LA Weekly
What democracy votes like:
Could a new way of voting save our system? By Judith
Lewis January 17, 2003
THE FIRST TIME DAVE ROBINSON VOTED, HE FELT like a
kid discovering there is no Santa Claus. "I had read all the grand
ideas about representative democracy in school," he says, but soon
realized that "there was no way my vote was going to result in a
representative I support." In 1994, inspired by a finance class at
Dartmouth, he became convinced that the political market ought to
mimic the financial one -- in other words, people ought to be able
choose the candidate they like the most, instead of settling for the
one they despise the least. A few years later, while Robinson was
working on a doctorate in chemistry at Stanford, voting-reform
activist Steve Chessin managed to persuade the Santa Clara County
Board of Supervisors to use instant runoff voting (IRV). Robinson
was encouraged, and by the year 2000 he found himself heading up the
California IRV Coalition. "Unlike Santa Claus," he says, "the ideals
I have about representative democracy really could come true."
Robinson is part of a growing cadre of multipartisan activists who
believe that voters are sufficiently fed up with the status quo that
they're willing to radicalize their voting systems. At the forefront
of their efforts is IRV, a formula for elections invented in 1870 by
Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor W.R. Ware. IRV
sounds complex at first, but it's actually simple: Each voter ranks
the candidates on their ballots in order of preference, and any
candidate who gets a majority of first-place votes wins. If no
candidate gets such a majority, the lowest-ranking candidate is
eliminated, and the votes are counted again. The process is repeated
until someone scores a majority of votes. In March 2002, San
Francisco voters overwhelmingly agreed to elect future city council
members by IRV (in part because it saves them a second runoff
election in December), as Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been doing
for half a century. European voters have been even more
enthusiastic: Ireland elects a president in an instant runoff,
London its mayors. And in the wake of California's last
gubernatorial race -- a lackluster battle between major-party
candidates so undistinguished only 55 percent of the electorate
bothered to come to the polls -- Robinson and his ilk have never
been more sanguine about their political ambitions; indeed, the Gray
Davis-Bill Simon showdown, during which potential Green Party
spoiler Peter Camejo was forced into the media shadows, set in
relief the dire need for a better way to elect leaders. Latino
Democrats faced a particularly tough decision in that race: They
could cast their lot with an incumbent who had, just over a month
earlier, deeply betrayed them by vetoing a bill that would have
allowed undocumented immigrants to obtain driver's licenses, or risk
the governorship falling by default to a man with even less sympathy
to newcomers from Mexico. Davis, meanwhile, was left with little
reason to court his natural constituency: While anti-immigrant
conservatives could tolerate putting Republican Bill Simon in
office, most Democrats could not. "We've seen a surge since then in
the number of people in our directory and mailing lists," says
Robinson, "as well as inquiries through our Web site and people
volunteering to take action in their local communities. We're making
progress." If IRV catches on, there will be no more spoilers, no
more lesser of evils, and a much more expressive democracy. "If the
gubernatorial election had been an IRV election," says Steven Hill,
author of Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner-Take-All
Politics, "Peter Camejo still might not have won. But he might have
got 20 percent of the vote, which I think would have been a more
accurate reflection of the new face of California." (Statewide,
Camejo netted only 5.3 percent.) Latino Democrats could have ranked
Camejo first, Davis second, giving voice to their objections to the
governor without feeling they were sacrificing their united front
with other Dem-ocrats. For that reason, Hill maintains, "IRV is a
real turn-on for young people and minorities." Robinson and Hill
are equally impassioned about IRV's companion, proportional
representation (PR), a voting system used to distribute several
legislative seats among various political interests according to the
percentage of votes they get. (In other words, in an election with
10 open seats where 40 percent of the electorate votes Republican,
four of the seats go to Republicans.) Robinson remembers hearing
Harvard law professor Lani Guinier in 1993 give PR "a fleeting
moment in the spotlight before getting drowned out by political
noise," and Guinier's reasonable arguments caused her to be
summarily dumped by Clinton before she got a chance to plead her
case as a nominee for assistant attorney general. Now, however,
proportional representation is a respectable enough method of
choosing leaders that it's used to elect Germany's parliament, where
a customary 75 percent of the electorate makes it to the polls. In a
political system where ignoring minority opinions would be perilous,
proportional representation is a matter of political survival:
Israel, for example, elects its Knesset by PR. RIGHT NOW,
CALIFORNIA IRV AND PR SUPPORTers are stymied somewhat by
irregularities in state law: Cities that govern by charter can
change their voting procedure at any time, but "general law" cities
and counties, whose political structure follows state law, would
have to draw up entirely new charters to change the way they vote.
Robinson and his allies are currently pushing a bill that would
exempt voting law from that process, and allow general-law cities
and counties to change their voting systems at the will of the
electorate. And even if they succeed, there's no predicting how
voters will react once the runoff results start rolling in. Ann
Arbor, Michigan, tried IRV in 1975, but dropped it after a Democrat
was elected in spite of a Republican having earned more first-choice
votes. New York City tried a related system, choice voting, in the
'30s, but abandoned it for fear that it would put communists in high
political office. And while Democrats might welcome electoral reform
on the grounds that it will get out the typically alienated,
liberal-sympathizing vote, they might also worry it will force the
moderate left to acknowledge the radical fringe, or even be
overtaken by it. Robinson, however, would prefer to keep the
voting-reform debate above partisan politics: He recently chastised
an avid IRV supporter in a group e-mail discussion for suggesting in
a proposed letter to the editor that IRV was more popular among
"progressive" voters. ("Yikes!" he wrote. "We need to be defusing
the claim that we have tilted the [San Francisco] electoral
machinery in favor of progressives.") Beyond voting reform, he keeps
his political leanings to himself. "Liberals yell at me for being
too conservative and conservatives yell at me for being too
liberal," Robinson gripes. "I like to think of myself as being
somewhere off the line, connecting the two."
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