Progressive reform of how Congress is elected. - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14992860
The problems to be solved or changes to be made to make America more responsive to the will of the mass of the voters. All to be done without a Constitutional amendment.
1] Reduce the power that the 2 Senators from each state thing gives to small states in the Electoral College when it votes for President.
2] End gerrymandering.
3] Give every voter a reason to go vote for a Congress-person even if she is a Dem in Wyoming or a Repub in NYC.
4] End 1st past the post voting.
5] Reform campaign finance funding.

The solutions I'm suggesting.
1] About double the size of the House of Reps. This also almost doubles the size of the Electoral College and so waters down the advantage the small states have now*. Recalculate the number of Reps for each start, dob't just double the current number, so that there can be an odd number of Reps. from a state.
2] Require [whenever possible] that House districts have 4 or 5 Reps. per district with up to 7 in the 1 district for small states. Or maybe 2 districts with 3 and 4 Reps. respectively for states with 7 Reps., and up to 6 for those states that are smaller.
3] Give every voter in every district the number of votes to use as the district will have Reps., and let them vote for any number of candidates. With machine counting it will be easy to program the machine to distribute their votes as numbers with fractions to each of the 3 people she voted for [like in a district with 4 Reps. = 1.333 to ea. of 3]. Now minor party voters can vote for just 1 person and all their votes will bullet vote for that 1 person.
4] Now gerrymandering is much more difficult even if 2nd choice voting is not used. The parties will tell their members how many candidates they should vote for.
5] Now, it matters in most districts if there will be in a 4 Rep. district, a 1-1-2 split or a 0-2-2 split or a 1-3 split. Or in a 5 Rep. dist., a 1-2-2, a 1-1-3, a 0-2-3 split, or a 0-3-2 split. So, voter turn out can make more of a difference.

Additionally, Progressives should try to get Washington D.C. and Porto Rico admitted as states. his should give them 4 more Senators. I think a simple majority is all that is necessary if the filibuster is done away with for a while.
. . . An amendment can be proposed to make filibusters permanent for laws and all judges, and set it at say 55% to 58%.

Increase the size of the USSC to offset the effect of the 2 stolen judgeships.

Tax all campaign contributions and independent political ad expenditures. And distribute the money raised among the major and minor parties.
the simplest way is tax them 60% and distribute the proceeds evenly among all the parties (up to 6) with a candidate in the area.
. . . Even if this were very in inefficient and wasted a lot of money it would still be hugely cheaper than the current system where Congress is bought to give hundreds of billions away to their donors and friends.
. . . Collect the tax every night and distribute the proceeds weekly; then daily for the last week or 13 days.

.* . With this change Wyoming gets 2 or 3 Reps and 2 Senators = 4 or 5 Electors instead of 3, while Calif. gets 110 Reps. and 2 senators = 112 Electors instead of 57 Electors. Therefore, instead of Wyoming having 15.8% of Calif.'s total of Electors it now gets just 3.6% of Calif.'s total of Electors. Still not proportional to the relative populations but far closer than now.

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