The youth are disenfranchised with American democracy. Emphasis should be on “American” democracy. Many systems using democracy around the world are very different.
Here’s bullet points that I feel should be the points of change to make American democracy fair and productive and far more participatory:
- Genuine and complete Public Campaign Financing: No elected office in our democracy should be without full public campaign financing. That means the dog catcher’s office to the city council to the mayor’s office, the judges, the sheriffs and so forth. Signatures raised manually should be the kicker to allow anyone access to public campaign money. That kicker to receive an escalation of public campaign funding should be more signatures. No elected official should have to spend 2 out of 8 hours per day calling and shaking hands with donors. No more PACs or super PACs for any candidate. Money is speech and so corrupting and that influence must end.
See this online essay I wrote several years ago: http://Public-Campaign-Financing.Org It is very unnecessary to get behind a movement to repeal the Citizens United supreme court case if we only support and pass one single constitutional amendment called Public Campaign Financing. There does not need to be one word in that amendment that speaks to business or corporate influence in that funding, just simply “Only public campaign financing shall be used.”
Within the new amendment for public campaign financing we can time restrict all political campaigning. That does not mean clamp down on free speech and restrict the press and any political opinion. It means the actual campaigns. It means that funds for advertising a political candidate must come from the Federal Elections Commission and locally from the Secretary of State’s office, in a time period prior to election day. 120 days prior to election day would allow the public to fully understand when it is election season and only then should our airwaves and internet be inundated with paid political propaganda.
- Electoral districts need to be population based only and not gerrymandered by type of people that differentiate neighborhoods by social and political divisions as we have allowed to happen in the United States. Only the Federal Elections Commission should be allowed to draw electoral districts and then only by scientific data of population centers. Those centers of populations are always developed by urban or rural needs of industry and commerce and population density.
- End the party dynamic. The parties are creations of political culture. They are clubs and have no place in our constitution. They literally are not in the articles of confederation or the bill of rights. They are creations and must be taken out of all representation. The labels Republican and Democrat should be what they really are in current language: ideological labels based upon an evolving cultural norm. Republicans used to be the liberals in American politics - for instance, but that changed as culture changed and it will likely change again. They are clubs.
That means no more primary elections and no more conventions of parties. No more whittling down the choice of candidates to two with perhaps one write-in candidate. That needs to end. An interested person should have to ask or be told by a political pundit in the news whether or not a representative or a candidate is conservative or liberal or a little bit of both (a moderate) or an independent (ambiguous swing voter) representative. Parties were cultural evolvements to help the public categorize and should have no bearing on how we vote or when we vote. Take them out.
- Bring back civics in all educational institutions public and private. Make children understand how full representation works as if it were learning how to read and write and perform mathematics. It is fundamental and should be taught as so. We have dropped that ball. We can pick it up and become more engaged again.
- Make voting very easy not more restricted. Time for online voting and telephone voting. We are modern now. Additionally, we need to extend the time period to several days, Friday through Monday. An over the weekend ballot casting nationwide. We need the time and we need freedom to cast our votes. We have the technology. That technology can be controlled. There is no more excuse for a single day’s voting period where a human has to show up personally. In this manner, everyone has no excuse to not vote.
All Rights Reserved: End All Suffering / James Gray Mason
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