It seems America is more divided than ever. Our weakening vote is demonstrated as the root cause for our increased divisions. The essential connection between innovation, improving society, and the need to have a strong voting process is investigated. A strong voting process:
Communicates the diverse preferences of the voting public to our elected representatives,
Encourages our representatives to negotiate the voting public's diverse preferences, and
Enables the passing of laws allowing for society's future innovation and success.
However, in 1972 our vote was hacked by the primary and caucus system. Since 1972, the voting environment America's founders architected has steadily weakened. We show how the candidate selection process - the primary and caucus system - is the root cause of our weakening vote. We explore vote weakening by applying information and incentive lenses. Disunity, unfit-for-constitutional-purpose representatives, lower-quality legislation, a weakening Congress, and economic inequality show the effects of our destabilizing voting system. We discuss a path forward. This new path recommends returning to the pre-1972 candidate selection process or significantly overhauling the primary and caucus system.
This article is part of our ongoing series dedicated to strengthening our vote. We explore ways to answer these questions:
Do you wonder how the January 6th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a symptom of a much deeper problem?
Do you wonder how our political system could change to address the problem?
Do you wonder what the Founding Generation would think of our current political system?
Do you wonder how social media distorts our political system?
Do you wonder how our own brains contribute to the problem?
This article and others found in our Empower Your Vote series answer these questions.
About the author: Jeff Hulett is a behavioral economist and a decision scientist. He is an executive with the Definitive Companies. Jeff teaches personal finance and the decision sciences at James Madison University. Jeff is an author and his latest book is Making Choices, Making Money: Your Guide to Making Confident Financial Decisions. His experience includes senior leadership roles in banking and bank risk consulting. Jeff holds advanced degrees in finance, mathematics, and economics. Jeff and his family live in the Washington D.C. area.
Political disclosure: Please see the author's political disclosure and business profile.
Table of contents
The vote is needed to improve society
1972 was the year our founders rolled over in their graves
What caused the reduction in voting power?
How do we know the primary and caucus system is a root cause for hacking our vote?
Nibbling around the edges is not enough
The Undoing Project - How to undo the voting hack
Notes
Before we discuss (un)hacking the vote, we need to explore the environment creating incentives to hack the vote in the first place. Next, we delve into how the vote is needed to improve society. To do so, we explore how:
Innovation needs information,
Voting needs information,
Innovation requires risk, and
Voting and innovation need balanced incentives.
1. The vote is needed to improve society
Innovation needs information.
Innovation is how our society improves. Without innovation, human society would have evolved slowly and still struggled to survive. This chart shows the link between the growth in market economies, the information available to the economy [i-a], and human progress - as proxied by GDP.
The big link
Market success helps drive human progress
The market economy is the way by which resources are distributed for innovation. Plus, the product of innovation is distributed to consumers via market action. Innovation and the market economy work together hand-in-glove. Information is the lubricating grease for innovation. Over time, as information has become more abundant, innovation has increased. Plus, innovations enabled information abundance. Innovation and information work together in a self-reinforcing feedback loop system. But it is ultimately the innovators enabling the innovations.
Voting needs information.
In today's information-abundant world, some may assume that increasing information improves the quality of society's laws. Unfortunately, that assumption faces challenges. Innovation, as necessarily forward-looking, is very sensitive to our future-framing laws. Our laws and culture could create an environment supporting innovation and improving society. To this desired societal end, the voting process should transmit preference information from the population to our elected officials making society-improving and innovation-impacting policy. Plus, there should be a feedback loop, enforcing the will of the people if the elected official does not meet expectations.
However, two challenges are working against the transmission of voting information from the citizens benefiting from innovation to their elected officials enabling the innovation environment:
Those challenges are:
There is a big gap between what should happen and what is happening. As will be shown, since the implementation of the primary and caucus candidate selection process, information transmission has lost significant signal fidelity. We will demonstrate that most people are unable to convey their preferences effectively through voting.
