The problem with our elections

What are the problems with our elections? It is not fraud. It is elections that are built to support super wealth or super extremist politicians.

Donald Trump and Fox News would have people believe that there are 100s of thousands of bad votes, especially, somehow, in key swing states like Georgia and Arizona, but not in states like Texas or Florida. Fox News has already had to pay a billion dollars to Dominion for lying about election machine fraud and they are losing other lawsuits. And, when the MAGA crowd wanted recounts in Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania to stamp out fraud, they found out that Joe Biden got even more votes than they reported on first counting (Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia)!

But I’ll let you in on a secret: Those hundreds of extra votes for Biden mean nothing. When 500 votes change across the country but more than 150 million people vote, that’s something like 0.00000003%.

I’ll let you in on another secret: There were only like 10 cases of voter fraud found. Maybe 100 total. Across the whole country. And almost all of them were Republicans voting twice (Pennsylvania, Las Vegas, Florida).

So no, voter fraud is not the problem in our elections.

The problems are these:

1. We have primaries, especially closed party primaries, and weird caucuses. Those systems were invented when only a few white, land-owning males could vote. In those circumstances, all of the people that mattered could “get in a room” at the same time. In present day, it results in extremists winning a vote among fellow extremists who are able to get together at a convention or caucus. Only the most motivated and locationally-fortunate go, and the party duopoly (like a monopoly, except there are two of them) tries to disenfranchise normal, calm people, because the two extreme ends of the stick are where all the money is.
2. We don’t have term limits in key spots, like in the US Senate and House of Representatives. Those politicians are incentivized to do whatever it takes to win another and another term. They don’t care about good governing or “doing their job” except inasmuch as it makes them look good enough to re-elect.
3. Campaign finance laws don’t really work — especially for super rich people. The legal amount an individual can donate to a politician is $3,300. But somehow, super rich people donate hundreds of thousands if not millions. https://www.threads.net/@melanie_darrigo/post/DAqVMtIv83b?xmt=AQGznMxfhrCRwjw6_QvC8Tec76tDxTMDifBj7PAfknq0LQ

To heal our partisan temperature and improve our elections and government, some very simple changes could help, such as implementing ranked choice voting, or having a national popular vote for president, or limiting how many years a congress person can stay in office.

I hope you’ll find some people to support, such as http://rankthevote.com/ and https://betterboundaries.org/.