I love the energy from an old man in this song.
One of the things I always try to remember is how new democracy is to many countries in Europe. We hear many issues about the effect of social media on our democracy. Chatham house have a paper dealing with this. One comment in the paper struck home to me
Perhaps most importantly, we should not think of democracy in a static way – that is, as a system that can be perfected once and for all and then simply maintained and defended against threats.
In effect this is saying that defending the status quo weakens democracy, and I think I agree with that. I always have issues with the overlap in functions of parliament, government and judiciary in the UK. A lot of people have issues with the House of Lords. I actually have issues with how the membership is granted. I dislike the fact that there are still a large number of hereditary peers, but this is not simply to do with the fact they are hereditary.
When one hereditary peer drops out they are replaced by another one. but most hereditary peerages are required to be male. At the moment they are all men.
The hereditary peers that are allowed to sit are chosen in a set ratio – the Conservative Party chooses 42, the Lib-Dems 3 and the Labour Party 2. This ratio is fixed. This hardly seems balanced.
But why should so many of the peers be associated with political parties? There are so many great people in this country that are not politicians, but are in touch with the people. I can just imagine Billy Connolly adding some spice to debates.
We need to keep thinking about how we are governed to keep our system relevant – to ensure people feel they have a voice.
But the thing that has really got me thinking was a BBC article on the American presidential election. You know there are two options, right? No – there are actually over 1200 people standing for president in the next election. I like the sound of Mark Charles, a lot of his policies sound challenging – for example his first 100 day statement proposes changing the US constitution to remove things like the exemption to the slavery prohibition (yes, slavery is still permitted in the USA constitution for on specific reason).
But it was the strategy of Brock Pierce that struck me. He plans to target one or two states – just enough to stop the two main candidates getting a majority in the electoral college.
Okay, short diversion – the votes of people in the USA do not elect the president – instead they elect people to go to the electoral college from each state (e.g. California elects 55, Texas 38). All of these form the electoral college and choose the president based on who gets 270 votes out of 538.
Oh did I say that the electoral college for a state is based on the winning votes in a State (in 48 of the 50 states), this means that the % of votes for one party does not represent the % of people chosen for the electoral college. The usa.gov website gives a good example from 2016
In 2016, even though millions more individuals voted for the Democratic candidate than the Republican candidate in CA, PA, and TX (if you add the votes from the 3 States), the Democratic party was only awarded the electors appointed in CA. Because the Republican candidate won the State popular vote in PA and TX, the Republican party was awarded 3 more total electors than the Democratic party.
CA – 8,753,788 Democratic votes cast vs 4,483,810 Republican votes cast = 55 Democratic electors
PA – 2,926,441 Democratic votes cast vs 2,970,733 Republican votes cast = 20 Republican electors
TX – 3,877,868 Democratic votes cast vs 4,685,047 Republican votes cast = 38 Republican electors
Total – 15,658,117 Democratic votes cast vs 12,139,590 Republican votes cast for the national popular vote, but 55 Democratic electors vs 58 Republican electors appointed based on each State’s popular vote.
Clinton got about 3,000,000 more votes than Trump in 2016.
So if Brock gets his wish and stops both Trump and Biden getting 270 electoral college votes then the house of representatives chooses the president from the top three candidates, and the Senate chooses the vice-president from the other two. This has happened once before (1824 when John Quincy Adams was chosen even though he got 10% less votes than Jackson). So Brock is betting that there will be such division they will chose the third candidate.
When I finally got my head round all this I was left with the feeling that this is system that really could lead to problems. With people reporting having to wait 11 hours in the queue to vote can we really call this democracy? Check out the tweet in the middle of this BBC article.
Fight for democracy – reject the status quo.