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Testimony of John
B. Anderson to the National Commission on Federal Election Reform
(Ford-Carter Commission)
May 24,
2001
Executive Summary and
Statutory Proposals
Summary of remarks: I am President of the
Center for Voting and Democracy, a national non-partisan, non-profit
organization founded in 1992 that studies elections -- local, state,
federal, and international -- and advocates reforms to promote
increased participation with strong and fair representation. I
served in Congress for two decades and ran for president in 1980,
appearing on the ballot of all 50 states as an independent
candidate.
We have been far too careless with our right to
vote.
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Our election administrators have come to
accept as normal a two percent failure rate in the casting and
counting of votes -- which amounts to some two million votes not
counting in each of the last three presidential
elections.
-
We limit access to the polls through such
devices as shortened polling hours.
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Our voter registration system is a failure in
most states, both because so many citizens fail to register
because of inaccuracies and redundancy.
-
We have been far too casual in
disenfranchising people due to past felony convictions -- not only
creating inequalities, but influencing future lack of
participation by children of those
disenfranchised.
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Most of our laws governing legislative
redistricting are as outmoded and primitive as we know our laws
governing election administration to be.
The Center for Voting and Democracy has two areas
of particular concern: 1) ensuring the accuracy of voter intentions
by requiring that winners have majority support from those they
represent and 2) providing full representation to voters. Strong
arguments for these reforms can be made by supporters of the current
two-party system, but I support them because of a strong belief in
multi-party democracy. New parties offer voters better choices and
bring important perspectives to political debate. They provide a
check on any drift of major parties away from substantial numbers of
people. To give the major parties the same kind of competition we
believe so important in our free market economy, we must eliminate
the many barriers that thwart efforts to build new parties.
We should require winners of unitary offices --
such as president, governor and U.S. Senator -- to have majority
support. Failing to do so allows distortions of popular will and
keeps minor candidates in the role of "spoiler." Instant runoff
voting generates a majority winner in a single round of voting and
has been tested for decades in major elections. States could adopt
it for all federal and state races or Congress could enact it for
all federal races except for president. It is a particularly
sensible alternative to runoff elections, which can be an expensive
headache for election administrators.
To address the pervasive lack of competition and
to provide full representation of our diversity through
constitutional means, we should adopt full representation systems
such as the cumulative voting method that Illinois leaders such as
former Governor Jim Edgar and former Congressman Abner Mikva
recommend be restored for electing that state's House of
Representatives. There are powerful arguments for these systems as a
means to ease the growing regional polarization apparent in our
politics, to generate more competition and to provide fuller
representation of our diversity through constitutional means.
Although fully proportional systems are used in most established
democracies, we at least should allow states to consider multi-seat
district, candidate-based systems for congressional elections that
would have the primary effect of broadening representation within
the major parties.
Summary of statutory
proposals
Voting equipment: States should use modern
voting equipment, paid for primarily by the federal government, that
minimizes voter error and provides maximum access for all citizens,
including people with disabilities, senior citizens and people whose
primary language is not English. Newly-purchased equipment should
accommodate all ballot types currently used for elections in the
United States, included ranked-choice ballots.
Minimum standards for election
administration: The federal government should set minimum
standards for voting equipment and various areas of administration
and voter education. The federal government should provide funding
to assist states in meeting these standards. States should extend
their polling hours to at least 8 pm.
Voter registration: We should take steps
either to register far more Americans in a reliable manner or enact
same-day voter registration.
Reenfranchisment: States should restore
voting rights to ex-felons. Congress should debate banning this form
of disenfranchisement in federal elections.
Redistricting: As with election
administration, the federal government should set minimum standards
for how redistricting must be done. States should move toward
criteria-driven methods that remove partisan politics from
consideration.
Fair access: Independents and third
parties should not be denied fair access to electoral politics.
There should be reasonable thresholds of support necessary to gain
access to the ballot and to candidate debates. The Federal Elections
Commission should have representatives of political independents and
minor parties as well as the major parties. Anti-fusion laws should
be repealed, either by states or by Congress.
Campaign finance reform: I personally
support public financing, based on the clean elections model in
place for state elections in such states as Maine and Arizona.
Majority rule: Congress should require
that winners of federal unitary offices have the support of an
absolute majority of voters through instant runoff voting. States
should adopt instant runoff voting for presidential elections in
their state and for other significant elections for unitary state
offices; it is particularly appropriate as an alternative to
traditional runoff elections At a minimum, new voting equipment
should have the capacity to conduct a ranked-choice election.
