Yes. University of Colorado is one of the very, very few institutions whose Board of Regents is elected. This is enshrined in our state constitution… so every election cycle we have to vote on a regent (or regents) for the school.
It is an absolute disaster for the University, as we have a cadre of highly political and underqualified folks trying to manage a multi-billion dollar operation with a responsibility as the largest employer in the state.
This still seems wrong. If a particular ballot initiative (or constitutional amendment) is of concern, it should be a campaign issue. I guess if neither the Republican nor the Democrat want to take it up, then it doesn’t become a campaign issue. From my understanding of US politics, there does not seem to be a viable third party or multiple other parties that one could credible vote for.
Oops. My bad. But I guess that is right on point with the confusion that must reign when an American is faced with a ballot. There is just a ton of stuff going on.
Well, it need some unstupiding. One place to start might be on gerrymandering. I learned about geryymandering in my grade 8 history class from a very passionate history teacher. He has a masters in history and was an immigrant from Poland. He became very animated when it came to lessons on the structure of government in Canada and democracy. Gerrymandering was a big problem in Canada, but electoral boundaries are now set by an independent elections body (Elections Canada).
I mean, it’s helpful to have some idea of what can and can’t be done to improve things in the US. The prevailing legal attitude is that gerrymandering is a perfectly legal and constitutional tactic. If you want to change that, you’ll need to change the makeup of the judiciary or change the constitution or both, and you can’t actually do that in anything under many decades.
Everybody here knows that gerrymandering is bad. You’re preaching to the choir.
The United States was founded by people with fundamental disagreements as to whether we should have a very democratic republic or something approaching a classical republic (that is, not democratic at all). In a general sense, the spectum of opinion ran north to south, with the New England states holding democratic ideals, but Georgia and South Carolina abhoring even of a whiff of popular power.
One problem is that this is not taught in school, so depending on where you grow up, you are likely to go through life believing that the nation and its constitution whole-heartedly back the view you grew up with.
Another problem is that the constitution never guaranteed the right to vote, and, in fact, originally set up a system where the president and senate were not directly selected by the citizens. And a related problem is that the amendments which have since added some voting rights, did so in rather a piecemeal way, such that the voting system cannot treat blacks or women or eighteen-year-olds as less than equal voters, but that begs the question as to what voting rights all citizens have.
So gerrymandering is difficult to attack because you are questioning the impact of districting on your right to have a meaningful vote… but the courts (especially conservative courts) hold that you do not actually have any such right. The Supreme Court actually said as much back in 2000 in Bush v. Gore.
The unfortunate outcome is that most successful litigation against gerrymandering takes the form of attacking systems that dilute Black voting… because the 14th Amendment guarantees that Blacks have an equal right to vote. But that has the result of making much of the white population think of gerrymandering and voting issues as “just” a concern over Blacks. Even liberals often seem unaware of just how broad a problem gerrymandering is.
A constitutional amendment simply guaranteeing every American citizen the right to vote would go a long ways towards solving the problem. (It also strikes me as a politically useful campaign, given the fact that it would force conservatives to admit that they are fundamentally opposed to voting rights.)
I think this accurately captures the view of the courts, but I don’t know how it applies specifically to gerrymandering. Gerrymandering doesn’t impact elections for the Senate or the Presidency, which are choices made at the level of the entire state; it applies only to elections for the House, which are elections confined to the unequal districts that gerrymandering creates. And the plain language of the Constitution — even before the amendments which clearly strengthen the idea of a right to vote — is that the people, not the states, choose their members of Congress.
The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.
This language left open the question of who, exactly, were meant by the people, deferring the question to each state; but not the question of whether those people had a right to vote. And the later amendments closed the loophole that allowed states to decide that women and Black people and other minorities and young adults were not included in the people.