Things we should work on changing in our election system

Politics & Elections
1

No doubt there are some people who think our system is just fine and dandy, and if you’re one of those, move along. Nothing for you to see here. But the rest of us may want to change things a bit.

No doubt everyone’s going to say “get rid of the Electoral College” and I won’t argue that’s not a good goal. But we’re not going to make it go away just by wishing. The party that’s in power has vested interest in retaining it, so it’s going to take some work to get into a postition to do that. Here are two steps we can take immediately towards that goal:

  1. Get every state to create a nonpartisan redistricting commission. One that cannot be overridden by the legislature. And give them the requirement that voters’ party alliance is not to be a consideration in redistricting. Just try to make the districts as close as possible to having the same number of voters, while still being contiguous.

  2. Get every state to adopt 100% vote-by-mail. Some people claim it’s more prone to voter fraud, but I’m not convinced of that. As far as I can tell it’s less prone to such or at least no worse.

Step #1 is necessary to eliminate gerrymandering. It’s a horrible flaw in the election system and one that’s practiced by both parties. It needs to go.

Step #2 is necessary to eliminate voter suppression practices. If all registered voters gets a ballot in the mail and have two or three weeks to fill out the ballot and mail it back, their vote’s not being suppressed by anyone. Well, except themselves, if they procrastinate too long. And they’re less expensive to run, which is a point in its favor for everyone.

We may want to have a third step of instituting motor-voter registration, where everyone who applies for a driver’s license gets automatically registered to vote, if they aren’t already. That will eliminate voter suppression by making it too difficult to register.

Just like eliminating the Electoral College, these changes will probably be opposed by the party in power, since they maintain that power in part by gerrymandering and voter suppression. But there’s ways around that. Many states have the Initiative, which allows people to put issues on the ballot for direct vote by the people. With the right advertising campaign, I’m sure they can be passed even when one party is opposed.

For other states, I’m not sure anything can be done, except lobbying the legislature. Start grassroots organizations to do this, rather than be seen as out-of-state interests.

Thoughts? Any other steps that can be taken? Any deep-pocketed donors willing to step up and support these? (Initiative campaigns are not cheap.)

2

I thought of a fourth step we can take: automatically reinstate voter rights to felons upon completion of their sentence. It’s scandalous that we don’t already do this, but only a few states do. It’s another form of voter suppression, though.

3

“Get every state to create a nonpartisan redistricting commission. One that cannot be overridden by the legislature.”

The only way you can do that (so that it cannot be “overridden” by the legislature) is build it into the state’s Constitution. Which usually requires a supermajority vote in the legislature (in some states a simple majority), then a referendum. Then it can be overridden again only by the legislature/referendum method again.

If the state is heavily gerrymandered already, good luck getting two-thirds or more of the legislature to vote for something very detrimental to their own chances of getting re-elected.

BTW, I thought of this method of redistricting that achieves the non-gerrymandering goal without having really heavy expertise on the part of the non-partisan commission (copied from the other thread):

  1. Allow the legislature to draw the district borders exactly the way they do it today.
  2. Present the districts’ map outlines, without any identifying marks, just pure outlines, to a bipartisan commission of non-politicians.
  3. If the commission rejects any district’s map outline as “gerrymandered”, go back to step 1

Lather, rinse, repeat, until you get past step 3.

If the outline in step 2 follows some natural boundaries (like shorelines) and because of that looks weird, maybe color those in a different color to indicate that.

4

It’s possible in my state to do a constitutional amendment with just an Initiative. Legislature not involved. I think you need a supermajority of voters to approve it, but that’s all. I guess I was assuming that most states with the Initiative had the same provision, but perhaps that’s not the case.

5

I agree with easier, and universal, registration. I agree gerrymandering has to be stopped.

I am the one who’s against voting by mail. Not everyone has a secure mailbox.

Let me add:

Every district needs physical (such as paper) ballots, with initial counts and recounts by hand, not machines.

Mandatory voting.

A new system of elections–such as, say, open party-list, or mixed-member proportional–that allows smaller parties to challenge and bring down one of the two major parties when it becomes dysfunctional. (As both majors arguably are now.)

6

So what? It’s not like people go around stealing ballots in the states that have vote-by-mail. And if they did, they couldn’t vote them anyway. One of the steps of counting votes is a check of the signature on the envelope against the one on the voter registration. If they don’t match, the ballot is not counted and the person is called or otherwise notified.

You get a physical ballot in vote-by-mail.

I got to see the system we use up close in the recent election, since I had a temporary job on the Elections Board (=ballot opener). It was quite impressive. The entire ballot is scanned into the computer. After the polls are closed, they are automatically counted. Counting them by hand for our county would take days, and we are just a medium-sized county. The computer does it a few hours or so.

For recounts, they could either run that again, or call up the image of the ballots one-by-one and count them by hand. Or they could actually physically get out the ballots and count them. I don’t think they’ve had a recount in our county since they installed this system, but they could do it any of those ways. I’m going to guess that the computer counting would be more accurate than hand counting virtually every time.

A certain party, and you know which one, would scream bloody murder about this.

7

It’s not just a few states. Only eleven states have lifetime voting bans for felons.

8

I can’t imagine it taking anything less than months in my county. At first glance, my 2016 ballot had 2.5 billion different possible permutations. I can’t imagine that humans would actually be better than machines at making sure that a Trump-Portman-Smith-Jones-Brown-Smith-Jenkins-yes-no-blank-no-yes ballot was put in a different pile from a Trump-Portman-Smith-Jones-Brown-Smith-Jenkins-yes-no-yes-blank-yes ballot.

