Tag: civics

Fixing the Voting System

C.G.P.Grey lays out the problems with the U.S.A’s current “first past the post/winner take all” voting system and then explains how to fix them:

The problems:

  • Minority rule: You can win with less than half the vote (at least in the beginning).
  • Inevitable, unavoidable, two-party system evolves over time.
  • Third-parties become spoilers; the better a third-party does the worse it is for their voters because it takes away votes from the other party they would favor.

The solutions:

1. The Alternative Vote/Instant Runoff.

2. Mixed Member Proportional Representation.

How Primary Elections Work

C.B.P. Grey explains how primary elections work. Right now the Republican Party is conducting its primaries to choose a candidate to face Pres. Obama in the November general elections, and all their debates, as well as the sequence of primaries highlighting different parts of the United States, provides for a quite interesting view of the social and political diversity in the country. The video below, however, focuses on the details of the voting process.

The Case Against the Electoral College

C.G.P Grey makes the case against the Electoral College in video form. He starts with how the Electoral College Works and continues with a well reasoned polemic against it: he’s big into democracy — one person, one vote.

How the Electoral College Works

The Trouble with the Electoral College

Should High Schoolers Be Able to Vote

Students in Lowell, Mass., are petitioning for the right to vote in their town. They argue that voting is an integral part of the civics they’re learning in high school, and they should be able to learn about, and vote on, issues in the communities where they grew up, and not have to wait until they’re in college.

Their campaign gained support of local politicians, cause the passage of a state law allowing the town to lower the voting age and even got a constitutional law professor (Lawrence Tribe) to write a letter supporting their case to the Massachusetts’ Secretary of State. They’re now organizing a ballot initiative for 2013.

Harry Potter and the Making of the Peace

Here’s a wonderfully serious piece in the magazine Foreign Policy on what the wizarding world should do to recover and reconcile now that Voldemort has finally been vanquished.

… if history teaches us anything (consider the bitter legacy still lingering from the 17th-century Goblin Wars or the recent experience of American Muggles in Iraq and Afghanistan), it is that the defeat of Voldemort by Harry Potter may have been the easy part. Indeed, one might even say it was child’s play. The hard work of postwar stabilization still lies ahead.

— Malinowski et al, 2011: Post-Conflict Potter in Foreign Policy.

It’s a bit long, but it’s worth reading at least through the first section on, “Transitional Justice and Reconciliation”.

This section points out that, sure, Voldemort’s henchmen need to be prosecuted before the law (and not just detained without charge), but it will be a lot more difficult to deal with the thousands who supported Voldemort in greater or lesser ways. After all, some of these only did what they did under threat. The article recommends a Truth and Reconciliation Commission like in South Africa.

Among their other recommendations are:

  • the breaking the monopoly of the Daily Prophet on the news media,
  • a Comprehensive Curse Ban Treaty,
  • more transparency at the Ministry of Magic,
  • a Charter on the Rights of Witches and Wizards,
  • “that the Wizengamot, the high council of Magical Great Britain, be split into separate legislative and judicial bodies,”
  • and closing Azkaban immediately.

You’ll notice that a number of these recommendations focus on expanding the rights of the individual and build in more checks and balances into government and the media. These, and the overall emphasis on building mechanisms to prevent future conflict, align well with the ideas of peace education. It might also be an interesting focus for a class discussion/Socratic dialogue.

I’d be curious to hear from any Harry Potter fans who might come across this post and have the time to read the article (even though school’s restarted and the homework’s being piled on).

Icelandic Constitution Update

Iceland’s new draft of a constitution has been submitted to parliament. The drafters relied heavily on citizen comments using internet sites like Twitter and Facebook. Anyone who’s scrolled through the comments sections of just about any site open to the general public would probably worry that the ratio of good information to bad would be pretty small (a low signal-to-noise ratio). But,

“What I learned is that people can be trusted. We put all our things online and attempted to read, listen and understand and I think that made the biggest difference in our job and made our work so so so much better,” [Salvor Nordal, the head of the elected committee of citizens] said.

–Valdimarsdottir (2011): Icelanders hand in draft of world’s first ‘web’ constitution on phsorg.com

The final draft is here (the link uses Google Translate, so it’s not a perfect translation). It will be interesting to see what the parliament does with it now.

From the constitution:

12th Art. Rights of children

All children should be guaranteed the protection and care of their welfare demands.

What the child’s best interests shall always prevail when taking decisions on matters relating thereto.

Child should be guaranteed the right to express their views in all matters relating thereto shall take due account of the views of the child according to age and maturity.

–Article 12 of draft Icelandic Constitution via Google Translate.

The Modern Way to Draft a Constitution

Iceland’s drafting a new constitution. To make it more transparent and involve the citizenry, they made the draft available online and used social media, like Facebook, to get comments. The Constitutional Council even broadcast their weekly meetings on YouTube.

Suggestions from the public that have been added thus far include livestock protection and a clause that specifies who owns the country’s natural resources (the nation), …

— Kessler (2011): Iceland Croudsources Its Constitution

I’ve been having my students write their classroom constitution on our Wiki. It’s great for transparency and collaborative writing, but usually very few students are interested in looking beyond the section they write. The Iceland experiment is apparently running into a slightly different problem; well-wishers are clogging up the social media sites.