Welcome, reader. I’m glad you’re hanging in there.
The title of this article doesn’t refer to the mascot of one of the two big political parties in the USA, but this isn’t unrelated to them, either. The concept of two-party politics in the United States has had centuries to entrench itself into our political and electoral system, not to mention our cultural landscape, and it will take a lot more than a single amendment to dig it out.
Here’s the problem, which you may already have thinking been about: even if we remove the current government, where exactly are we supposed to find a better one? The two political parties, Democrat and Republican, have an effective stranglehold on American politics. Regardless of what rules No Confidence might put in place, there is zero doubt in my mind, as there should be in yours, that the state politicians will do everything they can to give their party the best chance to succeed in the elections to come. Even if you ignore the rampant gerrymandering, every state writes their election laws in such a way as to give their party the best chance in the Federal Government. I don’t necessarily even think that’s a bad thing.
No Confidence doesn’t try to take the authority away from the states (as Trump is presently attempting); the states are the ones who will have to ratify the amendment, and that would make it utterly dead in the water. No Confidence is a way to give power back to the states, as so very many small-government advocates have wanted ever since our country’s founding. How, then, can we ignore all of the blatantly anti-voter laws that have been enacted all across the country? They, or laws like them, will color the outcome of every state-run election. Trump isn’t even wrong about that part, and we all know it.
So how do we get fifty incredibly partisan states who are very comfortable in their biases to run fair elections, without infringing on their right to make whatever rules they damn well please? Simple. We don’t give them rules to follow; we give them targets.
No Confidence introduces a new type of election into American politics: the Restricted Election. This is not intended to replace the existing electoral system, and it isn’t the type of elections we’d do going forward, forever; the Restricted Election format is only used to elect an interim government after No Confidence removes the old one. After that, unless the Interim Government passes laws or proposes amendments to change the existing electoral system, we go right back to it in the next election.
The Restricted Election format demands more, of both the states themselves and the American people, than any ballot or referendum we have ever held. We cannot stop the organizations and lobbyists from doing everything they can to bias the results towards their cause; therefore, the Restricted Election requires Americans to raise our voices louder than we ever have before, to drown them out.
That’s why, in a Restricted Election, voting is not just a privilege, it is a responsibility. Every citizen of age is required to vote, and every state is required to do their utmost to assist them. If the deeply partisan states try to play their usual games of making sure only the “right” people get to the polls, they will fall short of the high bar set by a Restricted Election.
The penalty for failing to do a Restricted Election properly after a No Confidence is that the rest of the states who did do it right get to start doing Congress stuff without you. If the deep-blue and deep-red states don’t do everything they can to ensure they run a fair election, they will not be part of the reconstruction of America until they do. Their citizens will have to go and vote again, and again if necessary, before they will have any voice in the Interim Congress.
(I’ll tell you though: if the results of America’s first Restricted Election are that only lawmakers from the swing states end up being seated from the beginning of the Interim Congress session, I can’t really see that as a bad thing.)
The actual text setting out the requirements for a Restricted Election is pretty wordy, but it boils down to three key points:
Every citizen votes.
Every voter has someone to vote for.
Every candidate on the ballot is trustworthy.
Number one is pretty easy. Normal elections in America are voluntary; a Restricted Election is compulsory. Every citizen of age who resides in the state is required to submit a ballot, with no exceptions. No Confidence doesn’t propose or even suggest penalties for citizens who don’t submit a ballot (even a blank abstention ballot, for those citizens who have religious objections to voting); states would be free to enact penalties for not participating in a Restricted Election if they felt the need, but they wouldn’t have to.
Turns out, saying “everyone has to vote” increases voter turnout, even when there are no explicit penalties for non-voting. (Shock, I know.) We even know by how much! Australia had voluntary voting like the US until 1924, and their voter turnout was in the fifty to eighty percent range, just like ours is today. Ever since 1924 voting has been compulsory, and their voter turnout has been over ninety percent.
Therefore, in order to hold a successful Restricted Election, the state must show that they have received a quantity of filled ballots equal to at least ninety percent of their population of resident citizens of age.
The state is permitted to set whatever rules they like; they can require you to show photo ID, or to register a month in advance, or to go to one of just a few polling places. They will simply need to provide enough support to their citizens that at least nine out of ten can make it out to vote at the right time.
Something tells me that all across America it will suddenly and mysteriously become extremely easy for a citizen to vote, at least in the Restricted Election. Much cheaper that way.
That takes care of number 1. Either the state gets close enough to “all citizens voting”, or they have to stay home while the other states get to go to Congress. How about number 2, that everyone should have someone to vote for? How do you ensure the state legislature doesn’t just pack the ballot with people they want to see in Congress?
Well, that comes down to the type of ballots states are required to use. I’m not talking electronic versus paper, I’m talking about “vote for no more than two” versus “vote for at least one.” Compulsory voting has been rejected by America in the past because of conflicts with the First Amendment; by requiring everyone to vote, you’re depriving citizens of their chance to make a political statement by not voting.
No Confidence avoids running afoul of the First Amendment by saying only that every citizen must submit a ballot. In addition, it specifically calls out that a voter may submit a ballot without any votes on it; the specific text is that each ballot may contain votes for “none, any, or all” of the candidates. This makes a Restricted Election a form of approval voting, where voting for one candidate doesn’t harm the prospects for a different candidate.
