Enough is enough: It’s well past time to fully democratize the U.S. electoral system

The principle of “one person, one vote” rings out upon the American landscape as an essential unifying element of our great democracy, but it is a principle that unfortunately resounds as an ideal rather than reality.

In the early years of our country, eligible voters included only wealthy landowners, primarily white men. Because the framers of our Constitution could not agree on national voting standards, the individual states decided.

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Most states, therefore, continued to grant voting rights primarily to the landed gentry. In fact, in the election of our first president, George Washington, only about six percent of the total population was eligible to vote. Eventually, white men of a certain age were granted the vote, whether or not they owned land.

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Former enslaved peoples were granted citizenship in 1868 under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, though only males could vote. The 15th Amendment passed in 1870 and granted suffrage to males regardless of “race” on the federal and state levels.

This, however, did not extend to Native Americans, since the federal government defined them as non-citizens, describing them in oxymoronic terms as “domestic foreigners.” In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring people of Chinese ancestry from becoming naturalized citizens, thereby excluding them from voting.

So-called “Jim Crow” measures enacted by a number of states placed enormous roadblocks in the way of African Americans registering to vote in the form of violent intimidation, voting taxes, and literacy tests. In some places, African Americans were not allowed to register unless they determined the exact number of grains of rice or beans in a large container, which of course, in every case they could not.

After many years of fierce and prolonged battles, women won the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, though other groups faced continued restrictions, including Asian Americans and Native Americans.

The 24th Amendment passed in 1964 outlawing poll taxes as a condition for voting, and the next year, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act forbidding states from implementing discriminatory restrictions on voting, including a provision requiring legislators in states with a history of discrimination against minoritized voters first to get federal permission before changing their voting procedures.

The U.S. Congress passed, and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed discriminatory voting practices that many southern states adopted after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a condition for voting.

The 26th Amendment followed in 1971, lowering the voting age to 18. This victory was won primarily by young people who rightly argued that if the federal government could draft them into military service where they could possibly lose their lives in foreign wars, they most assuredly must also have the right to choose their leaders.

Still, to this day residents of some U.S. territories, though granted U.S. citizenship, do not have the right to vote.

The anti-democratic electoral system

Democracy in the election process suffered a serious setback when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 5-4 in 2010 in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. 

The First Amendment prohibits the federal government from curbing independent political expenditures of nonprofit corporations, and the ruling extended this to for-profit corporations, labor unions, and other organizations. The result of this decision has been the almost unlimited corporate funding funneling into the election process to disproportionally affect elections.

Even with all the advances in the U.S. electoral process over the years, “one person, one vote” stands merely as a distant mirage, completely out of reach of the electorate. Some of the seemingly endless array of obstructions in the democratic voting process include the stripping of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court, state voter suppression laws, the state presidential caucus systems, the ways major political parties determine delegates to their conventions, and the “Electoral College” system. 

The gutting of the Voting Rights Act

In a 5-4 ruling in 2013, the Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Following the decision, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who sided with the minority, warned that the 1965 act was still needed, and the ruling was like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

In the aftermath of this decision, primarily Republican lawmakers nationwide have imposed measures to inhibit racial minorities and young people, who traditionally cast ballots for Democratic candidates, from voting. Though very little voter fraud has been uncovered, tactics include reducing the number of polling stations, decreasing the amount of days open for voting, requiring voters to present certain, often-difficult-to-obtain forms of photo identification, and other measures. 

The problematic delegate selection system

By its very nature, the state presidential caucus system is inherently undemocratic. The amount of time necessary (up to 3 or 4 hours) during a specific block of time make it possible for only a limited percentage of the electorate, primarily party activists, to participate. In addition, having to position oneself (caucus) at specific locations within a large room or in various rooms depending on the candidate one supports creates issues of confidentiality and privacy in the election process. I, therefore, advocate for the elimination of the caucus system.

State primaries and other delegate-selection systems function to restrict a true democratic process. A candidate may receive a given proportion of votes compared to other candidates of their political party but fail to receive that proportion of delegates who will vote for that candidate at the party’s presidential convention.

This inequitable distribution is heightened by the Democratic Party’s so-called “super delegates” composed of primarily state elected officials and other leaders who vote their own preferences rather than following the will of the people in their states. On the Republican side, party officials in a state like Colorado chose delegates to the Presidential Convention without that state’s electorate ever casting a vote.

I suggest the following changes to the current primary system:

1. Abolish the state caucus system.
2. Establish regional primaries, for example, one for the Southern states, another for the Eastern, Midwestern, Pacific Northwestern, Southwestern, etc. Rotate the sequence of regional primaries each Presidential election cycle.
3. Residents of U.S. territories not currently granted the right to vote in national elections must have that right.
4. Eliminate the delegate selection process altogether. Each candidate will receive a running total of votes from regional primaries. Following the last regional primary, the candidate of each political party with the greatest total number of votes (whether a majority or plurality) will become that party’s presidential nominee.
5. The party nominee will have the right to choose a vice presidential running mate.
6. Reinstate and enhance the Voting Rights Act in its entirety.
7. Increase the number of voting days from one day to one week.
8. Increase the number of polling stations.
9. Eliminate the spate of voter suppression laws.
10. Allow same-day voter registration.
11. Allow mail-in ballots in all national, state, and local elections. 
12. Eliminate the inequitable gerrymandering system, which could come about through U.S. Justice Department monitors or high court mandates.
13. Reinstate voting rights to formerly incarcerated persons after they have served their sentences.
14. Reverse Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission.
15. Grant Washington, D.C. statehood status with the right and obligation to elect two voting U.S. senators and proportional voting representation in the House of Representatives.

To further ensure a more democratic “one person, one vote” system, we must finally and fully scrap the undemocratic Electoral College system, which can and at times does elevate the runner-up in terms of cast votes to the presidency, as evidenced by the selection (not election) of George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.