I love how most of the replies here are people spitballing ideas for fixing the government, as if there weren’t a bunch of nations who have already solved these problems which we could take inspiration from. Basically every democracy that was founded after us has looked at our mistakes and fixed them in one way or another.
On a similar note, we need to boost SCOTUS to 29 or 31. The party membership of the court shouldn’t be so tight that one bad faith president can negatively impact American policy for the next half century.
29 justices, with rolling term limits, so every president gets to appoint a few, but not enough to screw the results.
Judges shouldn’t have political affiliations in the first place.
Congress should be huge like the writer says, but also chosen at random like jury duty.
Every January, NYE, the ball drops…and 10,000 new names are chosen. They’re sworn in a few weeks later, when we used to swear in the new President.
No fund-raising, no campaigning, just 10,000 Americans of all walks of life, set together to steer the ship.
That leaves a huge amount of power to the “random” selection algorithm and any other eligibility rules.
Computers cannot be random, true.
Humans cannot be “random”, true.
Things outside of Human and Computers control, “random” to us. E.g. Lava Lamps.
We have ways of “randomly” selecting people, and we also have ways of not throwing non-eligible people in the hat. A couple of non-eligible people in 10,000 isn’t going to matter if at least 5001 people are eligible and competent.
Now are humans capable of letting this happen “randomly” is another story
This is fraught with problems, but just to make my point: those potential jurors go through the selection process where they are whittled down. Conflicts of interest, bias, and more are all taken into consideration.
There’s also the fact that many Americans are just idiots. A not insignificant number of people legitimately believe the earth is flat.
Yeah randomness has been used effectively in the past but typically not that broad. Adding some chance to the process can be a good thing though as it limits the impact of corruption.
Oh absolutely, I don’t mean to say there is zero merit to the idea. It could absolutely be worked into a better solution than is currently in place in pretty much any country.
In 1787 the population of the country was : 4Million. With roughtly 250,001 being able to vote. 250,001.
The current voting population 250,000,000
250 THOUSAND to 250 MILLION – a THOUSAND times more Voters. A THOUSAND Time MORE voters.
As long as there’s a rule that they can’t be filled with Democrats or Republicans, it should be able to help democracy
“Let’s keep all the existing problems slightly repackaged and create new ones.” -VP at a Think Tank
No wonder we’re in so much trouble. With friends like this who needs enemies. Better solution:
No more geographic attachment for the House. Proportional representation time. In 1776, local concerns were much more distinct. Now, Anywhere USA is everywhere. Plus, Senators are still bound to states for people who worry about that. Instead, parties win seats based on a percentage of the vote they receive and can assign members (which they do already, just with more steps) as they see fit. Gerrymandering solved, also we just broke the terrible de facto 2 party system.
Having a district cross a state border will be a problem when a Rep has to navigate two separate state governmental systems when trying to access help for their constituents.
That’s OK-ish sounding but I’m going to give the example of NY. NYC is a very different animal from the northern part of the state and local issues matter a great deal depending on which portion you live in. I imagine it’s like that in other very large states and major cities in general.
I think perhaps there should be some accounting for population centers. Major cities simply have different concerns from rural areas, and it seems reasonable to have each be represented. But we may be getting into a “where does it stop” thing here.
I’m not sure how to skin that cat or if it’s worth skinning. I generally agree with your proposal - the way it’s currently done is absurd.
We have local and state governments. Focusing on these minor differences at the federal level made less and less sense with the industrial revolution, rail, telegraph, highway system, internet. I’m not sure where exactly we crossed over from valid governance to outdated system to absurd, but we’re definitely there.
Also, these differences tend to be overblown which is why people, politicians speak about them in the vaguest of terms. Yes, when comparing a large city to hill people there might be some differences (though again, far less than historically). However, we’re at the federal level and big city to big city and hill people to hill people it’s all more or less Anywhere, USA.
parties win seats based on a percentage of the vote they receive and can assign members (which they do already, just with more steps) as they see fit. Gerrymandering solved, also we just broke the terrible de facto 2 party system
Nope. If people only get one vote (vs, say, ranked choice) then they have to be tactical about their one selection. This forces “Abilene effect” voting.
Nope. There are many proportional government systems in the world that work just fine. Ranked choice makes zero sense in this context. Assuming everyone will be tactical is cute. The considerable leap in logic to the Abilene effect is… where to begin? First, we already have coalitions they just form before the election, but the voters are NOT deciding the power balance at the DNC/RNC. Second, nothing is forced and Abilene Effect is not a state of being. Third, as Larry David said “A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied”.
You need to purge your government of the selfish, the cruel and the corrupt. It doesn’t matter what form of organization you choose if you don’t keep the assholes out of power.
See… That the problem, the quote that best comes to mind is.
