Participatory Democracy in the United States

11/14/24 Here's an idea. What if every person who voted asked for a copy of exactly who they voted for from the place they voted, so they could take home the paper, see "who they voted for," and compare and contrast with friends and strangers? Like comparing graded tests after school. This would provide a little more security about elections. Not a lot, but a little. This is especially important if you honestly don't see any inauguration speech being packed with people unless they were paid to pack the place, because that means it's pretty likely that the president did not lawfully become said president. Think about it.

10/7/23 For my choices for state and national elections and issues for 2024 and 2025 see the Texas section. I will be adding to it with my reasoning. 5/13/24 Suggestion: in order to vote in a large group, no matter who you are voting for, it makes a lot of sense to discuss voting plans with everyone you can within a reasonable time frame before the election itself. This year, that's in late October / early November for the national election. Therefore, it probably makes sense to do this starting at the beginning of August. 7/16/24 Political campaign signs put in people's yards and campaigning from door to door is in my opinion at best morally questionable and at worst evil. It's an attempt to create a mob mentality, not an attempt to further actual improvements in government. You want a yard sign? You want a bumper sticker? Here's one I suggest: Stop voting for idiots. Research who and what's on the ballot before you vote.

Note 2/9/23 it's been brought to my attention that a lot of folks believe city, county, city, and local government don't matter because they'll be overruled at the state and federal levels anyway. That is wildly inaccurate. Yeah, they'll be overruled on the stuff that makes the news, sure. But in my experience it's at this level of government you will find the local good ol' boy network parasitizing their communities without any oversight. Try something if you can, right now. Look up YOUR city's website and its legal ordinances, and spend some time clicking around for the rules they draft. Do you like what you see? Being realistic here, also, the place you can have the most impact and make government the most transparent is at the local level. It also is in my experience even more ugly and corrupt than state and federal governments combined, often because wherever the city government allows the community to see what they are up to, no one pays any attention. Collaboration at the local level of government, and even for each neighborhood, heck or apartment complex or street, simply does not exist anymore. That has to change or frankly we are all sunk.

