Time to Change the Stickers at the Polls
With most Americans unhappy with the two choices the major parties gave us on November 5, the time has come to change the stickers we get after we vote. In light of this year’s selection, “I Voted” doesn’t cut it. The stickers should be “I Voted but I’m disgusted”;” I Voted, but I had to hold my nose to do it” or “I Voted and I’m sick to my stomach”.
It's clear that both the Republicans and Democrats have abrogated any role they once claimed to have had in support of the finest social experiment in history. With each succeeding election, we’ve been offered more and more flawed and divisive candidates. It’s become acceptable to put forward candidates whose knowledge of history and respect for tradition and societal norms are, at best, an afterthought.
The disgust felt by many Americans is evidenced by the number of voters who identify themselves as Independents. More than half of the registered voters in this country are not affiliated with either political party. To those of us viewing the behavior in Washington from the sidelines, the two parties have devolved into little more than crime gangs.
It’s easy to see why this happened. Whether you are liberal or conversative, it’s hard not to wince when Washington has been inhabited with the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jamal Bowman, Matt Gaetz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Compounding this is the money these people can make by simply walking across K Street to become lobbyists, sell a tell-all book or dip into their campaign coffers.
We were given a choice between a do-nothing tough-question-dodging Vice President and fast-food-inhaling unhinged narcissist. To vote for the Democrat was to affirm the McCarthy era-like intolerant man-demeaning woke cancel culture, while the Republican alternative offered autocracy and, in foreign affairs, a membership in the Neville Chamberlain fan club. And neither breathed a word about the national debt which threatens to destroy us all. Why were we given the choices that George Will aptly dubbed “the worst choice in U.S. history.”? The answer lies in a simple mathematical analysis of the primary system. With only a minority of the voters registered with the two parties, a huge swath of the American electorate is left out of the primary process. Unless you register with one of the parties solely to vote in the primary, you’re out in the cold. With only 21% of the eligible party voters participating in the primaries, the choices on the presidential ballot were made by a tiny percentage of the electorate. This situation has given a few party zealots enormous power over our lives, which strains even the most elastic interpretation of the word democracy. The Republican primaries (the Democrats didn’t even bother) is illustrative. Had there been open primaries, there’s little doubt that Nikki Haley could have prevailed.
Fueling the fire that threatens to consume us is the conduct of TV media. With the exception of News Nation, who tries to be balanced, the media doesn’t lean, it falls over. Their claim of being “journalists” is becoming more and more farfetched. In their thirst to sell advertising, they’ve become the harbingers of shock, scare and Armageddon. In addition to peddling more drugs than Pablo Escobar and ads from parasitic lawyers, the media this election cycle unleashed a bombardment of vicious political attack ads that did nothing but cause dismay for the independent voting public. Just once it would be nice to see a politician end one of these ads with “I’m ashamed of this message” as opposed to “I approved this message.” With the Citizens United decision, our political choices have been hijacked by a select group of the very wealthy who pour money into a broken system solely for their own benefit. The malignancy of social media only exacerbates this problem.
For us to survive, all of this must change. An open primary system is an obvious answer, but it’s questionable whether the party bosses who care only about their team would easily surrender this power—to them, democracy be damned. Ranked choice voting is a viable alternative. An open primary and ranked choice voting saved Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, who is that rarest of species—a sane Republican with a spine. It’s also clear that we desperately need a viable third party as well as term limits. Or we can send the parties, their billionaire puppeteers and the system they feed off a message—write someone in. Yes, we’ve heard it often, the mantra they want us to commit to memory: “You’ve wasted your vote”. The rejoinder is simple: if more people voted like us, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Meanwhile, start printing the new stickers.
S. Robert Williams
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