Half Believe Elections Are Rigged To Favor Incumbents

This is an interesting statistic. It seems that nearly half of all Americans (48%) believe the congressional elections are not fair -- that they are rigged to favor the incumbents. Only 39% see the elections as fair.

I think that 48% are correct. But it's not necessarily because of any nefarious political machinations. It's because of the way our elections are financed. Our elections for Congress have become so expensive that only the rich can run (or someone who has already sold out to monied interests for large donations) -- and the minute they get elected, they start getting money for lobbyists to support special interests with their votes (money they need to get re-elected if they are not filthy rich).

And while the incumbents are getting all that special interest money, their opponents in the next election are begging for money just to fund a meager campaign effort. This means every incumbent, regardless of political party, starts a new election campaign far ahead of his/her opponent in funding.

This illustrates the need to change how we run our elections in the United States. Personally, I think the best way to do that is to publicly fund all elections. Give all candidates who can demonstrate a minimum level of support (say 5% or so) the same amount of money, and make it illegal to spend any more than the amount they have received. Of course, this will only work if all spending by outside groups (like PACs) is outlawed. But that should be done anyway, whether we go to a system of publicly financing campaigns or not.

I also think the media should be mandated once again to provide equal time to all candidates (at least all candidates showing enough support to be publicly funded). I don't understand why we stopped the equal time provisions for elections. Are fair elections such a terrible thing? Do we really want to be ruled by candidates who have been bought by the rich and special interests (or who are rich enough to buy their own election)?

The public is right. Our elections are rigged to favor incumbents, and that is allowing the rich and corporate interests to buy our elections. And this buying of elections is killing our democracy -- and replacing it with a plutocracy that rules for the benefit of the wealthy only.

The figures above are from a new Rasmussen Poll, done on July 9th and 10th of 1,000 likely voters nationwide (with a 3 point margin of error).