Why the Democratic Party is Conservative, not Progressive

In a previous entry, I talked about what I believe it means to be a true Progressive, and gave some personal analysis of the Political Compass's way of grouping political thought. Today I'd like to talk more about why the Democratic Party has not always been a great home for Progressives, and especially not recently with candidates like Obama and Clinton.

In order to understand this, we need to look a little more at the history of the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party grew out of the Democratic-Republican party of Thomas Jefferson and others, which was Anti-Federalist. That's right, the Democratic Party in most of its history was actually for weak federal government, states' rights, and very pro-business. In many ways they were similar to modern Republicans, but perhaps a little more left-leaning than today's GOP.

The big change to the modern Democratic party was essentially during the civil rights movement. Southern Democrats were largely very conservative and still in favor of those original Democratic-Republican ideals -- pro-business and states' rights, which they used to argue against civil rights for African Americans. Civil rights legislation was finally pushed by a few Democratic presidents, leading up to Lyndon Johnson's signing of civil rights into law.

At this point, there was a mutiny -- thanks to the "Southern Strategy" of the Republican Party at the time, the Republicans quickly snatched up a large amount of Democrats that were unhappy with the expansion of civil rights and government programs under Democratic presidents. Meanwhile, African Americans that traditionally voted Republican (due to their loyalty to the party that freed slaves under Lincoln, and other reforms) strongly switched to vote Democratic in support of this legislation. By the '80s, the two parties were completely different, and oddly enough, essentially traded places in their platforms views. The Republicans, that were once founded on ideals of a strong federal government and civil rights, became the modern GOP that is very pro-corporate and states' rights focused. Meanwhile, the Democratic party that at one time was strongly against federal government expansion now supported expanded programs in an effort to establish civil rights and help the poor.

So the modern idea of a "liberal" Democratic party has only really existed since maybe the '80s (Gen X and Millennials, not for the Baby Boomers). Is it any wonder why there's such a split between the generations, with most millennials voting for Bernie but baby boomers voting for Clinton? Many older Democrats that are still loyal to the party still come from the era when Democrats were very pro-corporate and pro-states'-rights -- in essence, "conservative" as we understand it in the modern era. Considering Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas starting in the early '80s, we can conclude he was a Democrat in the old sense of the term; in his younger days when he joined the party, particularly in the south (like Arkansas), the Democratic party was much closer in ideals and platforms to today's GOP. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, as a young college student had campaigned for Barry Goldwater as a Republican. Goldwater was a controversial figure, but in summary, he was very strongly conservative in our modern sense of the term, and was one of the influential figures that changed the GOP from its old roots to today's pro-business conservative party. Hillary shortly afterward was talked into joining the Democratic party, likely because it was the "conservative" party at the time in the South and would have matched her stances.

So what we see in today's Democratic party, that was very much alive at the convention, was a fight between two factions in the Democratic party. One, is the Progressive faction, that wishes to keep alive the progressive ideals of New Deal Democrats and the Progressive Republicans of history. FDR and Teddy Roosevelt come to mind, with the expansion of social programs and busting of trusts and banks that became too big. This is the platform that has evolved over time and wants to take over the party. Meanwhile, the other faction is the Conservative faction, that still holds mostly true to its original roots as a conservative pro-business party, that largely wants to de-regulate and minimize federal government influence on business. At one point this faction formed the Blue Dog Democrats, a caucus of conservative Democrats in Congress. We see this conservativism in action as the Clintons are largely pro-fracking, pro-banking (did not support breaking up banks and in fact argue for less regulation), and pro-TPP (which is a trade agreement written with large amounts of business influence, that gives businesses a lot of authority over US government laws and regulations). Obama initially campaigned on a large amount of Progressive promises, but in office (especially his second term), he has continued many of the policies first instituted under Bush and the Republicans -- he's prolonged wars, he worked on "Obamacare" which was the Republican healthcare plan from the '90s (Romneycare, anyone?) and removed the public option from his fight, has deported more immigrants than Bush, and has cracked down on federal government whistleblowers more than past presidents. When all is tallied up, Obama and the Clintons are pretty moderate and even leaning conservative on some issues, particularly economics and business; don't let them fool you into thinking they're progressive. Being Progressive is about more than just supporting women and transgender rights (while those are great goals, there's more to being Progressive than just those issues), and even if they are more moderate than today's GOP, that doesn't make them Progressive, that just means our whole political system has shifted too far to the right.