Even if signal fidelity was stronger, voter-impacting information generated from social media is often incomplete or wrong. A poignant example arrives from the bipartisan congressional committee's report from the January 6th investigation: “The Committee’s investigation has identified many individuals involved in January 6th who were provoked to act by false information about the 2020 election repeatedly reinforced by legacy and social media.” This speaks to the broader political usage of social media to influence but not inform the general population. Political data is often incomplete or inaccurate, which places significant pressure on the populace to curate their data and not fall victim to confirmation bias. It requires effort to transform political data into useful political information. Unfortunately, many citizens are unwilling or unable to properly curate their data. [i-aa]
To summarize the two challenges: The signal fidelity of the information transmitted from most voters to their candidates is weakening. The quality of the voter information used to develop the voter's signal is also weakening. A double whammy.
Innovation requires risk.
The earlier "big link" graphic shows how human progress, proxied by GDP, has rocketed upward during the market age. While the market has provided the environment for progress, innovators can claim the mantel as central creators of that progress. But innovation is not for everyone. Individuals can be found along a risk and return continuum. Some of us are willing to take risks. These are risks enabling invention, innovation, and creating solutions to improve humanity. Many of us wish to improve humanity. The challenge is a matter of the degree to which individuals are willing to absorb that humanity-improving innovation risk. Some are found on the higher risk, innovation-enabling end of the continuum. Most are not.
In many ways, the innovative success of the United States links back to the American legal and capitalistic social environment. While not all people are risk-taking innovators, this environment taps into humanity's natural creativity and encourages more people to innovate. That environment includes risk-encouraging backstops for those willing to take significant risks. Those backstops include risk-mitigating bankruptcy laws, limited liability organizing structures, and tax incentives. For funding great societal innovations, the U.S. capital formation environment includes commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds, venture capital, and angel investors. This legal environment shares innovation risk downside between the innovator and our society which benefits from the upside of successful innovations.
The great inventor and innovator Thomas Edison is credited with saying:
"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."
Perspiration relates to innovation risk. However, without an environment that encourages risk-taking, innovators would not be as willing to take the 'perspiration' risk.
But many, if not most people are just not wired with the innovators’ higher risk and return mindset. They may not have grown up in an innovation-encouraging environment or otherwise learned how to manage innovation-enabling uncertainty. Generally, our evolutionary-sculpted genome starting point is wired to avoid risks. Many would rather have a known life where a fair salary rewards hard work. People are found on a risk-return willingness and ability spectrum. It doesn’t mean one cannot change, but everyone is located somewhere on the risk-return spectrum at any given point in time. Each end of the spectrum is anchored by:
1. Those willing to absorb uncertainty and take risks to achieve great innovation, and
2. Those benefiting from innovation, are employed by the innovators, but are less desiring of the risks and uncertainty associated with innovation.
As a result, this creates a natural tension. When finding a balance on the risk-return continuum, how do lawmakers maintain a balance and resolve the natural tension found on this spectrum? Lawmakers need to provide for those found somewhere on the spectrum anchored by risk-taking and risk-averse participants. Also, in America, the law should be implemented ex-ante. This means innovators and all those subject to laws should have confidence the laws will stay stable in the future. This enables all citizens to plan their success with a reasonable expectation of future environmental stability enabling their success.
Voting and innovation need balanced incentives.
For about 200 years, America mediated the innovation risk tension with our vote. This means our elected representatives, whether the President, Congresspeople, and state and local representatives were elected with the incentive to find an innovator’s balance. They recognized the needs of the risk-averse majority to be balanced with the societal benefits provided for by those with an innovators’ risk-taker mindset. For about 200 years - from 1776 to 1972 - America was able to find that balance with the broad-based vote and our constitutional framework. This balance was enabled by the incentives of the system.
