User:David Schaich/Steven Hill report
From SP Boston
Voting reform advocate Steven Hill of the Center for Voting and Democracy came to Cambridge of Wednesday, 11 October to give a talk on his new book, 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy. A couple dozen people attended the speech, which was moderated by voting rights activist and failed Secretary of the Commonwealth candidate John Bonifaz and was followed by a lengthy question-and-answer session.
In his book and in his talk, Hill promotes reforms such as instant runoff voting (IRV), proportional representation, direct election of the President, public campaign financing, free media time for candidates, and so on. His "ten steps" are:
- Secure the Vote
- Expand Voter Participation
- Increase Voter Choice with Instant Runoff Voting
- Scrap Winner-Take-All Elections
- Direct Election of the President
- Overhaul the U.S. Senate
- Reclaim the Airwaves
- Minimize Money's Role
- Reform the Supreme Court
- Restore Faith in Government
Obviously, each of these slogans contains multiple tasks and facets. For example, "Secure the Vote" includes reforms such as voter-verified recountable paper ballots; firewalls between the manufacturers of voting machines and political parties and candidates; and open-source software for electronic voting machines. "Expand Voter Participation" includes universal voter registration; making election day a holiday; and enfranchising prisoners and ex-cons. And so on down the list.
The talk, which will be rebroadcast on NPR, was held in a church, and I felt a little bit like the choir, since I was familiar with most of these proposals, and have supported many of them for years, even writing an article about IRV and collecting signatures to get nonbinding questions about IRV and PR on ballots. Hill gave a decent summary of many of the issues and options, but I would have liked a bit more discussion on the ways to organize activism around these reforms and put them into practice.
When I first talked with a socialist friend about the talk and my impressions of it, he immediately commented: "None of these reforms seem particularly radical..." The unspoken implication I picked up was that by supporting them I was skirting reformism, considered a Bad Thing by many on the radical left.
I replied that even though these reforms wouldn't immediately establish socialism, I support them nonetheless (well, I don't like the sound of restoring "faith" in government, but most of the others are shoo-ins), because they have the potential to revolutionize American politics. By making people's votes matter more, reforms such as proportional representation would increase interest and participation in politics, including socialist politics. By ending the possibility of "spoiling" elections, left-wing candidates will be able to become more than protest votes. By minimizing the role of money in elections, dissident voices will have a better chance of being heard and policies can better be judged on their merits rather than the amount of noise being generated by their supporters.
These reforms would create new opportunities for democratic socialism, for justice and for radical politics to actually play a role in this country. I support them, and I hope my fellow socialists will join me in working to get them enacted.