What would you like to change about your situation or about the laws in your country?

answer:

I’d make the right to vote, and to have your vote count equally with all your peers for all purposes, be part of the constitution. (I’d also add details to specify this, because while these are things guarunteed by the US consitution as interpreted, they are enforced on such a low level that they might as well not even be there).

This means that representatives would have to be chosen via choice voting, with multiple winners allocated proportionally (IRV or some other similarly good tabulation system) over large areas — eliminating the two-party system, gerrymandering, and “permanent” seats.

It means that ballot access (ie “primary” elections) would also be decided by a similar system; of course, parties could hold their own primaries to determine the party choices for various areas, but who made it onto the ballot would have to be based on a non-denominational universal primary, so everyone had the same amount of say in who the finalists were.

It means that it was the active right for people to vote — unstrippable via any means short of giving up citizenship voluntarily or via treason, and the active duty of the government to make sure everyone of age could vote in any general election (including primaries) without having to register months in advance.

And yeah — it would mean that the Presidential election (the only truly national election) would end up being a direct democracy via choice voting, making it unlikely that anyone hated by more than 50% of the population ever being elected again to the office vanishingly unlikely. (I’d be willing to compromise by preserving the skeleton of the electoral college system; prorating ballots from each state based on the state’s current electoral college representation thus preserving the existing unfairness and not giving advantages to states that have a much higher voting rate than others), but an actual electoral college is incompatable with choice voting at a national level, so that would have to go.

Since a government’s right to govern is granted by the people, it is of absolute necessity that the government legitimately is elected -by- the people. All else is secondary; a government that does not represent its people rules illegitimately and is far more vulnerable to every excess than one that is truly representative.

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Explanation:

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