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The
Nation
Wave of Election Reform Hits
California
By John Nichols
March 6, 2002 As partisan
squabbles in the US Senate continue to delay meaningful action on
election reforms proposed after the Florida recount crisis of 2000,
California voters are taking ballot matters into their own hands.
Voters in the Golden State endorsed a group of state and local
election reform proposals Monday that ought to make the state a
leader in fixing not just broken election machinery but a broken
political system. They even nominated a reform-minded Democratic
candidate for Secretary of State who -- unlike Florida's Katherine
Harris -- actually believes that election officials ought to count
every vote. From an election reform standpoint the news from
California was all good, and one development -- the decision of San
Francisco voters to create an instant runoff voting system -- is
particularly important. Here's what happened Tuesday: * In response
to the 2000 election debacle in Florida, where state officials
actually went to court in order to prevent ballots from being
counted, Californians overwhelmingly approved an amendment to their
state Constitution requiring that all votes legally cast in
elections must be counted. The measure includes a provision that
allows local election officials to petition the courts to waive any
deadline that might prevent a full count -- a rule that, had it been
in place in Florida, would have allowed officials in south Florida
counties to complete counts that Katherine Harris stopped by
strictly applying deadlines. * In another outgrowth of the Florida
fight, Californians endorsed a proposition to raise $200 million
through bond sales in order to help counties pay for new voting
equipment. After a recent ruling by a federal judge that ordered
California to replace controversial punch-card voting machines in
time for the 2004 presidential election, this measure will allow
even the poorest counties in the state to replace voting machines
that produce "chads." * By a 56-44 margin, voters in San Francisco
made their city the first major municipality in the United States to
adopt an instant runoff voting (IRV) system for local elections.
Under an IRV system, voters will now be able to rank lists of
candidates for positions such as mayor and city supervisor. The win
for IRV after years of local organizing by activists with the Center
for Voting and Democracy is arguably one of the most significant
victories for electoral reformers and third-party activists since
New York City abandoned its proportional representation voting
system in the 1940s. (Under the old system, New Yorkers had elected
not just Democrats and Republicans to their city council but
candidates from across the political spectrum, including Socialists,
Communists, American Labor Party members and other third-party
contenders.) With an IRV system, if no candidate receives more than
50 percent of the vote, weaker candidates with no chance of winning
are eliminated and the second-choice votes of their supporters are
then counted. How would such a system work in practical terms?
Consider the 2000 presidential election in New Hampshire, where
George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by 7,241 votes. Under an IRV system,
a substantial portion of the 22,198 New Hampshire voters for Green
Party nominee Ralph Nader might well have ranked Nader first and
made Gore a grudging second choice in order to prevent a Bush
presidency. Had Gore picked up enough second-choice votes to close
the gap with Bush, he would have won New Hampshire's four electoral
votes and been sworn in as president. Calling the San Francisco
vote a reflection of America's growing "thirst for a better
democracy," Center for Voting and Democracy national director Rob
Richie declared that, "In cities and states around the nation,
democracy advocates are involved in new efforts to improve our
politics. Instant runoff voting is an essential component of the
future of reform." Richie could well be right. In Vermont, where
Democratic Governor Howard Dean, Democratic Secretary of State
Deborah Markowitz and activists with that state's politically potent
Progressive Party are promoting IRV reforms, voters at town meetings
across the state on Tuesday overwhelmingly endorsed the idea. Among
those speaking for the reform at local town meetings was former New
York Times political writer and columnist Tom Wicker, who suggested
that Vermont could lead the nation toward a politics that more
accurately reflects voter sentiments. But veteran San Francisco
activists such as the Center for Voting and Democracy's Steven Hill
know that real reform does not come without a fight. That city's IRV
referendum was backed by local politicos such as City Supervisor and
former mayoral candidate Tom Ammiano and California House Assembly
Leader Kevin Shelley -- who on Tuesday won the Democratic nomination
on an election reform platform -- as well the powerful San Francisco
Labor Council, Common Cause, the National Organization for Women,
the Sierra Club, the California Public Interest Research Group,
local gay and lesbian and Latino political clubs, and the Green and
Libertarian parties. And, of course, it was backed by the city's
alternative weekly newspaper, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which
has for a number of years played a critical role in promoting
progressive political reform in the city. But the IRV measure faced
active opposition from business groups and some veteran political
insiders. Their objection? Reportedly, they feared that an IRV
system would make it harder to divide progressives in the next
mayoral race -- a shift that could make it possible for Ammiano, who
mounted an unexpectedly strong last-minute mayoral run in 1999, to
win the office in 2003. Opponents argued that instant
runoff voting was an untested and difficult approach to electing
local officials. Hill and other activists countered by using a
website (www.improvetherunoff.com
) to explain that IRV is used to decide
major elections in Australia, Ireland, Great Britain and other
countries. The site included a "Try It" feature that allowed voters
to see how the system worked. In also featured a link to a site
where the characters from the "Muppets" television show elect a CEO
using instant runoff voting. |
