EASY Ways To Help Fix American Democracy

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[Alkis]

it's disheartening to see such reasonable policy receive such an affluence of trolls in the comments

[jcarterla]

Public funding of ALL campaigns. Make it a crime to receive any money other than your salary when you are an elected official. You are also banned from working at any future job that may have been influenced by your time in office.

[CB-dbqx]

Get big money out of politics. Limit all donations to $5000 per person or entity. Place a cap on campaign spending per election. Make it illegal for government officials in influential positions of power to become lobbyists or go into the private sector for one entire election cycle. Real patriots serve the people, not private corporations

[lcarltbmx]

You can fix all this by not labeling corporations people.

[georgeb.wolffsohn]

What about adopting a NO Party system. Just this is what I believe in and this is what I want to do.

[bltlife]

America is the Titanic. Have fun trying to fix a ship purposely built to sink. 🍿

[scoundrel]

I like the idea of open primaries. Third parties has too many problems.

[icecoldpierre]

That's smart. Let's do this!

[pinkypony]

eliminate the electoral super redistricting for political corporate donation to limit terms in office to 8

[williamwaugh]

Those who know about IRV should also be aware that Approval Voting and more broadly Range Voting are also options.

[chrisoman]

we have preferential voting (rank choice as your calling it) in Australia and it works wonderfully!

[steh]

Oh I know the answer; you actually need a democracy in the first place and that's not what you've got in the USA.

[independent]

More achievable, but certainly not easy.

[bobbybabylon]

the yankee voting system is laughed at worldwide. usa has never had a fair election by world standards. you did mention maine and i know vermont also has fair elections. in these 2 states voting is a right government cannot take away so even convicts in prison can vote. that is the way it is in my country too. if you take florida for example if you commit a felony can never vote again. other states allow voting after time served. now colonies (territories) like guam puerto rico and us virgin islands get no presidential vote. if they leave the colony to a state they can vote there. then they can leave the country and vote by absentee ballot as many i know do. meanwhile back in the colonies all their relatives get no vote and they in a foreign country do by absentee ballot. there is no consistency in the yankee system because states each make their own rules instead of the federal government like in all other countries. millions can't vote and more each day just in the state of florida let alone the rest of usa.

[chroniclesofpercy]

Can you please break this down more and explain more for beginners defining each term and explaining how this whole system work? Thanks

[magister]

What we need is Range Voting, not Ranked Choice Voting, Ranked Choice may be better than first past the post plurality, but it has huge downsides.

[shakayojgph]

Really guys, America need a revolution, i'm not american, not even live there, but the policies and disasters of far right ideas affect almost everybody in the world, i'm so sad i can't do anything, but you who are reading, if you are american, start a revolution, for you and for the world

[chrisbrownaz]

There are dozens of cities and counties that have Ranked Choice Voting and the number keeps growing! Let's make sure we repeal the Maine legislature's repeal of the RCV initiative next fall and let's put pressure on the New Hampshire legislature to pass their bipartisan bill to enact it there!

[GiovanniGiorgio]

Fix democracy? A title of 'Discover democracy' would be more appropriate. Representative democracy is a sham.

[arix]

If you're going to go to the trouble of reforming your voting system, a single-winner Ranked Choice (IRV) system is a pretty poor replacement. It's not terrible when used in multi-winner contests, (STV) but has some unique complications.

What you should be looking towards is proportional list systems (Open List, MMP, etc...) for your state houses that will allow you to vote in new parties, and either a multi-winner Re-weighted Range Vote (RRV) or STV system for smaller local elections, with a Ranged Vote system for positions that have to be single-winner, like governor. You should probably also dump official primaries as there is no need for them once you've dispensed with the current plurality winner voting system, as in any of the candidate-based systems I've mentioned (IRV, RV, STV, or RRV) it's absolutely reasonable to run multiple candidates from the same party without hurting each other, so they can all run together in the general election rather than vying for official selection from their party.

The ultimate goal, however, needs to be to open up the political spectrum to choices other than democrat and republican. In New Zealand, we just voted to kill off two small parties in our recent election. We still have five left, and both of your political parties could fit within the spectrum of opinion in our largest right-wing party.