Full representation: Congress should
repeal the 1967 law requiring single-member district elections for
the House of Representatives. States should consider systems of full
representation in multi-seat districts for congressional and state
legislative elections, particularly when seeking to comply with the
Voting Rights Act.
Ongoing evaluation: Congress should
establish a review process to evaluate the full range of federal and
proposed federal laws affecting participation and
representation.
Full Testimony
Thank you for the opportunity to testify on this
most critical of issues: the health of our electoral process. I am
President and Chair of the Center for Voting and Democracy, a
national non-partisan, non-profit organization founded in 1992 that
studies elections � local, state, federal, and international � and
advocates reforms to promote increased participation with strong and
fair representation. I served in Congress for two decades,
representing the great state of Illinois, and ran for president in
1980, appearing on the ballot of all 50 states as an independent
candidate. I will return to that race for president, as its lessons
may be of particular interest to one of your honorary chairs -- and
indeed to several of you who have directly experienced how our
system can fracture majorities and under-represent political
minorities. That campaign also provided me with insight into the
political rights of independents and parties other than the
Republicans and Democrats.
Like many Americans, I was startled last November
to learn just how deeply and extensively the fundamentals of our
electoral democracy have deteriorated. Martin Menzer and the staff
of the Miami Herald summarize well in their new book Democracy Held
Hostage:
"In fact, few Americans knew it, but most of
their electoral systems were designed to accommodate voter apathy
rather than voter enthusiasm. These systems were based on the
premise that turnout would always be low, margins of difference
would always be high and the exact vote count would never really
matter."
The ways in which we register voters, educate
them about their responsibilities, provide them access to the polls
and count their votes too closely resemble those of a tinpot
dictator rather than the most powerful nation in the world with a
proud democratic tradition. In the midst of our economic success,
military might and individual freedoms, we have been careless with
the right that grounds all other rights: the right to vote. The very
existence of that carelessness should tell us something about how
reformers must do more than demand necessary improvements in
administering elections. Our electoral mechanics could be so poor
for so long only in a climate where elections do not matter as much
as they should: one where our choices are too limited and our votes
too weak. I applaud you and your fellow commissioners for your
mission to help bring our elections into the 21st century and hope
that you will entertain my proposals that at first glance may seem
excessively visionary, but which are grounded in American
traditions, have drawn rapidly growing attention in many states and
speak powerfully, but practically, to our urgent demand to make
elections matter and votes truly count.
You have heard from many of our nation's leading
experts about the state of voting in America, but allow me to
briefly review how the word "carelessness" is not too strong a word
to describe our attitude toward elections.
Our election administrators have come to accept
as normal a two percent failure rate in the casting and counting of
votes. That means that for every 100 voters who come to the polls,
two will not have their votes count for the office about which they
care most deeply. That number at first may sound small, but in our
recent elections for president, some two million Americans thus have
failed to have their voting intentions register in the presidential
contest. For all of Florida's abysmal problems in 2000, it is far
from alone. The error rate in fact was higher in my home state of
Illinois and, given modern technology, was unacceptably high in
every state. Yet this error rate has been accepted to the point
where rational, well-intentioned people can make decisions like that
in Virginia, where the state's elections division does not permit
counties to use features on their voting equipment that would inform
voters if they had over-voted or under-voted in a particular
race.
Our access to the polls is too limited and
arbitrary. Among many examples, consider polling hours. As we settle
in to watch the electoral returns -- or should I say, the parade of
premature exit poll projections -- we first hear from Kentucky and
Indiana. Why? Because their polls close at the absurdly early time
of 6 pm. Consider a working parent who in the morning must help
their child get ready for school before going to work. Is it too
much for them to ask that their polling place be open past the time
they might ordinarily arrive home from work? Many other states close
their polls at 7 pm, which is an improvement, but still can lead to
long lines of several hours in population centers with too few
polling places and polling stations. For federal elections, Congress
should require reasonable polling hours, and pay for them if
necessary.
Our voter registration system in most states is a
failure. If every single registered voter participated in 2000, our
turnout rate of adult Americans still would lag behind the rate of
most democracies in Europe and Latin America. At the same time, a
state like Alaska can have more registered voters than adults due to
infrequent purging -- a recipe for corruption.
Voter turnout is a useful indicator of a
democracy's health. While high rates of voter participation
certainly do not prove a democracy is healthy (dictatorships can,
after all, have show-elections with 99% turnout), low rates indicate
a potential serious problem, particularly when combined with
inequities based on wealth and education. Some would argue people
don�t vote because they�re satisfied with things as they are and
abstention really shows the strength of our American democratic
policy. Of course, no one has satisfactorily explained why
contentment with politics is consistently so concentrated among the
least well-off.
