* * Fixing our elections

By the time you read this, hopefully Election Day will soon be upon us and blissfully this worst-election-in-our-lifetimes will be over. The refrain I hear most often is that, “With 320,000,000 people in this country, how could we have ever ended up with two worse candidates?” Esteemed television newsman Bob Schieffer said following the October 9 debate, “I just hope to God I don’t see another campaign like this one. America can do better than what we have seen here tonight. This was just disgraceful.”

Hopefully we’ve reached the nadir, but I have my doubts. The system under which we nominate and elect people at both statewide and national levels is deeply flawed. We need a systematic way to fix it.

The first problem we have is that our districts are gerrymandered to such a degree that representatives are picking their voters and not the other way around. For those representatives picked by districts here in Virginia, the U.S. Congress and our state House of Delegates, there is almost never any competition. When I ran unsuccessfully for the House of Delegates three years ago, out of 100 seats, there were 88 incumbents running. 86 were re-elected. A year ago, not a single incumbent was defeated. The problem with this, for example in congressional races, is that an incumbent’s greatest challenge is typically not from the opposition party but from his own. Consider the case of Eric Cantor, a strong conservative who was ousted in the primary by an even more conservative challenger. This forces representatives to cater to the most extreme wings of their parties. We need non-partisan districting.

Adding to the advantage of incumbency is the extreme disparity in fund-raising opportunities. To illustrate this, as I write, 9^th District Congressman Morgan Griffith is being challenged by Army veteran Derek Kitts. To date, Griffith has amassed $636,507 to Kitts’ $23,154. This is not a typo. Griffith’s endless pit of money is put there largely by corporations, political action groups, and lobbyists. There is no doubting whom he truly represents. We must overturn Citizens United and impose strict campaign finance laws that return our representatives to servants of real, breathing human people.

Our elections are relics of an earlier era, making voting far more difficult than it needs to be. Today we have a single day to vote (other than absentee voting, which requires an excuse), and it’s on a working day. This puts undue stress on working people. All voting is vulnerable to fraud, but with the great minds our country possesses, I’m certain we could devise a safe, trustworthy Internet based system where people could vote anywhere they have computer access. Why not an Election Month instead of an Election Day? We need to make voting as easy as possible rather than as difficult.

Speaking of relics, our system of “winner-take-all” elections is producing results that our Founding Fathers would have never intended. Today, to win an election, a candidate merely needs one more vote than his or her opponent. While this is simple and makes logical sense, it produces legislatures that are not representative of the people. John Adams once said our country’s legislatures “should be in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large.” Right now, ours are emphatically not. Consider our state’s 10 westernmost districts. Overall, we may find a Republican majority of voters at around 60%. Even with non-partisan redistricting, each could easily select a Republican winner. Ideally, 60% of the delegates would be Republican and 40% Democrat. The situation exists in the reverse in Democratic-rich areas. Modern scientific voting techniques such as proportional representation voting yield results that are more representative of the people.

Finally, our Electoral College system, another relic of an earlier age, makes no sense in the modern world. How could we ever justify a Presidential candidate winning more votes and then losing the election?

One of the most disheartening comments I got while running was from a Christiansburg woman who said, “I never vote; my vote doesn’t matter.” Sad to say, she’s right; in most contests her vote doesn’t matter. Today’s systems drive away potential voters in the millions nationally.

The rise in this Presidential cycle of “protests candidates” is indicative of the dissatisfaction and anger of voters who know they are not being represented. A happy, potentially positive outcome of this most disgraceful and agonizing cycle is that our attention might be directed to fixing the process. Otherwise, we’re doomed to face even more rancorous and unbecoming elections in the future.