
Al Gore: US democracy has been hacked - iProject
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/03/al-gore-us-democracy-hacked
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SoftwareMaven
I have agreed with very few things Gore has ever said (I won't get into
details because this shouldn't devolve into a Gore flame war). However, I
agree with this one. And I hope he can use the influence he has to influence
change.

Citizens United may have been a death blow to our functioning republic. It was
already on life support previous to that, but with the addition of unlimited
amounts of corporate funding, Congress now has little incentive to look at
"real" people. Instead, its constituents are now people of the corporate
variety, and all of its decisions are made for them[1], even if a veneer of
"it's for you" is laid over it.

Without a way to undo the damage of Citizens United (and the path that led up
to it), I don't see how we can solve the fundamental problem of Congress not
representing the "real" people. And any attempt to solve Citizens United would
be met with huge amounts of lobbying and media buying against it, making a
grass roots effort nearly impossible, especially when most people would much
rather just pick up some coins on Dullsville.

I'm greatly disheartened with the US at the moment, and I'm not sure it is
going to get better. We need another social revolution akin to the 60s, but I
think it will be much harder to make happen today. I know I have no ideas of
how to make it happen.

1\. I believe there are a few representatives who are outside of that mold,
but they tend to be freshmen with little political power. By the time they've
gained political power, they generally fall into the "mold". Of course, there
are always exceptions, whom I admire greatly.

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peatmoss
I think there are many incremental improvements that could be made to the US
political system that would enable future, more wholesale improvements. I'd
love to see someone like Mr. Gore champion the cause of instant runoff voting
/ ranked choice voting.

IRV/RCV effectively removes the risk of supporting candidates that aren't
already hooked into (and beholden to) the existing political fundraising
machinery. What's better, is that IRV/RCV could be adopted without
constitutional amendments or other up-front, wholesale changes to our system
of government.

I'd like to imagine that, with the spoiler effect removed, data-savvy third
parties would be able to most effectively use the Internet to increase their
votes-to-dollars ratios. In fact, I'd hope that intelligence in this arena
would be a filter function.

Of course this doesn't solve everything--money would still largely dictate
candidates' levels of exposure. The difference would be that people could stop
using party affiliation (and by proxy money raising potential) as a pre-filter
for candidates.

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snowwrestler
The U.S. political system was hacked decades ago, by political parties.
Parties, not special interests, undermine the design of the U.S. federal
government.

They have baked themselves into the basic structure of the government through
power structures like debate commisions, special spending restrictions, and
legislative rules--none of which are anywhere to be found in the nation's
founding documents or concepts.

Special interests were not only anticipated by the framers of the
Constitution, they are an essential aspect of the government's functioning--
see Federalist #10 for instance.

Political professionals like Al Gore do not like the Citizens United decision
because it reduces the power of political parties, by giving any organization
the same power to communicate political messages. But in that respect it is
very closely aligned with how our political system was supposed to work from
the beginning.

