And we do not.
Of course it is easier to be one of the happiest nations in the world when a nation is relatively small and more homogenous. Nevertheless, the Swedes truly enjoy their political freedom whereas we do not. And that is not all.
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First the political reality of Sweden. Voters vote in the system Thomas Jefferson first devised. Every portion of the voters is more or less expressed with the same portion in the house of representatives, the Riksdag. As such, the Swedes have a pro-portion-al voting system.
- As we all know, we only have winner-take-all.
This is a major distinction, giving the Swedes nearly twice as much power over their representatives than we have. Their representatives need to listen carefully to the voters — or they are gone for good. Our representatives can stay on till they are old and worn out.
Our politicians do not need to listen to the voters all that strongly:
In our voting booths, many folks end up going home empty-handed, not receiving representation with the one they wanted. Let’s put that at 40%, so 60% of the voters picked the winner.
Then, the winners make a decision among themselves, let’s put that at 60% as well.
- 60% x 60% = 36%, obviously this is minority rule.
In Sweden, the voters pick the one they want and in the Riksdag with 349 members that means that 99.71% of the Swedish voters will get the one person or the party they desired to represent them.
If these representatives make a decision among themselves of 60% support, then that is majority rule.
- 99.71% x 60% = 59.83%, indeed majority rule.
This way, you can see that the Swedish voters are in control a lot more than we are. In this specific example, the Swedish voters are 66.7% more empowered than we are (36% x 1.667 = that 59.83%).
But that’s not all, folks.
The Swedes do not have a President and a Senate and a House. The Swedes have just the Riksdag.
Sweden has a unicameral political system.
At no point will a Swedish voter have her one vote fight with her one vote.
We, on the other hand, we have our vote for the Presidency fight with our vote for the Senate, and these votes are fighting with our vote for the House as well.
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‘We The People’
The Framers only declared that the Federal elections should be restricted. They specifically told us how to vote, but they did so only for the Federal level.
Then, the Framers wrote in the Fourteenth Amendment:
- No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.
They made sure therefore that we would have ‘We The People’ at all other levels, even when they themselves did not provide that ultimate level of political freedom for Federal elections.
In short, the Framers said to the States: ‘Do as we say, not as we do.’
The individual States, however, pulled out their middle finger and abridged our privileges anyway. Instead of using Thomas Jefferson’s clean voting system that optimizes representation, they restricted representation by using winner-take-all, the system that takes away 66.7% of the power of the voters.
- Worse, the States restricted local elections by ignoring the Fourteenth Amendment here as well.
At no point do we have Thomas Jefferson’s clean voting system. We are always restricted in our political expressions at all levels.
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To make sure the following is obvious:
- When a voter goes home empty-handed, then this voting cannot be called a privilege.
- When a voter is represented by a person the voter did not vote for, then this voting cannot be called a privilege.
The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees us our privileges.
Recap:
At the Federal level, everything is fine as put in place.
Yet underneath the Federal level, we should be a nation with political freedom. We should be ‘We The People’ as proclaimed and today we are not at any governmental level.
Sweden has ‘We The People’ and we do not.
