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Post by kjlowry on Jun 18, 2012 17:42:48 GMT -5
I have noticed there are mentions of pressing for elimination of the electoral college and some other versions of popular voting as a way to influence election reform. I have had an e-discussion with Richard Fobes on the 99% declaration website on the "A New Declaration" page about his ideas to prevent vote-splitting as a way to a fair and effective election process. Quoting Mr. Fobes: "The use of single-mark ballots in Congressional elections easily leads to vote splitting when there are more than two reasonably popular candidates in a Congressional race, and this vulnerability is exploited by the 1% who heavily fund advertising to tip the balance toward the candidate who favors the 1% over the majority of voters, and this excessive financial influence will continue until single-mark ballots are banned from Congressional elections." He gives more details of a plan to replace the single-mark ballot on the page I mentioned above which can be found at www.the99declaration.org/full_text?recruiter_id=835 I have seen others arguing for ballots that ask a voter to pick a second choice, etc. and I was wondering if anyone can suggest a way to merge this into one of the already decided upon "grievances" for this assembly? Thanks, KJ
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mhuttman
Full Member
People First
Posts: 124
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Post by mhuttman on Jun 21, 2012 14:08:04 GMT -5
I think this ties partially into the gerrymandering and campaign finance issues as well. Basically, there are a few things that are causing Americans to become disenfranchised with the way that elections are held: Money, the districts dance, and the apparent lack of choices. I hear "I'm picking the lesser of two evils" nearly every time I bring up the election with anyone.
We need to get money out of these elections, but also find ways to open the field in elections to candidates that are not from one of the two most established parties. Too many states have strict ballot access laws that effectively shut out any third parties from getting on the ballot. The influence of money in politics makes it extremely difficult for any third party to get its message out even if it does make the ballot (Ex: How many minutes of news coverage have been given to the Libertarian candidate this year? I'll be honest: I won't even know what the guy LOOKS like if I don't Google him!)
Basically, what grievance can we write that asks for elections to be more fair, more open, and more representative of the PEOPLE, not just the largest corporations and the richest billionaires?
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Post by votefair on Jun 22, 2012 11:44:50 GMT -5
Here are 3 important voting-related points that I sent to the steering committee via email. In the "P.S." at the bottom, I clarify which of the listed election-reform grievances are workable, and which aren't. 1: The idea of allowing delegates to give as many of their "votes" as desired to any one grievance will waste lots of time as the delegates strategize how best to distribute their votes. More specifically, the voting method proposed in the agenda is the least-fair voting method possible, and for that reason it doesn't even have a name, although it is similar to the "Borda count" method. If you specify a limit of no more than 3 (three) votes per grievance per delegate, you can greatly improve the fairness of the results! And this will reduce the waste of time that is likely to arise when the delegates realize they can focus all their votes on their favorite grievance and depend on other "sincere-voting" delegates to vote for the obviously popular grievances such as overturning Citizens United (which means that several truly popular choices can fail to make it into the final Declaration). The mathematically fairest way to handle the voting is to allow only one vote per grievance per delegate, which is called "Approval voting," but the three-vote limit is a compromise that provides justification for having paid for the keypad-entry system. 2: Currently your election-reform "grievances" fail to include the one reform that election-method experts -- from around the world, with high levels of mathematical training -- agree is most important. It is clearly stated in the "Declaration of Election-Method Reform Advocates," namely that U.S. elections use single-mark ballots that produce unfair results (unless there happen to be only two main candidates). I posted this grievance months ago -- at www.the99declaration.org/votefair/ban_single_mark_ballots_from_congressional_elections -- and it received 5 "Approve" votes, 6 "Relevant" votes, 6 "Must include" votes, and zero(!) "Disapprove" or "Irrelevant" votes. I received an e-mail message asking for the grievance to be submitted by e-mail, but I did not do so because I assumed that the organizers were paying attention to the forum voting and forum comments, and because I did not realize that it was necessary to grammatically convert "ban single-mark ballots from Congressional elections" into "Congressional elections use unfair single-mark ballots." The fuller "grievance" wording I suggest is: "The use of single-mark ballots in Congressional elections easily leads to vote splitting and this vulnerability is exploited by the 1% who heavily fund advertising to tip the balance in their favor, so single-mark ballots should be banned from Congressional elections." 