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Election Reform
It is clear that the US election process is designed to be
rigged at
several levels. We badly need election
reform. To assure election integrity, there need to be initiatives on several
areas:
- The simplest and best reform would be
Range Voting or IRV.
These would make for much better decisions in, for example, the primaries
where there are several candidates on each side. We have a process now which
makes it a little counterproductive for people to vote for the candidates that
they really like. It also makes third parties all but impossible. Many people
favor IRV, but it is not on the
table now. Why is that ?
I could guess the answer is that the two major parties
like the kind of paralysis that they have on the process.
Neither one is advocating IRV. The party mechanism is certainly not part of
the Constitution. We could see, when Republicans control all branches of
government, that checks and balances wither away, and the Constitution is at
risk. We too can become an
authoritarian state. See
http://www.seconnecticut.com/fascism.htm
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Media is conflicted. It is most interested in which
candidate is raising the most money because its profits will be best from the
well-funded candidates. So their story is about money, and not about the public
interest. Since major media are all corporate entities and very concentrated,
they have an agenda that we have seen clearly through the Bush years. They are
cheerleaders for war, advertising spammers, culturally depraved, ignorant on
important public policy issues, partisan Republicans, deliberately
misinforming, and heavily self-promoting. Republicans are working hard to
further concentrate media using the FCC, and that is an immediate danger. The
first thing to be taken in any coup is media. Republicans now own it. (See
Debating for Dummies: Eric Alterman comments
on the recent CNN debate.) See notes on media at
http://www.seconnecticut.com/media.htm Please mount strong opposition to
Republican's initiative to further concentrate media. Strong anti-trust action
to break broadcasting into small pieces would create a lot more jobs, it would
help to assure a diversity of viewpoints, and it would satisfy the
Constitutional intent of avoiding concentrated, unchecked power.
It would also be a good idea to have some balance in media.
It should not ALL be corporate or privatized as it is now. There needs to be some public
media as well. Media should not be allowed to determine which candidates are
viable, what the agenda is going to be, or to trivialize the process.
Political advertising should be illegal. Campaign messages should be on
free, dedicated public access channels.
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There should be a federal standards for acceptable election machines, and
sensible procedures to prevent election rigging. See notes on elections at http://www.seconnecticut.com/elections.htm
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We should discard the 'electoral college'.
- The competition among the States to see who can have the
earliest primary is non-sensical. There has got to be a better way. Perhaps
an 'American Idol' style program on CSPAN could be a start toward a real
democratic process. Either that or we could make our way to a Parliamentary
style process. I think Bush could not have been the product of a
parliamentary system. Bush is first hand evidence of a
dysfunctional election process.
Ideas for a broader reform agenda are at
http://www.seconnecticut.com/Reform.htm
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