" The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. "-Douglas Adams
Make it a small council, 3 to 5 people chosen at random from a pool limited to those with some list of qualifications. Make it a point system based on academic, civic, and business success. Those that have enough points are automatically in the pool.
Business success does not belong on that list. Giving capital interests a seat at the table is how we got and continue to be here.
Business success is a skill, and knowledge set, that’s crucial to the economy, without which the US wouldn’t be a global leader. The point of having multiple skill set leaders on a small council is to prevent the ‘business above all else’ mind set from prevailing, while also making sure needed expertise is at the table.
Start with an automatic retirement age; no one over the age of 65 (for example) can serve as an elected representative.
Honestly, the same should likely apply to voter eligibility - to be honest - but that’s a whole separate argument for another time.
Yeah, and while we’re at it let’s disenfranchise the intellectually disabled as well. /sarcasm
Personally I prefer term limits rather than an age cap because I’d rather see government represent everyone. If a 75-year-old manages to win an election by running a successful campaign, why shouldn’t they govern? But if they’re only in office because they ran unchallenged for 30 years… time to make room for change.
The biggest issue with term limits is that it transfers agency away from elected officials, and empowers unelected staffers who will instead be the ones with all of the institutional knowledge on ‘how things are done’ - further entrenching the rot.
By instead having an age restriction, it still allows for popular politicians to remain within Congress and transfer experience to newer members, while also incentivising politicians to plan long-term and focus on bettering things for future generations, as they will ultimately be the ones responsible for looking after things. After all, “a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit under.”
We have a great case study in how effective term limits are at achieving good governance: California. It’s just as @thatKamGuy said-- it empowers party bureaucracies, advisors and civil servants at the expense of elected legislators.
California’s governance did improve, but largely due to structural reforms to the budgeting process pushed through when Jerry Brown was governor. Term limits are a band-aid that doesn’t even stick properly.
Because if you’re not going to be around to see the consequences of the policies you supported maybe you shouldn’t be taking part in it.
We don’t let children take part in the policies being made even though they will change their entire lives, but we do it because they aren’t informed enough for such decisions. Well guess what? Children are often smarter than people who are sun downing and while an old person only gets dumber as the years pass a child gets smarter.
if you’re not going to be around to see the consequences of the policies you supported maybe you shouldn’t be taking part in it
For example, if you’re termed out and leaving someone else to clean up your mess?
I don’t think there’s a clean standard for gerrymandering. There’s only more gerrymandering or less gerrymandering, and it’s a subjective court decision when it’s gone too far
I read the article, but don’t follow the argument. Add some seats, and then each representative will represent fewer voters. So what? How does that fix gerrymandering or make elections more representative?
The easiest solution is of course proportional representation. Can’t gerrymander if there are no districts.
But if you must have districts for some reason, then… just don’t put politicians in charge of drawing them.
More representatives means more districts. More districts means smaller districts. The smaller the district the harder it is to gerrymander. If you take this to the extreme, a district is one person and that person is the representative, there is no gerrymandering and you’d have a true democracy.
To try and understand how/why adding additional seats to Congress would be a positive change (or really, ANY proposal) - take the most extreme ends of the spectrum:
With 1 single seat, 50.1% of voters would get 100% of the representation.
With 1 seat for every voter, 50.1% of voters would get 50.1% of the representation.
Obviously, not EVERY single person can be a congressman - so the goal should be to find the minimum number of representatives required to optimally represent the populace.
Always nice to look at edge cases, but the 1 seat per voter is never going to happen, not least because that’d be direct democracy, not representative democracy.
For any realistically-sized constituency, as long as the election remains first-past-the-post, if the votes are evenly split among districts, 50.1% of the voters would still get 100% of the representation.
In addition, gerrymandering will still be possible.
As for proportional representation (upthread), it can also lead to antidemocratic anomalies, as can every electoral system. That’s because they all have to meet requirements that are sometimes logically contradictory. In existing systems that approximate PR, coalition governments are common, and centrist parties have disproportionate power since they’re the difference between a coalition with a majority and one without. So the centrists end up perpetually in government and often prevent the larger parties from meeting their manifesto commitments.
Your math is wrong.
Let’s say you have 1 district. 50.1% wins, provided you have only 2 parties. If you have more than two, you could win with as little as 34% in FPTP.
Let’s say you have 3 districts. You need 2 districts to be in control. Each of those two need 50.1% of one third of the population for 2 parties, or about 34% of the vote. If there are more than two parties and FPTP, you could win majority with as little as 2/9, or 22% of the popular vote.
The more districts you add, the fewer people you need to win a simple majority in FPTP.
Those are ideal numbers, but so is the 50.1% you submitted.
My math is exactly correct. Note the assumptions “for any reasonably-sized constituency” and “if the votes are evenly split among districts.” That’s the very well-known mathematical practice of freezing or bounding certain variables in order to focus on the effect of others.
