Unpractical: we’d never again have an uncontested election in U.S. history. The courts would tie up every election in endless reviews and challenges. Democracy would be a dead letter.
Jail the sons of badgers who commit such fraud. If you can tie the candidate to him, that’s a damn good cause for impeachment, or, if you’re lucky enough to live in a state that has it, a recall election. Otherwise, save it, and remind everyone of it at the next election.
I want to make it almost impossible for an election to be invalidated and sent back to the people. I’d far prefer that impeachment be used as the remedy.
Well, that’s my opinion. No do-overs, because it would be grossly disruptive – and, in my opinion, destructive – of the democratic process. As I said, I’d like to make it a lot easier to prosecute people for fraudulent election campaigning. (I think… I’m willing to be talked out of this…)
No… But “You cannot spend your money on ads” is also not what democracy can be. In a free society, you can spend your money where you want. Limitations on free speech alarm me a lot more than elections bought-and-paid-for by plutocrats.
I don’t like it by any means! I just am damned leery of any reform that tells me what I cannot do.
(I hate term-limit laws, too, because they reduce my choice among people I’d like to vote for. So it goes…)
One other thought: sometimes, a “new election” isn’t an option…but total societal chaos is.
The Hayes/Tilden scandal might have erupted into a second American Civil War. It certainly never would have been sent back to the people for a new election.
I, ‘we’, the electorate, need to be represented by people rooted in communities, and who have a direct, visceral connection with the implications of policy. You can argue about whether lawyers fit that criteria but plenty of other professions certainly do inc. those from educational backgrounds, medical and science, social/community work and many other career paths.
Someone who went to an Ivy League college and started a business with dad’s money and clients who are dad’s friends is not inherently suitable to govern, in fact evidence would suggest the opposite.
You also need those kinds of people precisely because they are not career civil servants.
At least every other mature democracy seems to need that; something to do with ‘gov of the people by the people’, I believe.
Look, PV, if you want working-class Joes to even have a shot at high public office, what we need is real campaign-finance reform so as to eliminate the “wealth primary”. But, even then, I expect career pols will predominate in public offices; it’s just that more of those career pols will be people of humbler origin and state-university education (not, HS-only education, I should hope), and the socioeconomic center-of-gravity of political power in the U.S. will move a few layers down the pyramid.
But what we don’t need is some kind of term-limits system designed to assure a steady supply of political newbies in office. If that happens, we won’t have legislatures, we’ll have focus groups. They won’t be qualified to do much of anything but vote up-or-done on executive proposals, and if the executive is also dominated by newbies, then it will get all its policy proposals from the career civil servants. IOW, term limits = bureaucrats rule. I hope you would not suggest abolishing the civil service as well.
This, essentially, pretty much down the line for most of your scenarios.
Sometimes it is more important that the end point be definite than that it be fair. “Tough hop, fix it next time” cuts the Gordian knot of endless lawsuits and bickering. Cut your losses.
You make it sound like it’s some big deal. Things are bad in the UK - worse than they’ve ever been. Last election 25% of new candidates had done no other job and that, compared to the rest of the mature European democracies and non-US ‘Anglosphere’, is pretty bad:
What I’m suggesting to you is representation by people from conventional, employed backgrounds (I don’t know where ‘working-class Joes’ comes from) is the norm in mature democracies.
What you appear to be talking about is some kind of 19th century plutocracy.
Of those listed in the OP, I think that 1 should require a recounting of those votes. If they are impossible to retrieve, and the final result is within the margin of error of votes that could have been discarded, there should be a new election. And 4b should require a new election.
Many of the others should be challenged prior to the election. Requiring a library card that’s very difficult to get or extreme gerrymandering certainly undermine the democratic process and should be stopped. But it’d have to rise to the level of really really extreme to warrant invalidating a vote that’s already been made.
How many “citizen legislators” are there in the British Parliament, the Russian Duma, the Japanese Diet, in France, Germany, Brazil, New Zealand, etc.? Nearly all of these bodies are filled with professional legislators, and not with secretaries or machinists.
We select our juries that way, but not our representatives. If we did, their senior staff and other handlers would become the “real” legislators. (This is often the case as it is, with new Congressman coming in without sufficient experience to conduct themselves responsibly. The Tea Party freshmen have been an example.)
In any case, there isn’t any rule banning an “ordinary joe” from running for high office. They do it all the time. Orly Taitz is on the California ballot for U.S. Senator! She’s about as common as a cold!
That’s precisely the type of issue I’m thinking about here… if someone proposes something that is going to change something fundamental about the way an election is run, I feel like there’s some difficult-to-define “that makes it reflect the will of the people better/worse” criterion that ought to be applied. But there are plenty of situations in which it’s really hard to figure out what that even means. For instance, compulsory voting (which plenty of perfectly reasonable countries like Australia have). If voter turnout is 100%, then the result of the election better reflects the will of the people. Right? Or do you suddenly have a ton of totally apathetic people voting who just pick the person with the least foreign sounding name (or something). But then aren’t we being condescending and paternalistic by trying to claim that their opinions are less valid than ours? Etc, etc.
