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

[Richard Mason]

 As far as I know the LWV does not have a position on this issue. It would require a study.
Dick Mason
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Barbara Calef via Action <action at mailman.swcp.com>
To: Kathleen Burke <kathleenmariaburke at yahoo.com>; LWVNM Action <action at mailman.swcp.com>
Cc: Barbara Calef <bfcalef at gmail.com>
Sent: Tue, Sep 20, 2022 10:02 am
Subject: Re: [LWVNM Action] Scholars Ask Congress to Scrap Winner-Take-All Political System

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 HASENNew 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 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

_______________________________________________
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/20220920/7425a3ec/attachment.htm>