Excerpt from The Radical Center: The Future of American
Politics
By Ted Halstead
and Michael Lind (Doubleday Press Copyright 2001)
From Chapter Three: Digital
Era Democracy (Pages 112-115)
...American
politics is dominated by two parties because we have yet to abandon an outdated electoral
system inherited from eighteenth-century Britain. The United States is one of a
dwindling number of democracies, most of them English-speaking countries, which
use an archaic electoral system known as plurality or
first-past-the-post voting. The plurality system elects legislators from single-member districts and
can yield perverse results. In a two-way race, the
candidate with a majority of votes wins. But in
a race with three or more candidates, the candidate who receives the
most votes wins, even if that candidate receives less than
a majority of the votes. In other words, if
there are more than two candidates, the winner may
be a politician whom a majority-sometimes an overwhelming majority-of the public voted
against. Thus, in a three- or four-way race a candidate with, say,
35 percent of the vote may represent a district, even
though 65 percent of the voters wanted somebody
else.
You may have heard that a vote for a third party is a
wasted vote. Now you see why. Under a plurality voting system like
ours, if you vote for a third party in a three-way race you will
merely drain off support from the candidate whom you least dislike
and promote the election of the candidate whom you would least like
to see in office. In the 2000 presidential contest, Ralph Nader
siphoned off votes from Al Gore and probably cost him the election,
even though most Nader voters probably have preferred Gore to Bush.
In the very same way, Ross Perot might have siphoned off enough
votes from George Bush Sr. in 1992 to throw the election to Bill
Clinton. In other words, if we had an electoral system that more
accurately reflected the true choices of the people, George Bush Sr.
would probably have won in 1992, but his son George Bush Jr. would
most likely have lost in 2000. Because voting for a third party so
easily backfires, voters in countries with plurality systems like
the United States and Britain are offered a stark choice between
voting for one of two major national parties or not voting at all.
Increasing numbers of Americans have chosen the latter option. The
reason seems clear: A plurality of Americans are not satisfied with
the political choices that the two-party system provides. And if the
two-party system does not fit our multiparty citizenry, then the
system, not the citizenry, must give way.
Are there ways to broaden electoral choices in America
without amending our Constitution or moving to a parliamentary
system? Yes. One of the most promising reforms that is particularly
suited to America's single-member legislative districts and to our
elections for single offices-like those of U.S. senators, mayors,
governors, and presidents-is "instant runoff voting," alternately
called "rank order voting," or "single transferable vote." Whatever
name this system goes by, its basic principle is to allow voters to
register the order in which they prefer three or more candidates on
their ballots. If no candidate receives a majority of the vote, then
the second-choice votes are redistributed, and third-choice votes,
and so on, until one candidate passes the 50 percent mark. The
result would be the same as a runoff election, except that the
initial election and the runoff would take place simultaneously-thus
the term instant runoff.
If, in the 2000 presidential race, the president had
been elected by instant runoff instead of by the plurality method in
the Electoral College, voters would have been asked to put a 1 or a
2 or a 3 or a 4 after the names of George Bush, Al Gore, Ralph
Nader, and Patrick Buchanan. Since no candidate won a majority,
Nader and Buchanan would have been dropped and the second-choice
votes of those who voted for them would have been redistributed to
Gore and Bush. In a crude attempt to mimic an instant runoff system,
so-called Nader Traders in the 2000 election tried to register their
support for Nader without undermining Gore by swapping pro-Nader
votes in states safe for Gore with pro-Gore votes in swing states.
If instant runoff voting were formally adopted, this kind of
contorted strategy would not be necessary.
The benefit of the instant runoff approach is that it
would remove some of the barriers that prevent serious third or
fourth parties from emerging, while at the same time ensuring that
no fringe or extremist parties could win an election with a small
plurality of the vote. In short, an instant runoff system would set
a high but not insurmountable bar for the election of third-party or
independent candidates. At the same time, it would encourage more
serious candidates to run on independent or third-party platforms,
since they could no longer be tarred or dismissed as spoilers by the
guardians of the existing two-party system. New information
technologies can make the widespread use of instant runoff voting
both practical and efficient.
Instant runoff voting is one of many ways we could
move from our current system of plurality voting to a new system of
"choice voting" (also known as proportional representation). Most
elections in the United States are for single-member districts, but
this need not be the case-particularly when it comes to the election
of U.S. congressman and state legislators. The advantage of
multimember districts is that they allow for a greater range of
candidates and parties. Imagine, for example, if a dozen candidates
were running for a five-member delegation in the U.S. House of
Representatives, and voters put a 1, a 2, and so on next to the
names of the candidates, in order of preference. In this way, voters
would be able to mix and match different parties, or to vote for
independent candidates on the ballot. This would help ensure that
political parties are represented in the government more or less in
proportion to their strength in the electorate. The instability that
multiparty systems sometimes cause in parliamentary democracies like
Israel and Italy could not occur in the United States, where the
executive branch is independent of the legislature, and where the
president, the House of Representatives, and the Senate are elected
by different constituencies.
Replacing plurality voting with choice voting in one
or more of these ways not only would broaden the options available
to all American voters, but also could ultimately result in one of
two long-term transformations in or political system, both of which
would be good for our nation and our
democracy.... |