The Prague Post

Electoral System crushing the Democracy car of the USA

Over the past few years, a number of Czech leaders have said the country should consider adopting a "winner take all" electoral system in which representatives would be elected one geographic district at a time. A close examination of how democracy is working in the United States today shows that this could be a giant step backward for Czech democracy.

American representative government is suffering a severe breakdown. Op-ed pages from the liberal New York Times to the conservative Wall Street Journal have made the case for an overhaul. For example, 90 percent of the district races for the 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are grotesquely tilted in favor of one of the major political parties, the Democrats or the Republicans. The district lines have been rigged in such a way as to make most elections into pale farces of competition that would make the old Soviet Politburo proud. In the last U.S. congressional election, 99 percent of incumbents won re-election, usually by huge margins. As competition has decreased, so has voter participation, with only 38 percent of voters bothering to vote in the 2002 elections.

State government elections are even worse. The district races are so noncompetitive that of more than 7,000 races, 40 percent lacked a candidate from one of the two major parties because party leaders judged it impossible to win. That's 2-in-5 races where there was neither even a nominal race nor a political debate for voters to think about.

But the problems created by the American electoral system do not end there. This method has fostered severe regional Balkanization where entire regions of the country have become political fiefdoms for either the Democrats or the Republicans. The American political map now is referred to as "Red vs. Blue America" (red for Republicans, blue for Democrats), like regional combatants in a political and cultural war that has become increasingly tense. Political monocultures have resulted in these regions where debate and discussion of innovative ideas has virtually ceased.

The fundamental problem with the "winner take all" electoral system is that it grants representation based exclusively on geography -- on where you live rather than what you think. Voters from widely divergent views are expected to share a single representative, an increasingly impossible task in our modern pluralistic world. In a "winner take all" system, one side wins the election and everyone else loses. Entire states in the United States sometimes have representatives from only one political party. Millions of Americans living in the wrong district or state rarely cast a vote for a winning candidate or party.


Red and Blues

These defects of representation based on geography also infect the American presidential system. The election for president is not a national election at all. Rather, it's an election of 50 individual states, with the winning candidate needing to win electoral votes allocated to each state based on a complicated formula that gives more electoral votes per capita to low-population states such as Wyoming and Idaho. This bias in favor of low-population states favors the Republican Party and its candidates. That explains why George W. Bush won the electoral vote and the presidency in 2000, even as Al Gore won a half-million more votes nationwide. Bush won more of the low-population states that have three, four and five electoral votes. Because of the political geography in Red and Blue America, the Democrats need to win more votes than the Republicans to win the presidency. It's like having a foot race in which one side begins 10 steps ahead of the other.

In addition, most of the 50 states are solidy part of Red or Blue America. We already can foretell for the 2004 presidential election which candidate, Bush or John Kerry, will win approximately 35 of the states. The contest will be decided in a mere 15 battleground states. Campaign ads and candidate visits already are being concentrated in these states, while voters in the rest of the nation largely are being ignored.

Yet even within the 15 battleground states, not all voters will be courted by the candidates. The two party/two choice system is susceptible to manipulation via modern campaign techniques such as polling and focus groups. The candidates and their operatives can figure out which groups of voters are sure to vote for them, which voters never will vote for them and which are the handful of undecided "swing" voters. Most of the appeals target the last group, in what is know as the "swing-voter serenade." All other voters, and the issues they care about, are left on the political sidelines by this calculated slicing and dicing of the electorate. So what should be a national election for president this November will boil down to a handful of undecided voters in a handful of battleground states, with most American voters little more than bystanders.

The "winner take all" nature of the two-choice system also fosters extreme mudslinging and hack attack campaigns. If I am running against you, I win as easily by driving voters away from you as by attracting them to me. The system encourages candidates to exaggerate their opponents' youthful indiscretions, previous political positions or other perceived weaknesses in an attempt to drive away voters. In this charged atmosphere, meaningful political debate about issues or the national future is virtually impossible.

Not surprisingly, the kind of political dynamics fostered by the "winner take all" system turns off most voters. In the 2000 presidential election, a bare majority of Americans turned out to select the most powerful elective office in the world. Ironically, if people all over the world were allowed to vote in the U.S. presidential election, no doubt they would turn out in droves because they know how important that office is to what happens in their own country. But in the United States, we have difficulty mustering even half of the voters on Election Day.

Finally, as the debacle in Florida showed during the 2000 presidential election, the United States is also plagued by second-rate election administration and infrastructure. Despite America's wealth, voting equipment there is inadequate, not even at the level of that used by India and Brazil for their recent elections. That's because there is no national system for election administration; instead the job is left to more than 3,000 counties scattered across the nation, with conflicting standards and practices. There are vast discrepancies in the quality of equipment, with poorer counties having old and antiquated machines. Newer touch-screen computerized voting equipment lacks a voter-verified paper trail and has caused great concern about election fraud and the security of ballots. Elec-tion administrators too often are selected because of political connections rather than their knowledge in running elections, and training of poll workers is inadequate. A "revolving door" has resulted in state regulators going to work as lobbyists for the very election-equipment corporations they previously regulated.


Falling standards

This is no way to run a democracy. Without a real democracy in the United States, Americans are falling behind their European counterparts in standard of living. More than 45 million Americans have no health care, several states have infant mortality rates equal to that of Russia and millions are unemployed with no safety net. Americans now work an average of 42 hours per workweek and work nine weeks more per year than Western European workers for the same standard of living. Wages are inadequate, so people survive by accumulating a mountain of debt, with Americans now more indebted than at any time since the stock market crash of 1929. Huge government deficits at federal and state levels have resulted in severe cutbacks in education, transportation and senior care. Homelessness is rampant, especially in cities.

A functioning democracy is a prerequisite to having an economic system that works for everyone, instead of just a handful of the rich and powerful. But in the United States we have a failing democracy based on antiquated 18th-century political institutions. Most Americans -- indeed the entire world -- is paying the price.