3: If the election-method grievance (#2) is not allowed to be added until the last day, the 90% threshold will not be reached simply because a few people will fear that a favorite grievance will be displaced by the addition, or because they want a slightly different wording for the added grievance. The obvious solution is to allow adding a 90%-approved "new" grievance at an earlier day (i.e. not waiting until the last day). The final round of voting will still determine which grievances are actually chosen. For proof of my claim about the importance of single-mark ballots being unfair and the cornerstone of unfair election results, please view the "Declaration of Election-Method Reform Advocates," which has been signed by election-method experts from around the world. It is at: www.BanSingleMarkBallots.orgIn addition, if you want a "personal" reference, Adrian Tawfik at the NY-based online newspaper "Democracy Chronicles" ( democracychronicles@aol.com ) can verify that I am an election-method expert worthy of being listened to. Richard Fobes www.VoteFair.orgAuthor of "The Creative Problem Solver's Toolbox" and "Ending The Hidden Unfairness In U.S. Elections" P.S. The proposed election-reform grievances about "gerrymandering" and the "Electoral College" and "open primaries" make the mistake of recommending solutions that will not work. Election-method reform will not happen until U.S. elections use better ballots, and then the problems of "gerrymandering" and the "Electoral College" and "cross-party voting constraints" will be easy to solve. The only currently listed election-reform grievances that would be effective are these two overlapping ones: "New election laws banning all rules in all states that prevent equal access to the ballot by giving advantages to certain political parties or penalizing independent candidates for office" and "New federal laws requiring that no political party shall be privileged or receive special advantage in any state for their candidates running for Congress or the Presidency." (And here is a valid, but less-important, grievance: "Reinstatement of the "equal time" rules so that each candidate for office is given equal free air time on television, radio, cable, or any other medium licensed and regulated by the federal government.") The other proposed election reforms will only rarely affect any election results. P.P.S. Even the reform of eliminating preferential treatment to the two main parties would not be needed if we used better ballots, because then we, the majority of voters, would quickly regain control of those two parties (which currently are controlled by the 1%).
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Post by christopherabrown on Jun 22, 2012 12:33:05 GMT -5
I have seen others arguing for ballots that ask a voter to pick a second choice, etc. and I was wondering if anyone can suggest a way to merge this into one of the already decided upon "grievances" for this assembly? Thanks, KJ That is definintely an important election reform issue. In fact it is so important that it deserves to be on national televison primetime at least 4 times in a month. The whole issue needs explaining to the voters. However, with free speech abridged, and freedom of the press, (they are owned) the issue will not be heard by the nation.This is one reason I propose AFTER America figures out what the deprival of its first right, Article V, has cost the nation, that the preparatory amendments to an Article V convention need to be; 1) End the abridging free speech of free speech. (Then this voting issue can be on national TV) 2) Campaign finance reform. 3) Secure the vote and election reform. Of course if the vote is not secure, ballots might mean nothing. The diebold code needs to be trashed and the security of the technology verified OR the technology needs to go back to what it was.
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Post by jondenn on Jun 22, 2012 14:14:53 GMT -5
Hello Richard, Would you be so kind then as to suggest how to write the gerrymandering grievance/solution? Time is short. I was at a full spectrum nonpartisan event in NH yesterday and one of the things everyone agreed on was making congressional districts more competitive. Also, what's your beef with Top Two Open Primary? I agree that the voting system as proposed by the SC is AWFUL. As is the confirmation bias of everyone getting a whole two minutes to talk at the other delegates (instead of legitimate debate). I also have a real problem with presetting the grievances, without a drafting committee doing thoughtful editing for like topics, best practices, and bringing in the best research in each field. The CC2 is starting to look more like a bad game show, not reflective democracy for a nation. On Citizens United, I'm sure that we all agree it's a top grievance, but as evidenced in the excellent article "The Hard Truths of Citizen's United" www.salon.com/2012/01/21/the_hard_truth_of_citizens_united/ there appears to be no supermajority solution, therefore, imo and many others, the only supermajority make-do is complete transparency of Pac money. Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation has endorsed the new 2012 Disclose Act. At least then we will know who is speaking, until such time as a "cure" can be found.
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Post by votefair on Jun 24, 2012 0:35:16 GMT -5
jondenn, as you have requested, here is my suggestion for rewriting the gerrymandering grievance:
"Allowing a state legislature to choose congressional district boundaries is a conflict of interest that leads to "gerrymandering" and, as a result, unfair election results. In each state both main political parties should, as equals, choose from among publicly submitted proposals, and if the two political parties cannot agree, then the most party-balanced proposal would be chosen."
Below is the explanation I had to write before I could arrive at this wording.
The best way to solve the gerrymandering problem is to use a voting method that produces nearly the same results regardless of which district boundaries are chosen. However, such voting methods require better ballots.
More broadly, our currently used single-mark ballots are too primitive to produce fair results, regardless of how they are counted.
A few election-method experts believe that a mathematical approach would produce fair district boundaries. Unfortunately, although the mathematical approach is intended to be unbiased, any specific mathematical approach would produce biased results. We just don't know in advance (without peeking at the demographics) what the bias will be.
With these limitations in mind, I believe the best approach would be to allow any organization and any person to propose specific statewide district boundaries, then discard any proposals that do not meet the specified rules (mainly regarding how many people are in each district), and then ask the Republican Party and the Democratic Party to choose a proposal that they both can accept.
