What voting in Switzerland looks like

[Lynx122]

I just wanted to give you an idea how things work here :)

This time it's kind of a lot because The country, the Kanton(which is like a state) and the city all have things to vote on.

Country:

There's 2 issues. One is a biodiversity innitiative(meaning citizens collected signatures from other citizens to force a countrywide vote on this issue) which wants to protect the diversity of plants and mushrooms and animals in Switzerland. Often even if they get rejected because innitiatives are often not that well planned out because they don't have the same resources as the state, the government can later take the general idea and create their own plan of how to better execute the idea with less cost and less disruption to other areas of life and then the people can vote for that.

The second one is a change to the social security system in Switzerland. There have been quite a few changes to this lately because Switzerland faces challenges like a lot of other countries too. This change is supposed to secure a better retirement for the people who earn less money.

Kanton (State):

Here there's one issue it's about foreigners who are temporarily allowed to stay in Switzerland because they can't be returned because of violence in their country or so but they don't have official refugee status. The government is saying a lot of these people end up staying in Switzerland in the end so we should allow them to start job training sooner. Right now there's a 5 year waiting period for these people to get any financial support to do an education they want to remove that waiting period. They say it will help with shortage of qualified workers and integrate people faster. But opponents say this is wrong on principal. Honestly this one is the trickiest question of all the votes I'm thinking about it a lot.

City:

Here there were 8 different things you had to vote on. 3 Schools that need to be expanded or completely rebuilt. 1 new plant to capture the co2 when they burn the mud from the water treatment plants. It will reduce the co2 emmissions of the city.

1 vote to make the city more green(plant more trees have more green areas)

1 to reduce cars and increase bike and walking spaces

1 to protect the shores of the lake and river more

and lastly 300 million for renewable energy

That's it all the things I have to vote on. The vote is this Sunday but if you wanna send it in per mail you have to send it off early of course :)

I hope this gave you some insight and it was interesting in some way :)

[strateguy632]

But that is missing the main part!

If the money is spent on those, will money remain for medical clinics for poor! Medicare or its parallel there.

A budget " plans based on income", ! Need to ask "medicare or capture co2" if you only voted capture co2, that is a trick because they didn't specify what other budget item would not have money due to it!

[Lynx122]

It doesn't work like that in Switzerland :)

[Lynx122]

You can vote for these things without having to worry about them stealing money from somewhere else. That's why a lot of infrastructure projects usually have 70-80% approval.

[lexie_xo]

This is quite interesting whatd you think of it?

[Lynx122]

I think it's a great system it gives the politicians less power and the people more power and also more responsibility. It leads to less corruption and more accountability for the government, and among the people more practical and clear thinking.

[red-lipstick-girl]

I like this idea