Expand the Assembly!

Forrest Hill (above), the Green Party candidate for CA Secretary of State, visited the LA Greens meeting this evening and gave a rousing speech that touched on a lot of electoral reform issues, including public financing, electronic voting machines, same-day voter registration, and Instant Runoff Voting. (The speech was recorded, so I'll try to get a link to the audio soon.)

One interesting point he raised was about the size of state assembly districts. In California, state Assembly districts are so large that it is nearly impossible to run a grassroots campaign for even the lowest of representation. State Senate districts are twice as large -- even larger than Congressional districts. Forrest proposes matching state Senate districts to Congressional districts, and carving each state Senate district into five-seat Assembly districts elected via ranked choice voting. The five-seat districts would give the Assembly a bit of proportional representation and the number of votes to win any one of those seats would be much lower than is currently needed.

Other updates:
* Sunday is the first meeting of the new County Council, which includes yours truly.
* Steve Lopez has an article on Clean Money (or Full Public Financing of Elections, as some people prefer)
* I picked up a copy of Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate at the meeting tonight. It features essays by a number of high profile Greens, including Forrest Hill, Peter Camejo, David Cobb and Ralph Nader. I'll try to post some reactions soon. I also got Peter Camejo's campaign book, California Under Corporate Rule, recently, but haven't started it.