Comment by duskdozer
17 hours ago
I don't really see why age limits would be exempt for "voters need to take responsibility for their voting".
IMO, the real issue is that voters are coerced to accept candidates put up by the parties due to FPTP. The threat of the wrong side winning gets people to accept someone they don't want. The primary process does not need to be democratic, and the results are pressured by the future threat of losing to the other side in a head-to-head.
This is true: in general the best fix for US democratic systems is to learn from more functional systems from overseas.
US is running on beta version democracy; it was wonderful for a trial run and we learned a lot from it, but unfortunately the country has been stuck without upgrades for a while. It'd be like trying to connect a Xerox PARC desktop to the modern internet.
Obviously it's absurdly nontrivial to shift it at this point but I do agree that age and term limits both seem to be stopgap solutions due to the challenge of implementing more effective strategies.
Consider Australia: of 226 parliamentarians, there's one aged 75+: Bob Katter.
I'd say there's three features of the au system that keep us relatively free of the absurd incumbency advantages in USA:
1. Compulsory voting makes it harder to solicit votes from a subset of the populace.
2. The Australian Electoral Commission is highly trusted as a neutral body, so Gerrymandering is rare.
3. None of our voting systems use First Past The Post; it's all ranked choice, babes!