California Free Press

Ben Franklin and Privatization

Ever since Ronald Reagan, the Republican mantra has been "Privatize, privatize." You're unpatriotic if you don't want everything privatized. Well, who's unAmerican? Not the Founding Fathers who didn't want everything privatized. Take Ben Franklin, for example. Franklin founded the first public library. He was a rich man; he could have founded a private library, but he was public minded. He was that rare breed who thought not only in terms of himself but in terms of doing something to contribute to public welfare. Franklin also founded the first public fire department. He could have founded a private fire department, and in fact there were and are private fire departments only for the use of those who have paid into them. If you're not a member and your house is on fire, tough luck. But old Ben was a public minded citizen.

I would assert that the Republican agenda of privatization is unAmerican, mean spirited and against the grain and the spirit of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers. One of the things the Republicans want to do away with is public education. Now public education serves the function of giving equal opportunity to all regardless of ability to pay. It is paid for at public expense, or in other words by taxation, mainly by local property taxes. This is precisely why the Republicans want to get rid of it. It is socialistic. No, it even goes beyond that: it's communistic. Let me explain. The communist motto,"From each acccording to his (or her) ability (to pay); to each according to his (or her) needs." If a family with 10 children rents a house, they can send all 10 children to public school, and they pay no property taxes so they essentially get a free education. Of course, the landlord, who may not have any children at all, pays property taxes and supports his tenents' childrens' education. This is why the Republicans are so pissed off about it. They want every child to pay for his or her own education while childless couples should not have to pay anything.

This is what I love about public education: it's communist inspired and it was encouraged by the Founding Fathers! Now take health care. Universal health care is an idea whose time has come. In fact it came a long time ago to all the other developed countries of the world. Health care without regard to ability to pay, in other words, socialized medicine. The Republicans are up in arms over this one. First came public libraries, then public fire departments, then public education and now... public health care? What won't they publickize (or socialize, if you prefer) next? That means that rich Republican millionaires and billionaires and gazillionaires may have to contribute to the health and welfare of the hoi polloi. Horrors! Maybe they won't be able to afford $6000. shower curtains, Learjets and air conditioned dog houses any more! 

Now if the Republicans had their way, there would be no public parks, only private parks, no public streets, only private ones, no freeways, only toll roads. If it weren't for Andrew Carnegie, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and a few other rich people, there would be no public anything. Fortunately, all rich people aren't Republicans. And all rich people aren't totally greedy and selfish. But the point is that the government shouldn't be totally greedy, selfish and represent the interests only of the wealthy either. You know it's too bad if a gazillionaire has to pay something for my health care or any other public service. And it's too bad if they have to pay an estate tax when they die. And why should they even receive social security benefits at all if they're worth a gazillion dollars? They shouldn't even be eligible for any public benefits if their net worth exceeds a certain amount. But that's not how the government operates. If you don't really need the government's help, they give it to you because you're rich and you're one of them. If you really need the government's help, forget it because you're poor and you're not one of them. So go fend for yourself!

The problem is that the US is a plutocracy. Lobbyists write the legislation to favor large corporate interests, and they (the corporate interests) give generously to politicians who return the favor by passing legislation they want passed which increases their profits. The politicians spend millions on TV ads trying to brainwash people instead of educating them. Corporate interests spend millions on TV ads to get the populace to support corporate interests and vote against their own interests. The surprising thing: it works! Given a large enough advertising budget, you can get the hoi polloi to vote for and support anything. This is the Brave New World. Already the drug corporate interests are running ads telling people they shouldn't let their politicians mess with the Medicare drug benefit. Why? Because they're making out like bandits, and their profits would diminish somewhat if Medicare could actually bargain with the drug establishment to bring the price of drugs down. So now two years before a Presidential election which might bring about a change in the laws governing Medicare, corporate interests are already trying to convince the public to tell their Representatives not to mess with the drug benefit which is the same as saying vote against your own interests and in favor of ours. How can people be so dumb?

