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Every month since February 1987 the Olympia Fellowship of Reconciliation has produced one-hour TV programs on issues related to peace, social justice, economics, the environment, and nonviolence.

The Olympia FOR’s program airs several times every week (currently every Monday at 1:30 pm, every Wednesday at 5:00 pm, and every Thursday at 9:00 pm) for the entire month on Thurston Community Television (TCTV), channel 22 for Thurston County’s cable TV subscribers. You can see TCTV’s current schedule at .

You can also watch the program described below (and more than 160 of our previous monthly interview programs and also many special programs at the Olympia FOR’s website, . Simply click the “TV programs” link, scroll down, and click the program you want to watch. Many of our website’s TV program listings also include links to documentssummarizing the program in Word and/or .pdf format.

July 2017

“Reform Elections! Restore Democracy!”

Please invite more people to watch this interview and/or read the thorough summary(which you’re reading now) at the “TV Programs” part of .

 See many sources of information at the end of this document.

NOTE: This summary includes few pieces of relevant information we did not have time to include during the one-hour TV interview.

by Glen Anderson, this TV series’ producer and host

For more than 30 years the Olympia Fellowship of Reconciliation’s TV series has explored a wide variety of issues related to peace, social and economic justice, the environment, and nonviolent social change. We especially provide opportunities for the public to hear voices and viewpoints that are rarely heard in mainstream media.

Our July2017 TV program explores how our nation conducts elections. We identify several kinds of problems and propose solutions that would increase democracy and fairness.

The U.S. officially brags about being the world’s greatest democracy, but:

•Voter turnout in the U.S. is low compared to other nations.

•Rich people and big business fund campaigns that result in governmental corruption.

•Most Americans express disgust that the people we elect do not represent us well.

•People who are already suffer discrimination are also restricted from voting.

•Other problems exist too.

Three guests share their information and insights into the problems and solutions. All three guests are active with non-profit organizations that are working to reform elections and improve democracy:

•Bre Weider is active with the Washington Voting Justice Coalition.

•Colin Cole is active with Fair Vote Washington.

•Cindy Black is active with Fix Democracy First.

We started by mentioning a few problems that have been hurting the U.S.’s electoral democracy.

In addition to the problems Glen mentioned when introducing this program, Colinsaid that many people do not feel good about our electoral system.

  • A great many of our congressional districts are not competitive, so people can predict five years ahead of time which party will win those seats for Congress.
  • Sometimes people are elected without winning a majority of votes.

Bre said there is a general sense that our electoral system is not working for most people. This is even worse in communities of color, where people traditionally have been marginalized. For example, Bre (who is African American) said her grandmother was not allowed to vote until she was almost 30 years old. Bre said historical trauma is built into the system, and it was amplified during this past election. Glen agreed that “the people who get picked on are getting picked on worse and worse in every possible way, including the electoral system.”

We did not have time during the interview for Glen to mention that the two big political parties have their own internal screwiness. Their internal politics and procedures resulted in nominating two horribly unpopular presidential candidates in 2016. Public opinion polling kept showing that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had extremely high negative ratings – they were two of the nation’s most unpopular politicians – but the two big parties chose them anyway. The two big political parties’ internal screwiness would go beyond the scope of this interview’s topic, but Glen believes this is an important part of the problem in our nation’s dysfunctional electoral system.

What core values should drive the significant changes we must make in electoral systems?

In order to solve problems in any aspect of public policy, Glen said we should start by identifying our core values – the basic principles that should guide our public policy decisions – so we can devise solutions that will be ethical and deeply satisfying. Bre said honesty is the first core values that she thought of. People feel that our electoral system is not honest. She also affirmed fairness so people will feel that voting will represent their values and interests. We also need equity. She said people of color are 30% of our nation’s population, but they are not adequately represented in governmental bodies, nor are women adequately represented. Glen agreed and said governmental bodies are top-heavy with lawyers, business people and rich people. We are short on poets and social workers. Bre affirmed that we need more kinds of diversity in addition to the typical ways we think about diversity. She said we need diversity of thought too. More teachers, social workers, firefighters, etc., would broaden the quality of thinking across the spectrum, and this would enrich our democracy. Currently, she said, a person must be rich [or have rich pals] in order to get elected.

Let’s understand “Corporate Personhood.”

