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Complaints that laws are too compilcated

edited 2012-06-15 18:16:38 in Politics
Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human

No, you have the wrong idea.


A complicated law may be annoying for you to read and sort through, but that's not a very useful proxy for determining whether a law is useful.


The reason why laws are complicated is because all sorts of crazy corner cases.


For example:


In South Carolina, there are primary elections, which can have runoffs if no one gets more than 50% of the vote.  South Carolina law also says that candidates who have filed their papers to be on the ballot in an election must appear on the ballot.


Quick explanation: In most places in the United States, the "general election" is one where one candidate from each party (that fielded a candidate) run against each other, and the one with the most votes wins.  Before the general election, there is often a "primary election" wherein people from each party get to choose their own nominee for the general election; the candidate who gets the most votes from among their party's voters' primary votes becomes that party's nominee.  A "runoff" is a type of supplemental election that happens in some locales between the top two vote-getters in an election, when no one in that first election gets more than a certain threshold percentage of votes--usually 50%.


What happens when a candidate has filed their papers to be on the ballot, but later withdraws from the race (unofficially, as there is no way to do it officially), and then the primary election happens (and that candidate is still on the ballot, and gets votes), and no candidate has more than 50% of the votes...but if you don't count the unofficially-withdrawn candidate's votes, someone does?  Do you call a runoff election?


Well, South Carolina law never said anything about this.  And it just happened.  Now candidates, parties, state elections officials, lawyers, and courts have to figure out what to do about it.

Comments

  • But the main point of a common law system like the US is so you DON'T have to write in all these crazy corner cases into your laws: the courts can just decide them when they come up.

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