Majority Rule? or Majority
Fooled?
excerpted from the book
Fixing Elections
The Failure of America's
Winner Take All Politics
by Steven Hill
Routledge Press, 2002, hardcover
p223
Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics
A democratic government provides an orderly
and peaceful process by means of which a majority of citizens
can induce the government to do what they most want it to do and
to avoid doing what they most want it not to do.
p269
Even following the meltdown of the UnElection 2000, the level
of hubris remained at quasi-patriotic levels. During the six-week-long
presidential crisis, pundits and TV talking heads fell all over
themselves to reassure a bewildered, post-traumatic public that
the system was stable, like damage-control specialists at the
scene of a ten-car wreck. Following the December 12 Supreme Court
installation of the president, one influential daily newspaper
opined with a straight face: "Once again the Constitution,
the collected wisdom of the Founders, has met the test of democracy."
While European and other international observers scratched their
heads over a U.S. presidential election being decided by malfunctioning
voting machines that disproportionately affected black, elderly,
and poor voters, by a Republican-stacked Supreme Court halting
the vote-counting on the flimsiest of grounds, and by an eighteenth-century
voting procedure that failed to produce a majority winner in the
popular vote or even in many states, a Newsweek columnist gushed
about the "affirmation of the bedrock democratic principles
that make the United States so formidable around the world."
The New York Times smugly declared that "any wise observer-domestic,
foreign, or interplanetary-has to conclude that Americans' final
verdict will be that theirs is a country in need of new voting
machines, not a new electoral system."
p271
... certain statistical indicators are helpful for assessing the
health of any democracy ... These indicators include the following.
* Votes-to-Seats Index. The votes-to-seats
index builds on the theoretical work of political scientist Douglas
Rae and measures ... the "representation rip-off"-that
is, the extent to which one party wins a greater percentage of
seats than votes (overrepresentation) and the other party wins
a smaller percentage of seats than votes (underrepresentation).
It measures how well the intent of voters actually is reflected
in the legislature. In Arkansas, for example, Democratic candidates
for the U.S. House won only 45 percent of the statewide popular
vote yet ended up with a whopping 75 percent of the House seats.
These sorts of distortions occur in U.S. elections all the time,
at local, state, and national levels, and have real impacts not
only on representation but also on policy. But in contrast to
their international colleagues, most American political scientists
don't bother keeping track of the issue, and the media doesn't
report it. Not surprisingly, therefore, the public is not much
aware of it.
* Representation Index. This index measures
the percentage of voters in a state who voted for the winning
candidate in an election. Every election, besides most voters
not participating, even fewer voters actually help elect someone.
In a Winner Take All system where only one side can win, millions
of voters in the wrong districts vote for losers and waste their
votes, turning them into what I have called "orphaned voters"
or geographic minorities. Many orphaned voters vote for losers
election after election, and eventually they get the message-there
is no point in showing up on Election Day. So, besides the number
of wasted votes, the Representation Index also measures the degree
of futility of voting. In the 2000 U.S. House elections, the Representation
Index was only 31.2 percent, meaning that fewer than a third of
eligible voters had their vote count toward electing a House representative.
* Margin of Victory Index. This is a measure
of how much candidates win by, which is a measure of competitiveness.
It is important to know this because ... there is a direct correlation
between the competitiveness of many races and voter turnout, particularly
for legislative elections. Generally speaking, the greater the
margin of victory-the less competitive the race-the lower the
voter turnout.
* Landslide Index. Related to the margin
of victory index, this index measures the percentage of all races
won by at least 20 percent. This is a benchmark number because
twenty-point victory margins are considered such a landslide that
the other side did not have a chance of winning. It is an indicator
of "safe" seats. Whenever you see a pattern of districts
won by such margins, election after election, it generally means
that so many partisan voters-Democrats or Republicans-reside in
that district that you can easily predict who will win, regardless
of inequities in campaign spending or other factors. Demography
is destiny in landslide districts, and the sheer number of such
districts gives you a measure of how polarized a state or nation's
politics is, and how badly gerrymandered the districts are. For
the U.S. House, typically three-quarters of races are safe seats
won by landslides.