The United States ranks near the bottom --
103rd -- among democracies in voter turnout. Barely
one-half of Americans vote in our most important national election,
and little more a third cast ballots in federal off-presidential
election years. Even fewer vote in state and local elections, as
indicated by the plunging turnout here in Austin, where city council
election turnout has steadily dropped, year by year, from 39% of
registered voters in 1983 to only 5% in 2000. Important as it is to
retain the trust of the fifty percent who do vote, it is equally
crucial to examine reforms that will bring the rest of our citizens
to the polls. Of course, every ballot must be counted, but that is a
hollow achievement if most voters fail to cast ballots at all.
The partisan battle raged over "motor voter"
legislation, yet in the very first election after its passage,
Republicans re-took the House of Representatives for the first time
in four decades and in the years since have fared very well in many
state and federal elections. We should not fear voter participation,
and must embrace reforms -- be they making the government
responsible for registering voters, as commonly done in modern
democracies, or same-day voter registration with reasonable checks
on potential fraud -- that would at least allow the possibility of
turnout as high as the norm in most other modern democracies.
We have been far too casual in disenfranchising
people. One can be tough on crime without supporting current
policies that result in as many Americans being unable to vote due
to having been convicted of a felony as the total number of
Americans at the start of the 19th century. I was pleased to see
that several states in the past year have moved to re-enfranchise
their citizens, but still, too many states ban a person convicted of
a felony from voting for life. In Florida, that means that more than
600,000 adults cannot vote, including nearly a third of African
American men. Yet studies show that one of the best indicators of
future voter participation is whether one's parents voted: by making
ex-felons permanent outcasts from our elections, we are sending a
chilling message not only to them, but to their children.
The public has far too little say in the
redistricting process despite its critical impact on their
representation. The year 2000 marked the decennial Census and its
enumeration of our increased population. Every state grew in
population, with various shifts within states, and now nearly every
legislative district in the country -- from Congress to village
council -- will need to be reconfigured to uphold the one person,
one vote doctrine established in the 1960's in the landmark Supreme
Court rulings in Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims.
Unfortunately, most of this redistricting --
particularly for Members of Congress -- will be done by the elected
officials most directly affected by how the lines are drawn.
Incumbent legislators literally get to choose their constituents
before their constituents choose them. I would argue that our laws
governing redistricting are as outmoded and primitive as our laws
governing election administration. Last year, the election
administration train clearly was derailed. Whether we come to a
similar understanding about redistricting is an open question, as
its failings are unlikely to have the same visceral impact as those
from Florida despite the millions of people whose representation
will be largely pre-determined for the next ten years no matter what
happens in subsequent elections.
In contrast with our lackadaisical regulation of
redistricting, the state of Iowa and most democratic nations with
single member districts have clear standards and criteria for how
lines must be drawn, with little discretion for political concerns.
Congress in the 19th century used to set redistricting guidelines,
and it should restore that practice, particularly given modern
technology which makes precise political gerrymandering all the more
capable of making people's participation irrelevant. Two decades ago
I joined Jim Leach and many of Congress' leading lights in
supporting such legislation; no such bill has even been introduced
for years.
I will now turn to evidence of our carelessness
in two central areas of concern for the Center for Voting and
Democracy: 1) ensuring the accuracy of voter intentions by requiring
that winners secure majority support from those they represent and
2) providing full representation to voters as we did for so many
years in elections to the Illinois House of Representatives. Strong
arguments for each of these reforms can be made by those who support
the current two-party system, but first let me explain why I
personally support a multi-party democracy and changes in our laws
and practices to accommodate the potential energy and innovation
they could bring to our politics.
A friend of mine since my own independent bid 20
years ago -- distinguished political scientist, Theodore Lowi,
Professor of American Institutions at Cornell University -- last
year wrote an article called �Deregulate the Duopoly.� Professor
Lowi argues that there are many reasons why third parties are
destined, in the memorable words of Richard Hofstadter, �to sting
like a bee and die.� The only third party to become a major party in
the last century and a half was of course the Republicans who
replaced the fractured Whigs torn asunder by the most cataclysmic
issue to literally divide our Union and threaten the very
foundations of the American Republic -- slavery. To establish their
viability as a national political force Republicans first competed
and won a plurality of the congressional seats in the mid-term
elections of 1854. It was then possible six years later to capture
the White House with a former Illinois Congressman and prime
contender for the U.S. Senate in his historic contest with Stephen
Douglas two years before his presidential run -- something which had
brought Abraham Lincoln national attention and stature.
New parties offer voters better choices and bring
important perspectives to political debate. They provide a check on
any drift of major parties away from substantial numbers of people.