2020 really drove home one thing: if you are over 18 and not a felon, you are to blame for who is in charge, especially if you didn't vote. The responsibility for selecting the right leaders and judges and political officials is yours. That's a lot of power, and it takes a lot of work to pull it off so that you don't hire the wrong person. Personally I researched the people I voted for over the course of two months. Also every ballot measure, and I looked through the legal cases of every judge on the ballot before I voted. I looked at every website I could for every politician on the ballot, even the local dudes. Wikipedia, OnTheIssues, Reuters, all kinds of news sources, their campaign websites, followthemoney.org, every place I could find even a scrap of info. Seriously anyone telling me to "do my research" ever again is getting a big fat middle finger.
So apparently many people either don't vote at all or vote blindly based on red vs. blue and in-your-face propaganda, aka whoever is wearing the right colors and makes them feel good. If people, including you and everyone you know, would start voting for each candidate and issue on the ballot based on good background research as well as individual qualifications, to hire only those with the most merit for the job, things would change. Relatively quickly. If this idea catches on and the two-party system bites the dust sooner rather than later, then I believe things will change for the better in this country sooner rather than later also. As in, we could have most major problems here solved by 2025. But you, and everyone you know, all have to vote, and spread this idea, in every single minor and major, local and state and national, election until then. That's a lot of elections. That's a lot of research. It still beats what our soldiers go through to give us this right, and it sure as hell beats trying to gain rights through civil war and violence.
A website that helps you register to vote Turbovote
How Elections Work: USA.gov/election
A comprehensive guide for how to get involved Instructable Guide
Sample ballots: Ballotpedia Vote-USA BallotReady
Federal Elections Commission – candidates for public office are required by law to disclose where they get their funding, and you can find at least some of that data here FEC
Follow The Money – a nonprofit website that details where candidates get their funding. Generally more detailed than the FEC Follow The Money
On The Issues: summarizes candidates’ viewpoints On The Issues
VoteSmart: another website that attempts to summarize candidates’ viewpoints; a little clunkier and harder to use but still valuable VoteSmart
Note 1: just like communicating with a business or company to provide feedback, you can email, call or write letters to the public officials who represent you, including judges, Senators, members of Congress, Governors, and of course those in the White House. I have actually seen changes happen in my life that were possibly thanks to this so don’t knock it.
Note 2: Without a sample ballot, it’s nearly impossible to figure out who will be on it without something like a week’s worth of research. They usually aren’t complete, so you have to look at multiple sample ballots unless you’re a mail-in voter and have the luxury of a few days to look at your real ballot.
Note 3: The Democrat and Republican internal political machinery are in charge of which candidates get the most publicity and funding. There is little to no oversight or transparency for both parties. Therefore, it is wise to do your own research about candidates instead of blindly accepting who these parties choose to endorse
Here are a couple of my personal tricks for knowing who to vote for and why: 1. use a process of elimination. Skim the websites, Follow The Money, and other social media presence of the candidates to find things that you find 100% unacceptable, and then rule out those candidates. Saves a lot of time. 2. upon trying to look at judges and vote for them, actually look at their records of court cases and see if you accept their rulings. This is the worst, really, but it is also arguably the most important stuff on the ballot. 3. Break up the workload so you only look into a total of five to ten different candidates per day starting a couple of months before the mail-in ballot arrives or the election date.
2/4/23 USA Jobs is a government website. If you are really p'o'd enough to talk about how much you want change in this country then like, seriously consider working for the government. Don't just consider the openings on that website but also what in your local area needs doing. Usually local politics are overlooked by the people that live there, and then they wonder why things are shitty. They're every bit as shady and underhanded as the stuff at the state and federal level if not more so. Look closely. And if you don't like what you see consider being part of the change. Nothing is going to happen without courage, sweat, and quite a bit of strategic action.
8/29/23 If you really think about it, just about every major problem in the US boils down to a hiring problem. Think of it like this: we are all the human resources department. We vote for city, state, and federal officials, right? But how many people vet the candidates properly. How many do background checks. What sort of credentials do we ask of our elected officials, especially the ones with the most temporal power? We're human resources but we ain't doing our job right. That is why the most profoundly under-qualified people wind up in the situations and places which have the toughest problems. Then we wonder why everything gets f'd. Huh. It would be a good start to vote for people with more college education in the relevant fields, and less charisma. One very specific example of this is teachers: if any given place tripled teacher salaries while also voting in people with Masters degrees and Doctorates in the entire local and state education system, in about ten years that place's economy would no longer stagnate. Nor would it have a poor quality of life. If you don't believe me, take a closer look at the places that are moving in that direction right now and take a glance at them from time to time over the next ten years.
5/20/24 Voting is apparently a little like the 3 Rs of being eco-friendly: an expandable definition. As reduce, reuse, recycle has become refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, refurbish, repair (etc.) voting involves more than meets the eye. You can do more than you think you can. So here are the ways I can think of: 1. You can vote for national, state, and local offices and issues; everything on every ballot. As long as you're not a felon. 2. You can attempt to vote with your dollars for everything you think is ethical and good enough to buy. Including and especially financial stuff like banking, rent, bills. 3. You can vote with your feet for the place you decide to live in, if you have the choice. 4. You can flood the Internet with reviews on review sites for everything you think is noteworthy enough for it, such as struggling but very good local businesses. 5. You can vote for the corporations you support with your stocks or other direct investments such as angel investing (mutual funds and ETFs are more vague; you don't know what's in them). 6. You can choose your friends and who you decide to associate with and support in any way. 7. You can choose your workplace, career, job, or anything that kind of meets that criteria; at least in some cases. 8. You can choose your lifestyle, and as I've mentioned previously, you have a lot more control over this than you seem to in a lot of cases. A lifestyle has a lot of areas that you can customize. If you have a choice in any small aspect of it, you can choose as you like.
9/15/24 If you really want to make an impact as big as possible, then here's a way you can research political candidates and other stuff on the ballot before voting. Get a notebook and a pen, or something similar, and as you research, write down (summarize as much as possible) the reasons why you vote for each candidate or issue and why you won't for the others. Imagine that you are going to show this to all your family and friends, because the idea here is that this way you easily can. Ask each if they want to see it first. Then take a picture of it on your phone and send it their way, or type it up and send out copies via email or even snail mail, whatever. This way you don't need to blab at them for hours, and whoever in the family or friend group is the best at researching can dig up all the dirt for everyone else. This is not, however, a substitute for each person needing to do their own research on everything on the ballot! Consider the ethical ramifications of not doing this and how many people have literally died for democracy over the years, and the kind of life you'd live in a monarchy or dictatorship, and you'll see why it's important to vote as well as you can.
