It’s time.
It is time to move our nation forward regarding its own elections and stop preaching to the world that we are the greatest democracy when we are not.
It’s time to reform how we universally administer our elections in a nonpartisan manner. It’s time we universally agree and institute fairer methods on how all eligible citizens have unfettered access to vote. How elections are administered that best serves its own citizenry---not the powers that temporarily possess the reins of powers.
It’s time we establish who is universally eligible across all of America to vote.
It’s time to bring America and its administration of elections in line with the ideal of democracy in these modern times, the 21st Century, not the 18th Century. The United States must bring itself up and initiate a new standard of voting showing ”We, the People”, that America can do better---do the best the world over. Show the world how a modern struggling democracy can be reborn repelling authoritarian forces that seek to tear at our civil rights and compact of equality for all humans. “Yes---We Can” make elections and voting fairer even in this new Internet-infested deceitful world of sublime and systemic mendacity-laden skepticism.
Within these ways and means of voting reform, the Electoral College must be castaway, and abolished, if America’s ordinary citizens can obtain their promised individual self-determination. Even in 1787 in Philadelphia, the Electoral College, was a relic of the 13th Century for the Holy Roman Empire when it elected its Emperor from the Hapsburg nobles when it was reconstituted for the American Constitution. A compromise over unsettled irregular constitutional incongruities, things like slavery inside a free nation, and the woman’s right to vote. These constitutional incongruities have necessitated 27 Amendments including the Bill of Rights, on top of the original seven Articles, which formed a new structure of governance---One of those aforementioned incongruities was amending the undemocratic Electoral College in the XII Amendment.
To reach the historic moment in 1787 when our Constitution was conceived there were many before our founders who sacrificed their lives, limbs, and personal treasures fighting to win the American Revolution. Later others defended a British Empire invasion, whereas the following generation fought their own brothers in the Civil War for the emancipation of others, unrelated. World Wars, economic catastrophes, and a new deal ensued in the 20th Century. Now our generation witnessed an undersized company of Capitol and DC police take on a Trump-Republican fascist-inspired coup attempt so that Americans keep their teetering individual liberties under the rule of law.
Now are faced with a clear and present danger as our ancestors faced in other manifestations. The present danger is threatening our constitutional representative form of government as it is now an unmasked attempt to corrupt our underlying democracy---thus, our very American way of life---its invisible umbrella of freedom. Our entire society is threatened by this relic called the Electoral College providing an unlocked backdoor negating the voter’s collective will to elect our president. Simultaneously, the Electoral College warps and corrupts the entire electoral process as winning the Oval Office is the ultimate objective of our two-party partisan system.
Therefore, I’m making a public “call” to form a national citizen’s ‘Voter Caucus’, advocating for a broad-based, non-partisan, constitutional movement seeking national election reform. I am seeking to make universal (equal) all Federal election voter administration, the accounting thereof, and the Congressional District boundaries for all states, D.C., and territories. The end goal will lead to abolishing the Presidential Elector System where a national election of the president is conducted.
I am a former Presidential Elector from Colorado in 2016. I was one of the three who became known as “Hamilton Electors”. We legally challenged Colorado’s state law that forced Colorado’s Elector votes to be a ministerial exercise. My co-patriots, Polly Baca, (former Colorado State Legislature leader, former White House aide to four administrations, a Latino and woman activist, and also a National Democratic Convention co-chair), and Micheal Baca (no relation to Polly), taking our legal challenge all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. We initially prevailed in the U.S. Appeals Court in 2019 overturning Colorado’s state law. Our long-term purpose was to demonstrate how dangerous the Electoral College was by attempting to bring the Elector system back to its original text and intent allowing each Elector the free will and conscience in voting officially for president. Ours was an esoteric, symbolic effort, although it had real implications for the status quo.
What is now self-evident that Donald Trump, his loyalists, those opportunistic grifting supporters, and especially those aligned, authoritarian fascists, both foreign and domestic enemies of the U.S. Constitution are now completely unmasked as a clear and present danger, in the reality---not some pundit or academic conjecture spouting their political agenda or partisan propaganda.
Virginia Thomas’ reference in a text to Trump’s Chief of Staff decrying that the 2020 election outcome was part of the authoritarian’s perspective that; ‘all politics was a form of war’. “This war is psychological. PSYOP. It’s what I did in the military.”