Where is Ben Franklin when we need him or Thomas Jefferson? These Founding Fathers had a public conscience, cared about people other than themselves. Today corporate interests and their political lackeys are trying to convince you that notions of the public interest are unAmerican and a patritotic American should only be interested in reducing taxes and creating a totally privatized world. In fact the opposite is true. Patriotism is not about war and glory; it's about creating a just and caring society. Where is Ben when we need him?

Followup on Ben Botti and Katrina

This is a reprint of an article that appeared in the Montgomery Newspapers, Thursday, March 22, 2007 about our old friend, Wantage CS and Sussex HS alumnus, Ben Botti. We previously reported about Ben's role in helping Katrina disaster victims here.

Matching T-shirts help with solidarity in Pascagoula, Miss. From left are, Jeremy Gates of Phoenixville and First United Methodist Church members Ben Botti, Karyn Fisher, Janet Dietrich, Rogger Stauffer and Pat Stauffer. Not pictured is Barbara Sveen.

West Rockhill resident Ben Botti has kept himself fairly busy in his retirement by working as a travel agent of sorts. But the trips he plans require a lot of emotional preparation before, during and after. He's traveled on quite a few of the trips himself, and experienced the emotions firsthand when he returned from his first trip accompanied by his wife, Amy. "She wanted to sell everything and go back and be missionaries," said Botti, 67. "And I said, 'whoa, let's wait a day or two'."

Anger, guilt and frustration are all typical emotions experienced by those traveling on a first mission trip to help others in need. Helping people anticipate those emotions, as well as the emotions that they will encounter from those they are helping, is one of the most important parts of Botti's job.

Botti took the volunteer job as the Volunteers In Mission (VIM) coordinator for the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference of the United Methodist Church after being recommended for the position in 2002. He has been involved in mission work since 1994 through his church, First United Methodist in Perkasie. Botti began the job after a former coordinator found out he had spent his career as a civil engineer working in construction and thought his skills would be a major asset to mission work - and they have been. Botti traveled with former FUMC Pastor Phil Poncé when he was the VIM coordinator. Poncé would handle the spiritual aspect of the work while Botti offered the necessary construction knowledge. In his first several years of mission work, Botti traveled to Honduras, Trinidad, Grenada and Antigua, taking one international trip each year. There, the groups would help with recovery from flooding, hurricanes and other disasters by building homes, churches and doing whatever needed to be done. In fact, versatility is another pillar of mission work that the church emphasizes. "We stress flexibility in our training because we really are often surprised when we get there that we're doing something other than what we expected," said Botti.

The prime focus of Botti's job is to perform training sessions to prepare people to deal with these feelings while being sensitive to the culture and emotions of those who are the victims of disaster.
The training sessions do not include practical knowledge like how to hang drywall or install insulation. Those are skills that the group is expected to have in its makeup and can thus pass on during the trip.
"We need to have somebody that knows what they're doing," said Botti of each group's make-up. "If the leader is good at his job or her job, then they can find jobs for everybody." Botti teaches the groups how to deal with the emotional aspects - the anger and guilt people feel when they compare their own lives to those they are helping - in many cases, people who have lost everything. Botti said people often start with euphoria over being in a new place so different from their own. This soon leads to frustration over cultural differences in how things are done and sometimes, why more can't be done. That leads through several more stages until finally, if the groups could be there long enough, they would have acceptance of their home culture as well as the one where they find themselves on the trip, Botti said.

Botti's workload has increased drastically in the past couple years. Before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the UMVIM coordinated only a handful of trips each year, most of them internationally. Domestic groups were sent out as needed. Since Katrina, however, UMVIM has sent out 80 trips just to the Gulf Coast, with 60 of those trips occurring within the last year.
"My job now, since Katrina, has been basically a full-time job," said Botti, who said he was initially working 40 to 60 hours a week. Lately, that amount has cut back some, but he has not had the chance to do any consulting work on the side since the first two days after Katrina hit when he was wrapping up a project in Philadelphia. Overall, he seems to enjoy the direction his path has taken.
"It's very rewarding," said Botti of the work, which he said is often life altering for people.
Botti recalls the story of one woman who approached him at a regional meeting for the two towns, Bay St. Louis and Waveland, Miss. that were adopted by Bucks County after Katrina hit. She asked about how she could get involved in trips to the region, and he added her to an e-mail list about groups that were going down to the region. One day he received a thank you card from her letting him know that she had hooked up with a group going down from West Lawn United Methodist Church located on the far side of Reading.

