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?