So Progressives don't really have a home anymore. Initially, the Republicans were fairly Progressive, with Teddy Roosevelt even forming the Progressive Party at one point when he was unhappy with the direction of the Republican Party. Then, Democratic presidents such as FDR carried the Progressive torch when they implemented the New Deal, expanded social programs and civil rights. But now, with both the Republican and Democratic Parties moving to the right, what are Progressives to do?

We vote for an actual Progressive, that's what we do. Dr. Jill Stein is Progressive and wants to expand those Progressive ideals of the New Deal with what she calls the Green New Deal -- continue social programs, transition to clean energy, abolish student debt and break up the banks. The Green Party is a home for Progressives in today's era. And much like Lincoln helped establish the Republican Party (factoid: the GOP was actually a 3rd party against the dominant Whig and Democratic-Republican parties of the 1800s!) due to failures in our party system, I think the time has come for a new party to be established. I think that party is Green, and I support Dr Jill Stein. I hope Bernie Sanders also joins us in the Green party, for that is truly his home. We can't be afraid anymore, we can't keep propping up parties that move more to the right as the younger generations yearn to move to the left. If we all vote Green this fall, we will win. As Jill Stein says, if everyone with student debt voted for her, we'd be a winning majority. So let's make that happen in November.

Democratic Party Corruption and Unfair Tactics

There is mounting evidence that the Democratic Party of today, and its de facto leader Hillary Clinton, is overrun with corporate influence and greed, and nothing like the Democratic Party that many are still loyal to. The Democratic National Convention has been an amazing farce; while they've tried to put on a show that makes the DNC appear unified and positive, there is a deep amount of cynicism and division behind the scenes that rivals the Republican convention.

From Wikileaks and other sources, we have learned the following:

1. The DNC, in violation of its own rules, worked behind the scenes to form a narrative against Bernie Sanders in the media, implicitly supporting Clinton. Other emails show DNC had "infiltrated" Bernie's campaign and effectively spied on their own candidate, as well as maintained close ties to the media and relied on the media to disseminate their own fabricated stories. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has stepped down as DNC chair, which is an implict admission of guilt or at least incompetence. DWS was then immediately made honorary chair of Clinton's campaign as a reward -- no apology or other penalty required. Considering the appointment, one can assume Clinton's campaign was complicit and approved of such actions. The replacement chairwoman was also implicated in the leaked emails as having an anti-Bernie bias.
2. The DNC sold access to high level politicians to top donors. Effectively, donors that paid more were able to spend time with the president and other politicians like Hillary Clinton. The quote from the article that gets me is at the end: "John Cordisco, the chairman of the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Democratic Committee, said that as long as fundraising is an element of the political process, these kinds of transactions will also be present." This is again essentially an admission of guilt, and was meant to be a defense of the practice. Hey, we've been doing it this way for a long time, why stop now? The reason is, money alone should not influence policy. The rich should not have more sway in our system simply because they can throw money around as political donations.
3. The Clinton Foundation, a non profit, appears to have been used to channel money to various State Department officials while Clinton was Secretary of State. It's entirely possible these alleged actions were a huge conflict of interest (ethics violation), or even illegal money laundering, but no publicly known investigation or indictment has occurred yet to my knowledge. Aside from money being sent to various people through the foundation in fishy ways, it is well known and confirmed that some large donors to the Clinton Foundation were later appointed to political positions despite not having any experience or expertise in the subject; the best example is a big donor that was appointed to an important influential intelligence board shortly after a large donation, despite having no national security expertise or experience. The donor resigned when questions were asked. This seems to be a clear example of political favors for money.
4. As Hillary Clinton's campaign hit Bernie hard for not helping "down-ticket candidates" (which he did end up helping quite a few progressive candidates that won their primaries, more pending), Clinton campaign used a funding loophole to channel money to the campaign through state party donations. This allowed Clinton's campaign to raise much more money than typically allowed by federal election law, which left almost no money for state parties or down-ticket candidates. This also happened early in the primary; note that the DNC did not offer to make a similar funding agreement with the Sanders campaign.
5. Bernie delegates were stripped of their credentials (particularly for displaying Bernie signs, or protest signs such as anti-TPP after the nomination vote) and prevented from being seated for the nomination floor vote, in an effort to make the party look unified and minimize protests. Nina Turner, a long time surrogate for Bernie Sanders, was asked to officially nominate Sanders. Last minute, Turner was turned away from the stage and had her credentials revoked, reportedly because Turner refused to endorse Clinton.
6. Clinton delegates (very likely on their own, not necessarily endorsed by Clinton campaign) were rude and possibly committed several instances of assault on Bernie delegates. While not a specific transgression of Clinton or the DNC, this sort of behavior by Clinton delegates is indicative of the tone set at the convention: Bernie delegates were never welcome from the beginning.
7. Bernie delegates then walked out of the convention in protest, leaving a large amount of empty seats. The DNC then began hiring paid actors to come in and pretend to be Bernie delegates, to fill chairs and make the party seem unified.
8. Meanwhile, outside the DNC, protests occurred. Peaceful protesters were arrested and pepper sprayed. Some protesters staged a sit in of the media room, and were locked in by police. Most media ignored the protests and did not cover. Twitter and Periscope were used to spread information. Jill Stein was there leading several protests and marches.

