A Few Election Adjustments, Please

The Smart People at FairVote

Pending Doom. That’s what is in the air. Both the Trumpers and the Hillaryers are seeing the clouds gathering and the 500-year storm building for the nation post November. No matter which candidate is named the winner, the supporters of both are now so overdosed with tons of fear and anger that they are spewing forth rumblings of chaos in the streets.

Hopefully it will turn out to be just that — some rumbling, smoke and a few flashes.

We all know our election system is broken. They are simply not competitive, with more than 85% of U.S. House districts safe for the party that holds them. “As a result, millions of Americans are perpetually represented by politicians they oppose, with little hope of changing things at the polls.” Go here for details.

What can we do to extricate ourselves and make our system represent our interests?

Today I’m optimistic about our future. That’s because I’ve discovered reasons to believe that with a few tweaks here and there we can repair our broken election system and climb up and out of the bottomless abyss into which we have fallen.

Finally, I can see a FAIR, REPRESENTATIVE election!

What will we see? Well, with the help of the FairVote people, a nonpartisan organization, for the first time in my lifetime, anyway, we may see a fair and honest election system.

Since the 1990s the people at FairVote, have been working on election reform and they’ve found some pretty good solutions, too. Here a few:

Ranked Choice Voting
Eliminate “winner-take-all” elections and replace them with “fair representation voting methods” such as "Ranked Choice Voting" (RCV). RCV is “used today in Minneapolis and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and by every voter in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and Scotland. Voters rank candidate in order of choice, with backup choices counting in the event their first choice loses, and nearly all voters ending up electing a preferred candidate. The result would be that voters would almost always be able to vote for candidates they truly believe in and end up with representatives who fairly reflecting each district’s left, center and right—Republicans would win in Manhattan, Democrats in Oklahoma and so on.”

Right to Vote Amendment
I’ll bet that you assume that the U.S. Constitution guarantees your right to vote. It does not. The only way to guarantee that you have a right to cast a ballot is through the adoption of a Right to Vote Amendment which will give Congress the authority to protect your right to vote, oversee voting policies and ensure that elections are fair.

National Popular Vote
“All voters should be valued equally in presidential elections, no matter where they live. Our current Electoral College system, grounded in state laws which allocate electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, leads presidential candidates to concentrate their resources on voters in a handful of swing states, relegating the vast majority of the country to spectator status. Instead, we should elect the president by a national popular vote—and there's a state-based, constitutional way to do so: The National Popular Vote interstate compact.” Go here for details.

“The National Popular Vote plan has bipartisan support and has been introduced in all 50 state legislatures. To date, 10 states and DC have passed legislation to enter the compact for a combined total of 165 electoral votes, meaning the compact is over 60% of the way to activation.”

Universal Voter Registration
“Universal voter registration would modernize voter registration in the United States. Government would be responsible for maintaining accurate and complete voter rolls, shifting our system from its current opt-in structure to an opt-out structure. Automatic universal voter registration would significantly reduce duplications and omissions on the voter rolls, resulting in a system that balances the twin goals of election accessibility and security.” Go here for details.

Now, don’t you, too, feel better about the coming election? At least it will turn the spotlight on how broken our system is. And, we now know how we can make it work.