* Voter Turnout Index. This is about the
only democracy technology indicator that most researchers track
on a semi-regular basis. But finding voter turnout figures is
not easy, particularly for local, state, and nonpresidential federal
elections, since they are infrequently published by the Secretaries
of State, election officials, or daily newspapers. Even when they
do publish the figures, many researchers typically goof it up,
regularly distorting the information by calculating registered
voter turnout instead of eligible voter turnout. In other words,
they neglect to include those adult citizens eligible to vote
but who, for various reasons, have not registered (it's kind of
like keeping track of unemployment without counting those discouraged
workers who have given up looking for work). Eligible voter turnout
is used by virtually every other democracy in the world because
simply using the turnout of registered voters gives a skewed picture,
artificially increasing voter turnout figures by 20 to 30 percent.
I have asked various American researchers and reporters why they
do this and have received vague and inconclusive responses. Given
how embarrassingly low voter turnout is in the United States,
the reasons have ranged from ignorance to a conscious attempt
to artificially inflate voter turnout numbers.
* Democracy Index. This is a clever indicator
devised by Rob Richie of the Center for Voting and Democracy which
takes a state's average ranking in all the above key categories:
average margin of victory (measuring overall competitiveness),
landslide index (measuring number of safe seats), votes-to-seats
distortion (measuring how well the intent of voters is reflected
by results), voter turnout, and representation index (which measures
the percentage of voters who had an effective vote, i.e., contributed
to electing a representative). The Democracy Index is a relative
one, aggregating all these categories to arrive at an estimate
of the degree of democracy, comparing the states to each other.
For instance, according to this methodology the four states with
the highest democracy indicator in 2000 were Minnesota, Missouri,
Wisconsin, and Connecticut; the four states with the lowest democracy
indicator were Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arizona.
* "Mirror" Index. How well do
our legislatures mirror the face of our population along numerous
demographic lines, including race, gender, income, religion, trade/occupation,
and more? In today's simple-minded Winner Take All climate, this
is derisively labeled as "representation by affirmative action
bean-counters," instead of one legitimate indicator among
many of the representativeness of our political system. No doubt
it is labeled thusly because the American political system so
badly fails the test, hardly producing legislatures that mirror
our population, as John Adams said it should over two centuries
ago.
Like doctors of democracy, political scientists
and journalists should be calculating these measurements and indicators
immediately following every election for federal, state, and local
races. That would give each state and our nation a measure of
the health of our representative democracy. Measuring these indicators
is like reading the oscilloscope monitoring the patient of American
democracy, lying on the gurney. But other than the Center for
Voting and Democracy's Dubious Democracy report for U.S. House
elections and the Charlie Cook Political Report, which, like the
Center for Voting and Democracy, uses a calculation similar to
the Landslide Index to predict U.S. House races, these vital signs
of our democracy are not measured to any consistent degree. There
is practically no research or reporting done along these lines
for state legislative or local elections. It is truly a gaping
hole in scholarly research, a huge failure of American political
scientists and journalists, and our understanding of our political
system suffers greatly as a result.
p278
from the Nixon Tapes
Richard Nixon to John Erlichman:
You gotta remember, the smartest thing
the [Founders] did was to limit the voters in this country. Out
of 3 1/2 to 4 million people, 200,000 voted. And that was true
for a helluva long time, and the republic would have never survived
if all the dummies had voted along with the intelligent people.
Now we've gone all the way and passed
voting rights. We've got people voting down there, ah, we even
got rid of the literacy tests now. So you got people voting now-blacks,
whites, Mexicans and the rest-that shouldn't have anything to
say about government; mainly because they don't have the brains
to know.
p293
Despite the potential offered by the evolution of our eighteenth-century
Winner Take All practices, the American gatekeepers in the punditocracy,
the media, the academy, and among reformers steadfastly overlook
this course... their degree of misinformation, misunderstanding,
and outright disinterest in the area of voting systems is baffling
as well as dismaying. Even as our Winner Take All democracy gasps
for breath, some old Winner Take All war horses have faithfully
circled the wagons and rallied the troops. These gatekeepers have
clung to the hope that traditional methods will be useful still,
and approach the subject in an uninformed and oddly dismissive
manner. Even following the meltdown of UnElection 2000, they would
countenance few new ideas or allow discussion that fell too far
outside the orthodoxy.
