mithriltabby | Fixing the system (Reply)

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:

Accept no money from lobbyists or PACs
Vote to end earmarks
Support reform to increase Congressional transparency
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.