It also provides the mechanism to guarantee the second of the three criteria, that every voter have someone to vote for. How? Well, the ninety-percent voter turnout requirement counts filled ballots. Specifically, the voter has to have voted for at least as many candidates as are being elected, for their ballot to count towards that ninety percent requirement. States must allow their citizens to submit under-filled or even blank ballots, or else they violate their citizens’ free speech rights (and wouldn’t the ACLU have a field day with that); this means they need for their voters to want to vote for at least as many candidates as they have seats to fill.
(That’s another thing: Restricted Elections don’t even try to address the gerrymandering issue. The state is required to elect all its Senators and Representatives at-large in the Restricted Election. Yes, this does mean that each Californian will have to mark down votes for at least 54 candidates. It’s not quite as bad as it sounds.)
The more effort the state puts towards restricting and biasing its candidate pool, the less likely the voters will be happy with the ballot. Voters do not need to be instructed to avoid voting for people they don’t like; that’s already the expectation. So, if the state holds a Restricted Election but only puts Democrats on the ballot, there’s an approximately zero chance they’ll capture enough Republican votes to hit ninety percent of the electorate.
To avoid that becoming something that an anti-democracy movement could game (by instructing their members to undervote, perhaps), Restricted Elections are also the only elections that accept partial credit. If the state gets at least ninety percent of its citizens to the polls, but each ballot only has four votes on it, then the state sends two Senators and two Representatives to Congress. It will have to hold another Restricted Election to fill the rest of its seats in the House of Representatives.
Give them a target they can’t hit unless they’re actually giving it their all.
Still, though. Even if that accounts for the first two criteria, what about the third? How do you legislate trustworthiness? If there were a reliable way to tell whether someone was trustworthy, there wouldn’t be a need for trust in the first place. How can the states possibly tell if a candidate can be trusted, and how could that possibly be verified after the fact?
I have to credit the Voters Not Politicians movement from Michigan for the inspiration here, for the way they formed their 2020 Congressional redistricting committee. The answer is that you don’t try and figure out whether any given candidate is trustworthy; instead, you pick your candidates from a group that you already know is trustworthy. And how do you do that? Math.
Here’s the thing about trustworthiness: it, like everything else about biological life, exists on a spectrum. Some people are so trustworthy that they could say they need to borrow a thousand dollars of yours today so they can give you a million tomorrow, and they would be telling the truth. Some people are so untrustworthy that they could say the same thing and you’d believe it just as strongly, until they didn’t come back the next day. Most of us, though? Eh, we’ll bend the truth every once in a while if there’s no real harm in it, but we’d never try and cheat someone out of house and home, and even if we tried we couldn’t pull off that level of sociopathy without giving it away.
Our existing electoral system only picks people from the first and second categories. No Confidence exclusively picks people from the third, and here’s how: every person who appears on a Restricted Election ballot must have been chosen randomly from a pool of at least ten thousand, at some point within the ninety days prior. As Michigan discovered thanks to VNP, whenever you choose a random person from a large group, you get…just an ordinary person. Not a saint or an angel, and not someone gaming the system, but just an everyday citizen trying to live their life and make their way in the world. You get someone you can trust. Not an “I know they will tell the truth” type of trust, but an “I’m confident I could tell if they were lying” trust.
There’s still a lot of leeway in how the states enact the requirement, of course. They could call for tens of thousands of volunteers to submit their names, and then put all those names in a hat and pick a dozen out. They could randomly choose one out of every ten thousand citizens on the jury duty roster and send each one a mailing saying “you could be a candidate in the Restricted Election if you want to” and pick the candidates by hand from whoever responds, or whoever gets at least a hundred signatures, or whoever passes the background check.
(I suppose they could even turn it into some sort of reality show if they thought it would increase voter engagement. I’m not saying it’s a good idea, I’m just saying that as long as the candidates went through a random selection process at some point, it doesn’t matter how the campaigns get run, or whether the state allows viewers to vote candidates off the ballot before the election even happens to improve ratings, just so long as the actual Restricted Election they run at the end meets all the criteria. Hope that helps, California.)
There actually is one more thing in No Confidence that keeps the candidates honest, but this article is already long enough, so I’ll leave that for next time.
Until then, stay safe.
Thank you for sticking with me on this journey. It is easy to tear down the things that offend us; if we truly want to unfuck the world, we must spend ten times as much effort and be ten times as careful with what we construct to take its place.
If reading, commenting on, and sharing these articles isn’t enough for you and you want to do more to help, join one of the online communities organizing for UTW and No Confidence. All are welcome, regardless of political views or energy level; the only requirement is that you bring your best behavior.
Questions, challenges, additions, and thoughtful disagreements are encouraged in the comments; bring your good faith, and others will do the same. Today’s topic: if your state’s electoral commission invited you to appear on the Restricted Election ballot, and the fellow citizens of your state trusted you to speak for them, would you be willing to spend the next few years of your life representing their best interests in Congress?
Share this with someone you know who dreams of a better future, and stay safe.
–Danielle
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