Here we are in 2024 and so many people have completely checked out. As I wrote before Voter Apathy is by design.

I hear so many people complain about the system and how it does not work, how elected officials are not for the people, and how we need term limits, and there are more and more reasons. But the complaints all have a resolution available that requires some effort, but that effort is what is missing.

Elections is the ending of one cycle and the beginning of another cycle. The election process is when you make demands of the people asking for your vote. The election results begins the next stage which is pushing whoever is elected to respond to your demands for your vote. No matter who is elected they still represent you if they appeared on the ballot for you to vote for.

One major problem we have is that people believe that we need term limits but it ignores the fact that an election is a term limit. No one is entitled to win an election much less repeated elections.

People love to complain that elected officials do not care about the people. This is sadly true in some if not many cases. But voting out people that do not care about the people is what we should do. We have the power. Often elected officials do not engage with the public enough to truly know what people want but by not participating in elections we enable elected officials to not engage with the public.

I hear people say that we need more than a two (2) party system to give more voices. The problem with this idea is that a majority wins system means that the more parties you have involved the less of a majority is needed to gain power. If there are 2 parties you need 50% +1, if 3 parties you need 34%, if 4 parties you need 25% +1. This will actually work backwards as groups will recognize this and like minded groups will power together to push out smaller groups and seize power that way. There is no true best election system. There are options that can be tried but almost all have some flaws that enable least favorite people to seize power or people not within the majority to seize power. Recently I seen a youtube video discuss the topic and it is based on math to provide examples of how the system is flawed and some alternatives and their flaws. Take a look at it here.

Another complaint I hear about is how elected officials vote on projects that they dislike or worse oppose. Elections are about negotiations and giving things you may not agree with your vote in order to get things that you do want. At one point I did not understand how politics work and I was complaining about officials voting on things I disagreed with but as I learned more about giving and taking I became less tolerant of the hard line of vote them out for voting on things I did not agree with. We will never have a body of elected officials that all agree on the same things and will do everything in lock step. And because of that it is perfectly okay to give up some things to get some things. The problem often is that people do not elect enough officials to get anything done in a timely manner nor without giving up much in return.

People want better healthcare, they want clean air and water, they want to have some type of accountability of the people in power but constantly electing a divided government that ultimately cannot achieve much to improve the lives of the people they are elected to serve.

The best way for us to fix our elections and populate it with people that listen to the people is to vote for people and then demand that whoever wins listens to the people. It is easy to sit back and complain about the system but getting what we want requires us to do more than nothing at all.

So many people vote against their own best interest because someone told them something that sounds good but is rooted in lies and deceit. People that make less than $40,000 USD per year are complaining about the taxes on people that make $500,000 USD per year even though the people making $500k often pay less taxes than the person making $40k per year on a percentage of their earned income. This is just a single example of how broken our system is and how people believe so many things are true but have no foundation on why it is true other than they believe it to be that way.

For all of these reasons we are failing ourselves and refusing to make things better. It would truly help though if our country was more controlled by the people and not by a system setup to take power away from the people. The electoral college was designed to give states more power rather than the people in said states. It is estimated by 2040 or 2050 that 70% of the population will live in 15 states. This means that 30% of the population will control 70% of the population which is the basis of Minority Controlled government. That discussion is for another post though.