David’s Reviews > Becoming a Democracy: How We Can Fix the Electoral College, Gerrymandering, and Our Elections > Status Update

The last chapter on "citizen assemblies" is interesting, being something outside my experience. The concept seems good, with having a representative group of unelected citizens consider challenging problems, but I don't see how such a group would ever be allowed power by Rs who seem to want everything their way.

This chapter on leveling the slanted Senate, while academically interesting, seems awfully unlikely to be proposing anything with a snowball's chance of getting implemented. Once you say Congress needs to approve and realize that the changes would make it hard for Rs to have power, it seems impossible for any of it to get done. We can't even get the filibuster eliminated, what with Manchin defending it. Sigh.

On this page:
"[The Senate] serves as a drowning pit where the voices of more than half the American people go to die."
Making a good argument that the Senate is a barrier to good representative government. Already a senator from CA represents 70x as many people as one from WY, and it's going to get worse.

Proportional representation, or ProRep, does sound like a big potential improvement over winner-take-all voting that requires only a plurality! Good examples here of how gerrymandering can't really be fixed effectively when voters are self-sorting as they are: with Democrats packed into cities and Rs spread over the exurban and rural areas, Rs will get more reps than votes would indicate.

Discussing gerrymandering: "you can fix bizarrely shaped districts, or you can fix unrepresentative results. But with single-member districts, you can't fix both...."

Strong praise for ranked choice voting (RCV), with examples to clarify how it works and survey results to illustrate how voters think it improves civility in campaigns.

Nice overview of barriers to fair voting in our current system: what can be done about the electoral college, 2 senators per state, winner-take-all electoral assignment, and unbalanced distribution of representatives? The next few chapters will try to explain.

The section on drowning out big money in campaigns is just one chapter, on using donation vouchers to allow voters of any financial level to contribute. The overview section is a helpful summary of the current system, and the voucher chapter explains how the system in Seattle works with examples.

Voting rights are stripped from people to different extents because of criminal convictions, depending on the state. One ideal would be to allow people to vote from jail, as ME, VT, and DC currently allow, but at least why not restore the right to vote when their time has been served? FL is one of the egregious cases, requiring all fines and fees to be paid, effectively barring many ex-cons from voting.

In Make Voting Convenient we mostly read about at-home voting. Having voted from home via mail for several elections, this makes sense to me - it's easy, it's convenient, it allows looking up info about issues or candidates, and it's secure because the ballot and signature are verified against registration before the ballot is counted. What's not to like?