Had enough?

Beyond the Electoral College: some common-sense ideas for reforming our antiquated voting system

by Dan Kennedy

There's no question about it: election 2000 was a big, stinking, revolting mess. And it isn't over yet.

But it doesn't have to be this way. To be sure, there should be an immediate campaign for a constitutional amendment abolishing the Electoral College, the relic that makes it possible for a candidate to lose the election yet win the presidency. It hadn't happened since 1888, and, until the closing weeks of this year's campaign, few had given it much thought. But it's real, it's undemocratic, and it's got to go.

Doing away with the Electoral College is the most obvious change we should make to the way we hold elections in this country. But it's hardly the only change we ought to think about.

Bound by political and historical tradition, unwilling to learn from more modern systems of government, the United States is hampered by a winner-take-all system in which minority voices are completely shut out, and by a federal government explicitly designed by the Founders to make change as difficult as possible.

The result is an 18th-century government that has not -- and perhaps cannot be -- adapted to a 21st-century world. It is a system in which voters with minority views have no voice; in which presidents cannot govern effectively; and in which, with each passing election, an ever-increasing segment of the public tunes out.

According to preliminary reports, fewer than 51 percent of voting-age Americans turned out on November 7. Because George W. Bush and Al Gore each won 48 percent, that means whoever is ultimately sworn in as president will do so with barely 24 percent of the adult population behind him. Is this any way to run a democracy?

But though the fault surely lies in ourselves, it lies in our system as well.

"There's no point in blaming the voters," says Robert Shogan, a prolific political writer whose 1983 book, None of the Above, argues for a modified form of parliamentary democracy. "People are not fools, and the reason they don't pay much attention [to an election] is that they realize it doesn't mean very much in their lives."

Inertia is a powerful force, and, short of a crisis, it's not likely the system will be changed.

Well, guess what? We've got a big honking crisis right now. So let's get to it.

RALPH NADER or Al Gore? The candidate who was pushing all the right progressive buttons or the so-called lesser of two evils? Although the narcissistic Nader himself appeared gleeful at the prospect of sinking Gore, more thoughtful liberals were genuinely torn.

The Nation, for instance, issued a dual endorsement: Nader in states where Gore was either way ahead or way behind, Gore in states where it was close. Elaborate vote-trading schemes of dubious legality sprang up on the Internet, with Nader supporters in swing states such as Oregon, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania promising to vote for Gore if Gore backers would vote for Nader in non-competitive states such as New York, Texas, and Massachusetts. The idea was to push the Green Party over the five percent threshold it needed to qualify for federal matching funds, and to establish a progressive alternative to the increasingly centrist, pro-business Democratic Party.

As we now know, it didn't work. Nader did cost Gore the election. Give Gore three-quarters of the 86,000 votes Nader received in Florida, which seems reasonable, and Gore would be picking his cabinet members. And Nader didn't even get his five percent.

Such lunacies would vanish under a system known as the "instant runoff." Rather than simply voting for one candidate, you would rank the candidates in your order of preference. In the presidential election, for instance, there were six candidates who were on the ballot in all or most states: Bush, Gore, Nader, the Libertarian Party's Harry Browne, the Reform Party's Pat Buchanan, and the Natural Law Party's John Hagelin. You could rank them all, one through six, or you could stop at any point, even just voting for one.

With an instant runoff, if no candidate receives a majority of first-place votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated, and his supporters' second-place votes are awarded to the appropriate remaining contenders. Candidates continue to be eliminated in this manner until someone has a majority. It's like having a series of runoff elections, except that voters only have to go to the polls once.

It's easy to see how this would have solved the Nader-Gore dilemma. Nader voters could have ranked Nader first and Gore second. When Nader was eliminated, his votes would have been awarded to Gore. Thus, not only would Nader's supporters have helped elect Gore without abandoning the real object of their affection, but they also would have sent a powerful message to Gore: his margin of victory would have come from his left, rather than from the New Democrat center he had so assiduously worked to cultivate.

In this year's election, Gore supporters warned, correctly, that a vote for Nader was a vote for Bush. With an instant runoff, a vote for Nader would have been a vote for Gore, with an asterisk.

"Why have a system that gives you your least favorite candidate if you vote for your favorite candidate?" asks Eric Olson, deputy director of the Center for Voting and Democracy, which is a leading advocate of the instant runoff.

Why indeed?

Of course, the instant runoff would not always work to the advantage of liberals. In 1992, it's a good bet that most Ross Perot voters would have named George Bush the Elder as their second choice, thus giving the then-president a re-election triumph and sending Bill Clinton back home to Arkansas.

But the point isn't to get the result you want -- the point is to reflect more accurately the true inclinations of the electorate, rather than forcing voters to choose between the third-party long shot they love and the major-party contender they loathe.

TALK ABOUT an idea with a bad reputation. Early in the Clinton administration, the president threw Lani Guinier, his nominee as assistant attorney general for civil rights, over the side of the boat because she advocated a voting system known as proportional representation. "Quota queen!" screamed the right-wing editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

But it was a good idea then, and it's a good idea now. The theory behind proportional representation (PR) is that a political party -- rather than having to win an election outright -- would be represented in proportion to its support among the electorate. At the federal level, PR advocates have targeted the US House of Representatives. Here's how it would work: if 10 percent of the voters support, say, Green Party candidates, then 10 percent of all House members should be Greens. Since there are 435 House members, 43 or 44 of them would be Greens.

That's the theory; the reality is likely to be quite a bit messier. Still, if done right, PR would be more broadly democratic than the current winner-take-all system.