Receiving notes of appreciation from people who have been greatly affected or moved by mission trips is not strange to Botti. However, Botti later found out that the woman was regularly commuting from the Doylestown area to attend church in West Lawn with the group she had met. Prior to that, she had not attended church regularly in more than 20 years. "It does transform lives," said Botti. "It affects people on the receiving end, too." One couple, Darrell and Bernice, stick out in Botti's mind. The couple owned a home that was one of the projects that a group from First United Methodist Church helped with reconstruction after Katrina. Bernice explained to the group that her husband Darrell had trouble motivating himself to even clean out the house after the storm or help prepare it for reconstruction. He felt it was a waste and that his house was gone forever. This is where the mission teams come in and offer a different brand of reconstruction - the gift of hope. "[Bernice] said it wasn't until the teams started to come down there and were laughing, singing and joking that he started to perk up and have some interest in it," said Botti.

One of Botti's favorite memories and pictures from that trip is one where Darrell helps install the deadbolt on the front door - a finishing touch on a home he thought could never be restored.

In fact, this is what mission work is all about. "We stress in our training that the goal of our trip is not the project," said Botti. The main goal is to listen and talk with people about what they've been through. "If they want to talk, stop and talk with them and the project will get done somehow."
The first response groups - those who are the first volunteers to arrive after a tragedy strikes - actually include a "listener" whose only job is to listen to the people's stories. "It's cathartic for people to be able to talk about their experience," Botti said. For the volunteers, much of the life-changing thoughts and challenges can occur both during and after the process.

There continue to be many changes as the number of volunteers interested in helping increases. In February, United Methodist Volunteers in Mission, which focuses on challenging church members into service, and United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR), which responds to disasters, held a conference to focus on working together to smooth out challenges the groups have faced as disaster response groups become more necessary.

No matter what the future holds, volunteers like Botti and all those he has worked with over the years will become relied upon more to reach out and help those who are less fortunate, and in many cases, those who cannot help themselves for any number of reasons. "I surely appreciate what we have more," said Botti of how his work has affected him. "It always amazes me when I come from a place like Honduras with open sewers, ditches and creeks. To get on a plane in Honduras and fly for a couple hours and land in Miami, and circle around before landing and see all the houses with the pools and all the cars on the highway...An hour and a half, two hours ago, you left a place where people are living in huts. We're so blessed and we take it for granted, and I don't think I'll ever get used to that."

©Montgomery Newspapers 2007

US Attorney Carol Lam Investigations of Corrupt Republicans Lead to Her Firing

US Attorney Carol Lam working out of the San Diego Office was conducting investigations of leading Republicans that might have led to Vice President Dick Cheney's door. Therefore, she had to go. But Bush, through his surrogate, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, couldn't fire just her. That would be too suspicious. So they had to fire several others as well. White House counsel Harriet Miers, the inveterate Bush ass saver from Texas gubernatorial days suggested firing all 92. They finally settled on eight including one to make room for a Karl Rove ass kisser.

Carol Lam made her reputation by getting three Democratic San Diego City Councilmen indicted and two of them convicted (one died) in a titty bar scandal. The Republicans were pleased with her performance up to that time. But then she started investigating Republicans. The San Diego Union had run a piece on Congresssman Duke Cunningham questioning the sale of his Del Mar residence to defense contractor Mitchell Wade for twice its market value. Duke then subsequently bought an even more expensive home in the even tonier neighborhood of Rancho Santa Fe. In addition to the bribes provided Cunningham by Wade which included a $140,000 yacht, the Duke-Stir, defense contractor Brent Wilkes supplied Cunningham with a lavish list of gifts including prostitution services. Wilkes' company, Poway-based ADCS, received more than $100 million in government contracts between 1995 and 2005, partly with the help of Cunningham, who sat on the influential House Appropriations Committee.