Let’s say a reasonably-sized constituency has more than a few hundred voters. Then the anomalies you’d see with 1-person districts won’t happen. First simplifying assumption.
In that scenario, with votes evenly distributed, 50.1% for Party A in each district leads to Party A controlling 100% of the seats, as I said. And if there are more than two parties, as long as the vote is evenly split among districts and Party A is the leading party, Party A will still get 100% of the seats. You can keep arbitrarily adding parties to show the same effect with even smaller vote shares.
Your observation that even smaller vote shares can still control a legislature is correct, but requires multiple parties with roughly similar vote shares, or votes to be distributed unevenly to the parties among the districts. That’s a bit closer to how real elections work, but in practice, most uneven distributions cancel out each other’s effects, and only relatively few of such patterns can lead to the extreme cases you describe. And there are seldom many parties that gain over 10% of the vote. Those things can happen, but it’s putting you a few sigma out on the tail of the curve. Though in the UK, recent governments have had parliamentary majorites won by parties that got 35-40% of the vote. FPTP with multiple parties can cause that. Changing constituency sizes wouldn’t have any effect on that kind of outcome.
Actually, thinking about this, if you have one person per district, direct democracy, you need 50.1% to win a simple majority. If you have one district with 2 parties and FPTP, you need 50.1%. But overall, you need about half the votes per district and about half the districts for a simple majority, which means for most values of districts and people per district, you need about 25% of the vote. Near the extremes of number of districts and the number of people per district, you can see fluctuations up to just over 50% and a fair amount below 25%.
We’ll it would be harder to pick some Democrats from this neighborhood and a bunch of Republicans from that neighborhood if the district size is only one neighborhood
Also it would allow for more specific representation. Using myself as an example, my district is basically my county plus a couple small parts of some neighboring counties. One end of the county is pretty rural, the other half butts up against a major city and pretty much just bleeds right into it. We have some ridiculously wealthy old money areas, and we have some that look like they were plucked from a movie about gang violence. There’s a few towns here that I’ve legitimately never even had to drive through. It’s kind of insane that all of these different areas are being represented by the same person, we have very different and sometimes conflicting concerns. And if I needed to go to my representatives office for any reason, I’d have to drive about an hour to get there because of course she’s set up shop at the far end of the county from me.
Personally, I think the ideal way to draw districts is to kind of have voters do it when they vote. Give them a map, have them select the areas where they live, work, shop, drive through regularly, or have other connections to until they’ve selected an area with a big enough population to be a district. Then feed those maps into a computer and have it average them all together to generate the new district map.
We’ll it would be harder to pick some Democrats from this neighborhood and a bunch of Republicans from that neighborhood if the district size is only one neighborhood
They’ll just take half of one neighborhood and half of the other. That happens now.
Doesn’t really matter when those neighborhoods are likely very similar. That’s a far cry from a huge urban center drowned out by rural counties.
When you say proportional representation–is that to say the number of representatives per state is decided by the population level? If so that sounds great.
But without districts and candidates therein, how would you determine who is voting for what?
The % of the vote a party gets is the % of the reps they get.
And the party chooses the reps, or how is that done?
There are a couple of ways to go about it. A common way is open party-list proportional representation. Each party puts forward a list of candidates. The number of elected candidates depends on the proportion of votes with respect to the total (e.g. 10% of votes with 100 total seats means 10 seats for that party), where those candidates who received the most votes within the party list get elected.
It would make it harder to bribe congress.
How exactly?
Really?
Obviously more people makes it harder, it’s harder to bribe enough in congress to make a law pass. First it’s more expensive, second more people need to be on the take, and it will be harder to keep secret.Since in a smaller district, it’d cost less to get elected, a smaller bribe might also suffice to own a legislator.
It’s certainly the case that state legislators are cheaper to bribe than federal ones, probably for that same reason.
No, that’s not obvious at all. If that were true, you’d expect a correlation between corruption and the size of parliaments/city councils/etc. and to my knowledge no such correlation exists.
Besides, there is no need to keep things secret when there are plenty of legal pathways to (what elsewhere might be considered) bribery, as is currently the case in the USA.
and to my knowledge no such correlation exists.
Argument from ignorance fallacy.
Not an argument - a request for you to substantiate that claim.
I already did with "First it’s more expensive, second more people need to be on the take, "
These are facts, and facts beat ignorance.
All Congressman don’t represent the same number of people because they won’t expand the number.
Making the granularity finer doesn’t do anything to resolve the underlying structural and governance problems.
Yes it does!
It’s much harder to herd 10,000 cats than it is 100. Those in power who play defense for the status quo will definitely notice the difference.
Get rid of the parties and just have a government of the people. Vote on issues, not for people.