But one simply cannot build a third party or independent force from
the top down. Still resounding in my ears after more than two
decades was the challenge, nay the taunt, �but how will you govern?�
We are a government with three branches not just one. To give the
major parties the same kind of competition we believe so important
in our free market economy, we must eliminate the many barriers that
thwart efforts to build new parties and thus provide better choices
for the rising tide of independent voters -- and, perhaps,
re-channel the ever-increasing numbers of political drop-outs back
into the process. The anti-party ethos of our constitutional framers
has been replaced today by a hostility to any part other than the
two behemoths which Lowi terms �the duopoly.�
How does this manifest itself? How can I count
the ways! There are anti-fusion laws in most states that regrettably
were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Timmons case: as
practiced in states like New York, fusion gives all parties an equal
right to nominate candidates of their choice, including nominees of
other parties. Ballot access laws were improved after litigation in
1980, culminating in a case where I was a victor by a 5-4 vote in
the U.S. Supreme Court, Anderson v. Celebrezee. Nevertheless
all too many examples can be cited of laws that remain on that books
that are discriminatory to the point of being rightly termed
exclusionary for parties other than the existing duopoly. We must
not take from Florida's problems with designing ballots to
accommodate more presidential candidates in 2000 the lesson that
candidates with reasonable levels of support should not be able to
earn a right to be considered by voters.
The commandeering of the administration of our
federal campaign laws by the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) --
admittedly toothless on many matters, but only made up of major
party members -- is certainly a hindrance. Also extremely relevant
is our entire system of campaign finance. Suffice it to say that
despite the floodtide of money the duopoly has given us, despite
this most unbelievably costly election in 2000, with leaps in
expenditures of hard and soft money, more than 100 million Americans
avoided the polls in November.
I do not believe that many of these Americans
will vote without an expansion of choices and real debate that would
come with such better choices. The last election certainly was
riven, but it was not riveting in terms of the issues actually
debated and discussed. As the election season proceeded, it became a
dreary and repetitive contest in which the major party candidates
seemed to strive, to mix a metaphor, to square the circle by finding
the most centrist position.
Such a campaign might have been different if not
for the exclusion of Ralph Nader and other minor party candidates
from all three presidential debates under an arbitrary standard
based on near-unachievable poll numbers and fashioned by the two
majority parties through their inflexible control of the so-called
Commission on Presidential Debates. Where was the voice to bring
into the debate such issues as the death penalty, our failed war on
drugs, the necessity for a broader approach to health care than a
prescription drug benefit for old folks -- in short, a debate on
health care for all through a national health insurance program. Who
can recall any real discussion of tax reform through a
re-examination of corporate tax benefits which cost the treasury
hundreds of billions? Why was the in-depth discussion of the
appropriate role for the U.S. a pay in a globalized world economy
still bereft of the global political institution we need to assure
world peace through world law? There was not even a word from either
major party candidate about their willingness to sign the Treaty of
Rome establishing the International Criminal court -- despite its
support from all of our major European friends and allies and the
overwhelming majority of democratic nations on all continents.
Also among this list of ignored issues of course
was true campaign finance reform. The only candidate to endorse
public financing as a basic concept to replace private money was not
allowed in the debates. To borrow from Public Campaign -- the
organization seeking to offer candidates the clean elections model
now used in Maine, Vermont, Arizona, and Massachusetts in elections
for state offices -- the present system is simply out of control. We
need a new politics to replace spiralling campaign costs -- in 1996
our federal elections were said to cost two billion, while in 2000,
that cost had risen three billion -- that fails to produce the kind
of policy results that enhance the faith and trust of the American
people in our democracy.
You know where I stand on the issue of
multi-party democracy. That helps drive my interest in the following
reforms, but I want to stress that these reforms are also in the
interest of those in the major parties who want to heal some of the
divisions current in America and to inspire, mobilize and inform our
people in a way that will improve both campaigns and
policy-making.
Ensuring winners have
majority support from those they represent
.
Many of our most important elections -- like
those for president, governor and U.S. Senator -- are for unitary
offices where only one individual can be elected. When only two
candidates compete for such an office, the winner automatically will
have an absolute majority of the vote. But if more candidates appear
on the ballot, candidates can win despite a majority voting for
other candidates. This phenomenon indeed is common. It repeatedly
happens in party primaries, particularly when there are open seats
that draw many prospective candidates. There are several Members of
Congress who won their all-important first primary election with
less than 30% of the primary vote.
It also happens in our most important elections.
