The first of three editorials by David L Wetzell, PhD  

Who else who feels embarrassed over how ugly things have gotten over health care reform? After all, it's one thing to get worked up about being misled into a war of choice, but to want better health care for more people is to want to do the right thing.  And, if mistakes get made, they'd be less costly and easier to fix down the road.  And so perhaps we may diagnose our present partisan ugliness, unwieldy health care system and fifteen year lapse in efforts at its reform as symptoms of a deeper disease in our democracy.  As such, while Health care reform (of some sort) shall pass, my hope for change lie more with election reform.  Strategic election reforms could make our politics less cut-throat and assist reform movements of all shapes and sizes.  In recent years, I have brain-stormed, shared with and learned from all sorts of people on the issue of election reform.  I distill in this three part series my experiences and views into three goals, three rules and three strategies.  Below are three goals for election reform.    

The first and most general goal is for us to see a Democracy as a garden.  For like a garden, it needs much care to flourish.  Based on voter turnouts, ours has not flourished as much in the last thirty years or so.  Because of this, we need to tend our own democracy.  We cannot just export it.  And, as with great gardening, to tend our democracy will require some experimentation.  Yet, as we renew it, we will do far more to help spread democracy abroad than any regime-change ever could.  Yes we can overcome both terror and tyranny.    

The second goal is to fix our existing system.  For while our existing system favors for there to be two major parties, historically this has not been a serious problem.   When we have been both more active and respectful of the other side as citizens, both parties have accommodated reform movements, making our two party system work.  As such, while election rules matter, what matters more for the sake of our democracy apparently are our political habits as citizens.  And, because of this, we can, presuming that we cultivate better habits, afford to take a less is more approach to election reform.  We can focus on simple rule changes at the local and state levels that help to make both of our two major parties give more voice to more people on more issues.    

The third and most specific goal is to prevent any party from getting a "permanent" majority. Rivalry over this "prize"  is why our politics has been so heated.  But if we were to level the playing field between the major two parties, then the majority status would tend to shift more often.  As a result, influential people would hedge more and lower the stakes of politics.  Lowered stakes would foster more cooperation and reduce the level of heated rhetoric.  And if thereby our politics became more civil, both parties would converge on what would become a more dynamic center, as more people would vote and what-not.  In which case, we would have ideal, or far better, conditions for the success of reform movements that try to do the right thing.