Fixing the system

[mithriltabby]

Like me, you may be unhappy with the available range of choices for office, and the degree to which the candidates respond to wealthy donors and political action committees instead of the citizens they’re supposed to represent. If you don’t like the status quo, change it. There are some worthy groups trying to do so already, and they can use your help.

Right now, politicians spend far too much time raising funds for their next election, and not enough in working for their constituents; in order to raise the funds to be competitive, they owe favors to their big donors, whose voices are consequently louder than ours. Public campaign financing is a system where a candidate needs to convince a reasonable number of citizens to donate $5 to their campaign— enough to prove they aren’t an unelectable crank— and then the government provides them with enough money to run a campaign as long as they eschew private funds. If someone else outspends them from private funds, they receive matching funds up to a specified limit; the higher the limit, the less likely an opponent will be tempted to try to do so. The national organization supporting this is Public Campaign; the California one is the California Clean Money Campaign. This system already works in the states Maine and Arizona and the cities of Portland, Oregon and Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we’ll have a chance to vote for it in California in 2010, thanks to A.B. 583. There’s a good video by Bill Moyers covering Clean Elections legislation.

Transparency is an important principle of accountability: we need to see how our tax dollars are being spent. The Sunlight Foundation is doing good work.

The Change Congress movement seeks to get our elected representatives to pledge to support these four principles:

1. Accept no money from lobbyists or PACs
2. Vote to end earmarks
3. Support reform to increase Congressional transparency
4. Support publicly-financed campaigns

You can sign on with Change Congress and put pressure on your representative to pledge to any or all of those principles.

At the national level, “swing states” get all the attention while those with a strong majority in either party get short shrift, and the votes of citizens of low-population states count for more than those of citizens of high-population states. I’d rather see it evened out so we all get the same degree of influence. The National Popular Vote, which is supported by FairVote, is a way to get the President directly elected by the citizens— one person, one vote— without a Constitutional amendment. Four states have already signed on.

Even with these reforms in place, Duverger’s Law says we will be stuck with two parties as long as we have our current electoral system. Right now, I’m not happy with either the Democrats or the Republicans; they have strongly entrenched structures designed to primarily serve their own power and only secondarily benefit the American people. We need a free market in politicians: a chance for third parties to seriously threaten the major parties, instead of making people game the spoiler effect.

There are voting systems that make third parties viable: voters express their choices as a ranked list, and if your #1 vote wasn’t able to elect your favorite candidate, your #2 vote will do so. Such systems include instant-runoff voting (IRV) and the more complex Condorcet method for single-winner elections, and numerous varieties of proportional representation (of which I consider the single transferable vote (STV) to be the best) in multi-winner elections.

For example, the San Francisco Bay Area could merge three or five Congressional districts into a larger area and use STV to elect candidates; each candidate would answer to a more specific group in a larger area. Even if each former district were majority-Democrat, Republicans would still get a voice in Congress that speaks for them— or both parties could be chased from office if someone more interested in serving their constituents than their own power stepped up.

The Center for Voting and Democracy are the national-level organization supporting electoral reform; in California, the group is Californians for Electoral Reform.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The problem is not that the Democrats and Republicans are entrenched, it's that the parties consist of people. Overcome Duverger's law and replace one of them, and the new party will still consist of people. You think the Whigs were any better?

[mithriltabby]

I don’t expect human nature to suddenly improve, but I do hope to have an easier time of swapping out one party for another.

[chuckles48.livejournal.com]

Until this year, I would have said public financing might have some possibility of working. Obama's broken the system pretty decisively, though. Public financing of campaigns that matter is dead, and Obama's organization has really sunk the nails in deep.

Honestly, I don't agree with a national popular vote system. That being said, I'm in favor of something similar: proportional representation. You might note that that instantly makes all of the big states into serious battlegrounds - nothing more than California, where suddenly 25 or so electoral votes are up for the swinging.

As for third parties... I'm finding an increasing likelihood that one, or both, of the existing "main" parties is going to go the way of the dodo. What hasn't happened yet is a galvanizing event (and it will have to be a big one) that really brings out, say, the middle, against the ends. I was suggesting resurecting the Bull Moose party, but that's me. ;>

Finally, as to your STV suggestion for Bay Area districts... you _are_ aware, I hope, that the old 12th district was formed as a specifically Republican Ghetto district, which is why it stretched from Hillsborough, down the Peninsula, across San Jose, and out to Stockton.

[mithriltabby]

Are you thinking of a per-district scheme like Maine, or one that allocates all the electoral votes based on overall votes from the state? I’d prefer the latter, as otherwise it creates an incentive for yet more gerrymandering to minimize the number of swing districts.

Nope, I hadn’t known about that particular example. My Google-fu is not strong this evening; I haven’t found a map for the old CA-12.

[chuckles48.livejournal.com]

A system that allocates the electoral votes based on overall vote from the state, preferably. We've got enough gerrymandering problems as is.

As to the old CA-12, here's a map of it just after it became the 14th district (http://swdb.berkeley.edu/info/cdmaps/cdsf.html). Now take off that little extension at the northern end, and extend a ~ 100-yard wide finger along the seam between the 13th/10th districts and the 16th district, all the way into the Central Valley.

And no, your google-fu is not weak. We're looking for the 1980-based redistricting. It's a pre-internet artifact.

[akaihyo.livejournal.com]

Transparency is vital for a properly functioning democratic society (yes, I know that technically the US is a republic) and I fully support all such efforts.

I am not so sure about the public financing of campaigns, it still seems to tilt the field to the incumbent and I am worried about the restrictions it places on free speech.

Instant Runoff Voting, I would love to see used. Even a small number of 3rd party members in congress would shake things up for the good.

[mithriltabby]

Public financing doesn’t place any restrictions on free speech. It’s opt-in: if you don’t opt in, you can fund your campaign in the traditional way. How does it tilt the playing field any more toward the incumbent than the current system? The incumbent does has an advantage in name recognition and the number of people who might be willing to hand over $5 so they can make the threshold for public financing, but under the current system they can do the same thing for campaign donations.

[akaihyo.livejournal.com]

It depends on how the public financing in structured. But an opt-in system might be workable.

[mithriltabby]

The ones in Maine and Arizona are opt-in, and have been working pretty well there. As I understand it, anything other than opt-in would be unconstitutional.

[mithriltabby]

An op-ed in the New York Times observes:

This system, along with the winner-take-all practice used to allocate most states’ electoral votes, creates the potential for an absurd outcome. In the unlikely event that all 213 million eligible voters cast ballots, either John McCain or Barack Obama could win enough states to capture the White House with only 47.8 million strategically located votes. The presidency could be won with just 22 percent of the electorate’s support, only 16 percent of the entire population’s.