2. 1972 was the year our founders rolled over in their graves
Then, in the early 1970s that environmental balance significantly changed. That 200-year balance changed by the skewing of voting incentives and power toward minority interests and away from the voting majority. With the increasing minority power, it also increased a class of people benefiting from innovation but not necessarily innovating and creating societal benefits. Minority power is associated with politics as a business - which includes individual and corporate donation revenue, lobbying activity to transform taxes into political system revenue; partisan leaning, public-policy-focused think tank revenue; and television advertising revenue from political coverage. The political industry is a big, self-reinforcing business with many mouths to feed. [i-aaa]
While information provides a lubricating grease for innovation, the incentives of those guiding society will enable, or impede, the innovation benefiting us citizens. Today, the preference information is being dominated by a minority of Americans. Those interests increasingly serve minority party and partisan interests instead of the majority citizens. We all feel the impact. However, innovation is particularly sensitive to the information preference signals of the majority, voting quality, and the future-focused legislative environment. Widespread innovation and economic success lead us forward. Poor innovation and economic polarization impede progress.
The Double Whammy
Weakening information transmission from the electorate to representatives. The information curation and vote weakening challenges.
Ironically, this consolidation of minority voting power is the stepping stone for the two dominant American political parties to consolidate their political and economic power. The majority parties consolidate power by serving the partisan voting minority.
The weakening vote leads to decreasing the incentives of our elected officials to find a middle ground to benefit more Americans. This ultimately leads to less society-benefitting innovation. Each branch of government has an anchoring role essential to the balanced functioning of the U.S. constitutional government.
The courts are expected to assess the past.
The president is expected to act in the present.
Congress is expected to frame for the future.
A weaker legislative branch directly impacts our government's ability to create an innovation-enabling direction for the future. Constitutional scholar Yuval Levin calls the primary and caucus system a dangerous "constitutional deformation." [i-aaaa] This deformation leads to other unintended challenges because the lack of government branch balance creates incentives for the other branches of government to overstep their bounds. "Nature abhors a vacuum" and it is the legislative branch creating a constitutional vacuum the other branches are likely to fill.
In the next section, we discuss the primary and caucus system for selecting party candidates as the root cause of the balance destabilization.
3. What caused the reduction in voting power?
The McGovern-Fraser Commission's recommendation to implement America’s primary and caucus system is what happened. This well-intended change to our voting system is a root cause of diminishing the power of our vote as well as creating an increasingly unequal and unfair society. [i-b]
Why the primary and caucus system degrades the majority voter's information signal is relatively straightforward. Before the primary caucus system, the parties filtered candidates seeking public office. The purpose of the party filtering system is to ensure those running for office are:
qualified,
represent the needs of the majority electorate,
best represent the political philosophy of the party.
have a good chance of winning in the general election
Effectively, the pre-1972 party filtering process provided for information fidelity from the preferences of the population to the elected official candidate.
The primary and caucus candidate filtering system (“P&C system”) is different. The P&C system incentives are for candidates to win the party nomination by appealing to society's most extreme 5% or so from each majority party. Today's federal elections are won and lost in the primaries and caucuses. The breadth of political ideas and choices, which were formerly available to the majority, is now sculpted by the most extreme minority interests. Those candidates best able to sway high-powered minority interest groups are those who succeed in winning the primary (or caucus) and then represent their party in the general election. That sway often results in politician capture by high-powered minority interest groups.
The general election provides the veneer of a democratic vote. Once in office, legislators today are more likely to favor vague legislative mandates expressing the electorate's frustration but leave governing details to the executive and judicial branches. [i-c] This is a crucial point. As discussed earlier, the legislative branch is anchored for framing the future. A weakening legislative branch means the future is less clear for innovators and all citizens as they endeavor to plan for success. In section 4, we will show how the P&C system not only led to minority interests dominating the legislative agenda - but how it also led to wealth inequality. Political and social inequality are like two sides of the same coin.
In practice, the P&C system skews much of the voting power to the most extreme minority interest groups of society. The P&C System is where the majority's ideas and choices go to die at the hands of the minority. It is the minority interest's preference information being transmitted to the candidates, instead of the majority's preference information. As history teaches, a failure to transmit the population's governing preference information to their representatives canNOT last indefinitely. Eventually, the population will seek a new way to be governed.
