Comment On The Election Fallacy

posted by Don Klemenic

This is a great post. Your leading thought, warning against thinking one's own ideas are necessarily correct and competing ideas of others are necessarily wrong, leads directly to your support of the democratic process: solutions based on discussion striving for consensus are the objectively rational approach, and when they include everyone, either directly or through voting for a representative, they therefore have a natural legitimacy. Your caveat about protecting minority rights against majoritarian overstep is also important. I certainly endorse your emphasis on structural reform. There are many flaws in our political structure that have led to the sorry state of our politics and addressing them should be of the highest priority. My following list of suggestions deals with giving each eligible voter equal access to voting, with all votes having equal value, and with combatting corruption. 1.) I thought your idea of a "None of the Above" candidate on the ballot, who’s winning would initiate a Ranked Choice Vote, seemed unnecessarily complicated. Why not just start with Ranked Choice Voting? Being personally impatient, I prefer the high road of Congress using its Constitutional power to directly mandate the RCV system for all federal elections to the slow, low road of doing it one state at a time. RCV destroys the spoiler effect which maintains the Duopoly. Congress seems not to have the power to mandate RCV for primary elections, but with RCV in place the Duopoly parties (or a fascist cult-leader like the orange one who currently controls the Republican Party) lose their power to discipline their members in Congress with the threat of being primaried. (These Congressmen (and women) have the option of ignoring the primary and running as independent candidates. Without the spoiler effect, this would no longer be a futile exercise. Voters no longer must choose the "lesser of two evils" for their vote to count. Independents can win.) Rather than losing members in Congress, the state parties would probably extend RCV to primary elections also. With the necessity under RCV of gathering an absolute majority to win, candidates will need to concern themselves with who will choose them as their second choice, third choice, etc. This will require being moderate and conciliatory. Firebrands lose! 2. Since the Supreme Court gutted the Civil Rights Act of 1965, the Republican Party has initiated a systematic state-by-state program of voter suppression. Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to terminate this vile campaign. 3.) Gerrymandering, creating odd-shaped voting districts to achieve packing or cracking, is done to deliberately make some voters more important than others. The usual reform is to design districts that are maximally compact. While this lessens deliberately created inequality, varying concentrations of like-minded voters leaves a great deal of voter equality in place. No one has ever attempted “anti-gerrymandering”: creating odd-shaped voting districts to achieve “anti-packing” or “anti-cracking”. That doesn’t seem practical. But there is a solution. In the context of our defective plurality voting system, multi-winner super-districts would aggravate the problem: all the state’s seats in Congress could be won by the majority party, with minority voters completely locked out of representation. So the current federal law prohibiting multi-winner super-districts was a proper reform in the context of our defective voting system. But with a generalized form of RCV enacted, voter equality could be maximized. These are the modifications for multi-winner Rank Choice Voting: For a district with 1 winner, that winner must attain 1/2 of the votes plus 1; for a district with 2 winners, the winners must each attain 1/3 of the votes plus 1; for a district with 3 winners, the winners must each attain 1/4 of the votes plus 1, etc. The counting run-offs continue until all the winners have been determined. When one winner is determined but other seats are still open, that winner’s “surplus” votes over the winning requirement are divided proportionally by the second choices on the winning candidate’s ballots among the remaining active candidates. The tallying process is more complicated, but the voting process is unchanged: simply rank the candidates by your order of preferences as you would in a single winner race. It is generally suggested that states with 6 or less seats in Congress have one super-district for the entire state. States with more than 6 seats in Congress would have multiple super-districts—as few as possible to avoid going over 6 seats per super-district. 4.) The abomination called Citizens United and other Supreme Court rulings leading up to it destroyed a century of legislation aimed at removing the corruption of money in politics. Congress should use its power to wipe out all these corrupt rulings. Money is not speech. Corporations have no citizen rights. Implicit (smart) quid-pro-quo is just as criminal as explicit (stupid) quid-pro-quo. All political campaign contributions should be limited to an amount that the average citizen would consider making—no loopholes! Include a reference in this legislation to the text of Article III in the Constitution instructing SCOTUS that this is outside of their jurisdiction. 5.) It is long past time for Congress to reform the Supreme Court. The Justices should be subject to the same rules of conduct as any other jurists. Since Court members have become blatantly political, replacing lifetime tenure with a fixed term (fifteen years?) is long overdue. Lifetime tenure is not mandated in Article III of the Constitution. It will not require a Constitutional Amendment to change it. 6.) The revolving door in regulatory agencies between members of the agency and members of the organizations being regulated needs to be closed. This is a corruption leading to agency capture. The boundary needs to be maintained. This prohibition is currently in place for military officers in material acquisitions and employment opportunities in companies supplying the military: the revolving door is closed for five years after leaving military service. The five-year rule seems like a good standard. It should apply, for example, to FDA agents and pharmaceutical executives. The same prohibition on the revolving door should be applied to Congressmen and lobbying organizations. 7.) Some rules of procedure in Congress should be changed. These will require only majority votes to be accomplished. (a.) The Senate filibuster has degenerated from something exceptionally used into a standard requirement (with few exceptions) of a super-majority for the passage of legislation. This is grossly undemocratic. It should be permanently abolished. (b.) The so-called Hastert rule (actually initiated by his predecessor, Newt Gingrich) mandates that legislation will only come to a vote if the majority party by itself can provide the majority to pass the legislation. The minority party is consigned to irrelevance. This also is grossly undemocratic. It should be permanently abolished. I’m sure there are other useful reforms to be made. These are the ones that immediately come to mind.