Two of the biggest political problems, in my opinion, are gerrymandering and the current
primary election system.
Gerrymandering
is where the party in power in a state draws the lines of voting
districts. They do this in a way that will most benefit their own party for elections over the next ten years. As has been said by others, it changes the
whole idea of democracy. Rather than
having the voters choose their politicians, the politicians choose their
voters. And we end up with an
unrepresentative democracy. In 2014
Republican House members in total received 51.2% of all the votes cast nationwide, yet they got 56.8% of the House seats on D.C. That is not what the Founders had in mind.
Solution?
Eliminate gerrymandering by having independent, non-partisan committees draw
voting lines in each state, legislated by Federal law. Or better yet, have a mathematical formula
based on geography and population applied to each state so there is no human
bias possible in the drawing of the voting districts. Probably a complicated
math problem but should be solvable.
The second
big problem is what we are seeing in these 2016 elections – the primary
voting system being used by both parties to choose a nominee for
president.
The biggest
distortion is that the voters who turn out in primary elections are more
politically committed, and more ideologically extreme than the general voting
public. So, we get extremists nominated who
do better in primaries than they would in a nationwide general election.
Also, there is a set order, established by tradition,
that puts some states at the beginning of the cycle and others at the end. So, Iowa farmers have an outsized influence
on who survives the primary gauntlet.
And South Carolina too, with it’s strange effect of having lots of
African Americans voting in the Dem primary, and white not so unbiased whites
voting in the Rep primary. And then
California ends up at the tail end despite being the largest state by far.
Primary
elections were not handed down from the Founders of America. They have only been around for about fifty
years, and the flaws are becoming more and more apparent. What to replace them with? There was something to be said about the old
smoke filled room party leaders that chose who would represent their
party. They were a vetting system. They were natural suppressors of extremist
nut jobs. They were a force for
stability. Turning the selection over to
the voters opens up the parties to change, and that is good, but it also opens
the doors to extremists and populists, and in this year of Trump it opens up
the Republican Party to a populist demagogue who threatens to be an
authoritarian despot. Not good.
My
suggestion would be to keep the primary system, but moderate its effect in two
ways.
First, have
the order of primary states be on a rotation basis based upon random
distribution – with a mix of large population states and small population
states having their primaries every two or three weeks in groups of about five
or ten until the cycle is complete.
Second, have
the total number of delegates selected by the primary voters be only half of
the delegates who go to the conventions, where the real election to nominate
each party’s candidate happens. The
other half would be professional elected politicians, men and women who have
already succeeded in winning their positions at the voting booth. These folks would be the governors, attorney
generals, the state legislators, the city mayors, etc. The math would have to be worked out and
guidelines set as to their qualifications to attend the conventions, but that
should be doable.
That way, a
populist or ideological extremist would have substantial mitigating forces of
professional politicians that would either support or not support him or
her. And at the same time, corrupt or intemperate
or unethical candidates would have those who knew them behind the scenes there
to stop them as well. Also, a
traditional candidate would have these same elected politicians who might be
part of a movement or populist sentiment there to push back against them.
So I think
we need some balance in our electoral system.
End the corrupt, undemocratic gerrymandering. And balance the popular vote which is now
overly influenced by extremist ideologically committed voters and those
vulnerable to populist frenzies with professional already elected politicians
in each state. Checks and balances. We need them, I believe. A Trump nomination is wake up call for both
parties and for the nation.