It is the great minority monied interests that can afford to sway the majority parties' candidates. The minority includes the already wealthy seeking to protect their wealth, the capital providers, and rent seekers who benefit from the great minority. Minority power attracts minority interests to govern the majority.
In the P&C system, the needs of the majority are much less relevant for a candidate seeking office. Voting power and candidate funding have been consolidated to minority interests. While unseemly, the great minority and the political candidates are behaving rationally given their environmental incentives. From their standpoint, they are just playing by the rules to win a competitive game. If they did not play by the rules, someone else would beat them by playing by the rules. Competition is a normal part of our human nature. It is what we are competing for creating the challenge. If we want a different outcome, it is time to change the game's rules and revitalize the vote.
Former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said:
“The genius of the American constitutional system is the dispersal of power,” he said. “Once power is centralized in one person, or one part [of government], a Bill of Rights is just words on paper.”
Scalia points to another, more scary outcome of our hacked vote. The consolidation of power afforded by the hacked vote could lead to the undoing of our democracy. As it stands today, America's three branches of government are slowly being reduced to two. Power is being consolidated in the executive and judicial branches, with the legislative branch becoming increasingly marginalized. There is a reason why presidents increasingly issue executive orders and the Supreme Court increases its legal oversight... it is because Congress is weakening.
Congressional party-first polarization and gridlock lead to marginalization and reducing our founder's vision to being just "words on paper." An observer may suggest, "But Congress has the power to make laws, appropriate massive budgets, go to war, and many other activities demonstrating power." This is true, but the essential point is -- without the incentives to compromise and find a balance that best serves the diverse American society -- those powers are weakening in the service of the American people. This causes the executive and judicial branches to work around the political party and minority interest-focused Congress. In other countries, history shows the outcome of constitutional deformations and compensating branch overreach may lead to despotism, authoritarianism, and revolution. [i-d]
Yuval Levin sums up the result of modern America's political parties, how the P&C system is used for selecting candidates, and how it strays from the Founder's constitutional intent:
"A party system with incentives so thoroughly out of alignment with the constitutional system is a recipe for disaster -- and disaster is just what we have experienced."
In January 2021, the U.S. experienced its first-ever disruption to the transfer of executive branch power between outgoing and incoming presidents. This is an indication of the majority's frustration. It is a shot across the bow - or - the proverbial canary in the mineshaft. This event is telling us something. The inability of the majority to transfer their preference information to elected officials will cause the majority to rescind their willingness to be governed.
All this - started in 1972
4. How do we know the primary and caucus system is a root cause for hacking our vote?
Upon reviewing the data, there is an obvious change of power and direction* of congressional party line voting when comparing pre- and post-1972. [i-e]
* "Party line voting" is a proxy for congressional voting members' likelihood to follow their party's agenda. The lower it is, the more willing the congressional member is to vote the preferences of their constituents and demonstrate their willingness to bargain and negotiate to craft quality legislation.
"Power" is measured by R-squared - a statistical fitness measure. Before 1972, party line voting was mostly random - with no clear time trend relationship - thus the pre-1972 R-squared is relatively low. Then, in 1972, the party line voting likelihood time trend consolidated - thus the post-1972 R-squared is relatively high.
"Direction" is measured by the coefficient sign. Before 1972, if anything, the sign was negative, meaning party line voting was decreasing. Then, in 1972, the coefficient sign flipped to be positive and has been marching upward ever since. Please see the citation for more information regarding our statistical approach.
Historically, major legislation based on significant societal needs has been more likely to receive bipartisan support across political parties. For example,
The 1964 law authorizing the Civil Rights Act, a program preventing discrimination in public affairs and federally-assisted programs, received 64% Democratic party-based legislative support and 80% Republican party-based legislative support.
The 1965 law authorizing Medicare, a medical care program for older Americans, received 84% Democratic party-based legislative support and 49% Republican party-based legislative support.
More recently, major legislation has been less likely to receive bipartisan support. Today lawmakers are more likely to vote along party lines, also known as "party unity" voting.
