Democracy Fix

Finished my book “Democracy Fix.” It was more than just a bit disappointing. It was long on describing the problem, and spent a disproportionate amount of time on the judicial branch, but very short on the fix part. This is what bothers me a lot about liberals, Democrats, or the left in general, there is no real effort being made to propose solutions to the problems in our democracy. Despite the preamble to the constitution starting with the words “We the people” our constitution was decidedly not designed to be a democracy of we the people. The constitution, was designed to be an oligarchy. Voting was intended to be limited to those who were perceived to be “stakeholders”, i.e. wealthy white males who owned property. From there the problem starts. Many people have a list of what they perceive to be the major problems. The top five on my list; vote suppression, the cap on the size of the House, gerrymandering, the Electoral College, the imbalance in the Senate which gives two Senate seats to each state regardless of population. What intersection exists between my list and the author’s I would have liked to see a plan for the “fix” part. No such real fixes were included. While the Electoral College was on the author’s list, be a worthless book if it wasn’t, there is no proposed wording for a constitutional amendment to replace it. Few, if any, country uses straight majority vote; they either have a runoff election or some other type of ranked choice voting. What are the recommendations by others more knowledgeable on this subject. Gerrymandering is another failure of our democracy. Until recently the left seemed to put all its hope that the Supreme Court would save the day. Now that we know they won’t, what would be a solution? Which would be better; independent commissions to draw district lines, or each state be a multi-party district? Or some other solution? I don’t fault the author for not discussing the cap on the size of the house, that is a problem on very few people’s list. The arguments for increasing the size are the population imbalance between districts. Another argument is seven states currently have just one representative, which could leave as much as 49% of that state’s population without representation in the House. The biggest failure is the lack of solutions to voter suppression, or increasing voter participation. When Obama was elected in 2008 and the memory of election 2000 was still fresh in everyone’s mind a fix would have been easy. Should it be federal law mandating the ratio of voting centers and voters? Should federal law mandate how long polls should be open? Early voting? Unfortunately, the left sees the problems, but just doesn’t have mechanisms for recommending solutions.