Presidential Elections
Should Be for All of Us
Op-Ed News.com
June 22, 2004: CVD's Rob Richie and Steven Hill call for direct election of
the president with IRV. Versions of this commentary have appeared in
publications like the progressive populist.
Every presidential election matters, but 2004 has particular significance.
Re-election of George W. Bush with the return of Republican majorities in the
U.S. Senate and House could tip the ideological balance of the Supreme Court and
federal courts for a generation. It could trigger a wave of Democratic
retirements in the House that might cement Republican domination on Capitol Hill
for decades. It could unleash a wave of hard-right policy initiatives.
So everyone should be involved, right? In a democracy, it's one person, one
vote?
There's just one problem: that's not the way we elect the president. We cling
to a thoroughly outmoded Electoral College that divides us along regional lines,
undercuts accountability, dampens voter participation, and can undermine
legitimacy when the electoral vote trumps the national popular vote. As the
bumper sticker notes, Democrats have to RE-defeat Bush this year because the
Electoral College denied Al Gore's popular vote advantage of a half-million
votes in 2000.
Instead of a simple national election, we hold 51 separate contests in the
states and the District of Columbia, with each state having a number of
electoral votes equal to its number of U.S. Senators and House members (ranging
from three electoral votes in the states with the fewest people to California
with 55). This arrangement awards more electoral votes per capita to low
population states which tend to be conservative, giving Republican candidates an
unfair advantage. It's like having a foot race where one side starts ten yards
ahead of the other.
A presidential candidate needs to receive the highest number of votes in the
right combination of states to win a majority of the Electoral College vote. The
perverse incentives created by this method arepainfully obvious from this year's
campaign -- most states already are effectively ignored by the candidates and
groups seeking to mobilize voters because in a competitive national race most
states are dominated by one party or the other. Most campaign focus and energy
-- and increasingly, even the candidates' messages for how they plan to govern--
are pitched to undecided swing voters in the key battleground states.
If you feel like your issues and concerns are being ignored, chances are it's
because you live in the wrong state and/or are not part of the faceless slice of
undecided swing voters.
The Electoral College's democratic deficit is compounded by the use of
plurality elections -- the candidate with the most votes wins 100 percent of the
electoral votes from that state, even if less than a majority. Plurality
elections mean that a popular majority can be fractured by the presence of a
third party candidate. Far more than any ballot corruption in Florida, Al Gore
was hurt by the nearly hundred thousand voters in Florida who supported Ralph
Nader.
So what can be done? Over the years, leading national political figures like
Strom Thurmond, Orrin Hatch, Ted Kennedy, Kweisi Mfume, Hillary Clinton and John
McCain have supported approaches to amend, reform or scrap the Electoral
College. The time has come to institute a national direct election.
While there are serious proposals that would keep the Electoral College,
fundamentally, the only transparent solution to this anti-democratic mess is to
have "one person, one vote" all across the nation. Every American
voter should count as much as every other voter, it shouldn't depend on where
you live. All would have the same incentive to vote, no matter your postal
address.
There are important questions to resolve for a nationwide direct election,
however. One of them is related to our antiquated plurality tradition where the
highest vote-getter wins, even if less than a majority. This has happened in
several gubernatorial elections in the past decade. That possibility occurring
for a nationwide presidential election presents problems of legitimacy.
To prevent this problem, most direct election amendments call for a second
"runoff" election between the top two finishers if no candidate
receives at least 40 percent of the vote. But 40 percent is an arbitrary
standard that is too low for winning our highest office. A strong leader should
be able to reach out effectively to enough voters to command majority support.
Two-round runoffs also pose problems. Candidates would have to scramble for
extra cash to run a second campaign, and additional costs to election officials
for a nationwide election could be a half billion dollars. And voters would have
to trudge out to the polls one more time.
Rather than mandate a low 40 percent threshold and two rounds of voting, any
amendment to the Constitution should allow electoral mechanisms to determine a
majority winner in a single election, such as instant runoff voting (IRV.) IRV
simulates a two-round runoff in one election by allowing voters to rank their
"runoff" choices along with their first choice, 1, 2, 3. Instead of
having a second election, ballot-counters use the rankings to determine the
runoff choices of those voters whose first choice failed to advance to the
runoff. The system is used for major elections in Great Britain, Australia and
Ireland, and this year in such diverse settings as the Utah Republican Party
state convention and city elections in San Francisco.
With large majorities of Americans against the Electoral College, Democrats
have nothing to fear in picking up on Hillary Clinton's call in November 2000
for a constitutional amendment for direct election. And they have much to gain:
a unique opportunity to end an anti-democratic, 18th-century anachronism.
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