Last year, for example, your commission's vice-chair Slade Gorton
narrowly lost his re-election bid in Washington state in a race in
which votes cast for a Libertarian were far greater than the
difference between Sen. Gorton and Democratic nominee Maria
Cantwell. In 1997, another commission member Bill Richardson
resigned his U.S. House seat in New Mexico to become our ambassador
to the United Nations. In the special election to fill the seat, a
Hispanic Democrat lost to a Republican by 3% while the Green Party
candidate won 17%; a similar scenario played out in a special
election in New Mexico in 1998, triggering great interest in the
state legislature in a majority requirement. Numerous gubernatorial
races have been won with less than half the votes in recent years;
in fact, close to half of governors won one of their gubernatorial
primaries or general elections by less than half the votes, with
several winning with less than 40%.
More than half of states in the last three
presidential elections have allocated all of their electoral votes
to a candidate who did not win majority support in that state. In
1992, only a single state -- Arkansas -- allocated its electoral
votes to a candidate who won majority support in that state. Last
year, the presence of votes for third party candidates could have
changed the results in several states -- Pat Buchanan won enough
votes to keep George Bush from winning such states as New Mexico,
Oregon and Wisconsin, while Ralph Nader won enough votes to keep Al
Gore from winning New Hampshire and, of course, Florida.
Some might say, "well, that's the way it goes,
and our republic survives." That's true, of course, and part of the
reason our republic survives is that in nearly all cases, any major
candidate will do a reasonable job in governing. But if majority
rule is to have any meaning and if the accuracy of voter intent is a
concern, then surely we should consider ways to better ensure that
the candidate who wins is the one that most people would prefer to
win.
A traditional approach to trying to ensure
majority winners is two-round runoff elections in which the top two
candidates face off in a new election if there is no majority
winner. Sen. Gorton has suggested runoff elections in the
presidential race if no candidate wins a majority of the vote, and
even as we speak, his state of Washington is in a legal battle that
could result in adoption of Louisiana's primary system in which only
two candidates will face off in the November general election. Most
southern states use runoff elections for their primaries, while
runoffs are common in cities, including for mayoral contests in
Chicago, Los Angeles and New York.
But runoff elections have clear downsides. Here
in Texas, for example, runoffs greatly add to demands on voters.
Last spring many Texans were asked to go to the polls four times in
three months -- for the first and runoff round of a statewide
Democratic U.S. Senate primary, then for the first and runoff round
of municipal elections. Not surprisingly, voter fatigue is common.
Turnout was only 3% in the statewide primary -- so much for majority
rule. Voter turnout in a statewide runoff in North Carolina also was
well under 10% -- with taxpayers footing a bill of some $3.5 million
bill to hold the runoff. Voter turnout likely wouldn't drop much
with Sen. Gorton's proposed national runoff, but imagine both the
costs to the states for administering a second election and the
greater debt that candidates would accumulate to their campaign
contributors.
Florida, in fact, just eliminated runoff
elections for primaries, although only for the 2002 election cycle.
The justification for this change were complaints from election
administrators about the costs and difficulties of conducting three
elections in two months, as they often are forced to do in the
current system, but it is instructive to quote from Thomas Edsall's
article on the prospective candidacy of former attorney general
Janet Reno in Florida's gubernatorial race that appeared on May 19th
in the Washington Post. Edsall wrote:
"The Republican controlled Florida Legislature
recently passed an election reformmeasure that included a
provision that many believe would enhance Reno's chances to win
the Democratic nomination. The bill eliminated the requirement
that
a second, or run off, primary be held if no candidate wins
a majority in the first primary. Instead, the nomination goes to
the candidate winning a simple plurality in the first primary.
Republicans added the provision, which applies only to the 2002
election, in the hope that it would increase the chances that
Democrats would pick a weak candidate in the moderate state by
nominating the most liberal candidate who could win a plurality,
but not a majority."
Seeking to use electoral rules to gain partisan
advantage is common, of course. But note the key point: Republicans
allegedly believe that runoff elections would produce a stronger,
more representative nominee, and they would rather incumbent
governor Jeb Bush face a weaker nominee who only can gain plurality
support in the Democratic primary.
Is that what we want from elections in general --
a better chance to elect weaker candidates who do not accurately
reflect what the majority prefers? Defenders of plurality voting
must answer this question, particularly when there is such a
ready-made alternative to runoff elections that accomplishes the
goal of majority rule in a single round of voting.
