By William Raspberry
Published January 1st 2001 in Sierra Magazine
If there are county commissioners, state legislators and secretaries of state pondering what to resolve for the New Year, here's a suggestion. Resolve to fix your voting system.
You'll want to get rid of confusing ballots, including the infamous butterfly ballots. You'll also want to replace punch-card voting machines. Given the political trauma of the recent presidential election, those reforms are virtually automatic.
At least they ought to be. The problem is that some of you have been so fixated on Florida and the controversy about whether and how to count disqualified ballots that you may be missing a critical aspect of the problem. I refer to the fact that the most error-prone machines tend to be in the poorest counties.
It may be coincidental that those counties' voters are often disproportionately minorities, but it is a fact. That's the chief reason why the Supreme Court's derailing of the recount in Florida is seen by much of the civil rights community as a racial matter.
They are convinced (who isn't?) that a manual inspection of the ballots rejected by the outdated voting machines would have given Florida's electoral votes -- and the presidency -- to Vice President Al Gore.
But this isn't just a matter for Florida -- or for this election. The Post reported last week that one of every 16 presidential ballots was invalidated in Atlanta's Fulton County, which uses punch-card machines, compared with a rate of one in 200 for Cobb and Gwinnett counties, which have more modern equipment. A sixth of the ballots in some heavily black Chicago precincts were thrown out, while almost every vote in the outer suburbs was counted.
I hope you'll resolve to fix that. In fact, you'd better resolve to fix that. If any obvious inference is to be drawn from the controversial holding of the U.S. Supreme Court, it is that states that use voting devices of varying accuracy risk being found in violation of the "equal protection" clause of the Constitution.
But that's the mechanical aspect of voting. My suggestion for reform goes deeper -- that you fix the electoral system.
I have in mind two things. First -- and this ought to be a national initiative -- resolve to end the winner-take-all method of choosing presidential electors. Even without tinkering with the electoral college, it surely is possible to choose a state's electors in proportion to the votes for the presidential candidates. If that had happened in Florida, Gore and Bush would have been arguing over who got 13 of the state's electoral votes and who got 12. As it was, Bush, who garnered less than a majority of Florida's popular vote, received all 25 of its electoral votes, in effect disenfranchising half Florida's electorate.
While you're resolving at least to think about a system of proportional representation, you might take a look at the idea of preference voting. If it's wrong to disenfranchise voters whose presidential candidate loses by even the tiniest margin, it is also wrong to penalize those who vote for their preferred candidate by transforming that vote into support for their least favorite candidate.
That is precisely what happens now. A vote for Pat Buchanan in the recent election, for instance, translated into a vote for Gore, even though it is unlikely that Gore would have been that voter's second choice. Ralph Nader probably took enough Florida votes that otherwise would have gone to Gore to hand the election to Bush. Under a preference system, voters could list, say, Buchanan as their first choice and Bush as their second. If no candidate received a majority of the total vote, then second-choice ballots would be tallied -- in effect an instant runoff.
The obvious result would be that no candidate would be elected with less than a majority of the vote. But another, far more important, outcome would be the empowerment of third parties. It would be significantly easier to build third-party movements if supporters knew they weren't helping to elect their least-favored major-party candidate. In addition, it would give third-party supporters more clout with the major parties, which would be tempted to modify their campaigns to make their candidates attractive at least as a second choice.
Just a suggestion.
No More Spoilers: A better way at the ballot box
Sierra Magazine, Jan/Feb 2001
Last November's election had the unfortunate effect of creating a rift between environmentalist supporters of Al Gore and those of Ralph Nader. With the major-party candidates neck and neck in a handful of swing states, Gore backers claimed (with some justification) that a vote for Nader was a vote for Bush. Nader rejected the spoiler label, but many of his supporters were anguished by the political cost of their votes of conscience.