For instance, many reporters and pundits,
as well as political scientists (who should know better), when
you mention the words "proportional representation"
in one breath, will mention Italy or Israel in the next. For them,
it is as knee-jerk a reaction as the sun rising. It is as if the
sum total of their knowledge relies on stereotypes gleaned from
these two nations. Whenever Italy and Israel are mentioned so
quickly in the conversation, you know you are in the presence
of one of the many Winner Take All gatekeepers or their uninformed
accomplices. Not that Italy and Israel have not had their share
of political difficulties, but reducing the vast field of study
of proportional representation to the perceived troubles of Italy
or Israel is no more legitimate than reducing the drawbacks of
Winner Take All to the troubles of Algeria, Angola, or India,
which also use Winner Take All.
Those who make great sport of bashing
Italian and Israeli politics like to criticize proportional voting
methods for being held hostage by minority parties that can precipitate
the collapse of coalition governments. Yet, as we have seen, under
our own Winner Take All system small slices of the most uninformed
and uninterested spectrum of the electorate, or conversely of
the most zealous parts of the electorate, can acquire vastly exaggerated
power, determine which party wins a legislative majority or the
presidency, and thereby hold hostage any semblance of sane policy.
Despite the numerous drawbacks to our geographic-based, two-choice
system, the Panglosses of political science and punditry persist
in their blind and kneejerk defenses of Winner Take All. And following
the dictum that the "best defense is a good offense,"
they mount their defense often by making unjustified and insupportable
charges regarding proportional systems.
The fact of the matter is, various proportional
systems are used by most of the established democracies in the
world today, and virtually none of them experience the difficulties
of Italy and Israel. Currently there are forty-one nations with
at least 2 million inhabitants and high ratings from the human
rights organization Freedom House, and of these forty-one nations
only three (the United States, Canada, and Jamaica) do not use
a form of proportional or semiproportional voting system to elect
at least one of their national legislatures. Most use a proportional
system for their most powerful offices. In fact, the trend around
the world is decidedly away from our Winner Take All system and
toward these proportional alternatives. Even our own political
progenitor, the United Kingdom, is in midstream of a most remarkable
transformation of their old Winner Take All ways, recently adopting
proportional representation for electing representatives to the
European Parliament, the London City Council, and the Scottish
and Wales regional assemblies, with some political observers predicting
that the House of Commons is not far behind.
It is telling that, since their invention
and systematic formulation by people like John Stuart Mill in
the late nineteenth century, these other types of proportional
voting systems overwhelmingly have been preferred by the world's
newer democracies over the Winner Take All methods. Some voting
systems certainly are better than others, depending on the needs
of your democracy. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution requires single-seat
districts for the U.S. House, the fifty state legislatures, or
local government, although there is one federal law passed in
1967-ironically enough to support the now-besieged Voting Rights
Act's efforts to elect more racial minorities-that mandates single-seat
districts for U.S. House elections. By amending this federal law,
states could begin tinkering with proportional systems for their
congressional representatives, and state legislatures and city
councils can do so now since they are not affected by that federal
law.
Moreover, there also is no rule or law
that says we cannot combine our single-seat districts with proportional
representation, offering the benefits of both. Roughly speaking,
single-seat district's geographic representation gives representation
based on where you live, while proportional representation gives
representation based on what you think. These are not mutually
exclusive; indeed, they can be complementary, in theory and in
practice, and incorporated into a proportional system known as
"mixed member." Italian political scientist Roberto
D'Alimonte has noted a remarkable convergence happening in many
democracies of the world, with nations like Germany, Japan, New
Zealand, Italy, and others successfully grafting together proportional
and geographic representation in their "mixed member"
legislatures, providing voters with a deeper democratic experience
than we can possibly conjure here in the United States.
