We must change
how
we elect
members of Congress
WELL DUH!
Look
Someone that fears
history as much as I do!
What was the only
reason
that
Hillary lost the election?
We must change how
we elect members of Congress.
(Daniel Huizinga / Flickr)
VIEWS »
JANUARY 30,
2017
Voting Doesn’t Have
To Be
Winner-Take-All
To get people
engaged in politics, we need an electoral system
based on proportional
representation.
Progressives
suffered a terrible defeat in November 2016.
Thanks,
in part, to a flawed candidate with a flawed campaign, all three branches of
the federal government are in the hands of the far Right. At a state and local
level, the Left has been consistently out-organized by school-privatizers,
granny-starvers and water-poisoners. There can be no electoral substitute for
the challenging work of organizing grassroots opposition to these reactionary
ideologues. But reforming the mechanics of American elections is a necessary,
albeit insufficient, element of a left resurgence.
Trump
and the Republicans control the White House and Congress only because the
demographic groups that lean Republican—the old, the white and the well-off (a
shrinking minority of Americans)—vote at a much higher rate than those
demographic groups that lean Democratic—the young, the nonwhite and the poor.
Nonvoters
consistently give two reasons for not voting: They are “too busy” or “not
interested.” The Pew Research Center reports that nonvoters are also more
likely than voters to think “issues in D.C. don’t affect me” and “voting
doesn’t change things,” beliefs that reflect their alienation from our nation’s
political life.
ANY QUESTIONS?
Rep. Don Beyer
(D-Va.) plans to introduce
the Fair Representation Act in Congress.
It’s a
reform whose time has come.
Presidential Race
Not as Rigged as Congress