Remember that none of this means that I support Trump or the Republican Party. The GOP is at least as bad as the Democrats for many of the same reasons. But that is exactly the problem -- they are both corrupt parties, focused more on pleasing their rich corporate donors than doing good.

It's time we say goodbye to both major parties. I will be voting Green. I hope you will join me, but if you disagree with Green policy, I hope you will consider another party like the Libertarians. Do not give the major parties your vote. They do not deserve it.

Don't let anyone convince you a third party vote is a "wasted" vote. Truly, the only wasted vote is a vote cast for someone you do not believe in. I don't believe in Trump or Clinton. I will vote my conscience for the candidate that I believe will do the most good. I believe Jill Stein and the Green party are the best option to fight corporate greed and restore a functional democracy.

But more than this election, we need to focus on long term efforts. We need a better more democratic campaign and electoral system. To do this, we need money out of politics (join PA United to Amend, or a similar organization in your state, to push for a constitutional amendment at the state level!), and to promote better voting methods such as Score Voting or Ranked Voting. We need to mobilize and run for local office. If we all run for local office over the next few years, then we win from the grassroots up.

Why Focusing on Trump's Hate Speech May Be Counterproductive

OK, progressives, we need to talk. Every day, I get emails in my inbox like this one:

I don't think this type of campaign against hate -- which many organizations have adopted! -- is effective. I even wrote to MoveOn.org at one point expressing this point of view, but was overruled by the votes for this campaign. (I believe it was something like 80% in favor of Fight Trump campaign, which aside from its lack of effectiveness I think also took away valuable resources from promoting Bernie and his platform). Don't get me wrong, we should absolutely stand against hate, but simply pointing out Trump is hateful doesn't accomplish much in my view.

Firstly, this email points out that Clinton is losing to Trump, then deflects to fighting Trump's hate. Nowhere is there an acknowledgement that this could be part of Clinton's problem, and her lack of appeal. Do we have a reason to vote for Clinton, other than Trump has said a few racist things?

Let me give you a personal anecdote. Anecdotes by their nature aren't proof, but I think it illustrates my point. Much of my family is conservative and has been voting Republican since the Reagan years. I have a lot of policy disagreements with them obviously, but I still like to know what they think. When the subject of Trump comes up, I get basically two responses: (1) excitement that a "non-establishment" candidate won, instead of having the typical mediocre establishment candidates rammed down their throats like Romney and previous years, and (2) a quiet acknowledgement that Trump is a little bit crazy and racist, which they aren't happy about, but they accept. Seriously, when asked, many of his supporters will tell you they don't like his racism, but they support him anyway as the best candidate this election.

Let me say that again: Trump supporters know he is racist. Do they agree with it? Most of them do not. (I'm sure there are some neo-nazis and what not, but let's keep perspective that they are a very small minority). They don't like his rhetoric on muslims or immigrants. But they do think he is sincere about making the country better by not following the establishment or maintaining the status quo. And that is what they really want: the status quo to be broken. They want to see change, and they're willing to put up with racist comments if they get that change.

