Meme time: Amendment

[mneme]

Migrated from Miles Vokosigan of FB (who is apparently nolonger in the LJ/DWverse?)

YOUR MISSION, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT: If you could add one Amendment to the US Constitution, what would it be?

Here's mine (warning: it's a mouthful).

Every citizen of the United States of the age of majority is guarunteed an equal vote and an equal share of representation for senators, as well as for federal, state, and local representitives. Accordingly:

1. No Citizen of the country at or above the age of majority shall be denied the right to vote for any reason save an act of rebellion.

2. The states are required to make sure that all citizens are eligible to vote have the ability to vote in both semifinal and final elections, facing no bars such as unreasonable waiting periods, unnecessary voter registration, or unreasonable demands for identification beyond that needed to prove that they are a citizen of the United States (or for local elections, if that is not required, a local reseident).
a. This also means that a means of voting shall be made available to any citizen who might otherwise have problems voting due to residency, illness, disability, or incarceration.

3. Henceforward, the President and all other top executive offices of cities, states, and the country will be elected via direct popular vote of the populace.

4. No bar should be allowed to an equal exercise of the franchise based on any basis except that listed out here -- including location of residence, except that one must be resident within an area in order to vote for their executive officer or representative body or bodies. As such, the practice of Districting for the purpose of determining voting areas is hereby banned; instead, states and all other territories of the United States must use a voting system that apportions representitives in a manner proportional to the voters preferences.

a. All citizens must be able to vote in national elections and to elect representitives to the governing bodies of this nation, so non-state-resident citizens shall be considered as living in the non-geographical state of United, which shall be given Representitives and Senators as any other state.

5. In order that no cartel should henceforth control the choices available to our fellow citizens, all elected offices will also have their final candidates set via public and open semifinal elections, which like final elections, must allow choice of multiple candidates and produce fair and proportional results. Thus, there shall be one set of finalists for the Presidency and Vice Presidentcy throughout the nation, rather than separate and potentially contradictory sets of finalists in the several states. Congress shall make laws determining how this election proceeds, and whether the President and Vice President are elected and/or nominated together or separately.

6. All election days shall henceforth be national holidays, that no ciitzen be prevented by hardship or financial burden from exercising their rights and duty.

Comments

[gingicat]

Also, people who have been jailed should be allowed to vote.

[mneme]

Yup! I think this is covered--I added the bit about people currently in jail to add a positive requirement as well as a negative one, but the shall not in section one is pretty clear.

[sennashi_dorei]

I was denied election access in 2020. I was also arrested and detained earlier this year while celebrating a Japanese holiday. I am not having a good life, and election inaccessibility is too strong. But forcing votes doesn't sound great either, so I'm very exhausted.

[mneme]

oof.

And yeah; forcing votes isn't ideal (and risks being a tax on the poor), but also nobody should lose the right to vote -- even if they're in jail. Not being able to vote in -local- elections? Yeah, sure, probably; they're not part of the polity of the local city, but anything state-wide or larger needs to voted on by everyone living there who wants to.

[madfilkentist]

Changing the allocation of senators as you describe is one of the few things that's explicitly prohibited from amendment. Article V, Amendment: "no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate."

[mneme]

I don't think that prevents amendment; it just raises the bar to 100%.

But pray tell, where do I change the number of Senators allocated to each State? I would think that would require much more explicit verbage than a general principle of universal sufferage, and a ban on in-area districting as a method of allocating representitives to an area (it does arguably prevent state senators from being allocated per district, though).

[marcmagus]

"equal share of representation for senators" may implicitly change allocation of Senators, if you consider that currently a Wyoming resident and a California resident have an unequal share of representation.

[mneme]

Indeed, thoguh that wasn't the intent (in fact, I consider, ironically, the Senate to be the most democratic Federal body we have, despite the deliberate distortions induced by every state having an equal number of senators regardless of size).

Presidential elections are poisoned by the winner takes all states wrt electors, which often disenfranchise a vast proportion of the electorate and cause a whole heap of the rest to stay home.

Congressional districts are massivlely distorted and gamable.

But since the boundaries of states can't be manipulated, the senate tends to be less terrible overall despite massively over-representing small states.

I've got an offline version which revised this to make it clear it's not changing the number of senators except for adding a catchall state.

[bunsen_h]

(it does arguably prevent state senators from being allocated per district, though)

I think that anything with an arguable meaning should be clarified to remove the ambiguity.

[kgbooklog]

I'd vote for that. (Though I might want stronger language to fully strip political parties of any official authority and privilege.)

I'm a simple person, so my amendment would just be:
"Conflict of interest is sufficient grounds for removal from office for all elected and appointed officials at all levels of government."

[mneme]

I'm not as bothered by the existence of political parties per se -- to a degree, they're inevitable. The problem is that with a first past the post system with no party rules at all, parties aren't just inevitable, they're also in command of the wheels of government, with a collapse or expansion into exactly two major parties happening after every poltiical upheaval.

Add preference voting at the top level and at a semifinal stage that generates a range of finalists for political office, and the power of parties (not to mention their duality) will significantly wane.

[marcmagus]

The Senate under this system (if you still intend 2 Senators per state, see my other comment) is going to get kind of weird. By which I mean so long as there are two major national parties, I would expect the Senate to have one member of each in every state. This fact alone would retain the tendency toward exactly two big parties even with the electoral reform otherwise weakening it, because you have to coalition to get your Senator.

This may be an issue with how you've structured things or how I'm reading them, but you should probably make it more explicit that preference voting shall be used to elect executives.

I would be fully prepared to give up all aspects which impose requirements on states for non-Federal elections in order to make this more palatable to the "states rights" types. Fixing Federal elections and forcing states to do all the hard implementation work to fix their own may be the best that can be accomplished.