The US started that way. They ended up having parties again almost immediately.
The FF tried that and it immediately failed, leaving us with a system ill equipped to handle political parties.
FF?
Founding Fathers
I’m not necessarily sold on the idea that reps of a given state should only be responsible for a very small subsection of people who are likely poorly informed. Just thinking of my own representative, who won against a progressive based entirely on name recognition rather than policy, it seems abundantly clear that money can easily touch all races whereas educated voters and advocacy may not exist in enough districts to be meaningful. Money can, and in quantities above the median income with ease.
I’d argue that it is a lot easier to inform the public when the campaign doesn’t have to cover as much area and that it becomes more difficult to buy every race when there are more of them.
Sorry for the edit after your post. I think buying races isn’t harder when there’s more of them, but organizing for them might be. I’d be open to change on that opinion, but eventually wouldn’t you hit a point of diminishing budget for a small candidate that they can’t afford a single commercial whereas the corporate candidate could afford multiple?
Edit: Eventually the resolution of targeted ads starts to fail too relative to the district borders.
What would shape your opinion more: being bombarded by ads or the candidate showing up at your school to do a town hall and answer questions?
If we make things small enough, where in a typical campaign a candidate can meet their constituents at least once, does being outspent on ads matter as much? Doesn’t it at least make break-through candidates more likely if only because national parties have to spread out their spend?
Speaking from my own community, if the community knows who you are you’ve basically nearly won. One of our politicians started their career owning a real estate business where they posted their face on every billboard in the area. They were big with the center of commerce crew, but were* also antithetical to the views of a mostly young and highly educated and progressive city. They won anyways, because the opponent wasn’t already burned into the minds of everyone who drives around here.
I do like the idea of smaller meaning that you may actually know the person and have an opportunity to talk to them person to person, I just have a jaded view because of what I’ve seen happen with human fallacies controlling the results.
We truly are creatures of habit and prefer something known. Also, people just don’t have the fucking time to know anything but passively absorbing it. We’ve collectively gone from requiring 40 hours of work to support a whole family, to now needing 80, as a minimum, for most families.
Who the fuck has time to research candidates policies? Lmao Susie needs to be at soccer practice 5 minutes ago. We’ve allowed ourselves, bit by bit, to have our time stolen because of all the wage theft we’ve allowed by not keeping the minimum wage pegged to inflation automatically. Every year they push on 2% inflation target. And every year they didn’t raise the minimum wage, they stole 2% from us.
It also makes any progress we make for ourselves, so brittle. Before, you could have two part time jobs help support a family for a bit. Now being out of work could mean homelessness.
I’ve got the same jade. It’s nice to be realistic, but knowing that there might actually be solutions some day keeps it from becoming nihilism.
The entire electoral system that is based on a popularity contest is just really broken. It’s a testament to how perfectly “broken” the American electoral system is that we are still using an electoral system created for a 13 colony slave based society made to favor rich land owners.
I say “broken” because it’s really not. It’s actually very well written to ensure the system favors the power of the ruling class over the masses. What we are seeing now is the confidence of that class raising to such a high degree that they are no longer pretending that they have maintain that illusion.
No, it’s already borderline non functional.
A 6,000 seat house would be less functional, not more functional. You may reduce the gerrymander, but cripple government.
In what way? It’s not like they don’t already have rules around how long people can debate, when sessions happen, what technology they use, the powers of committees, etc…
It’s not the 1700s any more, it doesn’t take a month to organize and transit 1000 people or even 10,000 people. Hell, you can fill a football stadium with 100k people on two weeks notice when the team advances in the post season.
Changing apportionment rules is not even that rare historically, we’ve just been brainwashed to think 435 is some sacrosanct number. If we scaled with the number of reps on the 1910 census we’d be well over 1400 by now.
You can’t get 435 people to agree on things, there’s no hope of getting 6,000.
And yet somehow in a country of 340 million people we see these polls:
- 80% were not in favor of attacking Iran
- 80% believe abortion should be legal
- 60% thought Trump should be barred from office in 2021
- Similar numbers want him removed now
- 65% are opposed to ICE’s reign of terror
- > 50% want to abolish ICE completely
- 74% support universal free school lunches
- 62% support raising the federal minimum wage
- 67% want to raise teacher’s salaries
- 75% want to reverse the Citizens United ruling
- 88% support federal laws that would guarantee PTO
- > 60% support replacing the Electoral College and FPTP voting
But zero of those things are anywhere close to legislation because our congress is under the thumb of a dozen celebrity personalities and party flip floppers. The more diluted the voting power, the harder it is to make personal backroom deals and buy elections.
Inflating the House doesn’t solve similar problems with the Senate or Executive + Judicial branches, but it’s better than nothing.
Almost there, add 300 million (equal to adult American population) more
do you want a legislature that votes once a century?
