Ummmm, OK - 1) 18 years seems about the right age 2) Let 'em all vote, even felons and Trump supporters 3) In another world, I'd be fine with proportional voting, but that's not going to happen here. Would take too many Constitutional changes. So, keep the structure that we have. 4) Drop the electoral college, and elect the President on popular vote.
The real shit is a mix of both: FPTP and proportional - they even each other out it in advantages and disadvantages. also known as mixed-member proportional representation or personalized proportional representation I think it could be a wise thing to do in a politically split country like the US to give republicans in California and Democrats in the south some actual representation
Nope. Based on previous discussions, we broadly agree on this. Which makes for a crappy debate. Someone want to defend FPTP?
Not practical; in a close election you don't want to have to recount the whole country. We've had trouble enough doing that in just one state. Has to be a precinct system to some extent. You could go a long way to fixing the problem just by mandating proportional representation among electors within the states, though.
Proportional voting for the House and for Presidential electors wouldn't require any Constitutional changes. Senate could be elected by preference (ranked) voting of some sort.
If you go to some sort of proportional system for the House, you are likely to wind up with the actual members decided by the same people who currently gerrymander the districts, aren't you? Worse yet, those same people are going to be interpreting whatever rules of proportion you come up with, too. I'd rather the voters get to see who they are actually voting for, lest the power structure start naming drop-case legacies and such. That already happens in party elections, after all-- but at least there the folks with the most to lose have a chance to veto,
There are different methods of proportional representation, but all of them are going to elect politicians, so yes. All of them provide transparency on who is being elected, they differ in how much control voters have versus party bosses. The "rules" of proportion wouldn't be up for interpretation, they are mathematical equations, so once set there's no arguing over what it means.
Not by the time a law is written installing it. There'll be something not thought of, and an industry arguing that the rest doesn't mean what it means as well. The FF would be astonished at what has been made of the prefatory clause of the 2nd amendment, for example, or that growing something on your own property for your own use can be "interstate commerce..."
I disagree. These types of voting systems are in place throughout the world, we're not reinventing the wheel here. The rules behind them are not complicated.
Speaking of gerrymandering, this Wisconsin case seems destined for the Supreme Court ... http://www.salon.com/2017/03/26/mee...sors-supreme-court-case-could-save-democracy/
There's nothing particularly noteworthy about this, maybe. Just another data point in one of the biggest stories the national media refuses to even acknowledge: no democracy makes it as hard for citizens to vote as the United States does. The only reason this is even a case is because we've got it incredibly backwards. Why are we so used to arguments over HOW difficult a local or state government is allowed to make the basic civic act of voting to be? Appeals court upholds Texas governor’s restriction on mail-in ballot drop boxes
Because we're still fighting the remnants of the Confederacy and the legacy of systemic racism. One of the reasons I've been so hyped on taking state houses this election is that so many Dems are running explicitly on ending gerrymandering and voter suppression. And if we do that in enough states -- full mail-in voting with plenty of dropboxes; automatic voter registration; same-day voter registration; ranked-choice voting -- then that's pretty much the end of this version of the GOP.
Not to be a pedantic ass*, but that explains why this is the default position of the judiciary & whatnot; it doesn't (IMHO) explain why so many Americans don't see it for what it is. There are other remnants of Jim Crow that a sizable plurality if not outright majority of the population can see for what it is, or at least recognize is a problem, but it wasn't that many years ago that I would be repeatedly reminded that even many of my liberal/left-leaning friends took the "need" for voter registration procedures, voter ID laws, etc. for granted. We're so used to the government making it hard to vote that it's really only now that the GOP is getting incredibly desperate and craven that more eyes are being opened. I'm glad things are changing, but for a long time you'd have a hard time convincing a majority of any random group of Americans there was something odd about how routinely the state decides that our right to vote is a actually a luxury. Co-signed. *I know.
Other than eliminating the Electoral College with an amendment or making it moot by having at least 270 states of electoral votes sign the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) which takes effect if and when 270 states of electoral votes agree, there is a way of reducing the impact of the Electoral College. If it happened, the NPVIC would be challenged in court, and my guess is SCOTUS would declare it unconstitutional. More states could award electoral votes at the district level. States that are solidly one way wouldn't change because they would be giving the other side electoral votes. The only states I could see changing are swing states, where the governor and legislature could agree that they would rather each party get some electoral votes every time than risk their party getting none. If Florida, Michigan, Ohio, and/or Pennsylvania gave using the district level, it wouldn't matter as much if the state was decided by under 1 percent. It would make it harder to project the election. Maine will always have a Democrat get 3 or all 4 electoral votes, and Nebraska will always have a Republican get 4 or all 5. In populous swing states, using the district level (with 2 for the state winner) would have a chance at the state winner getting a minority of the state's electoral votes. For example, in 2012 the Democrats won the statewide House vote in Pennsylvania, while the Republicans won 13 of 18 seats. That means if every district voted the same way for president and House, Obama would have won the state but gotten 7 electoral votes (5 districts + 2) to Romney's 13. Gerrymandering that packs Democrats together to help Republicans is more common than gerrymandering that helps Democrats, and whether it's due to gerrymandering or not, the Democrats have an easier time winning a majority of House seats from a state than House districts from that state. I was surprised to find out that while losing in 2018, Beto O'Rourke won a majority of the districts, 19 to 17. 13 districts elected Democrats to the House, so O'Rourke won at least 6 districts that elected Republicans to the House. @Matrim55 supports ranked choice voting. Did you know that Massachusetts has a referendum on that? It if it passes, they will have ranked choice voting in 2022, but if all you care about are Senate and House, and Democrats win all of those on the first ballot, it doesn't matter.