I refer to instant runoff voting, the
preferential voting system used to elect the Australian House of
Representatives, president of Ireland and mayor of London. Instant
runoff voting has gained rapidly growing attention in the United
States. Alaskans will vote on whether to adopt it for all their
federal elections -- including president -- and most of their state
elections in November 2002. A dozen other states have debated
legislation on it this year, including a bill to use it to fill
congressional vacancies introduced by California's speaker of the
house and legislation in New Mexico that narrowly lost on the house
floor. Several cities are considering instant runoff voting; the
Austin city council, in fact, is weighing a charter commission's
unanimous recommendation to adopt instant runoff voting for city
council elections.
The idea is quite simple. In their one trip to
the polls, voters cast a vote for their favorite candidate, but at
the same time specify their runoff choices. If their favorite
candidate gets eliminated, they can support their next favorite in
the �instant� runoff. Voters specify these choices by ranking
candidates in order of choice: first, second, third.
Consider having the instant runoff in last year's
presidential race among George Bush, Al Gore, Ralph Nader, Pat
Buchanan and Libertarian Harry Browne. Voters would rank those they
prefer in order of choice. If a candidate received a majority of
first choices in a state, he would win that state's electoral votes.
But if not, the instant runoff would begin and the weak candidates
would be eliminated. Ballots would be recounted, with each ballot
counting for the voter�s favorite candidate remaining in the race.
Supporters of Bush and Gore would continue to support their favorite
candidate, assuming they were the top finishers, but supporters of
the other candidates would have their vote count for their runoff
choice among the major candidates.
In addition to producing majority winners, saving
taxpayers millions of dollars in election costs, reducing the need
for campaign cash and curtailing voter fatigue, instant runoff
voting has two other benefits particularly important in today's
politics:
-
It promotes less negative campaigning and reaching out to more voters because
candidates know that winning may require being the runoff choice
of their opponents' supporters.
-
It solves the �spoiler� problem in which a third party candidate like Nader
or Buchanan can split the vote and cause the stronger major party
candidate to lose. That helps both major party victims of spoilers
and voters who might want to consider a minor party or independent
candidate.
I have a particular interest in this latter
question, having had the charge leveled at me in 1980 until my ears
were ringing. Partisans of one of your honorary chairs, my
Democratic Party opponent Jimmy Carter, still believe it,
notwithstanding post-election analyses proving otherwise. Ralph
Nader, a far more recent example, has practically suffered
excommunication � David Corn of Nation has referred to it as
�crucifixion�. However unwarranted these characterizations, they are
a product of a system that produces a plurality winner in our
�first-past-the-post� method.
I would hope that this commission would consider
that federal elections be held using instant runoff voting to ensure
more representative winners and better politics. But short of such a
recommendation, there is a very important recommendation I ask you
to make: that any new voting equipment purchased by states and
counties be required to have the capacity to handle a ranked-choice
ballot and other ballot types already used in the United States.
Nearly all modern voting equipment can indeed have this flexibility
without additional costs, but counties and states need to ask for
it. It is a classic case of an ounce of prevention being worth a
pound of cure.
Providing full
representation to voters
Why have so many Americans given up on voting?
There is no single reason, but we can say categorically that turnout
is correlated to how meaningful voters feel their choices are, and
how competitive elections are. Today most legislative races are
non-competitive, as are races for Electoral College votes in most
states. Talk of a two-party system is a bit misleading, since most
Americans live in one-party jurisdictions for any given level of
elections. State legislative races are rarely competitive. Indeed
since 1996 more than 40% of state legislative elections had only one
major party candidate on the ballot -- thus effectively winning with
no contest. Most House races are similarly non-competitive, with
near 99% re-election rates since 1996 and more incumbents dying in
office since 1992 than being defeated at the polls in party
primaries.
The Center for Voting and Democracy biennially
issues a report entitled Monopoly
Politics , in which we make
projections of which party will win elections in most congressional
districts, over a year before the election, without regards to who
the challenger is, the level of fund-raising or the issues in the
race. We even predict the margin of victory. Our predictions are
nearly perfect, particularly in the majority of races we know will
be lopsided. Of the 235 House races last year that we predicted
would be won by "landslide" victory margins, all but one indeed was
won by such a landslide -- only my former colleague Henry Hyde fell
short, winning by 18% in the wake of his role in the impeachment of
Bill Clinton angering many Democrats in his safely Republican
district. The point is not that we at the Center are so clever, but
that the election system is so predictably non-competitive.
