Improve on Red vs. BlueWinner-take-all systems leave out too many voters
By William Raspberry
Published October 8th 2004 in Washington Post
Four years after a dead-heat presidential election came near to
producing a constitutional crisis, it's odd what stands out in my
memory. Not the butterfly ballots and the hanging chads; those were
mechanical failures, and quite fixable. Not Florida's partisan
secretary of state, its on-again off-again recount efforts, nor even
the U.S. Supreme Court's delivery of the state -- and the election --
to George W. Bush. Those were human failings of the sort that matter
only in very close elections.
What I remember most starkly is the fact that very nearly half of the Floridians who bothered to register and go to the polls (and who managed to survive the challenges of confusing ballots and human roadblocks) might as well have stayed at home. Approximately 3 million Floridians delivered all of their state's 25 electoral votes to Bush. The same number of voters less 537 -- the size of the official margin -- delivered nothing.
How could anyone imagine that to be fair?
Florida sticks in my mind, of course, because by the time it came to Florida, it was known that that state held the election in the balance. The flaw, however, was not Florida's but the winner-take-all electoral system used by 48 of the 50 states in presidential elections. Millions of Texas Democrats and New York Republicans had their votes similarly disregarded. If you didn't vote for the winner, your vote didn't count.
And here we are headed toward what may be another close election. Isn't it time to fix the system?
As a matter of fact, several repair efforts are underway. Maine and Nebraska do not follow the winner-take-all rule. (If their system had been in place in Florida, supporters of George Bush and Al Gore would have been arguing over which candidate should get 13 electoral votes and which one only 12.) Enacting some form of proportionate allocation of electoral votes makes sense to me. Interestingly, it's up to the individual states to do it, though at the moment only Colorado is considering the change.
One of the more interesting electoral reforms is underway in San Francisco, where voters next month will select their top choice for a seat on the city's Board of Supervisors -- but also have a chance to mark their second and third choices.
If you think this doesn't sound like much, you ought to talk to Rob Richie, executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy and my frequent guide on voting systems. Three things about the rank-voting system appeal to Richie. First, it increases the likelihood that any particular voter will have helped to elect a candidate to office, a fact that Richie believes might help to reduce voter apathy. Second, it makes it possible for a voter to support a dark-horse candidate -- say, a third-party hopeful -- without helping his least favorite candidate in the process. Say John McCain is on the ballot and he is your first choice. Under the present system, a vote for McCain would be a vote taken away from your second favorite, Bush, and in effect a vote for John Kerry. Under a rank-order system, either your first choice wins or your vote goes to your second choice.
But what really excites Richie about the system is that it tends to drive candidates and campaigns toward coalition-building and civility. "The present system leads candidates to sharpen, even exaggerate, their differences with their challengers," he says. "The result is a sort of polarization that marginalizes moderates of both parties. But the candidate who thinks he may need your second-choice vote to win will tend to reach out to -- or at least not antagonize -- voters whose first choice is someone else."
The people simply aren't as polarized as the system paints them. Florida wound up being a red state, though virtually half of its voters were blue. The truth is, with a small handful of exceptions, the states are various shades of purple.
Wouldn't it be a good thing for our politics to acknowledge that fact?
What I remember most starkly is the fact that very nearly half of the Floridians who bothered to register and go to the polls (and who managed to survive the challenges of confusing ballots and human roadblocks) might as well have stayed at home. Approximately 3 million Floridians delivered all of their state's 25 electoral votes to Bush. The same number of voters less 537 -- the size of the official margin -- delivered nothing.
How could anyone imagine that to be fair?
Florida sticks in my mind, of course, because by the time it came to Florida, it was known that that state held the election in the balance. The flaw, however, was not Florida's but the winner-take-all electoral system used by 48 of the 50 states in presidential elections. Millions of Texas Democrats and New York Republicans had their votes similarly disregarded. If you didn't vote for the winner, your vote didn't count.
And here we are headed toward what may be another close election. Isn't it time to fix the system?
As a matter of fact, several repair efforts are underway. Maine and Nebraska do not follow the winner-take-all rule. (If their system had been in place in Florida, supporters of George Bush and Al Gore would have been arguing over which candidate should get 13 electoral votes and which one only 12.) Enacting some form of proportionate allocation of electoral votes makes sense to me. Interestingly, it's up to the individual states to do it, though at the moment only Colorado is considering the change.
One of the more interesting electoral reforms is underway in San Francisco, where voters next month will select their top choice for a seat on the city's Board of Supervisors -- but also have a chance to mark their second and third choices.
If you think this doesn't sound like much, you ought to talk to Rob Richie, executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy and my frequent guide on voting systems. Three things about the rank-voting system appeal to Richie. First, it increases the likelihood that any particular voter will have helped to elect a candidate to office, a fact that Richie believes might help to reduce voter apathy. Second, it makes it possible for a voter to support a dark-horse candidate -- say, a third-party hopeful -- without helping his least favorite candidate in the process. Say John McCain is on the ballot and he is your first choice. Under the present system, a vote for McCain would be a vote taken away from your second favorite, Bush, and in effect a vote for John Kerry. Under a rank-order system, either your first choice wins or your vote goes to your second choice.
But what really excites Richie about the system is that it tends to drive candidates and campaigns toward coalition-building and civility. "The present system leads candidates to sharpen, even exaggerate, their differences with their challengers," he says. "The result is a sort of polarization that marginalizes moderates of both parties. But the candidate who thinks he may need your second-choice vote to win will tend to reach out to -- or at least not antagonize -- voters whose first choice is someone else."
The people simply aren't as polarized as the system paints them. Florida wound up being a red state, though virtually half of its voters were blue. The truth is, with a small handful of exceptions, the states are various shades of purple.
Wouldn't it be a good thing for our politics to acknowledge that fact?
Election Day '09 was a roller-coaster for election reformers. Instant runoff voting had a great night in Minnesota, where St. Paul voters chose to implement IRV for its city elections, and Minneapolis voters used IRV for the first time—with local media touting it as a big success. As the Star-Tribune noted in endorsing IRV for St. Paul, Tuesday’s elections give the Twin Cities a chance to show the whole state of Minnesota the benefits of adopting IRV. There were disappointments in Lowell and Pierce County too, but high-profile multi-candidate races in New Jersey and New York keep policymakers focused on ways to reform elections; the Baltimore Sun and Miami Herald were among many newspapers publishing commentary from FairVote board member and former presidential candidate John Anderson on how IRV can mitigate the problems of plurality elections.