Dear Trump Voters

[liveonearth]

 

 

You don't know me.  I'm from Tennessee and I was born in the 1960's.  I've been an independent as long as I've been politically aware, because it is clear to me that both of our dominant parties here in the United States of America have become corrupt.  Both are overly influenced by big money, favors and whatnot.  Political figures on both sides have found ways to work the system to stay in power and enrich themselves.  Both parties have become more extreme because our voting systems including closed primaries cause that.  The incentives in our system are all wrong.  It might seem to be time to blow it up, to clear the slate in a dramatic way.

I would argue there's a right and wrong way to clear the slate.  Blowing it up is the wrong way because so much useful stuff gets destroyed in the process.  The right way would be to update our voting systems so that no one population gets to decide for all of us.  Open primaries, non-partisan districting, and ranked choice voting would fix our problems immediately.  The far left wouldn't be stuffing wokeness down our throats.  The far right wouldn't be trying to set up an authoritarian who will rule without regard for the Constitution.  We would have more options, instead of always having to choose between extremes that are both awful.

The beauty of the American system of government and its Constitution is that it was designed to keep any one faction from gaining absolute power.  That saying about power corrupting, and absolute power corrupting absolutely--that's absolutely true.  Our government was designed to keep anyone from having too much power.  The plan is to force us to compromise for the good of the people.  Compromise is hard work. 

Our government is supposed to be OF the people and FOR the people.  Not OF the academics, Christians, rich people, minorities, white people, men or any other single group.  OF THE PEOPLE.  FOR THE PEOPLE.   This is why America is a beacon on a hill for people all around the world.  A place where regular people have a chance.  A place where you won't get killed because you look different or celebrate a different totem.  THIS is the greatness of America.  Our forefathers had a vision and we have carried it forward for over 200 years.

Democracies usually fail before 200 years.  It's rare for a democracy to last as long as this one has.  And it is riddled with imperfections.  It needs work, a big update, a major overhaul.  Those who pretend it's perfect are totally nuts.  We made a lot of changes early, and the civil war forced us to make a bunch more changes.  We're about to have to get busy again.  If this democracy doesn't fail this November because too many people vote for a DICTATOR, we still have a lot of work to do.  The Democrats aren't autocrats like DJT, but they aren't going to give up power easily either.  WE THE PEOPLE must force the changes needed, and those changes will disempower BOTH of our dominant political parties and return the power TO THE PEOPLE.  Ranked choice voting.  Open Primaries.  Non-partisan districts for voting. 

Democracies require work!  They don't work if the people aren't paying attention or doing the work.  A failing democracy is not a reason to give up, it's a reason to get after it!  If we let Trump win it's because we gave up, we were too lazy and too ignorant to make the updates needed to keep rulership in the hands of the people.  Or return it there, really.

If we let our government fall prey to a dictator who ditches the Constitution, we will have lost all that we've fought and died for, for so long.  We'll be right back where we started when those rich Brits and the king were bossing us around.  Don't remember that?  It's because it was 200+ years ago!  History seems real boring until you start repeating it.  The LAST thing we need is to let Trump destroy all the democratic systems in our government in order to glorify himself.  It will take hundreds of years to dig ourselves back out of that pit.  Autocracy is a very bad trap. 

If we let the Dems take this next election, we might live to see the changes that would actually help!  We'll be fighting against them too, but at least they aren't about to ditch the Constitution and ignore federal law to deport a whole bunch of people.

There are LOTS of other changes that we need to work on, but our voting systems must come first.  I pray that NO DICTATOR gains power before we are able to hit the RESET button on our systems and keep working toward a more perfect union.

Comments

[hudebnik]

Amen, sister!

Why do we have political parties? Largely because if you can only cast one vote per election, multiple candidates with similar views tend to hurt one another and split the vote so none of them wins. The traditional solution to that is a party picking one nominee per election, whether by primary, caucus, or smoke-filled room. Ranked voting is a different solution to the same problem, making parties and primaries less necessary.

