Now For Some Real Election Reform

According to the press, John McCain’s campaign finance legislation has saved the nation and will cause all corruption to melt away…or something like that. That’s wonderful, but McCain and his fellow “reformers” don’t seem to understand what really bedevils American democracy.

Forget the lobbyists and special interest groups. Like them or not, they do have a legitimate role to play, and whatever excesses they commit are well documented (and heartily denounced) by both the media and countless watchdog groups. Furthermore, lobbyists’ actions already were proscribed carefully by law long before McCain-Feingold.

Instead, our republic sustains far greater damage on Election Day, when big-city political machines routinely thwart the wishes of millions of voters. Under the pretense of “getting out the vote,” urban bosses scour their precincts for the uninformed and unmotivated, herd them into voting booths and coach them on how to cast their ballots. Not surprisingly, this creates big margins for the bosses’ chosen candidates, and rescues many politicians who otherwise would’ve been voted out.

In the U.S. Senate alone, fully thirteen of the Democrats’ fifty members owe their most recent elections solely to hyper-margins they racked up in the inner cities. This means that politicians may bypass the vast majority of voters who are at least moderately well-informed, and rely instead on urban machines to flood the polls with those who know little (or often nothing) about the issues at hand.

In this effort, the straight-party lever is an invaluable tool. In an even broader sense, any party identifiers on a ballot make the vote-herder’s job much easier. Why worry about finding informed voters, when you need only round up people capable of pulling a lever or, at most, of running down a list of names and checking off those with “Democrat” next to them?

Obviously, even the ignorant have a right to cast ballots, but must we encourage mindless voting? Eliminating party labels on ballots would go a long way to cleaning up our elections, and toward discouraging rampant abuse of the franchise. If a voter is unfamiliar with something as basic as the candidates’ names, that should be the voter’s problem, not the public’s. We shouldn’t aid and abet those who use this ignorance for their own political gain.

(By the way, this idea is not original to me; I’ve seen it posted before by others in various forums. I include it here in hope of inspiring a discussion.)

Of course, the modern Democratic Party is absolutely dependent on uninformed voters, so any effort to improve the system would meet with their bitter, almost fanatical, opposition. As a practical matter, these reforms only would be possible in states where Republicans hold the governorship and both houses of the legislature.

By my count, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Florida all have large urban areas, as well as GOP control of the state government; Texas is likely to join that list next year. If genuine election reform starts anywhere, it’ll be in these states.

In my opinion, the best campaign reform would be to strictly limit our federal government to doing just those things that are allowed to them by the Constitution. This would so reduce the size and power of the federal gov't that it wouldn't be worth nearly so much to influence them to do what the special interests want. Instant campaign finance reform!

In the U.S. Senate alone, fully thirteen of the Democrats’ fifty members owe their most recent elections solely to hyper-margins they racked up in the inner cities. This means that politicians may bypass the vast majority of voters who are at least moderately well-informed, and rely instead on urban machines to flood the polls with those who know little (or often nothing) about the issues at hand.

Repeal the seventeenth amendment to the Constitution.

-PJ

I can argue that this isn't the "American democracy", It is a REPUBLIC. And is not governed by the will of the people. There should be accounting of the personal nature in our elected representitives. This is the genius of the Constitution.

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