For example,
The 2010 law authorizing the Affordable Care Act, a program providing medical insurance coverage for most Americans, received 89% Democratic party-based legislative support and 0% Republican party-based legislative support. The challenge goes beyond the party-line voting percentages. Since the legislators were focused on win-at-all-costs incentives driving party-first behavior, the quality of the legislation suffered. If those legislators had been motivated to negotiate and find a middle ground, the Affordable Care Act would have been better legislation. As Yuval Levin pointd out:
"Congress is failing to facilitate cross-partisan accommodations and negotiated outcomes."
While these are notable examples, the operative questions are:
When did the decline in bipartisanship occur?
What was the catalyst that changed how lawmakers vote?
Across all legislation, how powerful is this catalyst?
The 1972 McGovern-Fraser Commission candidate selection rules change is that catalyst. Please see this article for background:
Of course, if political infighting, annoying commercials, and self-important political theater were the only outcome of the P&C system, it would not be such a big deal. But there is a direct line between how our government functions and income and wealth inequality across our society. The Constitution directs Congress to "promote general welfare" widely across all Americans. The weakening of our vote causes congresspeople's incentives to focus on narrow minority interests. Section 6 demonstrates the devastating effects of political inequality leading to economic inequality.
Political systems reinforce general social inequality.
Next, shown is another trend coinciding with the implementation of the P&C system in 1972 - the increasing wealth inequality in the United States [ii-a].
Political systems and general social inequality are like two sides of the same coin. Their interaction creates a reinforcing feedback loop. Those politicians with motive and opportunity to increase the power and wealth of the political party participants change rules causing more income inequality for the general population. Robert Solow, the Nobel laureate economist said:
"Great wealth attracts great political power and a society that tolerates extremes in inequality of wealth also tolerates extreme differences in political activity and political power.... It’s the interplay between economic inequality and political inequality. You start with some economic inequality. It generates political inequality. Well, the holders of political power, the beneficiaries of that political inequality, are going to pass laws and cultivate customs that help themselves."
The following graphic demonstrates the feedback loop between political and social inequality. It also shows the starting point for increasing political inequality and the reinforcing of social inequality. It all began in 1972 with the McGovern-Fraser Commission's recommendation to create the caucus and primary system.
It is time to change the rules and take our vote back. The horrifying scene from the January 6th, 2021 attack provided a powerful warning shot:
"If we do not change the rules from the inside, they will be changed for us by those disaffected from the outside."
Changing the rules from the inside will not be easy. The Republicans and Democrats are incentivized to keep things just as they are. They have consolidated their power by reducing the majority of citizen's voting power. Plus, the political parties are outside the government's checks and balances system to provide for what Justice Scalia called "The genius of the American constitutional system." In many ways, the political parties are like the fox guarding the hen house. James Madison was certainly correct in being very afraid of political parties. It would seem his worst nightmare has come true. Ideas for overcoming the political party hold over our vote are provided in the article:
5. Nibbling around the edges is not enough
Today, society mostly nibbles around the edges of fixing our weakened vote challenge. There are several well-meaning and modestly funded non-profits focused on the hacked voting system symptoms such as:
Ending gerrymandering,
Implementing campaign finance reform,
Enacting rank choice voting, and related voting initiatives.
While addressing symptoms does seek to impact the two-party duopoly and the hacked voting system, these symptoms are not the root cause. Where systemic incentives are concerned, water will find its own level. If one symptom gets remediated, the powerful party majority will just find another path to consolidate power. Incentives drive the party duopoly to optimize outcomes based on the game's rules.
The mistake citizens make is misunderstanding the game the political parties are playing. James Carse describes two kinds of games. One is called finite and one is called infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing the play. [ii-b] Many voters want to believe the political parties are playing a finite game and competing to win the next election. This is wrong. The political parties are actually playing an infinite game. The nature of a political duopoly is to perpetuate the two party duopoly indefinitely. To the political duopolist, it does not matter who wins the next election, as long as the system and its agents survive to play again. Changing the P&C system is the most direct route to update the political duopoly’s infinite game incentives. A party candidate may respond - “Hey - I absolutely want to win. I want to have an impact on government.” In the context of the duopoly - this makes sense. Party leadership - as leading the duopoly - develops candidates to fill the nominally competitive roll for the political theater. This is necessary for the duopolists to achieve the infinite game objective.
