Issue Position: Electoral Reform, Term Limits, Redistricting

Issue Position

Washington is broken because our electoral system is sclerotic and closed off to those who would challenge the status quo. Republicans and Democrats have insulated themselves from competition, and they sell out public policy to monied interests. Electoral reform can help reverse these trends and move us toward a more open and competitive system.

Term Limits

Incumbency advantage has become so great that truly competitive races are rare absent retirements, resignations, and deaths. In the past 20 years, only one Congressional election cycle (2010) saw less than 90% of House incumbents reelected. (This year's high-profile loss of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is a rare event--as of Aug 27, only three out of 373 House incumbents failed to win their parties' nomination.)

Term limits can increase competitive races directly by forcing vacancies, and indirectly by producing a surplus of term-limited politicians seeking their next gig.

I support a Constitutional amendment enacting Congressional term limits, or at least making them available via state legislation (overturning the Supreme Court decision in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton).

Nonpartisan Redistricting

Legislators gerrymander districts for self-protection and partisan gain, producing safe seats and polarized parties. Gerrymandering contributes to the incumbency advantage, to the lack of competitiveness in our electoral system, and to the hyper-partisan deadlock in Washington. This year, three out of eleven Congressional seats have no major-party challenger this year. (It's bad at the state level, too: In 2013, over 40 out of 100 seats in the House of Delegates went uncontested by the major parties, and that was a relatively good year for competition--normally over half go uncontested. Likewise in Virginia's State Senate, unchallenged seats are routinely over 40%.)

It's time to replace the redistricting charade with a simple non-partisan process--a simple computer algorithm could be used--that ignores partisan advantage, incumbent protection, race, and other inappropriate considerations.

I support adding rules to Title 2 of the U.S. Code that would help move us toward such a result, at least for federal election districts, and I would encourage state-level policy-makers to achieve a similar result for state and local redistricting.

Increasing the Size of the House of Representatives

Increasing the size of the House of Representatives would make the people's representatives more accessible, it would increase the attainability of elective office by average citizens, and it would render special-interest capture of the legislature more difficult and costly. There is no reason the House of Representatives needs to be kept at 435 members as our population soars past 320 million; that's well over 700,000 people per Representative. Why not double the size of the House? Why not expand it to 1,000 members, or 2,000, or more?

Other Electoral Reforms

I support federal legislation, pursuant to the 14th Amendment's guarantees of due process and equal protection, that protects the democratic process from unfair, anticompetitive practices by state-level policy-makers, such as self-serving ballot-order provisions and overly onerous ballot-access requirements. Such legislation would not expand federal power, but would provide a clearer statement of federal protection of ballot fairness than the current inconsistent patchwork of federal court decisions.

I support other electoral reforms as well, but many of them are only appropriately pursued at the state level.

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