The Un-Democratization of America

After the Revolutionary war, the founding fathers tried their best to create a system of government that is fair, balanced, and gives the people a voice in their own governing. However, more than 200 years have past that date and there are some flaws that have shown about the system. Today, I’m gonna go through a few topics about our political and government systems that have flaws in them.

The People’s Underrepresentation in The House of Representatives

Back in the colonial times The House of Representatives was a corner piece of the Government as a whole. The House of Representatives allows a small section of a state to send their a representative to Washington to argue for their constituents. The amount of representatives a state gets is based off its population. That means a state with a higher population get more representation and vice versa. This system allows the voices of American to be heard in a more individual way. However, over the years the voices of Americans are getting smaller and smaller. As more people become citizens of the United States, the smaller the representation for everyone. When the constitution was being made, the founding fathers made it so that each representative would speak for around 50,000 people, but today, each representatives on average speaks for over 700,000 people. This number gives America by far one of the worst population to legislative representatives compared to other democratic counties.With one person dealing with this many constituents, it is way more likely for your voice not to be heard, your ideals not shared, your complaints not cared. There are a few solutions that I’ve heard that can fix this problem. The one I like the most is increasing the number of people inside the House of Representatives, therefore decreasing the population per legislative representative ratio and giving the American people their voices back. The House of Representatives is plagued with other issues, like gerrymandering, but they deserve their own post and debates.

A Senate Issue

The founding fathers built the Senate to deal with the issue that some state have more populations than others. The Senate has only two representatives per state, compared to the House of Representatives population based number. This means that every state, no matter the size has equal representation in the Senate. An issue that the founding fathers did not foresee it the rise of political parties, more specifically, the area where political parties are more popular. Democrats usually are found in extremely urban areas, while Republicans can be found in more rural areas. There are only a few states that carry large enough cities that Democrats like to cluster in, for example New York and California. While the rest of America is mostly rural, which gives Republicans (or any political party that appeal to rural voters) better chances in winning a Republican Senate. On average state is six points more Republican than the country as a whole. A way to fix this is to let in more states, like Puerto Rico or Washington D.C. Another Way to fix this issue is to split states with multiple big cities, like California, into multiple states. These ideas however will never be accepted because they look like an power grab by Democrats.

The College of Electors

Every four years the word Electoral College gets thrown around the news, but not many people really know what that is and how undemocratic it is. Two out of the last three presidents lost the popular vote, but won the electoral college vote. The founding fathers founded the electoral college as a compromise of congress choosing a president and a fully democratic election, they did not want too much tyranny or democracy. There are many issues with the Electoral College, one of which is how it gives the people in small states more voting power than the larger states. For example, for one electoral vote in Colorado comes from 135,000 voters, while one electoral vote in California comes from 411,000. This means that one Colorado vote has the same weight as three Californian vote. Additionally, the electoral college allowed for the creation of swing states. Swing states allow for the whole election to be made up from only a few states. This means presidential candidates can ignore most of the country as long as he got the swing states. Also, the winner takes all philosophy of the Electoral College simply ignores anyone who voted for the loser in the state. For example, if 45% of the people in Texas voted for a Democratic Candidate, but 55% voted for a Republican candidate. All 538 electoral votes can go to the republican candidate, even though not all the state wanted that. One simple solution to this weird voting system is to implement a popular vote system. The major TV stations still count them on election night, it’s just we don’t use it to actually pick our leaders.

Why Won’t We Change

People should agree that our political system has some issues, but there has been no push to change anything. There has only been 17 amendments created after the signing of the Bill of Rights, and that include the one banning alcohol and unbanning alcohol. The last federal constitutional convention was in 1992. Ever since then, there has been no mention of changing the constitution at all. This is at a time where public confidence in the United States government has been very low, and that could be the problem. People see that the politicians in Washington D.C. are performing so badly that they don’t trust them to change anything. So, instead we just stick with this flawed system and hope for the best.