion in our electoral process to gain an advantage over us.
When I was with the Labor Party, I’d get into trouble because the party bosses determined that some of what I wrote, or proposed to write about, wasn’t conducive to their policies or to electoral success.
Now that Donald Trump has won the presidency despite losing the popular vote, there’s a growing cry to rethink, or even abolish, the electoral college. This would be a mistake.
Florida is one of the first states that sort of gives the legislature a very clear criteria for re-drawing electoral district maps. Basically, all the criteria do is tell the legislators that you can’t draw a seat that helps yourself or a political party. That’s really critical.
I’m so unhappy with electoral politics that I switched to sports radio.
The realities are, there are – you can be entertaining and you can be fun, and you can say things that actually appeal to people. You still have to figure out a way to get to 270 electoral votes. Get votes in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.
Much as I respect Russell Brand’s point of view, I’m in the opposite camp to him about voting. I think it’s enormously important to engage with the electoral process.
The Electoral College was necessary when communications were poor, literacy was low, and voters lacked information about out-of-state figures, which is clearly no longer the case.
The Conservatives as a Brexit party, being very clear about their objectives are almost certainly going to have to go into some kind of electoral arrangement with the Brexit Party, otherwise Brexit doesn’t happen.
One of the more important things the Bernie Sanders campaign did is reach people who are political but not electorally political. They’re political in either non-profits or community groups, but didn’t see how important it was to get involved in electoral politics.
We’re building an independent political program that can run electoral politics and then turn on a dime to hold our leaders to task, in case they suddenly develop that old case of amnesia! We’ll be there to remind them what they promised and who they promised to work for!
So when you hear these lies about how we can’t possibly change our health care system because it would be electoral disaster, kindly remind people that we already have a moral and ethical disaster on our hands.
The right to vote gives every eligible American a voice in our electoral politics. There’s too much at stake to stay silent as this right is eroded.
Restoring and maintaining a great nation’s fiscal health will require not just sound arguments and an engaged public but something more. It will require an electoral system that encourages our representatives to place the long-term interests of the public ahead of parochial special interests.
I am an electoral reformer and an ex-Lib Dem.
Governments usually end not with a bang but with a whimper, as the Conservatives learned in the 1990s. Support and authority erodes over time until there is a final collapse of support and pivotal electoral shift.