Democracy and elections are not war. This concept of war psychology dials back to Newt Gingrich
[...]“the next generation of Republicans would have to learn to ‘raise hell,’ to ‘stop being so “nice,’ to ‘realize that politics was, above all, a cutthroat WAR for power’—and to ‘start acting like it’.”
Gingerich’s attitude dials back to English history and their civil wars over the throne. Voting in a democracy is not “a war for power,” this mindset is unmistakable fascism attempting to manipulate democracy to seize power. Gingerich has promoted in his anti-democratic treatise seeking to radically overturn America’s representative government envisioning a one-party rule. Fascism is the one-party rule and is the natural outcome of domestic political warfare when the losers are vanquished and the winners conquer society where they radically reorder society for their one aim---not the general welfare of a nation.
It is time for the ordinary American citizenry to reclaim their hard-fought historical democracy and reestablish a functioning constitutional representative government. Former President Carter and former presidential candidate who won the popular vote, Al Gore both have made public statements that the United States is not a functioning democracy as Gore describes it in current terms:
“Democracy has been hacked,” he said. “Our political system has decayed. It’s an outrage. We are in danger of losing our democracy. We better wake up.”
It starts with truly reforming our national elections and voting laws abolishing the Presidential Electors as Rep. Jamie Raskin stated last week on CBS’s Face the Nation. Election reform would also have to be established as a national standard for all elections to Federal offices. The authority to make such sweeping changes is in Article I, Section 4, Clause 1:
The Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
*The Elections Clause gives state legislatures authority over Senate and House elections but allows Congress to regulate such elections and thereby override state election laws.* The only exception to Congress’s authority over state elections—the Places of chusing Senators—nullified when the Seventeenth Amendment superseded Article I, Section 3, Clause 1, where Senators to be elected by popular votes rather than selected by state legislatures.*
History lesson: In 1842, Congress passed its first legislation to regulate House and Senate elections by establishing the district system for House elections. Act of June 25, 1842, ch. 47, § 2, 5 Stat. 491. Later legislation provided that Representatives be elected by districts composed of a compact and contiguous territory and containing as nearly as practicable an equal number of inhabitants.* Congress’s authority to regulate elections did not extend to where state legislatures would choose the Senators, until 1913 when the Seventeenth Amendment abolished this electoral mechanism. The Seventeenth Amendment restated the first paragraph of Article I, section 3 of the Constitution, with “elected by the people thereof.”
The absence of national election uniformity is a dangerous and possibly fatal flaw in our Federal system. It is what Trump and America’s right-wing fascists attempted to exploit after the 2020 election. The need for federal legislation in setting basic minimum standards for how our elections are administered is necessary before abolishing the Elector system. Some ideas already forwarded to m include a minimum number of polling places per capita in various state and local jurisdictions, depending on population densities and distances. The establishment of a standardized mail-in voting system seeing how Colorado and Washington State have successfully administered the process that requires every ballot cast with paper trails, substantiation of voter and ballot eligibility, and also establishing uniform periods for early in-person voting, ballot challenges, and cures. This is not a radical initiative for the general population even RED States favor these modern measures. Only those in the right-wing political constituencies seek to diminish turnout for their partisan aims, in their pursuit of a war for power, oppose more voter enfranchisement to participate.
Congress has the constitutional power to institute these measures, no different than establishing minimum standards for interstate commerce, roads, education, or all other matters related to the use of federal funds. Those who oppose reform will decry States’ rights but this is about individual citizen rights and not an institutional jurisdictional authority of states administering elections or the hollow idea of small states' interests vs large states’ overwhelming influence. Tomas McMcIntee author of the book “Graduating from the Electoral College” mathematically dispels this notion in its entirety.
The net effect will be to standardize all voting administration drilling down to the local level, not merely congressperson. This goes to the Fourteenth Amendment and the “equal protection clause” as all citizen's votes are of equal measure. With these reforms in place, it would bring about the foundation for a national election for president (and vice president). However, it would necessitate a constitutional amendment like the Seventeenth Amendment which would be “elected by the people thereof”, and the consent of the governed.
