American Voter: Benjamin Rodgers

US President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden are battling for the presidency in a sharply divided United States. Trump has been focusing on “law and order”; Biden has been trying to strike a conciliatory note. The Black Lives Matter movement and whether Trump will release his taxes are among the many issues Americans will consider when choosing their president. As the hotly contested election approaches, Al Jazeera has been speaking to voters across the US asking nine questions to understand who they are supporting and why. Benjamin Rodgers [Courtesy of Benjamin Rodger]Age: 32 Occupation: Full-time Student and Full-time Shift Supervisor at Starbucks   Residence: Yakima County, Washington   Voted in 2016 for: Hillary Clinton  Will Vote in 2020 for: Joe Biden  Top Election Issue: Democratisation of the American Political System Will you vote? Why or why not? “I will be voting in the upcoming election. And I vote in every presidential election, but I feel like this election is just especially important. And obviously this year, there are a lot of barriers. There’s a lot of doubt about the sort of effectiveness of American election systems in the middle of the pandemic. And of course, we’ve seen a lot of efforts by Republican lawmakers to push back against people’s capacity to vote early, [their] capacity to vote remotely, things like that. So there’s a lot of fear about how the election administration is going to go in unprecedented circumstances. “I would always vote, but I’m sort of especially motivated to make sure that I vote the minute I get my ballot. I’m going to take my ballot into the drop box. I’m in Washington State, so we have all mail-in balloting – but instead of trusting it to the US mail, I’m going to take it directly to a ballot box, the day I get it, so that I’m not running any risks.” What is your number one issue? “I have a lot of issues that are really important to me. But I think that the sort of bedrock issue for me is the democratisation of the American political system. There’s a ton of checks, veto points in our system that sort of prevent the public from exercising choice in our democracy. Obviously, the electoral college is the most famous thing. “In the last 20 years, Republicans have held the presidency for three terms now, and in only one of those terms did they actually win the national popular vote. Currently, they hold the Senate while having received a minority of votes for senators. In recent elections, the Democrats only recently took back the House [of Representatives] after winning electoral majorities in most house elections over the last 20 years. And so we see a system not only that has nonrepresentative bodies in it, but it also seems to be systematically weighted against one particular political coalition, and in favour of another coalition built on sort of rural white voters. “And that same coalition [is] now about to appoint a sixth member on our Supreme Court, which has a very high degree of judicial supremacy. So what I want to see is the filibuster removed, so that a majority vote in the Senate is enough to pass laws. And I want to see DC and Puerto Rico added as states and some kind of measure taken to reform the Supreme Court. “And I think that any other issues that people on either side of the political spectrum want to get done, you’re going to have to start with democratisation like that. Because when you have really polarised parties, where either party that elects a majority can’t actually get its project done, that just incentivises people to send more extreme people, thinking that that’s going to be how they get their programme instituted.” style="width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0; bottom: 0; right: 0; left: 0;">