Now here's the important point: they support Trump over the Republican field this year (Bush, Rubio, etc.) because he was anti-establishment. They don't like him very much though, and would consider voting for someone else. Except the other major party nominee is now officially Clinton, which they despise, for much the same reasons as the Republican field -- she represents the establishment and status quo in the Democratic party. And when she campaigned against Bernie, she basically admitted it -- in her words, Bernie was too idealistic and radical and the plans would never work, and she was instead going to fight for essentially the status quo because change is too hard. You might disagree with that assessment, but keep in mind that this is what the average American heard when Clinton spoke.

When I ask "Well, what about Bernie?", I am surprised by the response. I fully expected a rant against socialism. What I got, from many family members, was instead: "I don't agree with his policies, but he seems like an honest guy that wants to change things, so I would vote for him".

Let me repeat that too: Some Republicans would vote for Bernie, because they view him as an honest anti-establishment candidate. They don't agree with him on many things, but what they primarily want is change.

So back to that email. We need to donate money and Unite Against Hate, according to the email. Who is that campaign directed at? Loyal Democrats will not vote for Trump and are already on board. So you'd have to target Republicans and Independents, which means you need to know: why are they voting for Trump? For change. They know he's racist. It insults their intelligence as voters to tell them "But don't you know he's racist?!?". Yes, they do know. Of course they know. And they've made the calculation that racism is the lesser of two evils when compared to the status quo establishment continuing. You very well might disagree with that assessment; I certainly do. But it doesn't matter what we think, it matters what they think.

If we are going to win them over voters from Trump, we have to give them a reason, show them why they can accomplish their goals through a different method. Currently, Democrats and progressive organizations are focusing their energies on "exposing" Trump. But that's counterproductive; Trump exposes himself on a daily basis, he doesn't need help. What we need is a very clear strategy and plan to present to these people that shows them a positive vision of the future -- a positive plan that leads to the solutions they are looking for, rather than the fearful solutions Trump is pushing. You fight darkness with sunshine. And so far Democrats have not made a good argument full of sunshine. Trump supporters know he is racist, but want anti-establishment. Clinton being the first woman nominee doesn't mean she isn't establishment and status quo. This is the reality. Ignore it at your peril.

The Democratic party is making a huge mistake not pushing for a much stronger progressive agenda that is inclusive of all Americans. A real progressive agenda that tells every single American -- we hear you. We know you're afraid. But if we stand together and form a strong government of the people, we can support each other and make it through this.

For this and other reasons, I predict Clinton will lose to Trump, unless she makes a major change to her platform and campaign. Given she chose the establishment Tim Kaine as her running mate, I doubt this will happen. In my opinion, we will have President Trump unless we rally together behind a true progressive agenda with Jill Stein and the Greens. Her platform is essentially Bernie's, and I think at the end of the day, many Republicans and Independents will cross over to vote Green for a positive future. Very few will cross over for a Clinton status quo presidency.

Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know your thoughts.

A Vision for a Better Elections Process

Before we can make reality happen, we have to imagine what could be. In other words, let's write down the best case scenario that we would love to see happen, and then consider what it takes to get from here to there. It might be a big jump, or it might be smaller more incremental steps, but we always have an end goal in mind. (Incidentally, this is one of many reasons I strongly disagree with Hillary Clinton's assessment of healthcare -- even if she's right in a political way that we should fight for incremental steps to the ACA, she's completely wrong to speak out against universal healthcare as a thing that can never happen. We need to first declare our morals/value system, the vision we have for our country, and only then work out compromises as necessary to work toward that ideal while we sell people on our vision. She basically gave up already without a fight, leaving Republicans with an opening to attack her lack of vision.)

So, in a more long form response to a recent tweet by Zephyr Teachout, I present my vision for a stronger democratic elections process that we all can have faith in.

Campaign Finance

Currently, campaigns require a lot of money. The higher the office, the more money. On the face of it, this makes sense -- after all, higher offices are over larger districts/states (in case of president, the whole country even!), and so reaching out to all of those people is going to cost more than running for a local office. I don't question the need for money.

What I question is how we get the money. Currently, campaigns are either self-funded (if you are lucky enough to have the money, unless you want to try a shoestring budget), or most often especially at the federal level, funded by donors. These donors can be small donors -- small donations from people with average salaries -- but often these donations come from high-wealth donors. You don't generally have lots of money dropped on you, so these high-wealth donors are almost entirely executives at large companies -- banks, multimedia, automobiles, whatever.