9

I thought most in most states, felons would have to apply to be reinstated, but I guess I was wrong. It needs to be changed in those states that don’t automatically reinstate them, though.

10

Eliminate first-past-the-post vote tallying in all elections, in favor of ranked-choice. This is something that should have bi-partisan support, since it reduces the threat of third party candidates becoming spoilers. It should be a more realistic goal than the elimination of the Electoral College (good luck getting small states to agree to that). It’s probably one of the better ways to get representation to more closely reflect the will of the people.

Still, I don’t think it’s likely to catch on any time soon. Even discounting the lack of ranked-choice, state primary rules aren’t even standardized. Big things move slowly, and we’ve got fifty big things that all want to go different ways.

In the end, I think the most benefit comes from the electorate actually voting. Tweaking the system is a good idea, but in the end, it’s no replacement for voter engagement.

11

I agree. And I’m not convinced that ~50% voter turnout rates are particularly influenced by things like ease of registration either. I’m sure it does affect some people, but they’re at the fringes- people who are some combination of indigent and elderly mostly.

Most of the rest seem to be disengaged from the process for one reason or another; either they think their votes don’t matter/don’t see any gain, or they consider voting enough of a pain in the ass that they’d rather do something else instead.

I think that the first can possibly be remedied somewhat through education, but the second… about the best we could do is implement some sort of policy requiring employers to give workers some kind of break on election day, so that if someone’s an hour late because they voted before work, they aren’t in jeopardy of some sort of disciplinary action and/or job loss. Don’t know about pay; requiring employers to give an hour or two of free pay seems a bit extreme.

I’m kind of unsure about the engagement angle; I was raised in a family and environment where voting as always been considered more of a duty than somethiing you could just opt out of because you were tired, it was rainy, etc… I mean, in our area the weather was bad on Election Day, and they talked about it being something that might reduce voter numbers. I was dumbfounded- who lets a little bad weather (and I mean moderate rain and temps in the 60s, not severe thunderstorms!) get in the way of voting? But apparently a lot of people view that as an insurmountable inconvenience.

And until we get people past that sort of mentality, I think voter engagement is going to be low.

Another pitfall is having an idea about how that non-voting 50% feels; the assumption seems to be that they’d vote in line with the 50% that did vote, but I’m not convinced that’s necessarily so; I’d be really curious to see if there’s any pattern in terms of socio-economic status, geography or anything else- if there is, then that would imply that we’re getting a different result than if a higher percentage of people actually voted.

12

Gerrymandering is a problem, but nonpartisan commissions are not the solution. They might work in places that have a long and proud tradition of nonpartisan government, but that’s not here: Here, if you try to set up a nonpartisan commission, you’re just going to get a bunch of partisans who pretend they’re independent.

But there are ways to force nonpartisan maps out of partisan map-drawers. The simplest is to first have some objective mathematical criterion for how gerrymandered a map is: I favor a measure of the total length of all district boundaries, with allowances made for where borders follow natural features like river or pre-existing boundaries like counties. Then, you have everyone in the legislature, in order of increasing seniority, propose a map. And, out of all of the maps submitted, the one with the best score is adopted. It’s sort of like the old “one kid cuts the cake, then the other chooses a slice” method: Submit a map that’s too gerrymandered, and the other party can just submit one that’s slightly less so, in the other direction.

13

In Maine, we don’t even wait until completion of the sentence. Felons can vote from prison here. Even in primaries.

14

I’m not sure what can be done about this, but I really wish there was more interest in down-ticket races.

15

I’ve been voting since I was 18. Make it mandatory and I will never vote again.

16

This is just another example of why, if you really want to reform the US electoral system, you need to get majority input from outside the US. Because you are intractably incapable of thinking outside of the USA-exceptionalism paradigm.

Other democracies handle larger and/or more complex elections more effectively, faster and more accurately than the US foul up on so many levels.

In this particular example, it was standard practice for Australian National or State upper house ballots to list over 200 candidates (though much needed reforms are reducing the incidence and impact of micro-parties). At the 2016 Federal election there were 60 political parties and 631 candidates in the six state ballots.

In comparison to 2.5 billion (2.5 x 10^9) anything more than 170! exceeds 10^300 permutations and approaches infinity.
Didn’t take the AEC months to work it all out. Go figure.

NSW “blanket” ballot 2016

17

I think that gerrymandering has also been aided by ever-increasing district size in the House. I’d like to see the size of the House doubled, or at least increased considerably. At some point I guess it would just be too big, but there’s nothing sacred about 435.

18

Very good point. People are just too people-like.

But there’s nothing in that which requires districts to have the same number of voters. A hex grid laid over the state with adjustments for borders would be pretty close to minimal boundary length, yet would fail horribly on voters/district.

How about we let any registered voter in the state submit a new district plan and take the one with the lowest standard deviation on the number of voters/district. In order to avoid really bizarre districts, calculate the standard deviation only to (say) 4 decimal points and then use your criterion as a tie-breaker. Or if there’s a better statistical measure than standard deviation, we use that.

19

True enough, but even simpler would be to just eliminate the congressional districts and allocate each states representation on a proportional basis.

20

A senator represents the whole state. A representative represents his district. He is supposed to live in the district, to know the district, and if a voter in the district has some problems, the rep is the one he goes to. And if the voters in the district don’t like the way he represents THEM (not the state, but the district) they vote him out. It may not work all the time, but it pretty often does work.

All that is summarily eliminated with your suggestion.