If the two political parties are not able to reach any agreement, then the proposal that is expected to produce the smallest difference between Republican and Democratic winners would be chosen. And if more than one proposal has the same smallest difference, the chosen proposal would be the one that favors the political party that is opposite from the state legislature's current majority party, which is a negotiation trick that motivates the major party to cooperate instead of only pretending to negotiate. (If there is still any uncertainty about which proposal meets this criteria, then the one that has the shortest total boundary length would be chosen.)
The problem with the current system is that whichever political party has more members in the state legislature naturally chooses district boundaries that favor that political party. The approach I recommend here gives equal power to both parties, which makes it more balanced and less biased. And it includes a penalty to the "majority" (in-power) party if they fail to cooperate with the "minority" party.
Of course fans of third parties will object to the two-party dominance, but they need to remember that third parties do not benefit, regardless of how district boundaries are chosen.
Yet remember, better ballots would lead to the possibility of vote-counting methods that make boundary disputes irrelevant, and that is by far the best solution.
Richard Fobes
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Post by votefair on Jun 24, 2012 0:48:16 GMT -5
jondenn, you also asked why I disapprove of "top two" open primaries.
They are unfair.
The easiest way to understand the unfairness is with an example.
Suppose there are two Republican candidates and four Democratic candidates. If none of the candidates are minor "can't-win" candidates, then the "top two" candidates will be the two Republican candidates. That happens because the Democratic voters are likely to split their votes among the four Democratic candidates.
The ease with which both candidates can be from the same political party, even when the opposite party is more popular, clearly makes the method unfair.
To better understand the unfairness, it is essential to understand that the ballots we use now, which are "single-mark" ballots, can be counted in only one way, namely by giving one count to each candidate. This approach prevents voters from saying something like "I like candidate A the best, and candidate C and D the worst, and the others in between." In the absence of this additional information it is impossible to know which two candidates are really the most popular.
For clarification, the "top two" terminology refers to the runoff election being between the two candidates who each receive the "most votes," but the real meaning of "most votes" is easy to overlook.
In any election that uses single-mark ballots, the candidate with the "most votes" is not necessarily the most popular. (And the candidate with the fewest votes is not necessarily the least popular.)
In other words, most people have an overly simplistic understanding of what "the most votes" means, and what it should imply.
Thanks for asking.
A final point. If we stopped using single-mark ballots (and used a good way to count the "better ballots"), then the majority of voters would quickly regain control of both political parties, and then the choice of candidates -- in both parties -- would quickly improve, and then the desire for cross-party voting would disappear as an issue.
Richard Fobes
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Post by votefair on Jun 24, 2012 1:02:38 GMT -5
christopherabrown, your efforts to elevate one grievance over another, and to predict the sequence in which the grievances must be solved, is likely to be shared by other delegates. However, they will be trying to elevate their favorite grievance over your favorite. Specifically they will believe that their grievance needs to be solved before your grievance (better news reporting) can be solved.
As an instructive comparison, the "Declaration of Election-Method Reform Advocates" was written only after election-method experts took a break from arguing about which election method is best. In that Declaration we agreed to support each other's election method, even though each of us dislikes at least one of the other declaration-supported election methods. Yet together we agreed on the importance of denouncing single-mark ballots (which are counted using the "plurality" method), and we agreed that the supported election methods are, as a group, the best choices.
In other words, the enemy is not other reform advocates; the enemy is the unfair status quo.
The 99 Declaration convention needs to embrace a similar spirit of cooperation. There can be as many as 25 (?) grievances in the official Declaration. If 15 or 25 grievances are chosen wisely, then progress can be achieved along each of those 15 or 25 paths – simultaneously.
As for the news media being biased and hiding significant information, there have been many attempts (such as through The Daily Show) to point this out, but there has been no significant success.
Ironically the news media will have its unfairness revealed quickly if the 99 Declaration contains wisely chosen grievances and the news media fails to report on the 99 Declaration.
In contrast, if the 99 Declaration only contained a single grievance about unfair news reporting, then most US citizens would regard the Declaration as meaningless (and truly not worth reporting on).
