the only way to change america

[greenforest32]

There are many electoral reforms we should adopt like:

1. IRV for single-member positions (Governor/Senators/President/Mayor/etc)
2. Proportional representation for all lower legislative chambers (along with the abolishment of every state senate)
3. Abolishment of the electoral college
4. Automatic voter registration

but how are these going to pass?

The current two parties in our two-party system are not going to vote their power out of existence, there are no federal initiatives, and electoral reform on the state-level (whether the state legislature or state public initiatives) always seems to fail. The best improvements we've got in the last two decades has been what? Two states (Oregon, Washington) using vote-by-mail?

[greenforest32]

2. Proportional representation for all lower legislative chambers (along with the abolishment of every state senate)

Bicameralism is a good thing, so long as the second house is not elected in the same manner as the first.

Bicameralism is something you have in a federal system but the state governments are pretty much unitary. What are the state senates supposed to represent? Counties?

[greenforest32]

2. Proportional representation for all lower legislative chambers (along with the abolishment of every state senate)

Bicameralism is a good thing, so long as the second house is not elected in the same manner as the first.

Bicameralism is something you have in a federal system but the state governments are pretty much unitary. What are the state senates supposed to represent? Counties?

Before the 1960's that was indeed the case in a number of States, including South Carolina. (Indeed, in South Carolina, the combined delegation to the General Assembly from each county also did double duty as the county council for each county back before the one man-one vote cases made impossible keeping that useful means of keeping the number of elected offices small.)  While that is no longer the case, a second house that is elected on a different schedule than the first can serve as a check on momentary political blips.  Yes bicameralism can delay and impede political action, but that is more often than not a good thing.

While none of the States make use of it, another useful possibility would be to have one house elected from districts, and the other house elected on a Statewide proportional basis.  Indeed, for a federal government, I favor tricameralism, with in addition to two houses elected as just described, a third house with an equal number of members selected/elected by each State, but having legislative authority only on bills that affect the State governments.

Yes that's quite elaborate but I just can't see any benefit to it. Any legislative bill, whether good or bad, should be dealt with through the legislative process: debate and amendment. I'm not convinced that we can only have a proper debate with bi-cameral state legislatures or that every county should get equal representation regardless of population like states and the U.S. Senate.

It's not like it's hard to consider how something will affect the counties and the legislators will obviously have an incentive to consider how any bill will affect the city/county governments in their districts. And as far as "political blips", I think the resulting unicameral legislatures should have elections every four years instead of every two.

But if the concern is that it should take more than one election cycle to change the composition of 100% of the legislature, well that's up for debate. I don't see the problem with it. Maybe it's a bit radical, but it's still a representative democracy and recall elections are always a possibility.

[greenforest32]

1. Oregon and Washington still use FPTP, just like every other state. The only thing is that both states conduct their elections 100% by mail so our turnout (as a percent of registered voters) is usually higher compared to the other states that still require people to vote in person

2. As far as the state senates go, they used to have representatives elected for each county/municipality rather than for equally populated districts, but we had a Supreme Court ruling in the 1960s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._Sims) that ruled that as unconstitutionally violating "one person, one vote" so now all state upper chambers must have equally populated districts just like state lower chambers. So now every state (except Nebraska which is already unicameral) has two legislative chambers based on population.

3. County elections are usually candidate based rather than party based and they also use FPTP. I think there are a few counties in the country that use IRV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting) instead of FPTP but it hasn't really led to a domino effect unfortunately.

[greenforest32]

Two states (Oregon, Washington) using vote-by-mail?

In what way is vote-by-mail an improvement?

It improves voter turnout, that's about it.