That is great, Sarah. I appreciate your thoughts on this.

I embrace parties, but only when they can come about in their natural numbers. In San Francisco there are 11 supervisors and they are all registered democrats.

I found a municipality in the Netherlands with 11 elected board members, and there were four parties in total, three that also operate at the national level and one that is a local party.

* Naturally, when the system is based on equal representation, then the parties are nothing but the expression of that power base.

* Same here, the one party in full control is nothing but the expression of the power base.

I hope you see that the power base in both examples are distinct. The power base in the Netherlands is the voters. It all begins and ends with the voters.

Here, the setup is such that there cannot be a natural outcome. The process is guided. If our democracy here is one big political factory, then there are just two doors through which the majority of voters can enter (and the minority is rejected).

In the Netherlands, the political factory has as many doors and windows to enter until 99.3 percent of the voters is guaranteed access. That percentage is the minimum and is in reality higher. Close to every voter can point their finger to the person or party they hand-picked themselves, sitting in one of the seats.

Voting minorities of as little as two-thirds of one percent can get their representative sitting at the table, though this number is based on the total number of seats.

In our system, the minimum win is in general 50 percent for any and all seats (100/2 x 1).

But already with two seats in total, the other system improves that minimum number to 66.67 percent (100/3 x 2).

For three seats, the minimum is 75 percent (100/4 x 3).

In San Francisco with 11 seats, the minimum would be more than 90 percent (100/12 x 11) and not the crummy 50 percent we have today.

The struggle is here such that anything that establishes a distinction (that can turn a candidate into a loser) is exploited to the max by the opponents. The dirt does not need to be real dirt to stick. What can be exploited is what exists inside (the majority of) people about race, gender, sexual preference, the whole list and then in both directions (too much, too little), whatever sways the majority of the voters.

As last comment therefore that our politicians here are on average ten years older than the politicians in the other form of democracy. The incumbents here have a tremendous advantage that they have been vetted already and are better known. In the other system of democracy, the voters and their political ideals are more important than the political candidate (and the candidate is therefore also more easily replaced by another candidate with the same political ideals).

The empowerment is the issue, and we are not fully emancipated yet. We have an 18th century voting system that has been opened up to the max for all (with the current game in place to repress votes when that benefits the other party), and now matter how hard we work to improve this system, it will never be good enough.

Thanks again for your reply. Sorry about my having to respond with all these long replies.

Here is another article I wrote about our voting system here:

https://medium.com/the-national-discussion/and-the-winner-is-the-losing-party-c683c1d739e5