Want a more representative democracy?

If we are to have a truly representative democracy, then at least two changes must be made to our current system. There are many other important changes, but I'll only focus on two.

The first change is to have all our federal primary elections on the same date nation-wide. I took a peek at how the Democratic presidential candidates are doing, and in the few news articles I found, I noticed a stupid, although expected, pattern: During the Columbus Day holiday, Hillary Clinton was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Some time shortly before that, she was in Ames, Iowa. And on the sixth of November, she was in Amana Colonies, Iowa. Barack Obama was in Muscatine, Iowa around the Thanksgiving Day holiday. And recently, if photo captions are any indication, Hillary was campaigning in New Hampshire.

They are all campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire. Not New York, not Oklahoma, not California, not Arizona, not my home state of Oregon. Iowa has its caucus the third of January, and New Hampshire has its primary election on the eighth. With only occasional exceptions, these two events alone pretty much decide the presidential candidate for each party, so the candidates are trying to grab whatever votes they can from Iowa and New Hampshire residents.

I doubt any of the candidates have stepped foot in Oregon to campaign. No, the votes of Iowans and New Hampshirites are more important. In the meantime, we Oregonians will just have to wait to have our say in May. May! After every other state but Montana and South Dakota has already had its say. By then it won't matter what Oregonians think. Voters in Oregon will either go along with whoever is the clear winner in the rest of the nation or defiantly vote for who they truly want (I will be doing the latter) and see nothing come of it.

I find this unacceptable and disgusting. I don't want some shmuck in Iowa to decide effectively for me who the Democrat I'll be voting for in the fall will be. I see no benefit of having a couple states decide the candidates for each party effectively for everyone else. The only argument I could imagine for the current system is that Iowan and New Hampshirite voters as a whole are representative of the entire nation's voters, but that obviously can't be true. In fact, while Clinton supposedly has an easy lead in the rest of the nation, as of early October she was struggling for a lead in Iowa. Furthermore, only a fairly small number of Iowans turn out for the caucus. A small sample of citizens of only one state can't represent the entire population of the US. There's no way.

The second key change to our so-called representative deomcracy is how we elect our president. Currently, in almost all states, we really just vote for electors for the electoral college who will pledge their vote for whoever gains the plurality of votes in the state they come from. The goal is to get at least 270 electoral votes in the college. The natural impulse in this situation is to campaign in states that either have the most electoral votes or appear to be ambivalent. This means both presidential candidates will try to woo California, New York, and Texas to get their many electoral votes, as well as work hard for the lead in the small handful of swing states, especially the more populated ones which consequently have many electoral votes. They both may at least set foot in all the states, but it's clear which voters will get most of the attention.

I have a better idea. Abolish the electoral college. Let's decide our president through direct democracy. Whoever gets the plurality of the popular vote is the winner. After all, the presidential candidates are asking for the votes of Americans, not of Californians or Ohioans or Oregonians. If they want to win, they will have to work for votes from all corners of the country.

Doesn't this sound much more representative? Everyone will get to voice their opinion at the same time, without being unduly influenced by the opinions of others, and the candidates for president will work hard to appeal to everyone. I think it's a major improvement. More ought to be done, of course, but this alone would be a great start.

— Athelwulf