More than any time I can remember, progressive ideas are growing popular. In a fair fight, a true democracy, we'd be on the offensive. The ideas Progressive Caucus's budget are popular, and if they passed, they'd be reason for a lot of optimism about the future.
But instead, all too often, we're on the defensive. Many of our greatest "victories" are in merely averting or ameliorating some right-wing disaster. And time after time, it's because of some anti-democratic rule or institution. The filibuster; gerrymandering; Citizens United; and the supreme court; like roundworms in the lungs of democracy, all have the potential to defeat the popular will and sap the strength of progress. And all of these parasites are also, in a way, opportunities; if we overcame them, it would multiply our power, just as overcoming the minority veto in California has multiplied our power there.
Underneath all these anti-democratic problems, like the mother roundworm injecting her eggs into our country's blood, there is another one that most people are not aware of as a problem. Click past the orange intestinal parasite to see what I mean.
The mother roundworm is the system of plurality voting. By artificially limiting us to vote for just one candidate, it forces most of us to actively ignore the "unelectable" options besides the two frontrunners. That leads to a two-party monopoly, where even the wimpiest blue dogs can (and do) take our votes for granted. It shuts out the new ideas that smaller parties could help bring into the dialogue, and feeds a thousand pointless arguments and pie-fights between compromising moderates and uncompromising idealists. It exacerbates the problems with gerrymandering and pushes candidates into the arms of deep-pockets donors so they can maintain their relevance among the fundraising frontrunners.
There are alternatives to plurality voting. The simplest and best is Approval Voting, which simply means that you can vote for as many candidates as you want. Without your vote artificially limited to one, you can vote for both the ideal and the realistic at once. This would enable third parties to grow organically, and reduce the outsized power of money in politics. The current two parties would still be the big tents which won most national and statewide elections, but with a credible threat from the left, the Democratic party would sharply reverse its depressing drift to the right.
But awareness of this possibility is badly lacking. I'm actually going to start a PhD at Harvard this fall to study this issue (I got my acceptance letter on Monday, yay), but most people are not election methods mega-geeks like me. Still, I'm not the only one: the Center for Election Science (CES) is having a fundraiser to create a video to help educate about approval voting. They've raised $3,850 of their $11,000 goal; over a third of the way, with 24 days to go. If they hit their goal, the video will be submitted to the MacArthur Foundation's Looking@Democracy contest, where it will get added exposure and could win prize money that would further help with the CES's voting system reform activism.
Please give if you can. I know that there are many other issues which are more immediate and pressing, but there are very few which are so fundamental to our ability to win on so many different fronts.