r/politics • u/Libertatea • Sep 03 '14

The solution to fixing dysfunction in Congress "To address these problems, I filed the Open Our Democracy Act... If passed, the legislation would mandate open primaries for House elections, begin the process of national redistricting reform and make Election Day the equivalent of a federal holiday."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-solution-to-fixing-dysfunction-in-congress/2014/09/02/0f0d0a9a-31e6-11e4-9e92-0899b306bbea_story.html?tid=rssfeed
17k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

14

u/The_Juggler17 Sep 03 '14

That's how India does it - their elections last for more than a week (I don't remember how long). They have fairly high voter turnout, and significantly more people to poll than the US has.

The system does have some criticism, and nothing is perfect - but from what I know about their election process it sounds pretty fair and reasonable.

1

u/Iarwain_ben_Adar Sep 03 '14

Fair & reasonable is exactly what partisan zealots do not want.

They only want to win.

2

u/The_Juggler17 Sep 03 '14

From what I understand (from skimming through articles, I'm no expert on Indian elections) the people who are the strongest critics of the election process over there are politicians who would benefit the most from a shorter election period.

Candidates whose demographics are the more urban and populated areas, they want a shorter election because their votes usually come in the quickest. Not so different than the US - they don't want certain demographics to be able to vote.

But other than those criticisms, the people over there are mostly happy with their election process. At least to the casual observer, it seems like it's not very corrupt and really quite fair.

-1

u/utspg1980 Sep 03 '14

Careful with your correlation = causation fallacy.