#election reform

[godisarepublican]

[reasonsforhope]

South Australia introduces ‘world-leading’ bill to ban political donations from elections

Premier says move will end the ‘nexus between money and political power’ and challenges state and federal counterparts to follow suit

"The South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, has announced plans to ban political donations from state elections, paving the way for nation-leading electoral reforms.

The state’s electoral amendment bill announced on Wednesday [June 12, 2024] night will ban electoral donations and gifts to registered political parties, members of parliament and candidates. The state will provide funding to allow parties and candidates to contest elections, run campaigns and promote political ideas.

Malinauskas said his bill would put South Australia on the “cusp of becoming a world leader in ending the nexus between money and political power”.

“We want money out of politics. We know this is not easy. These reforms may well face legal challenge,” Malinauskas said.

“But we are determined to deliver them, with this bill to be introduced in the parliament in the near future.”

In a subtle challenge to his federal and state counterparts, the premier told Guardian Australia he thought it was “something that democracies everywhere should be pursuing”.

The Albanese government pledged to introduce spending and donation caps, and truth in political advertising laws, as revealed by Guardian Australia after the 2022 federal election and confirmed by a parliamentary inquiry that reported last July.

The special minister of state, Don Farrell, said last month an agreement between the major parties and the crossbench had not yet been reached. An amendment bill is still expected by the middle of the year.

In order to level the playing field for newly created parties and independent candidates, the South Australia bill will allow candidates to receive donations up to $2,700, although they will remain subject to campaign spending caps.

Those spending caps have been set at $100,000, multiplied by the number of candidates up to a maximum of $500,000.

If the bill is passed, a registered political party will be entitled to a one-off payment of $200,000 before 31 August 2026. Whichever is lower out of $700,000 or the number of party members of parliament multiplied by $47,000 will also be given to parties for operational funding.

Membership fees will be allowed to continue but will be capped at $100 or less a year.

To deter attempts to circumvent the proposed changes, a maximum penalty of $50,000 or 10 years’ imprisonment will apply.

The guide acknowledges the proposal would lead to a rise in the cost of South Australia’s electoral system, but says a tightening of expenditure and party registration rules will keep costs to a minimum.

The Albanese government is under crossbench pressure to introduce electoral reforms before the next federal election.

Lower house independents, including Kate Chaney, Zali Steggall, the Greens, David Pocock, Lidia Thorpe and the Jacqui Lambie Network, joined forces to introduce a bill for fair and transparent elections in March [2024].

The bill contained a suite of reforms including truth-in-political advertising, a ban on donations from socially harmful industries including fossil fuels, and tightening the definition of gifts to capture major party fundraisers, including dinners and business forums."

-via The Guardian, March 18, 2024

[onlytiktoks]

[hale-my-nathan]

Trump Weird News - Election Reform Bill - Share To Support It !!!

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Yukon Party government quashes opposition bid for electoral reform | CBC News

A Yukon NDP motion called on the government to implement electoral reform, but the Yukon Party says it won't commit any more time or money t

The new Yukon Party government says it won’t commit any more time to the question of electoral reform. A motion from the Yukon NDP renewed the topic in the legislative assembly on Wednesday. The motion asked the government to drop the current first-past-the-post system, and replace it with a ranked-ballot system.  During Wednesday’s debate, Yukon NDP Leader Kate White said this would honour the results of the plebiscite on election day that saw 58 per cent of voters say yes to a ranked ballot system. “Yukoners want to do something different,” White said. “They want to have a system that is more representative of their voices." 

Read more.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[fandomsandfeminism]

Whenever you see anyone crowing about election fraud and election security, there's a question to consider:

Do you support democracy and free, fair elections because you think democracy and free, fair elections are a societal good; or do you support democracy because sometimes the candidates and ballot measures you like win?

