March 26, 2010
FairVote
Here's one of the basic facts of American political life that every adult should know: The Constitution does not guarantee the right to vote. Why? Because when it was written voting was a jealously guarded prerogative. Our founding fathers never, ever expected the franchise to be widely applied. The upside of their omission, today, is that we have many options through state and local governments to adopt reforms such as proportional voting and instant run-off elections. We also could, and should, consider more fundamental constitutional changes. To get at some of these questions I turned to Rob Richie, Executive Director of FairVote. Rob gets top marks for thoughtfulness and it was a real pleasure to talk with him. Total runtime an hour and six minutes. Enjoy!
Comments
Rob Ritchie as yourself is both knowledgeable and engaging.
But money in politics which you both dismiss for interesting but far lesser electoral changes which have both good and bad features is by far the most important reform needed for our electoral system.
Indeed the fixes advocated to enable more voices in the system are only needed because the two parties are thoroughly corrupted by money in politics.
Nearly every other one of our problems which are mounting and not addressed are due to money in politics.
We need to unite our voices and efforts behind a single effort to totally cut the connection between money in politics, which Teddy Roosevelt started to do a century ago and from which task we have been backsliding up to the recent Citizens United case which opens the floodgates.
United citizens can reverse Citizens United, but it requires focus.
Posted by: Larry | April 18, 2010 9:32 AM