REFORM MOVEMENT
Restoring our democracy to a vibrant state of health is going to require the 21st century equivalent of the Progressive Movement of a century ago. Many individuals and organizations are already hard at work on strengthening democratic institutions and practices
Here are a few of the specific arenas where a 21st century democratic reform movement is gaining momentum:
ELECTIONS
Nothing is more fundamental to democracy than the rules governing the election of officials. If the people are not in charge of their own election rules, they are not a self-governing people. Between them, the political parties and the Supreme Court have created a system of endless, viciously negative, money-dominated campaigns that bear no resemblance to what ordinary people would create if they were in charge. But there are hopeful signs of reform at the local and state level that you can follow and help us track here.
CAMPAIGN FINANCE
For several decades now, culminating in the 2010 Citizens United decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has been taking control of more and more key features of our election process out of the hands of the people and their elected representatives, substituting its own laws for theirs. Because SCOTUS has given its activist doctrines constitutional status, the work of reclaiming democratic control over this crucial arena is especially challenging, but more and more citizens are uniting in this work, and we will not rest until it is accomplished.
REDISTRICTING
Whenever they can, parties influence the drawing of congressional and legislative district lines in a way that optimizes the party’s chances of winning and holding a majority of the seats representing those districts. As a result, Congress and many state legislatures have come to be dominated by ideological purists from both ends of the spectrum, out of all proportion to the actual numbers of such ideologues among the citizenry. But the people are getting fed up with this, and they are beginning to reclaim citizen control of the redistricting process.
ELECTORAL COLLEGE
The mechanism we use to elect our president gives disproportionate voting power to less populous states and to a small handful of “swing states.” The 2016 election, where the candidate who lost the popular vote by over three million votes but still won the White House, is only the most recent and egregious example of the problem. Abolishing the Electoral College would take a constitutional amendment, but there are other effective steps we can take to begin repairing or replacing this archaic process.
