The Need for Electoral Reform

• Because campaigns are financed by private interests, government representatives see themselves as accountable to their funders, not to the people who elected them.
• The process of crafting legislation has been kidnapped by special interests—and even simple, straightforward changes get bogged down in the endless process of inserting favors to these special interests that have nothing to do with the issue at hand.
• So many amendments get inserted into bills that the policy goals are lost.
• The bills themselves can run hundreds or even thousands of pages. Nobody has time to read them, and legislators don’t always know exactly what they’re voting on.
• Wrangling over such compromises keeps the real issues off the table. They don’t get voted on, and the problems don’t change.
• In an electoral system where one candidate wins and the others lose, a lot of people really have no representation in Congress, their state legislatures, and the Governor’s office—because they didn’t vote for the winning candidate. Only the winner gets a voice—even when that winner earned less than half the votes cast in a three-way (or more) race. This has to change!
• In a winner-take-all voting system as we have in most of the United States, there is tremendous pressure on third-party candidates not to mount campaigns—and on voters not to vote for them—because they’re seen as “spoilers” who allow candidates to get in office without a majority vote. This system excludes creative and original thinkers who can provide real solutions to our nation’s problems. And it restricts the choices of the people to really vote their conscience.