After witnessing the last American general election and the furor around it, it’s become pretty obvious that American democracy is not really working. People are starting to see that, and lose faith in the democratic system. This is doubly unfortunate, as our system depends on the citizens having faith in the electoral process.
So what do we do? Ideally, we build a better democracy. Incrementally, that is. As much as angsty teenagers would disagree, it’s really not in anyone’s best interest to burn it down and start from scratch.
How do we do it? With a long and involved process that I honestly don’t know what it is. To give a real answer I’d probably need a constitutional lawyer that I could interrogate at my leisure. There’s a lot wrong with what we’re doing, a lot of it obvious and a lot of it less so. Even if you can see a problem, though, it’s no good to say “fix it” or “remove it” unless you know why it’s like that to begin with. Most things that seem obviously wrong on the surface have a good reason why they were made that way, even if it’s flawed or outdated (or just plain wrong or perverse, but there’s always at least a reason). I don’t know the reasons why, so add a political historian to the interrogation list too, then (also, those exist, right?).
One thing that’s been on my mind, though, is that fact that our system needs the citizens’ faith in order to work. Honestly? That bothers me. It shouldn’t need our faith, it should need our trust. Faith means belief in the face of evidence, trust works with evidence.
So how do we build trust between our electoral system and the American citizenry? Some bits are obvious: remove the computer-only voting machines, make the voting day a holiday, change the laws that prohibit public vote audit, and keep strict accounting of all the votes. Some of the problems are clearly visible, but the solutions are less obvious: jerrymandering, the electoral college, corruption, the cost of running, and many others. The worst are the truly subtle, fundamental issues: things like the inherent mismatch between the skillset for getting elected versus making good policy decisions, or the inherent set of perverse incentives surrounding the fight for re-election.
Do I have any answers? …Maybe? I don’t really know. I have ideas, but really coming up with a plan would involve a number of systems engineers, constitutional lawers, historians, psychologists and sociologists, and security analysts, at a minimum. It’s just too big of a thing for anyone to tackle alone.
We really need to start an honest conversation about it though, and one with as little dogma as possible. We need an electoral system that would work for America, with our culture and values, so we can’t even crib all that much from Europe or other more successful democratic regions. And most of all, we need to approach the solution with intellectual honesty, open minds, and the scientific method. It’s no good to come up with a plan without testing, and find out that it won’t work. This would need multiple tries, iterating on what does and doesn’t work right now to build to a more perfect union.
America 2.0 is too big of a goal. But we’re sitting here at America 1.27, and we should probably bump that minor version a few times.