Do Americans Want Symbolic Elections or Democratic Elections?

Voting

All modern democracies hold elections, but not all elections are democratic

Republicans want to limit the turnout for elections. Democrats want to expand the turnout — both parties act in their self-interests. What’s the right thing to do?

In a democracy, the government’s authority comes solely from the consent of the governed. If we want a legitimate democracy, all people governed should have the right to vote. Our country did not start that way. In the beginning, only white male landowners could vote. No minorities, no women, no renters, only white male landowners had the right to vote.

Fortunately, over time and many struggles, we legitimized our democracy by allowing all citizens over 18 to vote. In the US, true democracy ends with electing our representatives. We do not hold a democratic vote on each nitty-gritty issue. We have a representative democracy. Our elected representatives make the decisions and pass the laws on our behalf at the state and federal levels. In a republic or representative democracy, the power of the people is exercised through their elected representatives.

Each of our two political parties wants the dominant number of those representatives, so their party can wield the power of the people. To win back the White House, Republicans want to push voter reform backward. They want to make it harder to vote, hiding their true intentions under the guise of election security. Republicans believe that a larger voter turnout favors Democrats.

That’s a big problem for Republicans, especially after the last election when the pandemic made it problematic to vote in person. When states relaxed the rules that limited absentee and mail-in voting, voter participation increased dramatically. Not helpful to Republicans, but a good indication of the health of our democracy.

I’ve often been disappointed at meager voter turnout in most elections. It bothers me that so many people don’t care enough to vote. The massive voter turnout for the 2020 election was a delightful surprise. Obviously, Republicans were not pleased. The illustration below show just how many restrictive bills Republicans are…

Related posts:

Namespaces are intended for use in environments with many users spread across multiple teams, or projects. Namespaces cannot be nested inside one another and each Kubernetes resource can only be in…

El ser humano como animal social, se ha rodeado de otras especies para desarrollo de su vida desde el principio de los tiempos. Aunque antes la tendencia era imponernos como seres con raciocinio…

We live life on a hedonic treadmill. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus saw this clearly and his writings have never been more relevant and needed.