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Ocasio-Cortez endorses Biden's reelection campaign, sending a strong signal of Democratic unity
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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politics
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You need a better voting system.
Any single-winner system is inherently flawed, which is why presidential systems are just straight-up worse than parliamentary ones. They're by their nature going to be less representative. A system where the president is largely a figurehead is far better, along with a legislature which is elected proportionally using something like Mixed-Member Proportional, Single Transferable Vote, or party-list PR.
But failing that, the bare minimum to call your system democratic is to use Instant Runoff Voting. First Past the Post is just straight-up not democracy. It's a farce. The idea that two candidates with similar views both being very successful actually makes it less likely that either will win is an obvious complete failure of the system. (And, fwiw, you could have IRV presidential elections for a powerful POTUS while also improving congress by making it proportional, if you want to go a step further than just making Congress & President both using IRV, but not as far as the fundamental constitutional change required to make the president a figurehead.)
And how do you expect us to do that, revolt? Because it turns out elected officials are reluctant to make significant changes to the system that elected them from which they profit handsomely.
Suspending reality, it would be interesting if enough progressives moved to states like Wyoming (pop 580k) and the Dakotas (780k and 890k) to move them blue. Then vote in progressive senators. For reference, NJ alone has a population of 9.2m.
If that could happen It would be great to link senators to state population.
I agree with you but it'll never happen. That would require a constitutional amendment and that bar is so high it can only be cleared under the threat of national revolt (like when the voting age was lowered, or prohibition was repealed). States would not be so eager to give up their power, and three fourths of them would have to agree.
I don't know how you achieve it, but if you haven't got at least IRV, then electoral reform should be the top issue people push their elected representatives for. As I understand it, some states have already done it in some elections, so it's not like it's impossible. Without a functioning democratic system, you can't ever get good outcomes on the things that actually matter. And with FPTP you don't have a democratic system.
A parliamentary system with fully proportional representation would be best. The US is big though, so I think an electoral threshold of 4% may be needed. That, or require parties to fulfil the below condition before being able to participate in elections.
• They need enough support through party membership from the area's population, as a % of the latter. On counties, this would be about 4%. On a state level, that would be 1%. On a national level, 0.25% would be enough.
You might think, why lower with each level? But the larger the population size is, the smaller the membership can be while remaining representative. This also stimulates smaller parties since now they have a chance to actually grow.
Electoral districts also need to be thrown away -- counties, states, and the entire country, are where the elections get held in. Because of proportional representation, it doesn't matter however you were to divide up areas: 25% of votes on one party means 25% of seats.
Lastly, force the Democratic and Republican Party to break up into separate parties with each no more than 20% of all seats. Or tell the parties that putting through with proportional representation as an agenda point will give them more votes. The Dems can argue, "One man, one vote", the Reps can argue "America NEEDS to keep it Great! Vote the Dems away, get Proportional!". Both should have this as agenda point.
I also think it critical that the supreme court of the US isn't 7 judges. It worked for a country with 2 million people, but you lot are a country of 300+ million now. You need something like 100 members, and make the supreme court appointed by the judges themselves, who are chosen by multiple random ballots themselves.
The US Congress also could be expanded. Make the House go from 435 to 500 members, and the Senate to 250. They need to be updated for a big country.
It also makes it harder to manipulate politicians, since there are far more needed to bribe.
I have a whole writeup, if anyone is interested. I think that both Dems and Reps and anyone else can find themselves in it.
I have absolutely no problem with such a threshold.
Okay so here's a really controversial take. I think the problem with the SCOTUS actually stems from there being too many rights enumerated in the American constitution. I should note that I'm not a legal scholar, but I've read a lot of opinions from non-American lawyers who have explained this viewpoint, and it makes sense to me.
Where I live in Australia, our constitution is largely uncontroversial. It doesn't say what rights people do and do not have, but really just lays out the basic functioning of our democratic institutions, like how elections work, how Government works, how the Commonwealth interacts with the States, etc. Rights are left to Parliament to implement. This has the interesting difference from America in that it means that our High Court decisions are largely far less political than SCOTUS's. Because the High Court of Australia doesn't get to make the inherently political ruling of deciding how to interpret individuals' rights as laid out in the constitution. By putting the right to bear arms in the constitution, SCOTUS is inherently given the power to decide what should be a legislative matter of how much people are allowed to own guns. It's what lead to the morally-good but legally-nonsense decision that lead to Americans having the right to abortion*, which itself stopped the legislature from ever feeling like it needed to do its job in relation to abortion protections, which is in turn what made the disastrous outcome of Dobbs possible.
This is, obviously, something so deeply ingrained that it would be basically impossible to change. Americans view their constitution almost like a religious text. Even though some of the founding fathers supposedly thought a constitution is something that should be basically rewritten from scratch every few decades, Americans view it as written in stone and as something that must not be changed except perhaps to enumerate more explicit rights. But fundamentally, a less politicised constitution would lead to a less politicised judicial system, which would allow each branch of government to do its part without encroaching on the others like they currently do.
I'm with you on increasing the size of the legislature though. 2 senators per state is far too few (and makes it impossible to reasonably add in a proportional system on a per-state basis). I have much the same feeling about my country. I'd like to see our Parliament almost doubled in size, especially if we were to move to a more proportional system (we currently have a proportional Senate, but use IRV for our House of Representatives).
* legally nonsense because if you look at how SCOTUS justified it in Roe, it just doesn't make sense, legally. Somehow the right to an abortion is derived from...a right to privacy? That doesn't make sense. And it makes even less sense when you consider that the right to privacy itself is somehow derived from the right to due process and equal rights under the law.