Carol Lam announced indictments against Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, number 3 man at the CIA, and Wilkes at a February 13, 2007 press conference a little over a month ago. Foggo had awarded Wilkes a multi-million dollar contract to supply water to the CIA in Iraq. Wade had previously pleaded guilty in February 2006. Now about that boat, the aforementioned Duke-Stir, it seems it was bought by Mitchell Wade for $140,000 two weeks after Wade, a man who never before had received a Federal contract, received a check for $140,000 from Vice President Dick Cheney's office to supply office furniture for Cheney. This is according to the Think Progress blog. A few days ago, Kyle Sampson, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' Chief of Staff, resigned. Think Progress had made public an email sent by Sampson in May 2006 that contained the following line: "The real problem we have right now with Carol Lam that leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires." The email also said it was sent at "Harriet's request." That would be Harriet Miers, White House counsel, who has a long history of saving Bush's ass. That's why she's so valuable. But more about that later.

So Carol Lam's firing was not politically motivated? Hmmm. The problem was Carol Lam had switched from investigating and prosecuting Democrats to Republicans! So yesterday Bush warned the Democrats not to subpoena White House officials. Y'all Democrats, he might as well have said, can spin your wheels, bark up wrong trees and go on wild goose chases to your hearts' content, but don't you dare come after my boys! Well, c'mon Democrats, let's cut to the chase. If I can figure this out surely y'all, who have IQs higher than mine, can.

Now about Harriet Miers. You remember her? Bush nominated her for the Supreme Court and her nomination was rejected by the Senate on account of the fact she was unqualifed. She's the one who gushed that George W Bush was the most intelligent man she ever met? Well, it seems that the Miers-Bush relationship goes way back to good ole Texas days when her job was to save Bush's ass similar to her job today as Counsel to the President. According to Greg Palast's blog, "Harriet Miers fired investigator in 1997 to hide Bush draft-dodge." It seems like Harriet's role today in the firing of the prosecutors is just a continuation of her role when Bush was Governor of Texas and she was chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commision.

...in 1997, Governor Bush secretly suggested to the chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission that she grant a contract to the client of a Bush ally. The Governor’s back-door demand to the Lottery chairwoman was not so easy. Bush wanted the Lottery to grant a multi-billion dollar contract to GTech Corporation. But GTech hadn’t even bid on the contract - and a winner was already announced. There was only way for the Chairwoman to carry out the fix: fire the director of the Lottery who had discouraged GTech from bidding because of its history of corruption. The Chairwoman, Harriet Miers, did the deed: fired the Lottery director; Miers then ignored the winning bid — and gave Bush’s favored company the contract, no bidding, in perpetuity.

Why did Bush want the contract to go to GTech? Because its lobbyist, Ben Barnes, had been former Lieutenant Governor of Texas during the Vietnam war, and had used his influence to get George W out of the Vietnam War. In 2004, Barnes admitted the draft-dodge fix on 60 Minutes, the broadcast that brought Dan Rather down. Barnes picked up a $23 million dollar fee for getting GTech the lottery contract. In return he kept silent about his role in getting Bush out of the Vietnam War. The Texas Attorney General had a letter laying all this out. Why didn't the Texas Attorney General disclose the information it had or investigate further? It seems that well known Democrats such as Lloyd Bentsen and John Connolly had exerted their influence on Barnes, a Democrat, to get their sons out of the war as well. The moral of the story: he who controls US Attorneys can cover his ass very well indeed. And we come full circle to the current firing of non-compliant US Attorneys such as Carol Lam and their replacement by Bush team cronies who know on which side their bread is buttered.

