On Partisan Politics and Gerrymandering
As a Baha’i, I had to rescind my party affiliation because it is an aspect of partisan politics, which is forbidden. That doesn’t mean I can’t or don’t vote; on the other hand, election and democracy is as important to the Faith as avoiding partisan politics. These seem like irreconcilable ideas but it fundamentally means something quite simple. You need to vote for whoever you think is going to do the best job at governance. Party affiliation is fundamentally a way of creating tribes, and if we want unity, we must stop creating or investing in tribal affiliations.
For some reason gerrymandering is on my mind. We can probably all agree that gerrymandering is fundamentally wrong. It occurred to me recently that the only reason gerrymandering is possible is because of party registration. Your vote is secret. You can create a district and see what votes happen there; perhaps even polling stations can be separated out (I don’t really know) but the factual basis that enables gerrymandering is party registration. So maybe don’t do that and you’ll see less (or at least less effective) gerrymandering.
The counterargument is that you want to vote in the primary. The last election shows that such votes are an absolute farce, since neither of the major parties actually asked the voters in a meaningful way who they wanted on the ballot.
In some states, anyone can vote in a primary. This is a good idea because it dilutes the problem of playing to your extremes during the primary and the middle during the general election. If you have to play to the middle during the primaries too, we’ll all have more moderate candidates to choose between in the general election.
In a situation where enough people refuse party registration, parties will voluntarily choose to allow anyone to vote in the primaries, simply because otherwise the party members will choose people completely unpalatable to the general population. Right now, about two thirds of the country is registered with one of the parties. If the situation were reversed, where one third were registered with one or the other, the independent voice would be more important than the party die-hards.
This seems to me a good strategy for de-escalating the partisan nature of American politics.