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Post by jondenn on Jun 24, 2012 6:50:56 GMT -5
Richard, thanks for this. I am struck by the complexity of seemingly easy issues. And this goes to reinforce that a Continental Congress 2.0 with strategic voting, locked in choices not edited by policy professionals from a reflective panel, and two minutes to talk AT the other delegates is absurd. As noted in your thoughtful responses to gerrymandering and top two open primaries, we need to talk this out, in public, and after the delegates have heard all sides, rewrite the grievances/solutions, reflected on what we've heard—then vote with a thoughtfully designed system. I'm not bothered by the grievances, per se, that we'll vote on. But without suggested solutions don't we just sound like a bunch of whiny children? We should be going to Philly to do the work, the hard work, of trying to solve a myriad of problems that are facing our country. We've had over 6 months to prepare, what were we all so busy doing instead? If we can't come up with consensus solutions, don't we need to be more understanding of our elected officials' plight? Almost everyone dislike's SCOTUS' Citizen's United ruling, but no one has come up with a practical doable solution. (Until then total transparency of PAC money seems the consensus route.) Top-Two: I live in CT, if there was an open primary I would have voted for Brian K Hill (R) who was one of two Senate candidates (the other a minor libertarian) to endorse the PRE Plan to Reform Elections which was written by rebuilddemocracy.org (Stephen Erickson). * www.agreater.us/billpage.php?id=138 scroll to the bottom op-ed. (Essentially, Ending Gerrymandering, and Campaign Finance Reform fulcrums Term Limits to forge a bipartisan solution.) To do that I would have to register as a republican. I won't do that. I'm an Independent. Therefore, I am a huge fan of open primary. Are you? Is it just the voting method you disagree with? *Also, if I were voting in MA I would have voted for Marissa DeFranco (D) or Bill Cimbrelo (I) because they support PRE and/or the Pledge to Amend (not the oddly written Move to Amend). So, I truly am an independent centrist reformer.
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Post by votefair on Jun 25, 2012 22:21:29 GMT -5
jondenn, you are wise to recognize the complexity of the task of developing the Declaration, and the need to have accomplished lots of that development prior to the convention. Of course the main organizer apparently thinks that this development process has been going on, but failed to choose appropriate voting methods (both online and for use at the convention), and has failed to separate solutions from grievances. Years ago I created a website at www.NegotiationTool.com that demonstrates the kind of process I think is most effective for arriving at a wise agreement in complex situations such as this. The two most important components of that process are these: * A fair way to combine into a single overall ranking of importance each person's opinion about the importance of each component. That calculation is very complex, and much more complex than correctly identifying a single winner in an election (even when the ballots allow voters to fully express their preferences). * The need to focus on solutions and possible actions, rather than complaints and grievances. Many of the proposed "grievances" for this Declaration combine a grievance with an intended solution. For example, the grievance about gerrymandering also proposes a way to remedy the gerrymandering. Unfortunately it proposes a remedy that would not work, and the "solution" instead would produce wildly unfair election results as a consequence of straightening and shortening district boundary lines. Combining grievances with proposed solutions will complicate the voting at the convention. Someone might think that tax reform is the most important grievance, and yet recognize that the specific proposed "solution" will not produce desirable results. As another example (as you point out) is the Citizens United grievance, regarding which there is lots of debate about which, if any, of the proposed ways to solve the underlying unfairness would be both effective and enforceable. At this stage I think the best hope for this Declaration is to first focus on the grievances, and then introduce the proposed solutions with words that clarify that there can be multiple proposed solutions, and that the most effective solution is not yet known. In other words, the proposed solutions would be regarded as starting points for the process of developing effective solutions. You/jondenn also asked if I am a fan of an open primary. I already clarified that I oppose that approach. You commented on your unwillingness to register in the "other" political party, but remember that both political parties have been taken over by the 1%. Initially I registered to vote without any political-party affiliation, but then at my first opportunity to vote, which was in a primary election, I didn't see on the ballot any of the names of the major candidates. As a result, I now switch back and forth between the two parties so that I can vote in primary elections. I rarely see any candidate that I actually like, and basically I just vote against the worst candidates. In defense of this approach I'll point out that when I talk to people and find out what they really believe, very few people nicely fit into either party's real agenda. Viewed from a broader perspective, the real agendas of both political parties are revealed by the biggest contributors, and the data at www.OpenSecrets.org reveals that the same industries back both political parties. Specifically, those businesses are the "taker" businesses, such as banks, insurance companies, land "developers," natural-resource-extraction businesses, etc. In contrast, the "maker" businesses, such as Intel, Apple, family-run restaurants, artists, software developers, etc., do not contribute much (comparatively), if any, money to election campaigns, and they get stuck with the high tax rates that were intended for "taker" businesses. Of course you will recognize that this perspective corresponds with my "tax the takers more than makers" proposal, which I posted too late to get any traction here. Richard Fobes
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Post by davidindc on Jun 29, 2012 20:20:26 GMT -5
I posted something like this about gerrymandering on a long ago thread:
Grievance: Political gerrymandering creates "safe seats" for entrenched incumbents.
Redress: After each census, a board of neutral experts (demographers, statisticians, political geographers)* should be engaged to draw lines that create compact, contiguous districts that respect the integrity of traditional communities.
*The National Academy of Sciences or the National Science Foundation would be my nominee to convene the redistricting boards.
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