Oh, by the way, my bet is that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will not be fired. Why? Because he does Bush's bidding. He's one of Bush's boys. And besides he stays or goes at the "pleasure of the President." So no matter how much of a dumbeat, how big a crescendo, in the final analysis, it's up to the President, and the President will just thumb his nose at the Congress, the media and the American people. And besides the real issue here isn't Alberto Gonzales. The real issue is whether or not those investigations initiated by Carol Lam will be continued. With a Bush crony replacing her serving at the "pleasure [whim] of the President," don't bet on it! But if Bush can make a deal - stop investigating in  return for Gonzales' head - Gonzales' head will be served up on a platter.

Oh, if Congress and the American people don't like the principle of US Attorneys "serving at the pleasure of the President," why not change the law or the Constitution, whatever?

Meta Evolution

Meta evolution has been defined in different ways. My definition would be the study of evolution as a function of different environments. It could be a comparative study, for example, of two different environments and the different life forms that hypothetically might have evolved there. For instance, what different lifeforms would have an advantage on a planet larger than earth that had relatively larger land masses and smaller oceans? There must be billions of planets in the universe similar to ours and dissimilar to ours. The Laws of Evolution must apply on these other planets as well. So how might life have evolved under different circumstances?

Let's consider a planet that has large fertile grasslands. Would grazing animals be ascendant? And what determines whether carnivores, herbivores or omnivores evolve. If there were large grasslands, would this predispose the evolution of herbivores. What conditions favor the evolution of predators? Scarce resources? Are there planets where there are no predators because conditions aren't right for the evolution of predators? Would there be peaceful coexistence among all life forms on such a planet? Are people who live in environments where there is plentiful food just for the taking and climactic conditions don't require much in the way of clothing and shelter more peaceful than people who live in environments where food is scarce and clothing and shelter are no trivial matters? Are such people more warlike?

I submit that, despite the relative scarcity or abundance of the natural resources necessary to sustain life, advanced life forms will commoditize and commercialize everything and anything including land, animals, plants, manufactured goods, precious metals and gems. Obviously, some land is more desirable than other land, some gems more valuable than other gems. When Europeans came to America, one of the first things they did was to commodify the land. Surveyors were in demand. Native Americans had lived here without land being bought or sold. This doesn't mean that there was no territorialness among the Indians. Land just wasn't a commmodity. There  was plentiful land and wild plant and animal resources compared to the number of human inhabitants. Europeans were used to turning land into a commodity or real estate with each parcel having a private owner who possessed a title or a piece of paper giving a legal description of the land and giving him rights of ownership thereto. The legal description could be verified and attested to by a surveyor.

In societies that had adopted agriculture and animal husbandry, land, animals and plants (such as bushels of wheat) became commodities to be bought and sold and fought over. Hunter gatherers had less to fight over as real wealth couldn't be accumulated in a hunter gatherer society in which people led a nomadic existence moving from place to place as conditions changed. So it may very well be true that the commoditization of society leads to more warfare. However, not all native peoples were peace loving. There's more to fight over than natural resources. There's human resources. Men fight over women and vice versa. People fight in order to take slaves. People fight over ideas. More wars have been fought in the name of religion than anything else although World War II was fought over ideology.

In the final analysis predation or war doesn't have that much to do with environmental conditions. It has more to do with the inability of sufficiently intelligent life forms to cooperate, to have empathy for each other and to be willing to limit their self-centeredness in the interests of the community at large. It has to do with insufficient methods for conflict resolution. Any sufficiently evolved and intelligent life form will generate conflicts over natural and human resources, over anything that can be commodified, over human resources in one form or other and over religion in one form or other. These conflicts are intensified as the ratio of number of people to the amount of resources increases, but they are still there in primitive societies including animal societies.

The drama of evolution is that the more intelligent the life forms that are produced, the more likely it is that they will self-extinguish. Alligators have been around for 250 million years making them very successful as a species. Neanderthal man was around for 250,000 years and was probably the victim of species-cide at the hands of homo sapiens, a more intelligent species. Homo sapiens has only been around 150,000 years and in that relatively short time has developed the capability for self-destruction either by virtue of the fact of having harnessed the atom or by his capacity for destroying the environment. Most life forms on earth eventually become extinct. The success of a species can be measured by its longevity. It would seem that the more intelligent the species, the less likely it is to be successful unless it can find an alternative to war.