[justinspoliticalcorner]

America Needs a Bold Constitutional Reconstruction Agenda to Tame Presidential Powers

Fundamental flaws in our parliamentary rules, courts, and electoral system made our country vulnerable to an authoritarian takeover

Andy Craig at The UnPopulist:

Donald Trump’s second term is not merely a crisis of leadership, policy, or ideology—it is a structural crisis, one that exposes deep flaws in the constitutional order itself. For years, these flaws have been accumulating pressure, patched over with short-term fixes and the inertia of tradition. Now the contradictions have grown too large, and the system has reached a breaking point. At its core, the American liberal order has relied on oaths: to uphold the Constitution, to preserve the rule of law, and to honor democratic norms. These oaths are not just trivial ceremonies. The substantive commitment they signify is carried out in practice, in ways big and small that build and maintain the whole edifice. Imperfectly and with exceptions, those who have taken that oath have mostly meant it and attempted to follow it. But what happens when the system’s most powerful office is occupied by someone for whom the oath is meaningless? A presidency built on hierarchical command and consolidated authority over the executive branch, once intended to be checked by a web of institutional balances, has instead become a tool for personalist rule and authoritarian ambition. If American liberal democracy is to survive, it must do more than weather Trump’s second term and the constitutional omni-crisis it has provoked. It must confront the structural defects that made this collapse possible, and correct them with the same boldness that characterized past eras of constitutional reconstruction, including the original drafting and ratification of our supreme law of the land. The Constitution must be saved from itself, as it was intended to be.

Turnkey Tyranny

The U.S. presidency is a glaring outlier in global democracy. Its immense concentration of executive power creates a brittle system where democratic legitimacy hinges on the character of one individual. When that individual rejects the very premise of accountability and oaths to the Constitution, the system offers few effective remedies. Impeachment, designed as the ultimate check on presidential misconduct, has failed in practice. Partisan loyalties overpower constitutional obligations, rendering the process politically toxic and practically impossible. A more glaring demonstration could not be imagined than Trump’s acquittal in the second impeachment trial, with 57 senators voting to convict but still short of the two-thirds needed. The ban on insurrectionists holding public office, carefully and deliberately crafted in the 14th Amendment, has likewise proven unworkable when courts and political institutions lack the will to enforce it. The issue is not just Trump, but the structural incentives that allow and even encourage figures like him to rise. A presidency that blends the roles of head of state and head of government grants an aura of legitimacy and dominance that parliamentary or collegial executive systems diffuse among multiple offices. This makes the executive branch inherently prone to demagoguery, populism, and personalist rule. The concern did not go unnoticed at the constitutional convention. Edmund Randolph objected that the proposed presidency would be “the foetus of monarchy.” Charles Pinckney feared an overpowered chief executive would become “a monarchy, of the worst kind, to wit an elective one.” Benjamin Franklin urged the assembled delegates to carefully consider the issue, “a point of great importance.”

But these concerns did not carry the day, perhaps colored by how the delegates debated under the gaze of George Washington, presiding over the convention, understood by all to be first in line to head the new government. It might have been the most consequential decision the convention made, and the test of time has proven it to be a grave miscalculation. To address this flaw, reforms must decentralize power within the executive branch and return the partisan policy-making arena to Congress where it belongs. A Westminster-style parliamentary system has its own drawbacks and would be too foreign to the American tradition, but less radical reforms could still check the chief executive while preserving our historical attachment to the job title. To ensure that our head of state is not practically exempt from but subject to the law, powers must be arranged so that the law can actually be enforced on our highest office. The lawless notion that presidents enjoy near-absolute immunity from criminal prosecution must be repudiated, eventually by constitutional amendment if need be. Impeachment should be made a more effective threat, perhaps by lowering the two-thirds threshold required for conviction in the Senate, though not necessarily to a mere simple majority. Officers impeached by the House could also be suspended from office pending the outcome of the trial, as we have recently seen used to good effect in South Korea. And within the executive branch, key officials should have not just the theoretical duty but the practical ability to refuse unlawful presidential orders—to at least tap the brakes until other institutions such as the courts can weigh in.