This is where the problem comes in. Large amounts of money from small groups of people starts to make you wonder if these people have more say-so than the average person. Even

Solution: Require public funding of elections. Qualified candidates receive a stipend, and equal amounts of air time (radio, TV, etc. -- which we can do since our government leases out the airwaves; they are not owned by corporations, despite what those corporations may think). "Qualified" is a bit subjective and needs debate before it can be set at a reasonable limit; it may even take a few elections of trial and error to find a good bar. But generally speaking, candidates receiving backing from a party (not just Democrats/Republicans, but any party with a certain size of registered voters per capita in each state) or an independent with enough signatures would qualify for full funding. Otherwise, private funding is not allowed.

Short term, we can require donations only to local candidates. That is, a candidate must represent the district that a donor lives in (in case of corporate donations, the corporate headquarters must exist in that district). This is basically what the combination of the Supreme Court rulings Citizens United and McCutcheon allowed -- unlimited flow of money to any candidate in the country. In other words, a large corporate executive from another state can spend lots of money to get a certain candidate in Pennsylvania elected. This needs to stop; PA congressmembers are representative of us, not other states.

One way to achieve this is by calling for a constitutional convention where we draft such an amendment. Several organizations exist calling for this. PA United to Amend is a great one for PA. You can contact them via the Wolf-PAC Pennsylvania group: http://www.wolf-pac.com/pennsylvania or find the Wolf-PAC branch for your state.

Voting Methods

Currently, when we go to vote and step into the ballot booth, we are presented with a list of candidates. We pick one candidate, vote for them, and leave. The winner is the candidate with the most votes, and generally is whoever gets over 50% of the vote. This is known as First-Past-The-Goal-Post voting, and it seems fair on the surface. Most votes wins. But there are several problems with how we do it in the United States.

Firstly, there's only a clear winner when there's only two candidates running. It's easy to say one person won over the other. But what if there's three candidates? Say, one gets 40% of the vote, and the other two each get 30%. Instinct would say the 40% is the most votes and wins, but is it fair? What the vote shows is that 60% of voters -- a landslide majority! -- did NOT want that candidate. So is it fair to let a candidate win that didn't get most of the votes?

Secondly, the above scenario leads to several misconceptions about voting. Because people are afraid of the three-way scenario, it's very easy to gravitate into just two political parties, much like we have for most of American history. When someone does want to vote for the "third party" candidate, the person is immediately accused of splitting the vote, or even worse, throwing away the vote. This is not true, as the person is doing what any voter should do -- voting for the preferred candidate. Voting for who you prefer should NEVER be a bad thing, and so this is more evidence of the problem behind First-Past-The-Goal-Post. Furthermore, fear of splitting the vote leads also to tactical voting, where someone votes for a non-ideal candidate just to prevent a scary candidate from winning. This is super evident in this election as many are voting for Clinton out of fear of Trump, and vice versa, but the same behavior also leads to "safe" districts where the same Democrat/Republican wins all the time and doesn't allow challengers. Again, you should always be voting for whom you think is best, not against someone you fear, so our voting method is doing us a great disservice.

Third, as we see in the primaries, what happens when your preferred candidate loses the primary? Since all you did was pick one candidate, delegates to the party conventions have NO IDEA who you would prefer of the remaining candidates. Basically, you voted for a favorite, but no one knows who your second choice is! So if your preferred candidate drops out of the race, your vote is basically ignored -- or worse, switched to a candidate you didn't want, all because no one knows who your second choice was. Think of all the people that voted for John Kasich, for example. The top two delegate counts are Trump and Cruz; so as a Kasich voter, which do you prefer of Trump or Cruz? Well, a Kasich delegate has no idea because all you did was vote for Kasich -- you didn't vote for a backup! So that delegate now has to guess. Your vote almost didn't matter, even if you vote in primaries of the two major parties.

So what can we do? Change our voting method!

