Free elections are needed for America to have the fire-ability required for true political accountability.

Fire-abilty requires three things- an informed electorate, free elections and fair elections. In the last two articles, we saw that an informed electorate is needed, and that PeopleCount will help our voters stay informed. Now we’ll look at free elections.

American does not have free elections

By “free”, I mean any adult is free to run for office. We are not even close to this in America because of the domination by the two major parties and the high cost of an effective campaigns.

“Free elections” also means that voters have free choice among candidates. Because campaigns are so expensive and many good candidates can’t afford to run, we have very little choice in elections. The domination by the two major parties makes it worse. And then gerrymandering makes it even less free.

Most people can’t afford to run

Most districts are dominated by one party, and the incumbent wins in all but 1-2% of congressional races. This is obviously dysfunctional when you consider that citizen approval rates for Congress have been 20% or lower for the last 3 elections and 40% or lower since 2006.

The main reason for the incumbent winning is that money is crucial in elections. Today, money is the key to communication with voters. House campaigns averaged $1.7 million in 2012, and the candidate with the most money usually wins. Incumbents have the time and the leverage to collect a large war chest of funds for the next campaign. By leverage, I’m referring to corruption. If donors want something, they often contribute to both parties.

Plus, incumbent names become well known while they’re in office, giving them an advantage. A competitor must significantly out-raise an incumbent to win, or have a much larger group of volunteers.

In addition, voter turnout in primary elections is low. This means existing power brokers, or a well-organized group, can pretty easily sway an election, and the incumbent is usually tied to these power brokers and the party faithful that turn out in primaries. A lone candidate or one with a small team has little chance.

PeopleCount will deliver less-expensive elections

PeopleCount goes a long way to remedying this by giving candidates an inexpensive way to compete in elections. When most voters are using PeopleCount.org, candidates will be able to reach voters easily and cheaply on the issues that are important to them.

Using PeopleCount, more challengers will reach more voters. Ads are tiny sound bites on, to voters, mostly random topics. On PeopleCount, candidates will be able to deliver richer communication about the topics each voter is interested in. They’ll reach the voters at low cost. Not only will more candidates will run in the party primaries, but there’ll be more third-party challengers. We’ll have more competition in elections. And in their reports they file on the PeopleCount website, they’ll compete to serve the people.

Being able to run effective, inexpensive campaigns means money will be less important. More politicians will be able to run without using big-money donors. And when elected, our representatives will be able to stop spending so much time fundraising while in office.

PeopleCount will free more people to run for office. And once in office, it’ll free members of Congress from the need to constantly fund-raise.

In the next posts, we’ll look at two aspects of fairness of elections, our voting system and gerrymandering.