>You framed your earlier comment as being about democracy without qualifications. I'm wondering how far you'd go with that. Is every border territory only a 50.1% vote away from changing countries?
I dont know if 50.0% deserves to be the threshold but whatever the threshold is Im damn sure it's below 90%.
>How often can these votes be held?
Not sure if theres a clear answer to that. If enough of the population wants a vote i guess there should be one.
If there is one and 90% arent voting for the status quo there clearly needed to be one.
>Do they require international observation?
Ideally. I'd love to see international observers in all elections. Would be great if e.g. Venezuelan election observers got to monitor US elections.
If observers are absent and theres no evidence of fraud or coercion though thats not a good enough reason to reject a vote, especially when the result isnt close.
In crimea i find the "international observers" argument especially disingenuous though. The two sides were "referendum without western observers" (Russia) and "no referendum at all, ever" (Kyiv/West).
Ive heard hundreds if not thousands of people reject the idea that the crimean referendum was valid because of a lack of western observers. Not a single one of them rejected kyiv's position that there shouldnt be a referendum at all.
> I dont know if 50.0% deserves to be the threshold but whatever the threshold is Im damn sure it's below 90%.
The normal legality is that a state is governed by a national constitution that requires some supermajority to make major changes. Participating in a government formed by that constitution implies consent to it. If Ukrainian Crimea wanted to leave Ukraine then they could have looked for national support according to both regular and constitutional law. If they couldn't get the national votes then that's all there is to it. Democracy in action.
There are areas in the U.S. that heavily favor one party or the other, including rural border counties that went for Trump well over 80% in 2020. If one of these counties voted to secede after Biden won, that vote would simply have been illegal under laws they themselves had previously consented to. If prior to the secession vote some other country had sent passports and then troops to seize government buildings and "secure fair elections" or whatever, that would have been both ridiculous and hostile.
> Ideally. I'd love to see international observers in all elections. Would be great if e.g. Venezuelan election observers got to monitor US elections.
Venezuelans or most anyone else are free to come into the U.S. and observe voting stations from the outside like any other private person who isn't actively casting a vote, and conduct whatever exit polls they can convince people to take.
I dont know if 50.0% deserves to be the threshold but whatever the threshold is Im damn sure it's below 90%.
>How often can these votes be held?
Not sure if theres a clear answer to that. If enough of the population wants a vote i guess there should be one.
If there is one and 90% arent voting for the status quo there clearly needed to be one.
>Do they require international observation?
Ideally. I'd love to see international observers in all elections. Would be great if e.g. Venezuelan election observers got to monitor US elections.
If observers are absent and theres no evidence of fraud or coercion though thats not a good enough reason to reject a vote, especially when the result isnt close.
In crimea i find the "international observers" argument especially disingenuous though. The two sides were "referendum without western observers" (Russia) and "no referendum at all, ever" (Kyiv/West).
Ive heard hundreds if not thousands of people reject the idea that the crimean referendum was valid because of a lack of western observers. Not a single one of them rejected kyiv's position that there shouldnt be a referendum at all.