In just a few minutes, when we talk about how we finance election campaigns, the concept of “corporate personhood” would be arising, so Cindy helped us understand now what “corporate personhood” means. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1886 extended 14th Amendment protections to corporations in addition to protecting human beings. Now we have seen corporations use the “corporate personhood” concept to claim rights that really should be only for human beings. This has significantly changed the functioning of our economy, our government and our elections.

Glen said that people can learn more about this, by watching an interview about this for the March 2011 program in the Olympia FOR’s TV series. You can watch it through the Olympia Fellowship of Reconciliation’s website, . Visit , click “TV Programs,” and scroll down to March 2011. Click the program title, “Real Democracy, Not Corporate Personhood.” Next to that link is a link to a .pdf document summarizing what we said during that interview.

The way elections are financed makes the corruption worse.

To help us understand how elections are financed now, Cindy mentioned an interesting memo written by Lewis Powell in 1971, shortly before Nixon nominated him for the U.S. Supreme Court, where he continued a pro-business career. In 1971 Powell wrote a confidential memorandum for the US Chamber of Commerce, one of the most powerful organizations supporting big business. Cindy explained that the Powell Memo urged big business owners and executives to become more politically involved in order to advance their capitalistic interests. In the 1960s our nation’s social justice issues were becoming more prominent, so Powell urged big business to become more politically active so they could advance business interests more vigorously at all levels of government. Indeed, business has worked hard and gained much political power over laws, regulations, and government in general.

People talk about how “dark money” corrupts elections. Cindy explained the term “dark money” and how it corrupts our elections. She said the money is “dark” because we don’t know where it comes from. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, “Super PACs” emerged as ways to funnel much money from unknown sources to influence elections. These “Super PACs” hide the sources – which could be from big business corporations or other countries or who-knows-where, so the public does not know who is buying our elections.

Glen said every time we come up with some reform to promote honesty, other people figure out ways to get around those reforms and get back to corrupt business-as-usual. Cindy had mentioned “Super PACs,” which got around the previous reform of “PACs.” Unless we the people reassert public integrity, the special interests will continue corrupting the system.

Indeed, a sequence of U.S. Supreme Court decisions have increased the power of big money’s domination of our elections? A moment ago we mentioned the 2010 Citizens United decision, but few people remember the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which, Cindy said, had declared that spending on election is a form of constitutionally protected “free speech.” Cindy said the 2014 McCutcheon v. FEC decision allowed rich people to spend as much as they want, exempt from any legal limits.

Colin added that some of the reforms are far too weak. He mentioned a Peabody Award-winning piece by Stephen Colbert that had lambasted the ways in which Super PACs circumvent the rules that tried to prevent corruption.

Glen added that the federal government’s ability to limit corruption has been severely limited. The Federal Election Commission has been prevented from functioning. This independent regulatory agency was created to enforce laws regarding federal elections, but the Republican Party has prevented it from doing its job. Also, when Trump took power he simply waived the ethical rules that would have impaired the corruption that his appointees are rampantly practicing.

We must seriously reform how we finance elections.

People have been working for public funding nationwide and in various state and local government levels. We need to strengthen those efforts and pass serious reforms. For a number of years here in Washington State, we had a non-profit group, Washington Public Campaigns, which was working for public funding. That group evolved into Fix Democracy First, the organization that Cindy works with.

Colin summarized basic information about public funding of campaigns. He said it is not a radical idea. Other countries avoid the kind of corruption that plagues our elections by funding election campaigns through taxes. A few local parts of the U.S. (including Seattle) use public funding too. Public funding allows more diverse people (not only the rich or those with rich supporters) to run for office. It reduces the “pay to play” corruption in which rich people and corporations dominate governmental decision-making.

Amend the Constitution to establish: (1) Corporations are not people; and (2) Money is not speech.

Supreme Court decisions have been assuming that “corporate personhood” is a valid concept, and that it’s OK for big money to fund campaigns. The only way to fix those two systemic problems would be to amend the U.S. Constitution to explicitly say that corporations are not persons and that money is not speech.

Cindy said many Constitutional amendments were enacted in order to correct various problems that the Supreme Court had been allowing (e.g., poll taxes that required people to pay to vote, and laws preventing women from voting). Cindy said we need a 28th Amendment to the Constitution in order to abolish “corporate personhood” and to affirm that money is not speech. Glen said Cindy’s organization is part of a nationwide movement to accomplish this.