Focusing on voting symptoms and the political theater is like playing a never-ending and never-winning game of whack-a-mole and the nonprofits enable the game. Focusing on the voting symptoms is like addressing a brain hemorrhage with dim lights and an aspirin.
For background on how the two dominant political parties maintain duopolistic power, please see:
If America wishes to return to the intentions of the founding generation, where those men and women shed blood and lost lives in a courageous fight to protect our vote, then we need to focus on the root cause and take back our vote. The symptoms will resolve themselves within a balanced voting system, encouraging legislative negotiation to find balanced solutions. Until then, symptom remediation can distract from resolving the root cause.
6. The Undoing Project - How to undo the voting hack
The next graphic shows a perspective on how to change our system from the inside. Systems are just a set of environmental rules. Change the environmental rules, and you change participant incentives. Change participant incentives and you change system outcomes. This is a different approach. We do not discuss hot-button issues like the health system, guns, or immigration. We consider those as unfortunate symptoms. Sadly, those symptoms may be leveraged for political theater. While addressing these concerns could be helpful, we consider them as addressing symptoms .... not the systemic root cause itself.
We offer a political system's view and solutions to help resolve America's legislative branch systemic vote-weakening crisis. If we correct the system's rules, the symptomatic issues will naturally improve.
Political systems are tricky. We live in them so we naturally come to embrace them as "normal." Even if we recognize something is wrong, it is a challenge to understand how to change the system. We also naturally align ourselves with the systems of our life. Our biology is geared toward tribalism. Our tribalistic nature desires affiliation. This systemic affiliation may make us feel like we are somehow being disloyal when questioning a system. Frankly, our politicians leverage this feeling of loyalty.
As it stands today - a minority of political party insiders with little incentive to change are controlling the very large group of normal people that are desperate for change.
Earlier in the article, we introduced our weakening vote as the systemic root cause challenge to our democracy and society.
In our article, Your vote does not matter as much as it should! we go deeper. We address our weakening vote as the systemic root cause keeping us from making effective legislative branch-enabled changes. In this article, we address America's founders' intent regarding political parties, consider our own neurobiology, and investigate the impact of social media. We discuss "game theory" and how economists consider system or "game" rules to determine game theoretical equilibrium outcomes. Armed with this context, we then explore the 1972 McGovern-Fraser Commission recommendation to implement the primary and caucus system. We show how the primary and caucus system is the great unintended catalyst enabling political parties to cede our voting power for over 50 years. We show how the voting system created by McGovern-Fraser has elements of biological systems leading to cancer. We present the data clearly showing the party-line congressional voting changes after the primary and caucus system was implemented.
We need to take our vote back. James Madison, John Adams, and the other founders fought to make our vote the cornerstone of our society. The vote is the foundation of a well-functioning democracy. James Madison, known as the Father of the U.S. Constitution, also believed the regular vote is an important control for managing political parties. James Madison, in the Federalist Papers No. 10, said:
“If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution.”
(please note: "faction" is another name for a political party)
A strengthened vote enables:
Accountability of our elected officials to consider, debate, and implement new laws to strengthen the U.S.
Reduce the divisiveness impacting our legislative branch's effectiveness by encouraging lawmakers to find a middle ground.
Enable the will of the electorate to direct the will of the party.
Keep in mind - Madison and the other founders were equally concerned about the majority reducing the rights of the minority. Thus, a strengthened vote, in the context of our minority-sensitive constitutional system, protects the rights of the minority.