RCV works on a certain level, but as you mention in a FPTP election where it's Party A v Party B, it doesn't really matter. As a city, we're 85% Dem. This would be extremely helpful for municipal elections with that sort of partisan skew. If there was one thing I wish we could implement for Congress, it would be cumulative voting in multimember districts. You may have three seats in a district and 4 candidates. Voters have three votes. They can split them 1-1-1. They can split them 2-1 for two of the candidates. Or they can put all three votes behind one candidate. This is good to promote third party/independents, moderate Dems in heavily GOP areas and moderate GOPers in heavily Dem areas. Most critically, it becomes almost impossible to gerrymander. To secure one of three seats, a party would need to have no more than 25% + 1 vote assuming strategic voting is carried out efficiently by all voters regardless of party. Two seats 50% + 1 vote. All three seats 75% + 1 vote. Single member district gerrymanders are easy because the math is forgiving. You want a district that is 50% + maybe an 10 point cushion. And if you can pack your opposition into a district such that it is 80% party A, you can waste a lot of their votes. A 3 member district using cumulative voting has cutoffs at 25-50-75. To gerrymander, a party would like to be halfway between any of those cutoffs. Packing a district 80-20 is now inefficient. It gives the opposition three seats. Instead you're trying to pack the opposition at maybe 35-40%. But they'd still get 1 in 3 seats. It also doesn't take a lot of change in the district to see partisanship increase/decrease enough to make what was a semi-efficient gerrymander flip in favor of the other party. An example using a 6 district state. District 1 could be an urban core district and 80-20 Dem. The other 5 districts would be +12 GOP districts. Safe in almost all election cycles. Overall, that's a 50-50 partisan split assuming equal voting between districts, but the GOP ends up carrying 5 of 6 districts. That's an efficient GOP gerrymander. If you merge pairs of districts together, you'd have a 2-1 Dem district and two different 2-1 GOP districts. Overall, the state would be 5-4 GOP. In a highly partisan state in either direction, you'd see a regression toward a more even split that more accurately reflects state level partisanship. Introducing multimember districts would require a Constitutional amendment though. But it seems like a system not too drastically different than our current one that would promote some bipartisanship, minority representation, minority party participation while taking most of the bite out of gerrymandering.
I don't like the idea of being able to give each of your votes to a different candidate, give all to the same candidate, or somewhere in between. If the Democrats and Republicans get about the same amount votes, each party should want voters to give each of their candidates one vote rather than giving anybody more than one. For example, let's say the Democrats got 55 percent of the votes with a 35-10-10 distribution, and the Republicans got 45 percent with a 15-15-15 distribution. The Republicans would get two of the three seats even if one or both losing Democrats would have beaten one or both winning Republicans in a two-way election. Ranked choice voting is similar to ranking subjects in school rather than just picking your favorite. It's not too complicated, and voters who only want to give a first choice can do that. With assigning three votes to any combination of one, two, or three candidates, it's complicated. Complicated systems can lead to people choosing not to vote, overvoting because they didn't understand what to do, or votes being miscounted by people and/or machines. Maine has four Senate candidates, and a voter who ranks a top three is also showing who he or she would rank fourth by process of elimination. If voters could fill in a bubble for one, two, or three votes for each candidate with a total of three votes, some people would misunderstand and overvote by giving their favorite three votes, their second favorite two votes, and their third favorite one vote. A system like that is a new way of a majority of votes not necessarily resulting in a majority of the seats. Multimember districts have a problem about if they treat voters equally. For example, let's say the ideal size is enough people to elect three or four. States with four or fewer House seats would have it be done statewide. States with five seats could do it statewide or make an area with 60 percent of the population that elects three, and an area with 40 percent of the population that elects two. That means that voters in different states that each have five House members could get to vote for two, three, or five members. States vary in terms of jungle primaries and majority requirements to avoid runoffs. Letting states choose between the current system and multimember districts would make it more complicated to understand even if your state doesn't change. Candidates travel to their districts and have to choose where to go. Some districts have large areas, and the areas would be larger if three districts were combined into one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_area lists 194 countries and dependencies, and 32 of them have a smaller area than the median House district. 44 districts, which is just over 10 percent, have a larger area than the Netherlands and Switzerland (separately, not combined). Some local legislatures have weighted voting. For example, each town in the county elects one representative, but the more people in a town, the more votes the representative gets, so that the votes in the legislature will be higher than the amount of members.
You can change the voting systems to your heart's content, but as long as 40-45% of the country believe the earth is 5,000 years old, God protects the USA over all other nations, and God has imbued Republicans with a unique mission to bring about the end of days, the problems you're trying to fix will remain.
I'd like to see states pass laws that give an eighth grade civics exam to every candidate. And publish the answers.