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Today marks exactly one month until Americans go to the polls in the 2020 presidential election. But while we were expecting televised debates and (virtual) rallies in key battlegrounds, what happens in the next thirty days is anyone’s guess as Trump announces he has been diagnosed with coronavirus and fears for Joe Biden’s health grow in turn.
As confusion mounts, we are taking a moment to zoom out from the current race and look at the current flaws in our system as a whole—from the problems with the Electoral College and winner-takes-all elections, to the barriers holding back women and third parties. As Archon Fung notes, there are serious issues in our basic framing of elections too. “A problem with our democracy is that the ability to vote is something the political parties are competing over,” he writes. “They should compete over issues and principles and policies, not over who gets to vote and who doesn’t.” Whichever way you look at it, our electoral system is broken. This reading list offers some solutions.
The party’s fifty-year strategy has reached an electoral dead end.
Without pressure from social movements, they won’t produce meaningful and deeply needed reform.
Some candidates who lose elections strengthen democracy, but others threaten the democratic system itself.
Here’s what we should do.
To combat the new normal of two-party gridlock in U.S. politics, many call for more political parties. But what works in parliamentary governments might not help in our presidential system.
We must institute a method of electing a president that is sensitive to the votes of Americans everywhere.
The Electoral College once served an urgent political purpose. The time has now come to abolish it.
Voter ID laws burden minorities, but discrimination starts well before they reach the voting booth.
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As Roe is struck down by the Supreme Court, we bring together recent and archival essays to assess what is at stake—and how we might move from reproductive rights to reproductive justice.
Theorist Hil Malatino offers a compelling account of the persistent bad feelings with which trans people often struggle—but it comes with fashionable academic hang-ups that need to be reconsidered.
The systems that harm animals go hand in hand with systems that harm humans. Combating them requires inter-species solidarity.
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