The Heart of Christianity

A caller to a radio talk show recently maintained that, if you didn't believe that Jesus rose physically and bodily from the dead and ascended into heaven, then you weren't a real Christian. This controversy has arisen because of the TV special on the Discovery channel in which some guy claims to have discovered the tomb of Jesus and his family (including wife and child) in Jerusalem. This couldn't be true, the lady maintained, because it would invalidate Christianity or in other words, if it was true, all Christians might as well pack their bags and start looking around for another religion. This discovery, if true, would take the heart out of Christianity.

The talk show host said, "Wait a minute, I thought the heart of Christianity was Jesus' teachings not the miracles, not whether he literally arose from the dead. I thought the heart of Christianity was Matthew 25 where he was talking to his disciples and told them what they had to do to get into heaven. It had nothing to do with what they believed. It had to do with what they did, how they lived their lives. Jesus said that the ones that would go to heaven were the ones who had seen him naked and had clothed him, who had seen him hungry and had fed him, who had seen him thirsty and given him something to drink, who had given him shelter, visited him in prison. You get the idea. Someone who had done some tangible thing to help him. And his disciples said, "Lord when did we see you naked and not given you clothes, when did we see you hungry or thirsty and not given you food or drink?" etc. Jesus said, "Inasmuch as you have done it or not done it to the least of these my brethren, you have done it or not done it unto me."

Now the talk show host said, isn't this the heart of Christianity? Oh no, the caller maintained, the heart of Christianity is whether Jesus physically and bodily rose from the dead in which case his bones could not be found anywhere on earth. So this is really the cleavage in Christianity today: those who maintain they're going to heaven because they have a correct belief system regardless of whether they do as Jesus said and lift a finger to help others and those whose beliefs may not be correct but take literally Jesus' admonition to help their fellow man, in particular those less fortunate than they are. There are some who help their fellow man, to be sure, but who still don't qualify for Jesus' approval. For example, the Bush Administration has done a lot to help the rich and their cronies. I don't think this is what Jesus had in mind: helping the haves and the have mores!

Thomas Jefferson went through the Bible and took out everything extraneous to get at the heart of Jesus' teachings. Isn't this what Jesus came here to do: to teach people how to live better lives? The Jefferson Bible gets rid of all the miracles and mumbo jumbo and gets to the heart of Jesus' teachings. There are some who believe that one gains entrance to heaven, not by his or her actions, but by believing the correct line of mumbo jumbo. Isn't that the same as brainwashing? Jesus actually got in trouble with the Jewish religion over the same issue. There were the Jews who were literalists and legalists who thought all they had to do to get into heaven was to follow the Jewish law literally. The basic point of Jesus teaching was that  this is not the correct or true way to be. He called these people hypocrites. The Pharisees and Sadducees were the two main Jewish sects in the time of Jesus. They were more concerned with doing rituals correctly and a literal understanding of the Torah than they were with helping other people. A correct understanding of Jewish ritual included how people were to be punished: "who was to be stoned, who strangled, who burned, and who beheaded." Custom and ritual trumped compassion and empathy. It's obvious which side of this issue Jesus was on, and yet contemporary Christians, to a large extent, are more aligned with the Pharisees and Sadducees than they are with the teachings of Jesus.

The Barbarians, a series recently on the History Channel, brings to light another interesting fact. The Vandals from whom we get the word vandalism were actually Christians. They were Aryan Christians as opposed to Roman Christians, the difference having to do with scholastic interpretations regarding the Trinity. So even barbarians evidently were not above quibbling over scholastic differences. However, the barbarians' main concern was which god or God was powerful enough to give them victory in war. Some of them only converted to Christianity when they were convinced that this would give them the edge in warfare. Childeric, the Frank, for example, converted as a last resort after he had come close to losing his life on the battlefield and then became convinced Christianity was correct after he was able to pull his irons out of the fire, so to speak, and go on to win the battle. The Roman Emperor, Constantine, made Christianity the State Religion of Rome because he became convinced that it would help him to achieve victory on the battlefield.  Thus Christianity became a major religion not by virtue of the fact that people became convinced that Jesus' teachings were correct so much as they were convinced that by becoming Christians they would have success in war.

