– Mandatory voting booths per capita (bring them back to the black and Latino neighborhoods the Republicans removed them from).

– Get rid of the electoral college.

– Use a simple mathematical formula for district lines to make extreme gerrymandering illegal.

– Paper trail.

– Voting day becomes a national holiday (or move it to Presidents' day.

– Automatic registration when getting drivers license, and same day registration when voting.

– True representation of voters so larger populations have more reps in the Senate.

– Third parties can have representation proportional to their membership.

– Overturn so-called Citizens United.

– Bring back a true progressive tax.

– Democratize the workplace through stronger unions.

– Expand civics curriculum in our schools.

– Outlaw cross-checking where citizens are omitted from registration simply for having the same name (yet different social security number)

– Bring back net neutrality and more: nationalize the net and insure privacy rights, no speed lanes, etc.

– Boost funding for education and boost, and deeoen, history and world literature so citizens understand the ROOTS and REASONS for democracy.

– Create a cabinet level position to oversee all of the above?

– Other ideas?

Isaac Chotiner: There has been a debate on the left about how much to focus on Russia—Russian meddling, Russian bots, Russian fake-news tactics—when we’re thinking about threats to our democracy. Some people, especially on the left, think the fear is too Russia-focused, and that many of our democracy’s problems are about us, not about Russia. What do you think?

Timothy Snyder: Here’s how I would characterize some of what I think is going on, on the left: I think it’s a kind of inverted nationalism. I think there’s a tendency, in the U.S. left, to think only in terms of the U.S. and to say, “Whatever’s going wrong, whether it’s abroad or whether it’s at home, let’s think just about America.” That’s comfortable, because we’re Americans. Most of us only know English, so why don’t we start from there?

Today, we are reporting that over the past five years IBM has been removing older U.S. employees from their jobs, replacing some with younger, less experienced, lower-paid American workers and moving many other jobs overseas.

We’ve got documentation and details — most of which are the direct result of a questionnaire filled out by over 1,100 former IBMers

The author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a New York Times best-seller and the most-bought book in the history of Harvard University Press, has published a paper that uses exit polling data to argue that embracing economic populism would power the left toward huge electoral wins.

Piketty’s conclusion is that moving the Democratic party further to the left, at least when it comes to economics, would help it win. That’s because it would help them bring back alienated working-class and uneducated voters who either don’t vote now, or who are brought into the Republican fold through the party’s nativism and social conservatism.

Piketty’s analysis squares with what commentators from outlets like Salon, who employed the strident H.A. Goodman during the 2016 primary, have been preaching for awhile....

The future, then, would have a Democratic Party where “lower class voters” of all stripes, including lower education and lower income voters, support them while upper and middle class people formed the Republican party...

“If you look at the patterns of where gains are being made and who is creating the foundation for those gains, it’s the same: An energized Democratic base is linking arms with disaffected suburban voters,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told the Times. “The president’s conduct has basically given voters this permission slip to go against the Republicans.”

Enough with paying millions to pricey consultants and wasting millions on television ads.

1) Give people a reason to vote by forcefully supporting FDR’s legacy and pushing health care for all, Medicare and Social Security untouched, without any apologies. Oh, and tax the snot out of the billionaires for good measure.

2) Contact every single eligible voter and let them know Democrats will fight for them against the Oligarchs and their Russian puppet-masters.