What is it about our particular political and election system that we love so much? Here are a few ideas that have been floated for changes recently:
- In an interesting audio essay, an NPR commentator suggested a single six-year presidential term in light of the fact that list of second term scandals is as long as the list of post WWII second term presidents.
- Pretty much everyone agrees that the justification for the Electoral College has long since vanished.
- Many have suggested that life long appointments to the supreme court means something much different than it used to (and just imagine if we start to see dramatic life-extension this century).
- Our current election system of primaries and general election seriously discourages third-party candidates. Instant runoff systems, such as those in Australia, may be much more fair than our current single-vote system.
- No one thinks that lobbyist (or a candidate’s) money is a good influence on elections, yet we seem to be unable of moving to a completely federally-funded system. Do we really want fundraisers and wealthy private interests voting more than they’re due?
- In the age of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), couldn’t we agree on some system of redistricting that cannot be controlled by incumbent parties?
Why are we so reluctant to make changes. Maybe not all (or any) of those six ideas I discussed above are generally agreeable, but some changes surely are. Is it pride? Fear? Do we think the Constitution so flawless that clearly outdated provisions should rule our modern technological age?
Issues of disenfranchisement and general dissatisfaction with candidates will not go away until we reform the system. Are either of the radical sides of parties satisfied with their middling candidates? Do we want the extremes to control the parties because of the primary system? I would certainly argue that most everyone would be happier if we can take some of the politics out of politics, and get back to actual governance.
I would love to get rid of the electoral college, in the sense that we vote for electors that vote for the president. But, I would keep the point system, so nothing would really change since most states have laws mandating the electors to vote with the people.
One key reasons of electoral college was to construct a way for canditates seeking votes to care about people in lower-density (rural) regions of the country. If this were not the case, then they would be largely ignored, and politicans would only pay attention to big cities. This would give a huge disadvantage to states without large cities, because they would ultimately have no influence in the federal government. Thus, the point system gives a slight weight in favor of less-dense regions. This has just as much effect today as it did in the 1780s, so I wouldn’t consider this concept out dated at all.
The one six-year term concept is interesting, but I think six years is too long to allow a bad president to go unchecked. I would prefer one four-year term to that. However, I don’t see what having only one term would do to stop the corruption. Citing second-term corruption as evidence only leads to the conclusion that it’s not necessarily the second term that would be the cause of corruption, but the last term. If we went to just one term, then that would be the term with all the corruption. And there’d be six years of it, and there wouldn’t be a “break” in the scandals, it would just be one scandalous term after another. Instead, if the last term is truly what causes corruption, then term limits should be eliminated altogether.
I do agree with you wholeheartedly that the judicial system needs revision. The problem is that the details of the judicial system is largely absent from the constitution, since the congress was supposed to figure out what would be needed, and change it as needed. In Marlbury vs Madison, the Supreme Court decided that it had the power to overturn laws (and later to create law from judicial activisim). This was not in the constitution, but no one stopped it, so it stuck. Now, we have nine people who can decide anything without consequence or check, and are there for a very long time. I would support term limits on federal judges with my whole body and soul.
As far as districting is concerned, this is up to each individual state, so I don’t know how it works from state to state, but I would bet it is probably party-line in all 50. The only thing is, if district lines are algorithmically drawn, then you can’t account for certain cultural factors or certain practicality issues. However, I agree with you that it may be best to be “culture blind” in these matters since they end result is usually one-sided.
I actually proposed a problem in my nonlinear-optimization class to create a NLP that drew the michigan political districts algorithmically based on population densities. The objective function was to minimize the sum of the squares of distances between cities and the center of their district, plus the sum of the squares population deviation from the mean district population. This algorithm then would mathematically balance the key forces of district size, shape, and population. The districts would automatically be sized in circle-ish shapes with the center of mass being the center of mass of the cities it contained, and the populations each district covered would be very close. The prof wouldn’t let me work on this by myself and so I had to work with some retarded group on something retarded, so I never got to see the result. But I bet it was cool.
That’s enough for now.
Tom,
About the electoral college thing, I’m not sure that rural voters need necessarily to be campaigned to in the same way that cities do. One of the interesting things about rural america right now is how similar the issues are across a whole range of states. Thus, the “local issues” of rural america can be in many ways broadly addressed. This is not, of course, universally true, but I think the rural/city thing is a bit exaggerated.
About second-term corruption, let me expand on that thought a bit. It seems to me a reasonable hope that if a president never has an opportunity to campaign again for another term, the decisions that he/she might make would be much more governed by thoughts of their “legacy.” So, less pandering to special interests (that tend to dominate during election cycles), and more focus on positive change in the government. A problem with this, of course, is that presidents then would have even less incentive to embark on projects that take more than four years. But, perhaps if we can fix the election cycle problem, we don’t need to shorten term limits.
About the supreme court. I agree that the court does now seem to have a role beyond that envisioned by the framers. I do not agree, however, that “judicial activism” is necessarily bad. Case in point: segregation. It was the ability of the Supreme Court to do something that the legislative and executive branches were politically incapable of doing that changed our country so much for the better. The courts are in many ways the sole defender of the minorities in this country. The ingenious balance of the courts and legislative/executive lawmaking allows our system to succeed where other majority-rule governments have not. I don’t think that even the political/religious/ethnic majority would want to live in a country that had not been shaped by judicial activism. So, un-elected judges overturning the supposed wil of the people (i.e. legislative action) is not universally bad. That said, I do think that there are cases where the courts can overreach their authority, but as a religious minority I find their actions to be in my best interest, where as you might not.
Redistricting algorithms are a very intersting topic for me. One addition I might make to your distance-valued objective function is that of minimum circumferences of district boundaries. Also, you might need a bit of a constrained optimization in which distances traveled can not exceed x-amount, or do this via limiting the number of polling places in a district and then limiting the distance traveled to each. Anyway, quite an interesting subject that I think could produce some results that we’d all be happier with than the crap that our self-interested state legislatures produce.
For the objective function, the maximum distance constraint is reasonable, except it poses problems in the UP, since it’s so low density. But, it’s probably a good thing to add. Additional constraints would be things like keeping the UP and LP separate. Minimizing the square of the distance to the center criteria should have the same effect of minimizing circumferences, because it ultra-penalizes long, skinny districts more than the circumference method would. However, there’s no way of telling which one would be better. I think I picked the sum-of-squares method because it was siginificantly faster to calculate than a perimiter and has well-defined derivities that make it solving the problem algorithmically easier in less iterations.
Detroit poses an interesting problem, because the city is large enough to have multiple districts. So, the polling places method you suggested might be a good way of doing that. However, with the vast number of polling places, the problem is probably not feasible to solve, since there’d be something like 10-50 thousand variables in a very complex NLP… so it would take months on a cray at least. Plus, the constraint that districts be continuous and not broken apart is discrete and makes for an especially difficult problem to solve and guarantee a global optimium. Thus, it’s hard.
Perhaps I’ll sove this problem one day.