So what has changed? Throughout history most (if not all) wars have been fought over religion. Catholics and Protestants have fought for centuries. Different sects of Protestants have fought other sects of Protestants. Hindus have fought Buddhists. Christians and Muslims have fought for centuries. Religious persecution has been rampant - against the Jews, against Christian heretics such as Jean d'Arc. Remember her? She was burned at the stake. Religion is more about who's right and who deserves to win than it is about empathy and compassion or helping one's fellow man as Jesus tought. If that grave in Jerusalem really contains Jesus' body, it's a wonder they haven't claimed to have seen him rolling over in it due to the complete perversion of his teachings over the last 2000 years! Onward Christian soldiers!

Range Voting

A little known or discussed fact of life in the US is that, while we are a younger nation than most European countries, our constitution and our voting system is older than any of theirs. Why? Because they have updated their constitutions and/or voting systems while ours have remained static since their inception over 200 years ago. While other countries have taken the pragmatic view that upgrading (taking into account advances in voting theory) might be a good idea, our voting system along with all other aspects of our constitution (not to mention our economic system) might as well have been set in stone. To even question their continued validity or possible improvement is considered by some to be unpatriotic.

Our voting system is called plurality voting. This means that only one candidate out of however many are running for office is chosen by each individual voter, and then the votes are tallied and the one with the most votes wins providing he or she has a sizable enough percentage of the total votes cast. Otherwise there's a runoff. The literature is full of the pitfalls of this method of voting. Suffice it to say it practically eliminates more than two parties. Another disadvantage of our political system is that the US is divided up into districts with each district returning one representative to the bicameral House while each state returns two Senators to the Senate. So each voter is represented in Congress by only three people: one member of the House and two Senators. That's a very small proportion of the total number of lawmakers when you consider that there are 435 Congressmen and women in the House and 100 Senators. 3 out of 535? 0.5%? How does that make you feel, voters, to know that less than 1% of the lawmakers in Washington represent you or that you had anything to do with electing them? In addition there are the problems of the Electoral College (the President is not elected by a direct vote of the public) and gerrymandering which is an artificial way of dividing up political districts in such a way that favors one party or another. Of course, the party in power gets to do this in order to guarantee itself as many seats in perpetuity as possible. A more sensible way to choose a President is by a majority of all the votes cast eliminating the Electoral College altogether, and a more sensible way of choosing legislators would be a system in which each voters gets a chance to vote for more than three legislators.  

Fortunately, voting theorists have not been inactive. There are at least three methods which promise to be an improvement over the current state of affairs vying for the hearts and minds of the public - at least some members of the public, the cognoscenti, who have bothered to consider such things: range voting (RV - not to be confused with those behemoth gas guzzlers), instant runoff voting (IRV) and approval voting (AV). Each method has its supporters, defenders, detractors, protagonists, antagonists and critics. Approval voting is simple enough. Instead of voting for one out of however many candidates are running, you vote for all the  candidates you approve of. Instead of marking the ballot once in each race, you mark it multiple times. Obviously, it wouldn't make sense to mark it for every candidate who is running although I'm sure there are many who would. IRV is more complicated, but you can Google it and find out more than you really wanted to know. That leaves range voting.

