Political Frenzy

I received a letter today, and decided to share it with all of you!

Dear Al-Attack,
I wonder what is going on with the voter fraud front. It seems we heard alot about it in 2000, 2002, again in 2004, but when the democrats took both houses in 2006 the howls of voter fraud quieted down. Can you enlighten me on this subject o’ wise one?

I have heard no specific allegations from anyone, so I can’t form an opinion or whether or not there were voter frauds in the 2006 Congressional elections. Although I do believe that voter fraud wasn’t the problem with the last elections - it was a matter of poor organization, bad tallying systems, and a hugely incompetent structure.

Americans, as I have recently pointed out, are so eager for their problems to be an epic battle against good and evil that the failing structure of an outmoded system gets pinned to a specific person. No one “rigged” anything, the problems arose from trying to use a system designed for a few million people in an election for hundreds of millions of people. Jeffersonian Democracy is failing under the weight of parties (Thomas Jefferson himself expressed the belief that political parties were the enemy of democracy, and the US electoral system was designed without them in mind) and the massive population of the American people.

If, dear author of the letter, you are trying to imply a liberal cover-up of a Democratic plot to fraud their way into the house of Congress, I’d have to say I believe that even less than I believe Bush and crew rigged their elections. Although Bush’s first election was quite suspicious, the last one was little more than a systematic break down.

Although I may be labeled unpatriotic, I see two possible options to solve this problem: either implement a Parliamentary system, or outlaw parties. You see, in the original vision of Jeffersonian democracy, each region picked a representative from its best and brightest to go to Washington. Now we vote for a party, one of two usually. Instead of the more than a half-dozen candidates of our nation’s earliest eras, any one district will have three candidates on average. If we assume that the Democratic and Republican candidates are the only ones who are likely to win in any given district, and then assume that forty-five percent of every single voting district’s registered voters are ardent Democrats and the other fifty-five percent are staunch Republicans, we will, by Jeffersonian Democracy, arrive at a one-hundred percent Republican government.

Although I know this could never happen, it is a perfect example of how Jeffersonian Democracy and political parties are completely incompatible. Now take into consideration the massive numbers of people in the United States currently, and we have a serious problem.

Under a Parliament, if only 12% of the voters vote for some party, they still will receive a seat at the table. That is representation, that is democracy. We have a system in place that ignores the minority, and encourages the tyranny of the majority. And to those who would claim I’m anti-American for saying all this, I counter that America is not the way we make laws, but how we use them. America is not who is president, but who is living under them. It’s American to want a better way, and anti-American to want them to stay so obviously wrong.

Election, Jeffersonian Democracy, Letters, Parliament