Voting is a joke.
I am a liberal living in a red state in a very republican suburb. My vote is about as useful as a cheese sandwich to a drowning ferret. My local elections rarely have democrats on the ballot, never mind in the running. My congressmen and senators are always conservative war-mongering homophobes, be they R or D. The only race where I might help a Democrat win this year is the Governor race, where we have a shot at re-installing a conservative white male Democrat from seven years ago, Roy Barnes.
Four things in particular suck vigorously:
Private campaign funding throws the system out of balance, and Citizens United made it worse. The filibuster and "hold" rules have allowed a coup d'etat in the Senate, subverting majority rule. The lack of a free press means the electorate is not fairly and fully informed. Gerrymandering makes a mockery of fair campaigns.
Support public campaign finance for federal elections. It won't raise taxes much and we could stop sending money in to candidates. Give them each the same amount of money and may the best woman or man win. No more dipshit billionaires buying their way into office.
The Senate must repeal the filibuster rule next session. The way it is being used right now subverts the Constitution, which calls for legislation to be passed by a majority vote of the senate with the VP breaking a tie. The filibuster rule is not law - it is a procedural rule imposed by the Senate upon itself. Democrats will have to live without it as well, but so be it. There is an idea floating around of amending the rule to requires 60, then 55, then 51 votes for cloture. That's better than nothing, but it still slows down the process.
Revive the equal time rule. Reagan did away with it and created conservative talk radio and Fox News. Faux News is out of control. They now have republican candidates on their payroll as commentators and are donating millions to the republican party. It's time to institutionalize broadcast media news again as an important instrument of democratic electoral process.
Redistricting must be reformed in an unbiased manner. I'm not sure how you accomplish that, but as it stands, it is a fraud. Districts are drawn to be statistically certain to vote one way or another, subverting the voting rights of people in opposition in those districts.
The right to vote in a meaningful fair election is the most important of our civil rights. Our revolution against the British Empire was about voting rights; blacks and women fought hard to get in on it. It is fundamental to self-rule.
My favorite reform is instant runoff voting, where you get to pick your first, second and third choice of candidates. It creates an instant runoff because if your first choice doesn't get enough votes to be in the runoff, they count your second choice. If they had used hits method in Florida in 2000, all of the Nader votes would have gone to Gore and he would have won easily.
There's another reform that lets you vote "NONE OF THE ABOVE," and if nobody gets enough votes they have to find new candidates and hold another election. Love it.
Something needs to be done. I should not feel like voting is a waste of time. I should feel like my vote counts. We all should.
1 comment:
Please, don't promote IRV. It is in competition with the system that we currently use for voting for the title of the worst way to run an election. I'll not go into all the details of the many dozens of voting systems that have been proposed and evaluated over the years by voting systems researchers; I'll just mention two of the better ones:
Acceptance voting: you are presented with a list of candidates. You mark *all* of the ones that are acceptable to you. Candidate with the most votes (or most votes above a threshold, like 50%) wins. You may choose to vote for your favorite "third party" candidate(s) as well as your least unfavorite 'mainstream' candidate - just be sure to not vote for anyone you would find unacceptable. If there is a strong third-party candidate, they don't "siphon off" votes from the mainstream candidate who is most similar in world view (i.e., there is no "spoiler" effect for voting third-party). All of the good benefits which are often attributed to IRV adhere to Acceptance Voting, without the chaotic instabilities which analysis has shown to lurk in IRV.
Range voting: similar to acceptance voting, but give each of the acceptable candidates a score from 1 to (say) 10. Add up the scores and the candidate with the highest total wins. This is very similar to how winners at Olympic events like ice skating are chosen (but with a voting public rather than a limited judging panel). Acceptance voting can actually be seen as a special case of this (where the score is either 1 (for accept) or 0 (for not-accept)).
There are reasons to expect range voting to give slightly better results (in the sense of "representing the will of the people") than acceptance voting, but not by the leaps and bounds that either would represent over first-past-the-post (as currently used by most races without runoff elections) or IRV. Acceptance voting, however, is quite good and simpler to tabulate (and (very) slightly easier to explain to voters), so it may be preferred over range voting for these reasons.
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