The underlying reason is our single-seat,
winner-take-all election system. We inherited this voting system
from our colonial rulers - the British parliament. Interestingly,
within the United Kingdom today there is steady movement away from
winner-take-all elections, due to flaws that have led nearly all
well-established democracies to use alternatives. Forms of
proportional representation were used to elect the newly-established
legislatures in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and London and
Britain's representatives to the European Parliament. A commission
led by Lord Roy Jenkins has recommended a form of proportional
representation for electing the House of Commons itself. The Labour
Party has pledged referendum on the question, although its
disproportionate share of seats has its leaders hedging. Around the
world, all but three democracies -- Canada, Jamaica and the United
States -- that have more than two million people and a high human
rights rating from Freedom House use proportional representation to
elect at least one of their national legislatures.
Proportional representation is a general term
that describes voting systems in which like-minded groupings of
voters can pool their votes from across a constituency to elect
candidates in accordance with their voting strength. A 50.1%
electoral majority remains well-positioned to win the majority of
seats, but it cannot shut out a substantial political minority. I am
not talking about a parliamentary system, with the executive
selected by the legislative branch, but rather a reinvigorated
presidential system, with a more competitive and hence more fully
representative legislature. With proportional systems -- or what, in
the American context perhaps could better be known as "full
representation" -- many voters gain new power to elect the
representation of which they currently are deprived due to their
minority status in their area. As American society grows
increasingly diverse and communities of concern increasingly develop
along non-geographic lines, full representation systems are drawing
even more attention. Certainly freeing more voters to define their
representation with their votes has fundamental appeal.
Forms of full representation are used in many
localities in the United States. Cambridge, Massachusetts uses
Ireland's system of choice voting for electing its city council and
school board. Amarillo, Texas and more than 50 other Texas
localities have moved to cumulative voting in the wake of George W.
Bush signing legislation to allow school districts to use cumulative
voting. Cumulative voting has been adopted to settle voting rights
cases for commission and school board elections in Chilton County,
Alabama and city council elections in Peoria, Illinois, hometown of
your fellow commissioner and my former colleague Bob Michel. The
Illinois Task Force on Political Representation and Alternative
Electoral Systems, convened by the Institute of Government and
Public Affairs at the University of Illinois and co-chaired by
former Republican governor Jim Edgar and former Democratic
Congressman, White House counsel and federal judge Abner Mikva, will
soon publish a report calling for the return of cumulative voting
for electing the state's House of Representatives.
The potential of full representation can be
glimpsed through looking at Illinois' experience with cumulative
voting. Cumulative voting opens the door to representation of
political minorities by allowing a voter to concentrate votes on
fewer candidates than seats. Illinois used cumulative voting in
three-seat districts from 1870 to 1980. Voters could put three votes
on one candidate, one vote on each of three candidates, or some
combination in between.
Illinois adopted cumulative voting at the urging
of influential newspaper editor and politician Joseph Medill as a
means to hold the state together in the wake of the polarization
that had emerged in the Civil War, when the southern part of the
state leaned toward the Confederacy and the northern part to the
Union. More than a century later, it was eliminated as part of a
ballot measure that sharply cut in the number of legislators.
Thoughtful political leaders and activists from across the political
spectrum now support its return, citing less regional polarization,
a fuller political spectrum and less partisan rancor. With
Democratic strongholds like Chicago electing Republicans and
conservative suburbs and rural areas electing Democrats, both major
parties had a direct interest in serving the entire state. Former
representative Harold Katz described the legislature as "a symphony,
with not just two instruments playing, but a number of different
instruments going at all times." Recurring themes heard in Illinois
include ones that would resonate deeply when applied to concerns
about national politics:
1) Filling out the
spectrum : In a two-party
system, the parties are supposed to be "big tents." But
winner-take-all leaves whole sections of the electorate without
strong representation -- be they Catholics who are both pro-life and
pro-labor, anti-welfare women in favor of gun control, reform-
minded independents drawn to John McCain and so on. In contrast,
Illinois' districts typically had three representatives from
distinct parts of the spectrum: two representing wings of the
majority party and one from that area's minority party. Political
minorities in office included Chicago Republicans concerned with
urban issues and independent reformers like Harold Washington
willing to take on local machines. In 1995 the Chicago Tribune
editorialized in support of cumulative voting's return, writing
that "it produced some of the best and brightest in Illinois
politics."
2) Less regional
polarization: One-seat districts
don't even represent geographic interests well. Nationally,
Republicans represent most rural districts, while Democrats
represents nearly all urban districts. When only one side represents
a region, policy for that area is subject to the whims of the
majority party. Cities can suffer under Republicans who so little
need urban voters, but also can suffer under Democrats too quick to
accept the local status quo. Setting environmental policy in the
Rockies is far more problematic when those open to change are shut
out of representation. And indeed Democrats and Republicans co-exist
everywhere. Bill Clinton won at least 25% of the vote in every House
district in 1996, for example, meaning that a Democrat likely could
be elected by a full a representation system from every single
three-seat district in the nation. Republicans might only be shut
out in one or two heavily urban districts -- meaning, for example,
that Massachusetts would have three Republican Members of Congress
rather than none.
