Campaign for Democracy in California

California Governor, Gavin Newsom, has launched a campaign for democracy but, he leaves out what democracy is all about. We can't have democracy as long as poor people can't afford to get on the ballot. We can't have democracy if working-class candidates can't afford to get their message out to the voters through government-produced voter information guides. And, we can't have democracy if most candidates can't even get on the general election ballot because only two big-money candidates will be allowed on it.

Further, we can't have democracy as long as big money can buy elections by giving some candidates more speech than others. Money is not and should not be speech. We can't have democracy as long as people can't vote for their preferred candidate with the hope of winning. And we can't have democracy when sizable groups of people are not represented or not represented in proportion to the number of votes received. Those are just some of the problems.

Now, we need solutions. Let's take big money out of politics. Abolish the thousands of dollars poor people need to file to run for office. Abolish the $25 a word to inform voters what candidates stand for in the California Voters Information Guide and the thousands of dollars it costs for just one word in the county voter information guides. Let's encourage candidates to avoid asking big money for a handout by introducing and passing a clean money type of equal public funding for all ballot-qualified candidates.

And let's put democracy in our voting system. Let's create multi-winner districts where each voter has one vote to allow constituency groups or parties to be represented in proportion to the number of votes received in a general election. That way, people will know that their votes count for winning candidates and constituencies will be represented. And fewer votes will be wasted. For example, in a ten-member district, if a party or independent candidate gets 10% of the vote that party or independent gets 10% of the seats, one, not none, from that district in the legislature, and if a party gets 50% of the vote in the district that party gets 50% of the seats or five, not all of them. And fewer votes will be wasted. For example, in a ten-member district, if a party or independent candidate gets 10% of the vote that party or independent gets 10% of the seats, one, not none, from that district in the legislature, and if a party gets 50% of the vote in the district that party gets 50% of the seats or five, not all of them. In addition, let's save the taxpayers millions of dollars and abolish the primary for all state races. Except for the office of president, unless the primaries allow the voters of each ballot-qualified party to arrange a list of candidates for the general election, they're not needed.

Now, these are some of the issues that a real campaign for democracy should be talking about. Let's organize and build real democracy.