Democracy Café

Our representative democracy is more and more unrepresentative. As Lawrence Lessig asserts, American voters are being "essentially silenced by constitutional inequality." This is made abundantly evident by the winner take all system that pervades the way nearly all states allocate electoral votes -- and yet this system isn't at all mandated by the Constitution; rather, it's been created by the states. The tragic result of denying proportionality in distributing electoral votes is that millions of votes for presidential candidates effectively don't count. It's downright undemocratic. This is an ever more alarming predicament, as the winner take all system increasingly likens the odds that we'll face more presidential election outcomes in which the candidate with the least votes wins. Listen in as Lessig, Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard University, shares how he and other concerned citizens are taking on the existing system. As Lessig puts it, such vitally needed change can only co