A Call for Fair Elections

In this post, I will outline the improvements we need to make for fair elections in Pennsylvania (and the country as a whole). These improvements will ideally be implemented by the next presidential election (2020), but the sooner the better as many actions will also improvement how the state handles state and local elections. I call on Governor Tom Wolf as well as state GOP and Democratic leaders to implement these changes as soon as possible.

Note that I previously discussed some of these issues in past post, but I'm putting them together in a shorter simpler format here along with some maybe new ideas not previously addressed.

1. National Popular Vote Act. By passing the NPVA, Pennsylvania would award its electoral votes for president to whichever candidate has the majority of the popular vote. This would effectively abolish the Electoral College at the state level, and would only go into effect once a winning majority of states agree to the compact. This would make our presidential election system more democratic and ensure that the candidate with the most votes always becomes president. Ultimately we should support a constitutional amendment if necessary, but as states have the authority to determine how electors are assigned, this plan is also perfectly constitutional but can be implemented faster.
2. Free and Fair Elections Resolution. By passing FFER, Pennsylvania would call for a Convention of the States under the authority of Article V in the Constitution on the topic of money in politics. The convention would be used to draft one or more constitutional amendments to limit the power of outside money and influence in our election system, possibly by overturning court cases such as Citizens United vs FEC (whereby corprorate money was equated with free speech) and McCutcheon vs FEC (whereby large donors could donate money to races outside of their home district, allowing someone from for example California to influence Pennsylvania's vote for Senate). This resolution doesn't create any new law, only calls for a convention. Any amendment drafted at the convention would then need to be voted on by all the states before it becomes law, so there's no reason to not support this resolution since all it does is call for more debate on the subject. But, it could lead to some very good outcomes for democracy by keeping our elections local choices without outside interference. Note that this bipartisan legislation was introduced and had large support in the last session of the PA assembly, but was not voted on in time before end of the session. We're pushing for it to be voted on as a first order of business in the next session in January. 6 other states have already called for a convention.
3. Switch to Ranked Choice or Score Voting. Our current system, known as "first past the goal post", is failing us. It often leads to the tactical voting we saw in the 2016 Trump vs Clinton election. Voters should feel free to vote for their favored candidate, and not against their least favorite candidate. Furthermore, in cases where ties happen, or no candidate receives a majority of votes (when many candidates are running), our current system requires a costly run-off to determine the will of the people. We can fix both issues by switch to Ranked Choice or Score Voting. In Ranked Choice voting, we rank candidate from most favorite to least favorite, and we eliminate the lowest vote-getter one by one until a clear winner occurs. We can do this because if someone's favorite candidate is eliminate, we know who their next favorite is already. Score Voting is kind of like rating each candidate on a 1-5 star scale. Everyone rates every candidate, then we average up all the ratings. Whichever candidate has the highest rating wins. In both cases, we clearly know who is favored by the most voters, and voters may effectively choose multiple candidates (by ranking multiple favorites higher than others, or giving more than one candidate a 5 star rating) which takes out some of the current party-line voting tactics we see. These methods lead to more moderate candidates everyone can agree on, rather than our current system which favors more extreme candidates. Research leans toward Score Voting being the most fair, but Ranked Choice is also ok and was recently approved by voters in Maine. Pennsylvania should be the next state to adopt a more fair voting method.
4. Universal Access to Early Voting. Currently, Pennsylvania's early voting provisions only apply to voters with medical conditions or those on active duty in the military. You have to apply for a ballot and be approved. The restriction should be removed, and all eligible voters that request a mail ballot should receive one.
5. State/National Voting Holiday. Election day should be declared a holiday. All non-essential/non-emergency workers should receive at a minimum a half day off work, if not a full day, the idea being to allow lots of time for citizens to meet up, discuss the issues, and actually go vote. Currently, many people leave the long voting lines because they need to get back to work, for example. Pennsylvania can declare the day a mandatory holiday for most workers; essential/emergency workers should have the opportunity to vote early by mail. Another option is to extend voting to multiple days (preferably including a weekend day) to ensure maximum voter turn out.
6. Increase Polling Station Numbers. Some polling locations around Pittsburgh saw long lines (90+ minute wait times). This is unacceptable. Allegheny County needs to open more polling locations, with financial/logistical help from Pennsylvania if necessary. I imagine Philadelphia also saw similar issues. We should take pride in democracy and make it very quick and easy to vote.
7. Switch to Verifiable Paper Ballot Trail. Pennsylvania voting machines currently are all electronic and do not produce a paper trail that allows full auditing of the vote count. Pennsylvania should ideally switch to a completely paper ballot, or at least a better electronic voting system. Pennsylvania would need to help counties purchase new equipment, etc.
8. Required Mailers Prior to Election. Pennsylvania should require that each county/district mail simple fliers to every registered voter, reminding them of voting day, their polling place, and providing a sample ballot with information on how to contact the campaign of each candidate for more information. This should be done at least 2 weeks ahead of time, probably 30 days. It was like pulling teeth trying to find my sample ballot on the PA Secretary of State website; that's unacceptable.

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.

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?