[LWVNM Action] Scholars Ask Congress to Scrap Winner-Take-All Political System

[Barbara Calef]

This was Lonna Atkeson's recommendation (and Kathy Campbell's as well).

Barbara

On Tue, Sep 20, 2022 at 9:57 AM Kathleen Burke via Action <
action at mailman.swcp.com> wrote:

> Excerpted from the New York Times, here below from the Election Law Blog:
>
> “Scholars Ask Congress to Scrap Winner-Take-All Political System”
> September 20, 2022, 7:53 amalternative voting systemsRICK HASEN
>
> New York Times:
>
> If there’s one thing we know about America’s creaking democracy, it’s
> this: Whenever it seems fundamentally broken, people get together to try to
> fix it.
>
> That’s happening now. We’re living through one of the United States’
> periodic bursts of reformist energy, with various groups pushing to alter
> the structure of our elections even as — or rather because — millions of
> voters on both sides of our partisan divide question the integrity of the
> system.
>
> The latest entry is a roster of more than 200 American political
> scientists who have put forward a sweeping proposal to change the way the
> United States has conducted its federal elections for nearly 250 years.
>
> In a sharply written open letter to Congress
> <https://medium.com/@scholars-redistricting-reform/open-letter-to-congress-to-end-single-member-congressional-districts-and-adopt-proportional-97ad1cf6aa2e> published
> on Monday and shared in advance with The New York Times, the scholars tell
> lawmakers, “It is clear that our winner-take-all system — where each U.S.
> House district is represented by a single person — is fundamentally
> broken.” They call on Congress to “adopt inclusive, multimember districts
> with competitive and responsive proportional representation.”
>
> The list of signatories includes nine of the 18 living U.S.-based winners
> of the Johan Skytte Prize, a prestigious Swedish award that has become a
> kind of unofficial Nobel for political science: Robert Axelrod, Francis
> Fukuyama, Peter J. Katzenstein, Robert Keohane, David D. Laitin, Margaret
> Levi, Arend Lijphart, Philippe C. Schmitter and Rein Taagepera.
> “Our arcane, single-member districting process divides, polarizes and
> isolates us from each other,” the professors write. “It has effectively
> extinguished competitive elections for most Americans, and produced a
> deeply divided political system that is incapable of responding to changing
> demands and emerging challenges with necessary legitimacy.”
>
>
>
>
> *Kathleen M. Burke*
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Action mailing list
> Action at mailman.swcp.com
> https://mailman.swcp.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/action
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.swcp.com/pipermail/action/attachments/20220920/7c3af505/attachment.htm>