Correcting the Court

At the core of our Constitution’s crisis of structural misalignment is the catastrophic decline of the Supreme Court. With lifetime tenure and appointments tied to the happenstance timing of deaths and the partisan gaming of strategically timed retirements, the court has become unbound from its intended democratic accountability. The judiciary serves as an independent check on the other two branches, and the American model of strong judicial review has accomplished great things. But the court is still ultimately supposed to be a lagging indicator of election results over time, for president and Senate.

This careful balancing act of judicial independence and democratic accountability has been failing to work as intended. And there are good reasons to want reform even if you prefer a more conservative and originalist court, as the status quo both erodes the quality of the court’s output and fuels a crisis of legitimacy which is careening toward a breaking point. The fix needed is a simple one with broad support: ditch life tenure for a lengthy fixed term, with seats coming up on a predictable, known schedule. If appointments to the nine-member court were distributed evenly across presidential terms—say, two per term, with each justice serving 18 years—the court at the start of Trump’s second term would have a 6-3 Democratic-appointed majority, reflecting that Democrats have won three of the five presidential elections from 2004 to 2020. Of these, one from each party’s president would have been appointed while the other party held the Senate, assuming one justice appointed before and after the midterms. Once common, a justice has not been nominated and confirmed under such divided control in more than 30 years. With seats coming open on a regular schedule, there would be less incentive for partisan obstruction and deadlock over any one nominee. The incentives change when both parties know the shoe will be on the other foot soon enough. By the end of his second term, Trump would have replaced one Bush and one Obama appointee, resulting in a 5-4 balance, in line with the fact that Democrats have won three of the preceding five elections, from 2008 to 2024. Under the staggered appointment schedule, no president would appoint more than four justices (except in the unusual case of a two-term president filling a premature vacancy, who would only hold the seat for the unexpired remainder of that justice’s term). [...]

This system must be overhauled. Proportional representation, ranked-choice voting, increasing the size of the House, fusion voting, and nonpartisan primaries all offer ways to open the political arena to new voices, put some play in the joints of the two-party system, and restore genuine representation of the broader electorate. Any of these ideas can be debated, but they all share the same broad goal, and experimentation at the state and local level is worthwhile. Here is where our federalist “laboratories of democracy” can shine, providing important lessons and potential models to follow nationwide, while misfired attempts can be discarded. Electoral reform is not a fringe issue; it is the foundation for rebuilding democratic legitimacy and responsiveness. Some reforms can be achieved by statute without the need for constitutional amendment. Others can be enacted by simply giving states freedom to experiment, serving as laboratories of democracy in the search for better systems of representation.

There are definite fixes that America should consider: 18-year term limits for SCOTUS justices, removing Presidential immunity, and an overhaul of the first-past-the-post system.

[magma-bunny]

I know there is a lot going on in US politics right now, but there is always a lot going on in US politics, so whatever, yelling into the void about it now: Puerto Rico should have seats in the US House of Representatives.

Puerto Rico is not a state, so they don't get seats in the Senate. Fine, whatever, if that's the game, that's the rules. (They've voted in favor of statehood in 2024, 2020, 2017, and 2012, and we're still not seeing movement on that point.) But the House is based on population, and Puerto Rico is populated by US citizens who have been US citizens for their entire lives. A lot of US citizens, actually. Like, substantially more citizens than a dozen states. If Puerto Rico was fairly awarded the representation they should have based on their population in the 2020 census, they would be entitled to FOUR seats in the House. Note that if you're in to that sort of thing, that would also mean four electors in the electoral college.

This logic would also entitle Washington DC to one voting seat in the House. I know how much those guys complain about not getting a voice in politics over there. Taxation Without Representation and all that. None of the other US territories even come close, all of them together would total about half a chair.

For whatever reason, seats in the House are capped at 435, so under current rules this would mean a few other states lose a representative to make up the difference. This may also have something to do with congress dragging their feet on admitting PR as a state. Fuck em. Let Puerto Rico participate in government. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.