One of the times that this comes up the most often with respect to real life is in situations where there’s some amount of difficulty/hassle associated with voting. Now, presumably unless there’s some truly magical “at 9 a.m. on election day, everyone is teleported into a voting booth that lies in a space-time bubble outside the normal universe so that they don’t have to worry about missing any work” thing going on, voting is going to be SOME amount difficult/hassly, pretty much no matter what. But what happens when that amount changes? And very very frequently, these changes are one which are expected to have demographically predictable outcomes (ie, poor people find it harder to take time off work, and are more likely to vote for party X in this district), and gosh darn it, wouldn’t you know it, it’s usually the party that would benefit from these predicted outcomes that is very concerned about some justification for making this change. But of course, we can’t make it impossible to ever change how elections are run…
The other thing that is so troubling about all of this is that normally a democracy should be self-correcting… if Dems get too much power and go crazy with socialism, then the voters will throw them out, and then the Repubs will go crazy with making-sweet-love-to-oil-companies and then the voters will throw them out, etc. But when it’s the election process itself that is being messed with, the pendulum gets broken, and even if there’s enough sentiment to throw the bums out, that sentiment might fail to express itself, etc.
This is again overlapping a lot with the other thread about free speech, but I think there’s an important distinction between various positions that one might have:
(1) Paid political advertising actually makes democracy better
(2) Paid political advertising makes democracy worse, but it is free speech, and outlawing it or severely regulating it would be bad in its own right
(3) Paid political advertising makes democracy worse, but it is a kind of free speech, and outlawing it or severely regulating it would be nearly impossible without tromping all of over lots of other related kinds of free speech
(4) Paid political advertising makes democracy worse, but, regardless of whether it is really “free speech” in a meaningful sense, it’s currently constitutionally protected in the US, end of discussion
To me, the most important thing about free speech is that limitations on it (and there are already plenty) are not based on what opinions one holds. That is, it is of absolute paramount importance that if I think Obama is awesome and Shodan thinks Obama is a douchebag, any situation/medium in which I’m free to communicate that opinion is one in which he’s free to communicate that opinion, and vice versa. But to me the difference between, say, posting on a message board and purchasing national TV commercials is different than the difference between supporting and opposing Obama.
To be very clear here, I’m not actually currently endorsing banning political advertisement, nor do I have answers for the myriad difficult questions about how precisely it could be defined, etc. What I am saying is that I can certainly imagine a society in which commerical political advertisement was banned but which still had what I considered to be a totally free speech and totally free press.
I actually believe all four of these propositions, even as they are contradictory! Put me down for 10% on option 1, 30% on option 2, 50% on option 3, and 10% on option 4!
There’s an old Dan O’Neill comic strip where one guy is narrating a long, complicated dream that he’d had, involving a dragon eating the staircase he was climbing, etc. His friend said, “What did you do next?” The first guys said, “I don’t know.” His friend said, “Then you are still sane.”
In political reform, the highest sanity is shown by those who admit, “I don’t know.”
I have difficulty seeing this. It would allow rich people to start up their own newspapers and publish them without commercial support. Would a group of not-rich people be able to cooperate to do the same thing? Is a group enterprise “commercial” or “private?” I just don’t see how the boundary could ever be defined, and, even if it were defined, how it would be protected from trespass. (Or how it could be protected from abuse, of the variety I’ve mentioned above: people faking “news” stories which were really political endorsements.)
I fully agree that you are seeking the good, and that you aren’t trying to build up some sneaky form of censorship. What I’m worried about, though, is that some sneaky form of censorship might evolve out of these reforms.
No one, supporting the 18th Amendment, wanted Al Capone; I worry about similar unintended consequences.
(And…without the benefit of hindsight…back in 1919, I would have been a wholehearted supporter of Prohibition. So it goes!)
What the hell is a “citizen legislator”, the phrase invokes some Hollywood nonsense of peasant farmers from around the time of the French Revolution?
Looking very briefly at the Prime Minister’s of Australia, New Zealand and Canada, they spent somewhere between 15-20 years working outside politics before standing for Parliament. That’s about ‘normal’, are they examples of your “citizen legislator”?
Fwiw, Angela Merkel is a chemist by profession, the French PM was a teacher for 15 years, the Brazilian President was an imprisoned militant, etc. I think you’re missing the point by citing Russia.
Generally the phrase appears to mean a newbie officeholder who has not held public office before and (it is implied) has no intention of making a career of it. And that’s what we don’t need.
Actually, it’s a fairly common meme. Some people run as “outsiders,” proudly boasting of their lack of experience in partisan politics. Some boast that they know how to run a business, so running a government should be just the same. They often start out promising never to run for higher office, or even for re-election.
They don’t tend to get elected, and, when they do, their performance tends to be disappointing. They spend much of their time un-learning. They have to be taught how running a business is not like running a government.
I respect the ideal of citizen-legislators, just as I respect the ideal of ordinary people being jurors. The difference is that jurors are carefully selected, carefully instructed, and have a very limited mandate. Legislators get to vote on constitutional amendments and (some of them) Supreme Court nominees…