1/23/25 Just in case you have this bright idea that voting doesn't count anymore and democracy is dead, not quite. KEEP VOTING. And it wouldn't be a bad idea to keep six years' records of exactly who you voted for and why, along with that of your family and friends' voting records, just in case. Because fuck this. What hypocrisy, "stolen election," about Biden when this one actually was stolen.
1/8/26 I may be beating on a dead horse at this point, but here's something copypasted from the Wisdom Teens section: Just in case you thought voting didn't matter, I have some tips to make sure your impact goes as far as it can. If you're over 18, you might not have been told this (I wasn't, at that age), but here goes: if you don't vote, you are actually part of every problem around you after that and therefore have no right to complain about it. Look around you and see what's going on with the complacent versus the people who have been fighting from the get-go. It doesn't matter if you didn't/don't know how, because you and everyone around you will still pay the price. Once you turn 18, the right to vote (which was granted only after the Vietnam war draft for 18 year olds prompted people to demand a lowering of the voting age from 21 to 18) is yours. It's a lot of work, but you can do it. It's better than the alternatives especially now - 1/6/26, edit 1/10/26
1/8/26 As an adult, it is your duty to teach everyone how to vote and everything about how government works, since school obviously doesn't. It's important. How many people do you think actually know how it works? I had to spend several years studying it, and I still don't know it all. That is not good.
1/12/26 Here is something a lot of people don't know about voting: no matter where you live, chances are really good you will have to vote EVERY YEAR, MULTIPLE TIMES A YEAR. You have city and county, state, and national elections to contend with, plus ballot issues and a bunch of other random stuff such as who's going to be on the local school board, ballot issues to expand the parking lot (yea nay?) for city hall or whatever. You must check your city's voting website and your state's voting website, and you have to do it prior to every election. You have to make a voting plan in specific detail: if you will be arriving to vote in person, where do you go, what's the bus route or car route, do you have the proper ID, who will you vote for and why, who will you try to sway to your reasoning about who you're voting for (yep, you don't have to vote "alone" though in the booth you do). Or if by mail or by proxy, you have to figure that out too in order to make sure it works. Voter registration is also different in each county, state, and for national voting - you have to figure out a. how to register where you are and b. if you are still registered a few weeks before Early Voting In Person. Also, if you wait til the last minute to vote in person, the polls might close by the time you finally make it to the end of the line. Use early voting in person. Voting By Mail is still subject to the same potential problem since someone (probably the Russians) messed up our postal system, the USPS. (Do I still recommend voting by mail if the only alternative for you is not voting? Absolutely. Yes.) So for heaven's sake, check your voter status and what elections are happening in your location this year. Check it now. The links on this page are all helpful for all of this.
1/12/26 Here is some "hearsay," aka what several family members of mine have researched in great detail, that I am now telling you about how our voting system got messed up. I can't give you direct sources but I can at least tell you what they found. First: there is still a policy in the U.S. that if you are registered to vote as either a Republican or a Democrat, then if you don't show up in the elections for Republican or Democrat officials - if you don't vote by mail or in person - the system automatically votes for you and you "auto-vote" for the front-runner candidate either platform has chosen. Second: There have been hundreds of voting machines found to have been tampered with, I think it was one line of code. This was done (eerily to me as a Texan after the heat waves and the ERCOT scandal where people drove around with devices to raise the AC temperature setting in other peoples' homes through WiFi) via WiFi alteration at least for some of these, possibly all of them. At least for some of them we now know that the code was altered to change a person's vote from Democrat to Independent or Republican. This was done for the National election of the President - we do not yet know if such voter tampering was also done for the State and County elections and ballot issues, which could have (and probably did) also stacked the deck in favor of Republicans. In at least one instance this bug was found in a local city election about giving a library a greater budget - in my opinion proving that even the elections about small fry issues really counts. We also still do not know the total number of voting machines in existence for the 2024 Elections, nor do we know how many voting machines were tampered with. 2025's elections and ballot issues may have also highlighted some issues with the system but I do not know. Some very early 2026 Elections may have also happened already: I do not know. Third: Gerrymandering really does happen. There's lots of it. It vastly prefers Republican counties and rich landowners. Fourth and probably the biggest deal: Most people don't know how voting really works. Maybe if you're lucky they know that a national election happens in November, but chances are very good they don't know about all the others, and all the stuff you have to do, and all the stuff on the ballot. For instance, if you are registered as a Democrat or as a Republican, then if you don't vote in the Primary election for Democrats or Republicans you might as well not be registered at all due to the auto-vote reason I just explained. Fifth: There is no law on the books explaining that each time an election happens everything on the ballot has to be released to the general public on the website and in the mail, and both in the most accessible easy to understand way possible (Wow, city websites tend to suck with this). Therefore even if you prepare as well as you possibly can, you're still very likely to be surprised by at least one thing on there. All sorts of shit has snuck on there recently as a direct result. Sixth, just my speculations: There is still a possibility that there were voter roll purges in 2024 in some places, de-registering people perfectly (and legally) registered to vote at the eleventh hour. I don't know on that one. There is also a possibility that some electors were bribed or coerced. Again, I don't know. Seventh: For whatever reason, we still don't the full ways the National election and possibly also state and local elections were stolen in late 2024. And yet, each time I go on the news, it's gradually decreased (since early 2025 til now, early 2026) its blatant lying about who "won" the election from claiming the whole US supported and voted for Trump to claiming that states did to claiming that counties did to claiming that individual people did. It's ALL fake news with little peppercorns of not bullshit in there. And that's pretty weird. Makes me wonder why no independent newspapers are actually filling the void of Pravda (Russian propaganda, did you know Pravda directly translates into English as "Truth"?), bots, Nazi fuckboys, radical-left-wing fuckboys, and AI.
1/12/26 One other thing you should know about voting is that the way things have been up til now is that people have been voting "as a team," aka without thinking for themselves about it. For instance, thinking about a candidates "electability" and using that as some kind of so-called criteria to vote for them or not, or caring at all about what other people think about the candidate or one's personal vote. Or going like "well my family/group has always voted this way and my family's cool, so I'll vote for this guy." And so on. There's not actually a reason for this besides peer pressure and wanting to fit in. However, groupthink and tribalism has gotten us to this point. Independent critical thinking and reasoning will get us out. I think so. Do you?

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