• gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    This is what we’re doing

    Young people have not been as enthusiastic supporters of the Biden administration [even] before President Biden was elected. So what’s different about Gen Z generation in particular, who’s known to be politically active, also very diverse and caring about a variety of social issues, is that when they’re disappointed in what the government is doing or what the leaders are showing them, they’re willing to take the issue in their own hand and try to intervene, try to get involved sometimes by speaking up by their vote.

    But by and large, they have voted more than other generations have as youth, regardless of how disappointed they say they are in the government. So if the past couple of elections’ trends hold, young people have been disappointed in the government and their elected leaders, but they voted.

    [Bolding added]

    • LordOfTheChia@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      The big thing is that movements start from local political offices and can grow from there.

      It can start with representatives, the rare senator, or even taking over of a party at the state level:

      https://apnews.com/article/nevada-bernie-sanders-las-vegas-harry-reid-6f834efcd0dcc3644ce2365447aabab0

      Participate in local elections, back primary candidates. Once the numbers are there at the nationwide level, we can push for a more representative electoral system.

      We can push system that uses ranked choice voting like Alaska did. We can also increase the size of the house of representatives to better match the idea of representation the founding fathers had for us. It’s been nearly a 100 years that the house was capped at 435

      The founding fathers had envisioned a house that grew with the size of the country:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment

      This laid the intent that we have 1 rep per 30,000 people and increase the constituents per rep by 10,000 each time the house reached another 100 seats.

      Or in other words, the max constituents represented by each rep in the house should be:

      30,000 + RoundedDown(Number of house seats/100)*10,000

      So at 400+ seats (1 rep per 70,000) would make sense for a country of 28 million. Really, with the wording of the amendment and understanding that the examples lay out a mathematical formula for expanding the house indefinitely (but with more people per rep as it goes up) we would have over a 1,000 reps! In fact, some quick math shows that per the original intents, we would have 1700 reps with at most 200,000 constituents each. This would hold until our population reaches 340 million when we’d switch to 1800 reps and a cap per rep of 210,000.

      There’s a current “Uncap the House” movement, however, I’m unsure of how much momentum they’ve been gaining.

      To see how the number of constituents has grown per member over the years:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment#Number_of_members

      In other words, we’re being shorted almost 1300 reps!