(02-22-2021, 03:30 PM)robkelk Wrote: I've found that the lower the amount of money any one party is allowed to raise, the more parties there are in total - the "big two" or "big three" parties can't drive up the price of advertising time to the point where the smaller parties can't afford to purchase any. Hence my suggestion of putting a cap on how much any one person can donate to parties.
I have to agree, here. I'm somewhat in support of the movement towards federal/taxpayer funding of elections in general - where any party who gets enough votes to get their critter on the ballot gets a certain fixed amount of credit towards TV ads, newspaper spots, etc, all of it explicitly allocated towards what type of thing it can be used for. Anything you want to do beyond that, you do fundraising for. With a cap on the amount per person, and no corporate donations whatsoever.
(The utter scam that is 'corporate personhood' needs to die in a fire, but that's a different thread.)
The gerrymandering issue is a thing that definitely needs to be addressed but just how to go about it is clearly difficult or it would have been fixed by now. Random thought on it is to use current county boundaries, with representative numbers allocated by county and elected at-large by the citizens of that county. Or, for that matter, go to at-large-by-state election of representatives (using some ranked voting system) while Senators return to being appointed by the state legislatures.
I think there's a certain level of "too much" at the federal level, really -- that local district needs should be handled at the state level, not federally. A Congressional representative should be speaking for just the state, not a particular district in it, and things internal to the state handled by the state legislature.