Cindy said more and more states are passing resolutions or initiatives putting their states on record calling for this reform. In November 2016 Washington State became the 18th state to do this (by an initiative passed by voters), and this year Nevada became the 19th state to go on record (through legislative action). One way to amend the Constitution is to have Congress begin the process, and that’s what these states are promoting. The other way is through Article V of the Constitution, which would call a constitutional convention, but that Glen said that would be extremely risky because that would open up the danger to changing the Constitution in many, many dangerous ways. Some elements of the right wing are urging an Article V constitutional convention so they could rewrite the Constitution to become extremely right-wing.

Cindy said several bills in Congress would be good remedies to accomplish our goals, including House Joint Resolution 48, which calls for amending the Constitution in good ways.

Glen said people have been experimenting with different kinds of wording to accomplish our goals, and some have been converging upon similar wording to make it easier to move through Congress. Cindy agreed that the language is still being debated.

Ranked-Choice Voting = Instant Runoff Voting

Colin said one problem in our electoral system is that sometimes people are elected even though they did not receive a majority of votes. He said the U.S. uses “first-past-the-post” voting in which the person who gets the most votes (a plurality, not necessarily a majority) wins. But this means that when multiple people are running, some persons get elected without an actual majority of votes.

For example, in the current race for Mayor of Seattle, 21 candidates are running, and the two with the largest numbers of votes will advance to the general election. It is possible that the candidates in the general election will be persons who each got only 15% of the votes in the primary (with 85% voting against them). This is not very democratic.

Glen said the State of Maine suffered with this for many years. Their governor has been elected and re-elected with only slightly more than 1/3 of the votes in a 3-way race. He is a widely disliked, mean-spirited extremist, but the decent, fair-minded people split between two other decent, fair-minded candidates, so this widely disliked extremist keeps getting elected, even though he keeps getting just a little more than 1/3 of the votes. Colin said in 2016 he got 37% of the votes.

In November 2016 Maine’s voters chose to use “ranked-choice voting” for future elections for governor, statewide offices, and the U.S. House and Senate.

The remedy is called “Ranked-Choice Voting” (RCV) or “Instant Runoff Voting” (IRV). Instead of having a primary followed by a general election, voters can do this in one step (an “instant runoff”) by ranking the candidates in order of preference.

Colin explained how this is actually simpler than it might sound at first. He said people rank their preferences in many aspects of our daily lives (e.g., when deciding with friends which restaurant to visit). This should be an intuitive aspect of voting.

However, our current voting system causes people to vote against candidates they don’t like, not just the candidates they do like. Colin said our current system hurts people at all places across the political spectrum. Examples:

  • In 1992, some people who really liked Ross Perot did not dare to vote for him in the general election because they were afraid Perot would be a “spoiler” taking votes away from the older George H.W. Bush and leading to the election of Bill Clinton.
  • In 2000, some people who really liked Ralph Nader did not dare to vote for him in the general election because they were afraid Nader would be a “spoiler” taking votes away from Al Gore and leading to the election of George W. Bush.

Our current system means that if you vote for the candidate you think is best you’ll actually cause the election of the candidate you think is worst! In the two examples above, RCV or IRV would have allowed voters to avoid the spoiler effect: a 1992 voter could have ranked Perot #1, Bush #2, and Clinton #3; and a 2000 voter to rank Nader #1, Gore #2, and Bush #3. Colin said, “In a democracy you should be able to vote for the candidate you like the most without feeling bad about it.”

Glen explained ranking several candidates. The candidate getting the fewest number of votes is eliminated, and those voters’ votes are transferred to their second-ranked candidate. When votes are re-tallied, whichever candidate is on the bottom now is eliminated, and the votes for that candidate are reallocated to the voters’ next choices. Eventually, bottom-ranking candidates are eliminated until one candidate remains who is acceptable to a majority of voters.

Colin said a number of organizations around the country use this method for their own internal elections. So do a number of cities and counties. Starting now, the State of Maine will use this method too.

One nice side-effect of RCV or IRV is that it reduces the amount of negative campaigning. Candidates want to be chosen as 2nd choice or 3rd choice, so instead of slinging mud at competitors, candidates discuss the issues in substantive ways in order to gain support from other candidates’ voters as an alternative even if not their first choice. This is better than negative campaigning. Colin says research has shown that in Minneapolis and St. Paul, which use this method, negative campaigning has indeed decreased. He says that if a candidate is doorbelling and sees a competitor’s yard sign, this candidate can still visit that house and ask to be that voter’s second choice in case their first choice loses. This increases civility and democracy, and it reduces the political polarization that plagues our nation.