Our bicameral state legislatures provide
an easy opening for such a mixed system. We could use geographic-based
representation via Winner Take All districts in one house of the
Legislature, and proportional representation where geographically
dispersed "communities of interest" win representation
based on what they think in the other. It is imperative that reformers
and political scientists begin to think "outside the box"
for creative solutions, begin to experiment a bit in the spirit
of democratic tinkering like the Framers did. It is deeply ironic
that corporations and entrepreneurs are extolled for innovation
and modernization, even swashbuckling investment in the latest,
greatest trend that amounts to the next dot-com bubble; free marketeers
and their disciples celebrate Joseph Schumporter's creed of "creative
destruction" as the rationale for failing businesses and
lost jobs, the necessary price to pay for a vital economy. Yet
when it comes to our politics and democracy technology, we are
hopelessly bogged down by tradition and defenders of the status
quo, stuck to the fly paper of old ideas. Just as with the free
market, there is no "one size fits all" plan when it
comes to our political institutions. Each city and state will
need to figure out the best method to evolve its antiquated Winner
Take All ways, and the federal level will need to do the same.
p295
At this particular historical juncture, it is vitally important
that American voting methods-in addition to our voting machines-act
as creatively and efficiently as possible to produce an inclusive
representative democracy that is not bedeviled by the Winner Take
All gremlins and goblins. It is important that our democracy technology
offer electoral opportunity to the millions of orphaned voters
from all races and perspectives to finally cast a vote that counts,
and win representation and a degree of influence that heretofore
have eluded them. What's more, it's important that the democracy
technology act efficiently to allow new ideas to percolate to
the surface and enter into the public debate. And finally, it's
crucial that the democracy technology allow a majority of votes
to translate into majoritarian policy. But these requirements
are exactly where the eighteenth-century Winner Take All system
is most deficient.
Certainly reforming Winner Take All is
not the end of the road. Other changes are needed to truly open
up our democracy and allow the Founders' and Framers' political
invention to fulfill its destiny. These include public financing
of elections and curtailing soft money expenditures, which will
reduce the impact of private donors on policymaking and party
leaders (the Soft Money Kings and Queens and Captains of Cash),
foster debate, and help to reverse the mind-numbing loss of political
ideas; a beefed-up public broadcasting sector and government-subsidized
daily newspapers that can counteract the profit-seeking motives
and duopoly allegiance of the Winner Take All corporate media
that undermines democratic pluralism and political debate (several
European countries could serve as a model for this, including
the British Broadcasting Company in the U.K. and Germany's public
broadcasting sector); streamlining and updating of electoral infrastructure
and administration (voting machines, ballot design, recount procedures,
etc.); and other electoral rules like Election Day voter registration,
a national voting holiday or weekend voting, and reasonable and
fair ballot access laws.
In addition, the idea of increasing the
size of the federal House of Representatives should be explored.
The number of representatives has not changed since 1910, and
the 435 Congress members now each represent over 600,000 constituents,
three times as many as then. It is little-known that the original
Bill of Rights proposed by the Framers included twelve amendments,
and one that failed to pass would have established a ratio of
"not less than one Representative for every fifty thousand
persons." Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in Federalist
No. 58 noted that the purpose of the Census, among other things,
was to "augment the number of representatives," so clearly
the size of the House and the expectation of growth was on the
Framers' minds. The House generally expanded in size each decade
since 1792, until 1910 when it froze.
Now, compared to the national legislatures
of other democratic nations, ours is about the lowest per capita.
Various estimates have established that regular growth since 1910
would have produced a House with about 588 members, still smaller
than the national legislatures of either Germany or the United
Kingdom. In the U.K., for example, each Member of Parliament represents
only about 70,000 residents, a manageable size closer to a city
council district in many American cities that gives geographic
district representation more meaning. Purely from a consumers'
point of view, today there are a lot more "customers"
(i.e., constituents) for each "store clerk" (i.e., representative)
to wait on, and the customer-constituent relationship is being
short-changed by the inelasticity of The People's House over the
last century. We have only one-third of the representation of
our 1910 ancestors, and for a system that depends on geographic
representation in an increasingly complex world, the sheer numbers
undermine the very basis of its value.
The overarching goal of all these reforms
should be to open up our political system-a perestroika, so to
speak-so that it is more responsive to the popular will, more
representative, and fosters participation, national unity, informed
public debate, majoritarian policy, and even civic enthusiasm.