Open primaries and non-partisan districts both sound like incremental improvements, but there's another that would largely take care of both of them at once, at least for legislative elections: multi-member districts with proportional representation (which also requires multiple candidates with similar views to run in the same election, see above).

And these two things work well together: the most effective (albeit complex) system of proportional voting, Single Transferable Vote, relies on ranked ballots. It chooses candidates proportionally not based on their party identifications, but based on whatever voters think is important, even if they don't consciously know what that is themselves. It can elect people proportionally by gender, or race, or sexual orientation, or occupation, or dietary preference, or favorite superhero, depending on what the voters actually care about. If there's a political issue not yet associated with any party, but voters care about it, it will elect proportionally based on that issue. Look it up.

[liveonearth]

Single transferable vote, huh. It DOES sound interesting. How on earth do you connect what voters care about with what candidates really can/will do? I mean yeah, there's what they say, but we know people can lie through their teeth so how? Thanks for the comment!

[liveonearth]

OK, looked it up, and it's basically the same as what we're using here. STAR voting is a new variant that sounds maybe slightly better.

[hudebnik]

Oh, STV doesn't do anything about connecting campaigns with reality, and I don't know of any voting reform that does that (other than impartial fact-checking by a free press).

STAR, like IRV and Borda and Condorcet and approval and score voting and and plurality and anti-plurality, is a system for electing a single candidate to a single office. Of those approaches, IRV has been the most widely adopted, but it has serious problems. I happen to like Borda the best of these, followed by Condorcet, but any of them is an improvement on single-vote plurality.

To my mind, IRV's biggest problem is that it pays attention to whom you vote for but ignores whom you vote against, so it elects a divisive candidate with strong first-place support and strong last-place opposition over a broadly-acceptable consensus candidate (say, every voter's second choice). IRV intentionally looks no farther down your ranking than necessary, so for most voters there's no difference between ranking a candidate fifth and twentieth. Borda and Condorcet pay equal attention to all of your ranking: the difference between 19th and 20th matters just as much as the difference between 1st and 2nd.

STAR is a cross between score voting and Condorcet, and like them, it pays as much attention to down-votes as up-votes. Pure score or approval voting incentivizes candidates to persuade their supporters to "bullet vote", giving this candidate a maximum score and everybody else a zero, which effectively turns the system back into single-vote plurality. STAR avoids that by mixing in a bit of Condorcet, so it matters which candidate you rank above which others, even if neither is your first choice.

STV solves a different problem. If you elect a large legislature with one representative per district, no matter which of the above approaches you use, you'll inevitably amplify the majority: if 60% of the voters want policy X and 40% alternative policy Y, it's possible that 100% of the seats are won, 60-40, by candidates who run on X. STV is specifically designed to achieve proportional representation in a multi-candidate election, so policy Y ends up with roughly 40% of the seats rather than 0%.

For example, in places where race is the dominant political issue, a 60% white state can easily elect a 90-100% white legislature or Congressional delegation, even without intentional gerrymandering to ensure that. The current solution to that is racial gerrymandering in the other direction: if 40% of the people are black, draw 40% of the districts to have a black majority. This has three big problems: it draws districts based on people's race, which "feels wrong"; it requires deciding in advance that race, not some other criterion, is what voters care about; and it makes all the districts "locks" for one party/race or another, so the general election is a foregone conclusion and all the action happens in primaries, which pulls candidates to the extremes. STV achieves the same goal without any of those three problems.

STV doesn't make sense in a single-winner election, and if you tried to use it there, it would be a more-complicated version of IRV. It only works with multi-seat districts -- in the extreme case, one "district" for all the legislators in a state. Multi-seat districts have been illegal for the US House of Representatives since 1967, since a number of Southern states with statewide white majorities but substantial black-dominated regions were using them to ensure disproportionate white representation. So if we wanted STV for the House, we would need to repeal that law, or pass an exception to it for states using STV or something similar.