Illinois' legislature today suffers from regional
divides, but it was different with cumulative voting. The loss of
full representation has undercut bipartisan support for key policies
and greatly exacerbated urban/suburban fractures. Chicago has been a
big loser in equitable funding of public schools, for example. Abner
Mikva, who got his start with full representation, observed it
"helped us synthesize some of our differences, made us realize that
even though we were different than the downstaters, different than
the suburbanites, that we had a lot in common that held us together
as a single state."
3) Less partisan
rancor : The impeachment of
President Bill Clinton was only the most pronounced example of the
bitter partisanship that reigns in Washington. Nearly every major
legislative initiative seems calculated for political advantage, and
perhaps nothing turns the American people away from politics more
than the sniping between party leaders. Yet voices of compromise are
vanishing, in part because of the growing homogeneity of
representation in districts that lean clearly toward one party of
the other.
Former Republican Congressman John Porter notes
that in Illinois, "We operated in a less partisan environment
because both parties represented the entire state." Former state
representative Giddy Dyer says that under single-seat districts
"It's gamesmanship, how can we beat the other one? Each party views
the other one as an enemy. That lack of civility began when we did
away with [full representation]."
Cumulative voting also resulted in much better
representation of black and women candidates over the course of the
century than the winner-take-all state senate elections. It
encouraged more grassroots campaigns where money was less of a
factor. Full representation plans would not do away with the
problems of inequities in campaign finance, but it would give
important new opportunities to candidates with strong support among
constituency groups that can turn out voters without much cash.
This aspect of full representation is
particularly important given that Congress remains overwhelmingly
male, and the U.S. Senate has no blacks or Latinos. Several members
of your commission are well-versed in voting rights laws. As you
know, under current rules, blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans and
Native Americans only have made significant advances when districts
are drawn to turn their typical minority status into a geographic
majority. It is not an ironclad relationship between race and
candidate preference, but a depressingly powerful one. Yet the
Supreme Court has made such districting more difficult.
Full representation plans are particularly
promising as an alternative means to enforce the Voting Rights Act.
Combining adjoining districts into bigger districts with between
three and five representations would be almost certainly increase
the number of black-elected US House representatives in such states
as Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi,
Arkansas and Louisiana -- and avoid costly and divisive legal
challenges that have kept some states' plans in court for most of
the last decade. Women also would likely increase their numbers --
still stalled below 14% of Congress -- as more women tend to run and
win in multi-seat districts.
I know that some of you may think that
proportional representation automatically means "instability." We
tend to be far better versed in the role of small parties in causing
problems in Italy and Israel than in their positive role in the
great majority of democracies allowing full representation. We also
tend to overlook problems with winner-take-all representation in
such nations as Algeria, India, Pakistan and Zimbabwe. But note from
the examples cited above that full representation need not be a
party-based system and that the threshold of representation can be
low enough to allow more diverse representation without being so low
as to allow small parties to win seats. Given the obvious
difficulties we face in representing racial minorities -- it is no
accident that the Supreme Court has debated a voting rights case
every year for the last decade, with more expected in the years
ahead --and given the hardening, geographically-based divisions in
Congress, it is time for Congress to lift its 1967 mandate against
states considering multi-seat district systems, which is the only
barrier to modest systems of full representation. Among those who
support providing states with the option to consider full
representation systems are the American Civil Liberties Union, the
Department of Justice's voting section, former Republican
Congressmen Tom Campbell and John Porter and leading Members of the
Congressional Black and Hispanic Caucuses such as James Clyburn,
Loretta Sanchez and Melvin Watt.
A commission like yours has been desperately
needed for some time. But like the frog sitting in a pot of water
with a slowly, but steadily, rising temperature that eventually
reaches a boil, our democratic crisis of careless attention to
securing the right to vote has developed slowly, such that it has
generally escaped notice and comment by the news media and elected
officials alike. Our democracy's crisis has become business as
usual, and thus hardly newsworthy.
Until Florida. It was the splash of cold water in
the face that we needed. The integrity of the mechanisms by which
votes are counted, the rules and procedures by which citizens are
added or removed from lists and the logistics by which voters are
helped or hindered in casting their votes are of course in need of
review and reform. But if we stop there we will have squandered a
rare opportunity to focus attention on even more fundamental defects
in America's election system. Thank you, and I would be happy to
make the resources of the Center available to the staff of your
commission as you pursue your work. |