Solution: Switch to a Score or Ranked Voting Method. Instead of picking one candidate, these methods let you declare how you feel about ALL of the candidates. The best way to think of Score Voting is to think of it like an Amazon or Yelp review. You rate every candidate on a scale of 1-5 stars. We then tally up everyone's scores, and the candidate with the highest rating wins. Why is this fair? Well, now you can rate as many candidates as you want. You can give both Jill Stein and Hillary Clinton 5 stars if you were happy with either; you could still vote for Jill by giving her a large score, while at the same time knowing you also supported Hillary (a major party) so you didn't "waste your vote". And, once we tally up scores, we might find a lot more people supported Jill than we realized, and were just afraid to vote a third party in the past. This method ensures that the person that the most people preferred wins. Ranked Voting allows you to rank candidates in order of favorite to least favorite. An example would be: #1 Jill Stein, #2 Hillary Clinton, #3 Gary Johnson, #4 (last) Donald Trump. We tally up everyone's #1 vote and see if there's a winner (which requires a majority, greater than 50%). If there's no winner, we eliminate the person with the lowest number of votes; anyone voting for the person that was eliminated, their vote gets transferred to their backup #2 choice, and then we re-tally the votes. We keep doing this until there's a clear winner. Again, the method favors more popular candidates. Remember that our current method actually allows -- and even favors to some extent! -- candidates that people generally DO NOT like, so either Score or Ranked Voting is a huge improvement.

Research has showed that Score voting is easier to understand and use, and easier to implement. Ranked voting is a little more complicated in the mathematics. But either method would be vastly superior to our current methods.

I'm not aware of a large-scale effort to change the voting methods at the state or federal level. Some municipalities do use alternate voting methods. Other countries in the world also use these alternate voting methods and it has worked fine. We should really lean on our elected officials to get alternate voting methods implemented in elections as soon as possible.

Redistricting

Our voting districts are formed based on US Census data, taken every 10 years. According to the constitution, we divide up a set number of representatives among the states using a formula based on the population of each state, and the same thing happens at the state level.

Districts don't stay the same though; they can't, since populations change. Districts need to move to where the people are. That's fine. But did you know that the districts are hand-drawn? And each state's congress votes to approve the districts. Highly partisan congresses can draw these districts in such a way as to "spread" out vote for the opposing party into multiple districts. As an example, an area that has more Democratic voters than Republicans can actually end up with more Republican representatives than Democrats, because in each district the Republicans win the vote, despite the overall being in favor of Democrats. This effect is known as gerrymandering and is a well known problem.

So districts need re-drawn after each census, but entrusting politicians to draw their own political maps encourages abuse of power. So what do we do?

Solution: Require automatic computer drawing of districts using a known open source software. Specific requirements would need to be debated by experts in the field, but it can certainly be done. A prototype example was recently covered in the news. The software needs to be open source. For those not familiar, open source software basically means that the programming code that makes the software work is open for anyone to study and analyze it. This means you can't hide anything; experts can look and find problems or rigged software. This is important, because if we are not allowed to know how it works (because some company owns the rights to it and keeps it secret), then we can't trust that it is doing the right thing.

At the very least, if we don't want district maps drawn entirely by computers, we can ensure the redistricting process is much more open and inclusive. Take a look at hypothetical redistricting done for Philadelphia using some open source software that helps keep track of demographics for fairness, as an example.

In either case, I'm not aware of a specific federal or state movement to make this happen, but there does seem to be growing momentum from researchers to move to a computerized method. We need to make sure our elected officials know that gerrymandering cannot continue.

Voting Process

Currently, we vote in November for most offices. Election day is always on Tuesday. Know what else is on Tuesday? Work. School. Whatever. The point is, people are busy, and in many cases, cannot simply take a day off. Employees may not have paid time-off, and missing pay might mean not eating that week. Students might have an important exam that day that cannot be missed. Ideally the employer or school would understand and schedule around Election Day, but not everyone does or thinks about it. Even if they did: what if you became violently ill on Election Day? There's no Voting Makeup Day that I'm aware of.

Even if you can show up, this year's primaries showed a large number of districts and states shutting down polling stations. Locations were closed, and not enough ballots were at some districts, leaving some people to wait hours before they could vote. Many people didn't have hours to wait (waiting might have meant missing work, which means missing a paycheck and possibly not having the money for rent or food this week) and gave up and went home, which should never happen in a country that prides itself on being a strong democracy.

There will likely never be a way to cover all of the possibilities. But we can definitely take some simple steps toward making sure that the large majority of people have a fair chance at voting.

