We are now about to have another national election. Most people are not happy with the electoral process in America. Most people don’t trust politicians or the system that we use to choose our leaders.
I would like to see a bigger effort to fix the system before our next major national election.
I believe most people think that there is too much money spent on elections. Presidential candidates have to raise billions of dollars to have a chance at winning. Does anybody believe that they are not in debt to their contributors? Why don’t both parties work together to find fair ways to limit the amounts of allowable campaign contributions?
If you watch TV in the month prior to a national election, you see hundreds of negative ads attacking one politician or another. Most of these ads are paid for by a nonprofit political action committee that does not have to disclose who actually contributed the money for the ad. For all we know, China or Russia is trying to determine who gets elected in America. Why is this legal?
If you listen to political commentators talk about the polls and who is likely to win the election, you hear a lot about the battleground states. In America, the popular vote is not used to elect our presidents. We use a system called the electoral college.
According to many political commentators, you can ignore all the other states but the seven battleground states. The seven battleground states will determine who is president. That doesn’t sound very democratic. I want my vote to matter, and I don’t live in a battleground state. Why don’t we just use the popular vote like other countries?
Another thing I keep hearing from political commentators is that this election will be extremely close. It is possible that a third-party candidate could make the difference between who wins. The way it works, a very liberal third-party candidate could effectively push the election to the Republican candidate, or a very conservative third-party candidate could give the race to the Democrats.
Is that how it should work in a democracy? Several states have systems that prevent that from happening. In a ranked order choice system or a system that has a top two candidates do a run off when nobody has more than 50% of the votes, there is no third-party effect. Why don’t we do that nationally?
A lot of people complain about how bad elections are in America. Unfortunately, I don’t see many people trying to fix the problems in the election process.
Dan Meekhof
Packwood
