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LOCAL News :: Civil & Human Rights : Elections & Legislation

Kalbfleisch Will Focus on Election Reform

Election reform is a critical issue our nation must address before real progress can be made on anything else, says David Kalbfleisch, Green Party candidate for U.S. House of Representatives, IL-10th District.
In any given election year, only about 10% of races for U.S. House of Representatives are thought to be competitive. One reason for this is gerrymandering, wherein an incumbent periodically gets to redraw the district to include voters most likely to keep him or her in office and also to elect the incumbent’s endorsed successor, as was the case with Illinois’ 10th district in 2000.

“As monopolies are often bad for consumers, our electoral system, with its artificially limited field of candidates, is bad for citizens. The lack of competition means many incumbents don’t fear losing their job enough to listen to their constituents,” says Kalbfleisch. The perfect example is the continuing Iraq occupation despite voters putting Democrats back in the majority after 2006. “Most people only have two quasi-identical choices, both of whom will vote to continue funding the war.”

U.S. Senator Barack Obama acknowledged last Friday, the 17th, that he is “swimming in the same muddy water” of lobbyist money as everyone else in politics, but he claims he will try to “clean it up” if elected President. Kalbfleisch called this statement “preposterous.”

“There are many candidates, third party, independent, and otherwise, who run grassroots campaigns rather than sell out,” says Kalbfleisch. Like all Green Party candidates, Kalbfleisch is not accepting any money from corporate political action committees (PACs). He continues, “If Obama wants to take special interest money out of the system, he could introduce bold legislation now, as a Senator, instead of inviting us to make him President before he actually does anything. Only someone not profiting from special interest money will push for comprehensive change.”

Kalbfleisch wants to introduce legislation mandating uniform ballot access requirements independent of affiliation in all states, instant runoff voting (IRV) that would streamline elections with more than two candidates and eliminate the need for a primary, and qualified public financing for statewide and national elections using money saved by not having a primary. He also wants to outlaw all campaign contributions from corporate PACs, stating, “I want to force others to run the way Greens choose to run.”

Kalbfleisch concludes that, “The present system is bad for everyone except those currently in power who wrote the laws. Voting against the reforms I want to introduce is democratically indefensible.”
 
 

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