Solution: National Holiday Voting Weekend, and restoration of a stronger Voting Rights Act. Voting should be a multiday event, including at least one weekend day. Law should require that everyone have at least one of the days during Voting Weekend off of work; as we saw in this year's primaries, going during a lunch break or even having a couple hours isn't enough. Extending the voting period would likely increase our abysmal voter turnout numbers. Besides, I would hope that getting a day off would help every citizen have a little extra time to do some last-minute research to decide how to vote. (Ideally, research would be done early, but since scandals can occur, there is some logic to waiting until last minute to decide). In any case, there also needs to be strong laws requiring a certain number of polling stations per capita and/or within so many miles of voters. The Voting Rights Act was used to ensure this was the case in many districts across the country, but was struck down by the Supreme Court. Congress could easily pass a fixed version of the law that removes the provision the Supreme Court objected to while still protecting our voting rights... but they haven't.

Contact your state and federal representatives to establish stronger voting rights laws, and a voting holiday.

Consistent Trustworthy Ballots

Currently voting consists of going in to a polling station. Depending on the state, you may be faced with a paper ballot, or you may vote on an electronic device. Such vastly different ballots can lead to confusion when comparing them, or when a person moves between states.

Furthermore, as more ballots are cast on electronic devices (and possibly over the Internet in the near future), there comes a question of: did I vote for the right person? Was my vote recorded correctly? Does the machine tally the votes correctly? We need to have trust in our voting process.

Solution: Nationwide ballot standards, and a requirement of open-source voting machine software. We have standardized forms for so many other things like taxes, why aren't our voting records standardized and easy to tally and scrutinize? We could set some laws requiring common formats for ballots across the states. Furthermore, to ensure trust in our electronic devices, the software the runs the devices needs to be open source. Our voting records MUST be processed by software open source to the public, so we can all (in principle) check that the software is doing what it should be doing correctly. Maybe someone rigged the systems? Maybe no one did it on purpose, a software glitch incorrectly counts votes? Requiring open source software prevents these scenarios by allowing them to easily be found. Currently, devices are proprietary and treated as trade secrets; in other words, none of us are allowed to check that the voting machine works properly, we just have to trust that the company that made it did a good job. And we all know how blind trust in companies tends to work out...

I'm also not aware of a nationwide movement to update our balloting format. The Free Software Foundation more generally fights for open source (more accurately called free software -- it is "free" as in "freedom", protecting your freedom to know what software does) and does a great job, but I'm not aware of a specific campaign for voting machines or redistricting software.

I think it is our duty to contact state and federal congressmembers to make them aware of these issues and push for more legislation.

What would you like to see done to improve our democratic process?

Bernie's Endorsement

Bernie's endorsement today of Hillary Clinton has given me mixed feelings.

On the one hand, I sympathize with being afraid of Donald Trump. He should not be president. He does not represent the majority of Americans' views on many many topics. He's racist, he's quick to jump on people in anger, he's pro-business and won't help most Americans. I don't know what his voters see in him.

But on the other hand, we know that Clinton is racist ("superpredators" need to heel), quick to anger (see how she gets bent out of shape in her NPR interview with Terry Gross when Terry was clear what she meant by her question early on, Clinton jumped to conclusions a bit), pro-business (see her support of the TPP and her bizarre debate answer of supporting banks because "9/11"). On social issues she generally isn't as bad as a Republican, I will admit that, but I overall don't know what voters see in her either.

Obviously, Bernie made the calculation that good change is more likely under Clinton than Trump, and I can't really argue that. But I'm not convinced that Clinton will change anything for the better. Since Bernie has been an outsider -- running as an independent against democrats and republicans -- I had always hoped he'd stay an outsider. If he couldn't push the Democratic party, then he'd go Independent, or possibly with the Greens and Dr Jill Stein.

It's really a difficult decision. But I think overall I can't really support that calculus. Progressives should defeat Donald Trump by #UniteGreen behind Bernie and Jill. That ticket would crush Trump, whereas Clinton is quite a gamble that could actually lose. But, fear of Trump is preventing that from happening, when we could win by staying positive. I hope Bernie isn't giving in to fear of Trump, but with the endorsement, I can't say I'm optimistic he will go independent. I guess we will have to see what happens at the convention.

A future blog post will discuss why our election system needs to change if we intend to stop having elections that are always between a rock and a hard place.