Actions and ideas for taking our vote back
In a 2020 article by the Brookings Institution [iii], they suggested an approach to recast the primary and caucus system. The recommended approach enables the parties to act as a means of quality control. The parties would serve to vet the candidates to ensure they are fit for the primary or caucus process. This seems like a reasonable root cause-focused suggestion. It aligns with the balancing system architecture such as our 3 branches of the federal government or our bicameral legislature. Thinking like this, and from a broader set of constitutional stakeholders, will help our society to take back our vote.
“[T]wo filters are better than one. Electoral and professional perspectives check each other’s excesses and balance each other’s viewpoints[.]”
Michael Porter and Katherine Gehl wrote The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy. It is a fascinating political industry application of Porter's iconic five competitive forces methodology he developed at Harvard University. In place of party primaries, Porter and Gehl propose single, open, nonpartisan primaries in which voters are permitted to choose any candidate, regardless of party. This approach would benefit candidates whose policies appeal to large swaths of voters, and the top five finishers—a number that “allow[s] a broader slate” of ideas—would move on to the general election.
In 2020, Alaska moved to non-partisan primaries, which seeks to reduce party primary influence. A Nonpartisan Top Four Primary is used to determine the top four vote-getters that will advance to the General Election, regardless of political affiliation. In accordance with Alaska’s laws, a primary election candidate does not have to be a member of a political party or a political group to run for office. If a candidate is registered as affiliated with a political party or group, it does not imply the candidate is nominated by, endorsed by, approved by, or associated with that particular party or group. Currently, there is one primary ballot.
These are three examples of thoughtful people, identifying the primary and caucus system as a challenge and suggesting or implementing solutions. There are certainly other alternatives. The point is, it is time to take our vote back.
Notes
[i-a] Available information has exploded during the market era and especially in the 21st century. In the graphic, a logarithmic transformed insert enables visibility of the earlier eras.
Hilbert, M., & López, P. The World's Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information. Science, 332(6025), 60-65, 2011
Bawden, D., & Robinson, L. The dark side of information: Overload, anxiety, and other paradoxes and pathologies. Journal of Information Science. 2009
[i-aa] Congressional Committee Members, final Report Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, 117th Congress Second Session House Report 117-663, December 22, 2022, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-J6-REPORT/pdf/GPO-J6-REPORT.pdf.
For a primer on Confirmation Bias and reasoning errors - error of omission and error of commission - please see: The path for bad decisions and how to avoid them.
[i-aaa] Gehl, Porter, WHY COMPETITION IN THE POLITICS INDUSTRY IS FAILING AMERICA, Appendix E, Harvard Business School, 2017
[i-aaaa] Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation―and Could Again, 2024
[i-b] For more information on the McGovern-Fraser Commission recommendation, please see section 3: "The Building of our Political System and a Call for Vote Strengthening" in:
Hulett, Your vote does not matter as much as it should!, The Curiosity Vine, 2022
[i-c] Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation―and Could Again, 2024
[i-d] Levitsky and Ziblatt provide several examples of failed democracies and the slippery slope to authoritarianism.
Levitsky, Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 2018
[i-e] Vital Statistics on Congress, Chapter 8, 8-3 Party Unity Votes in Congress, 1953 - 2016 (percentage of all votes)
[ii-a] World Inequality Database (WID), access 5/9/2024
Wealth inequality and income inequality are different. Income inequality was chosen to demonstrate the McGovern-Fraser impact - with the expectation it is likely to lead to wealth inequality at some point. Income inequality is a direct effect of changing laws and tax incentives impacting innovator / non-innovator balance. Income is an immediate flow from those environmental changes, whereas wealth is a more stable stock subject to inertia and compensating income sources. For example, if someone is already wealthy and their annual income decreases, they have other sources of income from their accumulated wealth. If someone is not wealthy and they lose income, their wealth is not impacted because they had so little wealth before the income change.
Paradoxically, income change is a more relevant wealth impact indicator than wealth change.
[ii-b] Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, 1986
[iii] La Rja, Rauch, Voters need help: How party insiders can make presidential primaries safer, fairer, and more democratic, The Brookings Institution, 2020
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