The goal should be the establishment of political institutions
and practices that will promote a newfound sense of national pluralism.
As we journey further into the twenty-first century, with our
shifting racial demographic becoming the rising tide that lifts
or sinks all boats, this is the only course that makes sense.
In the longer term, that pluralism can only find expression via
a multichoice/multiparty democracy founded on the bedrock of proportional
representation. A pluralistic, mass society in the twenty-first
century simply will not be well-served by the archaic, eighteenth-century
Winner Take All political system with its strict reliance on exclusive
geographic representation and a two-party duopoly.
But under the chronic nay-saying of the
gatekeepers, reform always seems to have a ridiculously difficult
road. Even a no-brainer like establishing Election Day as a holiday
or on the weekends becomes hopelessly bogged down in cerebral
red tape. Most modern democracies today vote on a holiday, a weekend,
or over a series of days. There is nothing sacred or even constitutional
about voting on the first Tuesday in November; most people have
no recollection why it was established that way, how in 1845 President
James Polk established the Tuesday voting tradition for the convenience
of farmers. He set the day after the fall harvest, allowing Monday
as a travel day to get to town so farmers could cast their ballots
on Tuesday. A century and half later, most people don't live on
farms, and Tuesday is a busy workday. The right to vote in a democracy
is worth honoring and celebrating, instead of something to squeeze
between errands, work, or at the end of a frantic workday if the
commute home goes well. Yet even such a commonsense initiative
as voting on a holiday, proposed by the high profile Carter-Ford
commission in its July 2001 report regarding electoral administration,
met with ridiculously stubborn resistance from the political class.
It is crucial that a national dialogue
ensue about ways to bring our representative democracy, our pluralistic
society, into the twenty-first century. And in that dialogue,
the considerable deficiencies of our Winner Take All system must
be front and center. For at the end of the day, the dynamics that
exist in American politics today and that are contributing to
post-democracy exist because of Winner Take All, not as a coincidence
to it. Certainly it is inadequate for a pluralistic, free-trading,
twenty-first century world that is no longer the sparsely populated
agrarian society of our eighteenth-century wealthy and slave-holding
founders. Instead, we live in a mass society of burgeoning diversity
and complexity; our world is a hypertechnological, highly populated,
and diverse one, hurtling toward yesterday's science fiction where
an uncertain future awaits.
And right there at the eye of the maelstrom
is the Winner Take All system and its disruptive gremlins and
goblins. It's no coincidence that post-democracy should be happening
now, at this historical juncture, with our political institutions
and practices stuck in a two-choice, geographic-based political
system from the eighteenth century. With the exception of local
jurisdictions like Amarillo, Cambridge, Peoria, Hartford, and
counties in Pennsylvania and Alabama and others scattered across
the American landscape, the torch of bold democratic innovation
has passed from the United States, stuck in its Winner Take All
ways.
p298
Does the American Dream and way of life, extolled from shore to
shore in the wake of the September 11 attacks, require an active
and participatory democracy and an engaged citizenry? Or can our
nation exist, as some like conservative columnist George Will
and sociologist Michael Schudson have suggested, as merely a ratification
democracy, a kind of "check-off" democracy, where most
citizens only rise up at the ballot box when riled by offensive
government policy, or repugnant personal behavior by a politician
or party leaders, or an external threat?
This is a fundamental question that cuts
to the heart of who and what will shape our society and what our
society will look like in the future. Such a "ratification
democracy" harkens back to the earliest days of the Roman
Republic, which was dominated by wealthy elites but where major
decisions were ratified by citizens who otherwise did not actively
participate. Will such a bend in the road represent a step forward
in our constantly evolving national destiny? Or will it amount
to some version of Gaetano Mosca's elite ruling class, a post-democracy
demonstrating once and for all that, indeed, at the end of the
day, "the history of all societies has been, is, and will
be, the history of dominant minorities?"
