OK, this is gonna seem counter-intuative …

I am getting seriously sick of elections in the U.S. being decided by:

  • who bothers to try to vote
  • who actually manages to vote
  • whose votes get thrown out

This is dumb, wrong and an affront to the idea of “democracy”.

I have done this rant before, so I’ll try to keep it short this time.

The (so simple) idea is that many elections, especially primary elections, aren’t actually necessary or even useful.

They could easily be avoided just by using the party affiliations in the voter registration databases to assign legislative seats to each party based on what proportion of the voters have chosen that party.

Then you hold party-only elections for who gets the seats allocated to each party.

Half the elections, twice the democracy.

(You can’t really quantify democracy that way, but whatever.)

So when you’re thinking about what we should do next here, consider that a system based on proportional representation would:

  • simplify voting
  • reduce the number of elections
  • more accurately reflect the desire of the voters

It also helps that registration data is public.

So there’s less opportunity for shenanigans.

It’s not really possible (or, at least, it’s highly unlikely) that we could implement this fix in our current federal system, and it’d be quite difficult to establish even at the state level, but now is a good time to be discussing how this continent will be organized in the future.

Cause, well; you know.

arkady

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