Rep. Raskin among others has said that the first stage of abolishing the Electoral College is through the National State Compact but in the reality, this measure is as tenuous as walking on a frozen pond in late March. At any time a state legislature could change its mind and thereby the fatal flaw of the compact holding true to form. You can see how current fascists in the name of the Republican Party have sought to conjure up justifications for state legislatures to negate their own citizen’s votes, looking to appoint their own partisan Electors with a total disregard for their citizen’s votes.
A future Amendment must codify within the constitution individual voting rights, Federal election administration across the entire United States, and a general national election of our president. It goes further as to how Congressional Districts are apportioned again looking to standardize this process out of the political partisan process and finally being in accordance with current legal measures (i.e. the 14th & 17th Amendment and Acts of 1842), where Congresspersons are elected by districts composed of a compact and contiguous territory and containing as nearly as practicable an equal number of inhabitants). It further needs to include all U.S. citizens wherever they reside, in states, territories, special districts, or abroad.
Therefore the National Voter’s Caucus I’m seeking must take at least a generational perspective in advocating this reform agenda. It will need to generate a broad-based political movement from true grassroots programs bubbling up through localities to the states and finally up to a national footprint. The National Voter’s Caucus will counter the “war politics of fascism”. A National Voter’s Caucus will need to cross over and beyond partisan labels, more importantly, be forged and propelled by our nation’s younger generation(s) who are now engaged in greater numbers. It will also engender the full spectrum of inclusion from diverse groups that were historically oppressed in voting. Make no mistake that the right-wing elite who decried the Trump election outcome found conveniently the idea of wholesale voter fraud was fueled by the unstated belief (and realization), that their voting constituencies are a losing formula that is accelerating at a faster rate each election cycle at the ballot box.
Far beyond the politics of the day, this is a deeply moral issue, centered on the concept of American liberty for each individual. This issue defines what America was founded upon. The promise that America was made to the world over. Following the ravages of World War II, American liberty was ideal for the ruins in Europe and Asia. American liberty was the beam of light for the last two-and-one-half centuries. Figurably described as a great beacon for freedom from Reagan’s fictional metaphor, the “City on the Hill” attracted the oppressed and subjugated peoples of the old world.
The promise propelled my ancestors who fled the monarchies of Austria, Germany, Scandinavia, and Britain’s realms. Leaving the remnants of ancient feudal societies they sought their family’s futures with American freedom—and the right to vote. Voting was an expression of self-determination and power, when as powerless subjects, peasants, serfs, or common folk they never had the power. Four of my immigrant ancestors were elected to local offices. Voting from previously enslaved peoples made them fully human and free to choose. Voting by previous immigrants made them a citizen of a new nation.
Voting by many is now taken for granted, discounted, and assumed as not making a difference, but once it is taken away and you personally covet its immeasurable value. I felt this when the power and force of Colorado’s Secretary of State enforced by the state’s Attorney General compelling me under duress of felony sanctions to vote against my will. The Appellate Court said we were right. The Supreme Court disagreed. Let us end this question of the Electoral College once and for all. Let all Americans in the collective, decide like every other electoral office voted on by the citizenry.
Those themes and more were all present when I read my ancestor’s writings from the 17th-to-early 20th Centuries when they expressed their feelings in my familial genealogical research. In fact, my wife’s family is a descendant of one notable Puritan minister. He preached at the founding of the colony of Connecticut: “ the people of Connecticut had the right to choose their own government”, he cried out from the pulpit. That sermon served as the basis for the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which established Connecticut’s local government and the foundation for Connecticut's becoming independent from the Colony of Massachusetts. Like in 1640 America as the right to choose its own government. Nothing has changed.
The time is now for this generation to add to the ongoing Great American Experiment of self-governance. Reform our voting system. Make it uniform for all Americans, where we all have an equal and direct vote for who is our president.
So, I am making this national “call”. The call is inviting genuine organizers, ordinary citizens, and those of stature to lay a foundation for this journey. Skeptics I have approached say it will take generations. I disagree. Yet political journeys start by taking the step of forming an organization as people are brought together with a common objective. In seeking out others privately, a few significant legal and political resources all agreed that it was a noble cause that needs to commence and also it must begin as a genuine grassroots ---not astroturfed so it's sharp to cut through the entrenched, vested interests and fatalistic status quo naysayers. So I am asking for suggestions and how we can get this started.
Comments and private messages are welcomed.