You are already familiar with it as this is the method used to score Olympic athletes. You would rate each candidate on a scale from 1 to 10 or 0 to 20 or -99 to +99. The actual limits to the range are somewhat arbitrary as long as each voter can assign ratings over the same range. Then you tote up the score for each candidate and the one with the most points wins. Or you can take the average and the one with the highest average wins. There is one refinement, however, with reference to the above linked website. You do not have to actually vote for each candidate. If there are 100 running and you actually rate only 50 filling in an X for the remaining fifty, then the average is computed by dividing the total (over all voters) votes cast for a candidate divided by the sum of all the voters who actually cast a vote for that candidate (Xs excluded). A candidate needs a quorum of votes to win where a quorum is defined as half the total points of the highest point getter. So, theoretically, a candidate with half the total points of the highest total point getter could win the election if sufficiently few voters actually voted for him or her while sufficiently many voters put down an X for him or her. This seems to introduce a certain amount of arbitrariness to the method, but, obviously, something would have to be done to prevent a candidate whom only a handful of voters voted for (all presumably giving him the highest score) from winning. An alternative way of handling this situation would be to just use total point scores forcing each voter to make a decision regarding each candidate. For candidates unfamiliar to any particular voter, that voter could use a proxy rating. A proxy rating would be provided by an expert of the voter's own political persuasion or someone trusted by the voter who is familiar with the candidate. It could be a rating provided by the voter's political party. Without having done an extensive analysis, this seems somewhat less arbitrary to me. 

Donald Saari is a proponent of the Borda count. Steven Brams is a proponent of Approval Voting and Warren D Smith is a proponent of Range Voting. I also independently came up with a version of range voting which I called the Lawrence Count. Due to the serendipity of the internet, someone perusing my website, Social Choice and Beyond, brought to my attention that, unbeknownst to me at the time, there exists a major website promoting and expounding on a similar voting method. Thus are like-minded people all over the world brought into contact with one another thanks to the world wide web! This is truly amazing! As I said on my webpage: "The Lawrence Count is a modified Borda Count which seems so obvious that maybe someone has already discovered it. If so, I relinquish the name and any claim to being its progenitor." So I will change my webpage to indicate that I'm no longer pretentious enough to name something after myself especially if someone else has already discovered it. By the way Warren D Smith doesn't claim to have discovered it either so  I guess it was too obvious for anyone to have discovered it, and Smith claims that actually the ants and honey bees discovered it.

The three gentlemen named above go round and round trying to prove that their method is the best and showing the pitfalls of all the others. My opinion is that approval voting is a step above plurality voting but is too simple to take into account the range of expression a voter may wish to demonstrate. It's as if Olympic ice skaters were either approved or disapproved by the judges and then their scores computed. Would you be satisfied with that? The Borda count is too rigid. It has the anomaly that, if one candidate drops out of the race, point values must be reassigned with the result that someone could win who previously was ranked last. Range Voting, in my opinion, is a modified Borda count in that the underlying grid remains constant whether or not candidates enter or drop out of the election. Point values remain the same except for some strategic considerations which, again in my opinion, the voter has a right to take into consideration. There is maximum expressivenesss in that the voter not only gets to rank the candidates but also gets to indicate to an extent how much he or she favors one over another. If each voter gives his or her most favored candidate the highest possible score and his least favored the lowest posssible, then he or she will be getting the most strategic value out of his or her vote. If there is one candidate who is so horrible compared to all the others in the mind of a particular voter, it would not only be honest but strategically advantageous to give the horrible candidate a zero and all others the highest possible rating. Likewise, if there is one candidate who is far and away the most superior compared to the other candidates, it would be honest and strategic to give that candidate the highest rating and all others a zero. Another point is that the point spread from lowest to highest score (say 1 to 99) need only be as great as the sensitivity of the most sensitive voter where sensitivity is defined as the most perceptive voter's ability to make a one point distinction between two candidates. Presumably some voter would be able to rate some candidate in a meaningful way as a 53 and another as a 54, for example.

One reason for the lack of agreement regarding voting methods is Arrow's Impossibility Theorem which states in general terms that there is no democratic voting system which obeys certain rational and ethical criteria. This has given rise to the field of social choice theory. Not everyone would agree with Arrow's choice of rational and ethical criteria but, be that as it may, in over 60 years no one has been able to show that Arrow didn't know what he was talking about. So even if in some sense democratic voting systems are impossible, elections are still held and some voting methods are definitely better than others, and, even though there is no general agreement, there is still hope that we will be able to do better in the future than we have done in the past. Hope springs eternal!