I am reminded that President Abraham Lincoln
ended his Gettysburg Address with the famous words, "that
government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall
not perish from the earth" (italics mine). Certainly Lincoln
considered, on that brisk November day in 1863, as he reflected
over a grim battlefield where brother had brutalized brother,
that this bold experiment "conceived in liberty and dedicated
to the proposition that all men are created equal" could
not be taken for granted, that it could wither on the vine as
much as flourish and ripen. Are we, the first of the twenty-first
century progeny, resolute enough to reconsider with Lincoln his
moment of doubt regarding the fragility of our representative
system?
Lincoln's "of, by, and for the people"
is still a precious thing, still worth striving for, it seems
to me. The fulfillment of the democratic Spirit of 1776 has been
the most enduring legacy of the American revolutionaries, these
last few hundred years having exhibited ceaseless heroic endeavor
all over the globe to usher it forth, like a frail flower pushing
up through the soil of calumny. Over the centuries millions of
people have paid the ultimate sacrifice for their right to vote
and practice democracy, and those of us benefiting today stand
atop some mighty shoulders.
We live in a time when the words "invention"
and "success" have become intertwined and confused with
entrepreneurial and corporate values. Yet the greatest human invention
ever, in my view, has been the practices, customs, and institutions
of democracy. Everything else pales by comparison. Thomas Jefferson
wrote the Declaration of Independence without a computer or the
Internet; the Magna Carta was composed without automobiles or
the telephone or a fax. Mary Wollstonecraft's Declaration of the
Rights of Women was imagined without a Palm Pilot or a Web page.
Yet their ideas have spread across centuries, sometimes like wildfire,
other times like slow and patient tree roots.
It has taken a relentless march to get
here. The quest for democracy is hundreds of generations and over
two thousand years deep, and we occupy only the topmost strata,
a small plot of land at that. Our mudslide into post-democracy,
if left unchecked, is more likely to unleash not Lincoln's government
of, by, and for the people, but a government of, by, and for the
few-that is, tyranny. But, ironically enough, elected tyranny,
a historically unique phenomena where elections will be pale farces
of participation, representation, and discourse, and super-wealthy
private interests will dominate. In such a deformed democracy
economics will dictate to politics and politics merely will provide
the means to clear the boulders for those who control the economics,
an enervating antipode of the old Soviet-style command economy
where bureaucratic politics decreed to economics. It will complete
a tragic interment of the Spirit of 1776, and already we are already
seeing the first signs of it in various American localities and
landscapes. We should not relinquish the inspiring vision of a
pluralistic democracy so easily, nor roll over and let it become
a moribund remnant, a mere check-off democracy, one that is undernourished
by the corporate media and the political duopoly and subordinated
to unrestrained free market economics and the gremlins and goblins
of Winner Take All.
But if Fukuyama is correct, that the march
of history and ideology indeed has reached some "end of history"
apotheosis in liberal democracy's balancing of equality and liberty,
then certainly it also must be true that proportional voting systems-not
Winner Take All-will provide the political engine of the new paradigm.
The severe drawbacks of Winner Take All cannot be ignored much
longer; they are threatening our national future. A disengaged
public in a Winner Take All check-off democracy can be tricked
too easily by the "crafted talk" and "simulated
responsiveness" made so potent by modern campaign technologies
in the hands of slick politicians and their pollster-geists and
mad scientist consultants. Reflecting on the five sturdy poles
that hold aloft the great tent of representative democracy-representation,
participation, campaigns and discourse, policy, and national unity-Winner
Take All breeds exclusion, alienation, ignorance, distortion,
and adversarial division. While no voting system is perfect, given
the alternative, proportional representation systems offer great
hope for keeping these States united and evolving into the twenty-first
century.
Government of, by, and for the people-not
by emperors, not by a Politburo, not by preachers or mullahs,
not by corporate CEOs or multinational media magnates and their
proxies, nor by neo-aristocracy or kakistocracy, but "by
the people." Two hundred years after our national birth-quake,
that is still a vital animating force, still a revolutionary concept,
albeit a fragile one. During this time of national anxiety, with
minds that rarely seem to meet except in the most tragic of circumstances,
and partisan, cultural, and racial lines that hardly cross, the
potential offered by evolving our Winner Take All ways is a tantalizing
prospect that demands our consideration. If we fail, around a
future bend in the road awaits post-democracy.
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