Before PR could be tried, we'd have to reconfigure the 435 House districts in a fairly radical manner. With each district electing just one representative, it's no surprise that pretty much every House member is a mainstream Republican or Democrat. But what if -- by way of example -- you instead had 145 districts, each represented by three members? As a voter, you'd get three votes, which you could cast any way you wished: one vote for each of three candidates, three votes for one candidate, or some combination. The result would be that some House members could be elected with 20 percent to 30 percent of the vote -- a sizable minority that's shut out entirely under the current system. Greens, Libertarians, and independents would be elected. African-Americans and other minorities would find it easier to win -- and there would be no need for the sort of racially gerrymandered districts that have come under the baleful scrutiny of the courts.

For the past several years Congress has been considering a bill that would reverse a 1967 ban on multi-member districts, the only legal impediment to PR. (Unlike the other reforms discussed in this article, this would require no constitutional amendment.) Among those who support PR are Representative Cynthia McKinney (D-Georgia), an African-American who nearly lost her seat after she was redistricted into a mostly white area in 1996; Representative Tom Campbell (R-California); and Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, who says he'd like to see a state try it on an experimental basis to find out whether it works as intended.

John Bonifaz, director of the Boston-based National Voting Rights Institute, thinks PR would not only create a more ideologically diverse House, but improve presidential politics as well. "There would be a whole lot of other voices that would broaden the debate," he says. "And that would have a definite effect on those running for other public offices, including president of the United States."

Sean Cahill, research director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's Policy Institute, adds that PR would make it easier for candidates to take "bold stands" in favor of causes such as gay marriage -- although he warns that it would also make it easier for "extreme-right parties, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis" to get elected, too, since candidates would no longer have to aim for 51 percent of the vote.

The theory, however, is that minority voices, no matter how reprehensible, should be heard, not stifled. As advocates like to point out, a notably enthusiastic supporter of PR was the 19th-century British political philosopher John Stuart Mill, who wrote: "It is an essential part of democracy that minorities should be adequately represented. No real democracy, nothing but a false show of democracy, is possible without it."

IF YOU didn't like divided government before, you're going to hate what arrives in Washington this January: a new president denounced as a fraud by half the country, and a Congress almost evenly split between the Democratic and Republican Parties.

Most democratic countries long ago hit upon the solution to divided government: make it constitutionally impossible. Nearly every democratic government in the world is ruled by a parliamentary system -- a legislature, usually consisting of one branch, that is led by the head of the largest party, who is known (in most cases) as the prime minister. Whereas the US Constitution mandated the separation of powers, power would actually be concentrated if the US followed this system. "It would eliminate what Madison tried to do, which was to make ambition work against ambition," says None of the Above author Robert Shogan.

Unlike proportional representation or, to a lesser extent, the instant runoff, reformulating the United States as a parliamentary democracy isn't a matter of public or even private discussion these days. It's ironic, because at one time the shortcomings of the presidential system were regularly debated. In The Imperial Presidency (1973), Arthur Schlesinger Jr. notes that Woodrow Wilson, as a young political scientist at Princeton, proposed something like a parliamentary system. At his first inauguration, Schlesinger writes, Wilson said that the presidency was "quite abnormal, and must eventually lead to something very different."

In 1942, political scientist Henry Hazlitt argued in A New Constitution Now that a parliamentary system or something like it was needed so that the government could respond more rapidly to emergencies, such as war. As late as 1980, Lloyd Cutler, the presidential counsel at the Carter White House, wrote a long piece for Foreign Affairs lamenting "the structural inability of our government to propose, legislate and administer a balanced program for governing." "In parliamentary terms," he wrote, "one might say that under the U.S. Constitution it is not now feasible to `form a Government.' "

What people such as Cutler and Shogan advocate is not strictly a parliamentary system. Rather, they propose changes that would more closely link the fates of the president and Congress -- essentially creating a hybrid of the presidential and parliamentary forms of government. Some ideas:

* Electing the president, representatives, and senators to the same four- or six-year term in order to increase the likelihood that one party will capture both the White House and Congress. Shogan notes in his 1998 book The Fate of the Union that more than four out of five voters back the same party for Congress and the presidency, thus belying the myth that voters like divided government.

* Allowing members of Congress to serve as Cabinet secretaries without giving up their elected positions.

* Empowering the president, Congress, or both to call for new elections in the event of a stalemate or governmental crisis. Consider how quickly Richard Nixon could have been gotten rid of during the Watergate era if Congress had approved a "no confidence" resolution.

Or consider how much more satisfying the outcome of the Monica Lewinsky scandal would have been. Bill Clinton could have called for a new presidential and congressional election and -- if polls at the time were accurate -- succeeded in vanquishing his sexual inquisitors. Impeachment under such a system would become an instant anachronism.

SEVERAL YEARS ago Lani Guinier, now a Harvard Law School professor, told the New York Times: "A winner-take-all culture rewards winning by any means necessary. There's a great stake in winning, because you get all the power, and the loser gets nothing, so there's an incentive to play sound-bite, attack-dog politics. And I think that's alienating the voters."

Does anyone doubt that the voters are alienated? No system is perfect. But instant-runoff elections and proportional representation would reflect the full complexity of the country better than the simplistic I-win/you-lose system we're all so accustomed to. And tying Congress's fate more closely to the president's would unquestionably make it easier to get things done -- such as universal health care, for instance, or Social Security reform.

Such changes are not going to happen overnight. Hell, they're probably not going to happen at all. Let's face it: even after the events of the past 10 days, we'll be lucky if we can get rid of the Electoral College, which has to be the first priority for anyone looking for a fairer, more democratic system.

So the next time you feel like screaming at your TV set or ripping your newspaper to shreds, stop, take a deep breath, and remind yourself: it doesn't have to be this way.

The Center for Voting and Democracy has published an extensive archive of materials on proportional representation, instant-runoff elections, and other voting reforms at www.igc.org/cvd. Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.