There is no mentioning in your article about the divide-and-conquer aspect of our voting system.
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One in eight Americans is African American. Three out of 100 Senators are African American and that is actually an all-time high. Our voting system effectively promotes racism.
More than half of us are women and we do not even have half of that half sit in all our seats. Our voting system effectively promotes the suppression of women.
You should write about our voting system because it is the root cause of our not yet being emancipated.
The following explains systematic racism without mentioning it:
In 1996, New Zealand changed its two-party system to incorporate proportional voting. Amazingly, the number of female representatives jumped by a phenomenal 47 percent in the first next new election. This shows real well how the district voting system discriminates. Winner-take-all suppresses large voting minorities. Today, forty percent of the NZ representatives are females. Today, in the US, we have about half that percentage.
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The truth of the matter: Being able to speak the truth at the tables that matter.
This is us, to the left. We are segregated in districts where we have to battle each other for that single seat. This is pure divide-and-conquer.
Voting minorities of as large as 49.9 percent of the voters remain unrepresented; they don’t sit at the tables of decision making, not speaking their truths. Fifty percent plus one vote can dictate the outcome to the unrepresented voting minorities. It doesn’t matter if the voting minority is African American, young adults, women, homosexuals, or white poor for that matter; when not in the majority, no seat is obtained. All these large voting minorities are not represented to the level of their numbers.
To the right in the image above one can see the actual We The People system. As shown in this example of a city council with eight seats, almost 90 percent of the voters are guaranteed that their vote translates into a representative they handpicked themselves. All substantial voting minorities are represented in this better system. Example.
We can retrain the police and remove statues. We can try to make our neighborhood be based on equality. Yet when the city is based on divide-and-conquer, we will never succeed in combating racism.
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When San Francisco moved from At-Large to district voting, the ugly voting system became quite obvious, too. Prior, in the semi-proportional system also known as city-wide, they had 6 men and 5 women in the eleven supervisor seats. After the change to district voting, the city had 10 men and 1 woman in these eleven seats (nice twist: a black woman).
The Democratic Party did their best to fix it up over the years. Wonderful as the board may appear today, the Democratic Machine tried to quickly mask the divide-and-conquer system we have with applying a nice pancake layer of We The People makeup.
It should not be a surprise that the system was changed to the more restricted version. Back then, the Green Party had become a popular party in the Bay Area, getting some of the seats in the region. Today, they are gone. By moving back to district voting, the Democrats made sure that third parties wouldn’t get their seats. Today, all SF supervisors are registered Democrats.
There is a tremendous gap in our democracy. Few recognize it and dream how the usual parties can indeed fix all problems (wake up!). Our future depends on our closing that gap (and this is not done by jumping over the gap and have others deal with that gap when they get to it).
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Let’s not uncover and discard the good parts of our society; let’s fix the ground rules that aggravate racism and ingrain discrimination of all kinds.
The good news is that the US Constitution is already demanding the We The People system for cities and counties. Here is a visual.
A: Federal and State governments are given powers and freedoms.
B: The 14th Amendment demands the better system put in place.
As shown to the left, Federal and State governments received powers (#A) from the US Constitution and they can use that to create themselves some leeway with the demand expressed with #B.
Cities and counties are not even mentioned in the US Constitution, and so they must fully abide by the highest document of the nation. Cities and counties cannot circumvent #B.
States did not receive any rights to hand over power (#A) to third parties within that would then extend their right to ignore #B to the same level as the State. Cities and counties cannot circumvent #B.
Cities and counties must follow #B strictly as declared in the US Constitution. But as you can see in the same visual to the right, they assumed those powers that they do not have. They perpetuate the divide-and-conquer system to a level that constitutionally is not allowed. They should have the We The People system in place, per the highest document in the nation, and not apply it as makeup where they see fit.
Racism may never disappear from the face of the earth. But divide-and-conquer can disappear from the face of the earth, and that will be a wonderful day in our struggle against racism. It will make this a better nation for all of us.
We are a diverse nation and we need to honor all. That is best done when all are able to tell our own truths; we should be able to do that in our natural numbers. We can already demand it, today, for our cities and counties. Proportional voting is part of the foundation of our nation, for it is the better system.