It didn't have to be that way. With a simple change to our electoral process, Nader could have easily doubled his numbers and made a powerful statement about the environment, trade issues, and corporate influence without sabotaging fellow environmentalist Al Gore. That change is called instant runoff voting. In this system -- already being used to elect the president of Ireland, the senate in Australia, and the mayor of London -- voters rank candidates 1-2-3, in order of their preference. A candidate winning a majority of first preferences is, of course, elected. If no one reaches that mark, however, the candidate with the fewest votes drops out, and the second choices of his or her voters are then distributed to the remaining candidates. This process is repeated until one candidate gains more than 50 percent. In last November's election, instant runoff would have worked like this in New Hampshire, for example: Gore received 47 percent of the vote, Bush 48, Nader 4, and three minor candidates the other 1. Let's say that all of the three minor candidates' second-choice votes went to Bush, giving him 49 percent. Next Nader would drop out, and four out of five of his second-preference votes would boost Gore over the top.
Without such a system, the growing numbers of independent voters and third parties ensure the current trend toward political leaders elected by plurality (that is, the greatest number of votes, but not necessarily a majority). In the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections, only a quarter of all states were won by a clear majority. "There's nothing in the Constitution that ordains we should have plurality voting," says John Anderson, who polled 7 percent of the national vote as a third-party presidential candidate in 1980. He is now president of the Center for Voting and Democracy, which seeks to popularize voting reforms. Instant runoff, he says, would also save third parties from their spoiler role of benefiting the majority party that they have least in common with. In his campaign in 1980, says Anderson, "the spoiler charge definitely took its toll; I could have done two or three times as well if that incubus had not been hovering over the race." As for Nader, beyond reaching the 5 percent of the vote needed for federal matching funds, he might even have garnered the 15 percent necessary for inclusion in future national debates.
An end to the spoiler effect should appeal equally to the major parties. In several recent congressional races in New Mexico, for example, the Green vote threw races to Republicans. And in Alaska's 1994 gubernatorial race, votes for Libertarian and Alaska Independent Party candidates siphoned votes from Republicans, electing Democrat Tony Knowles.
The Sierra Club Board of Directors recently voted "to support alternative electoral methods that better reflect the diversity of public opinion," including instant runoff. Shifting to instant runoff could be accomplished by state legislatures or by popular referendum. Alaskans will vote on the issue in 2002, and Vermont and New Mexico are also considering the system. The main opposition, says Anderson, comes from "institutional inertia." If we can get past that, voters may finally be able to vote their hearts without fear of bringing on their worst nightmare.
You'll want to get rid of confusing ballots, including the infamous butterfly ballots. You'll also want to replace punch-card voting machines. Given the political trauma of the recent presidential election, those reforms are virtually automatic.
At least they ought to be. The problem is that some of you have been so fixated on Florida and the controversy about whether and how to count disqualified ballots that you may be missing a critical aspect of the problem. I refer to the fact that the most error-prone machines tend to be in the poorest counties.
It may be coincidental that those counties' voters are often disproportionately minorities, but it is a fact. That's the chief reason why the Supreme Court's derailing of the recount in Florida is seen by much of the civil rights community as a racial matter.
They are convinced (who isn't?) that a manual inspection of the ballots rejected by the outdated voting machines would have given Florida's electoral votes -- and the presidency -- to Vice President Al Gore.
But this isn't just a matter for Florida -- or for this election. The Post reported last week that one of every 16 presidential ballots was invalidated in Atlanta's Fulton County, which uses punch-card machines, compared with a rate of one in 200 for Cobb and Gwinnett counties, which have more modern equipment. A sixth of the ballots in some heavily black Chicago precincts were thrown out, while almost every vote in the outer suburbs was counted.
I hope you'll resolve to fix that. In fact, you'd better resolve to fix that. If any obvious inference is to be drawn from the controversial holding of the U.S. Supreme Court, it is that states that use voting devices of varying accuracy risk being found in violation of the "equal protection" clause of the Constitution.
But that's the mechanical aspect of voting. My suggestion for reform goes deeper -- that you fix the electoral system.
I have in mind two things. First -- and this ought to be a national initiative -- resolve to end the winner-take-all method of choosing presidential electors. Even without tinkering with the electoral college, it surely is possible to choose a state's electors in proportion to the votes for the presidential candidates. If that had happened in Florida, Gore and Bush would have been arguing over who got 13 of the state's electoral votes and who got 12. As it was, Bush, who garnered less than a majority of Florida's popular vote, received all 25 of its electoral votes, in effect disenfranchising half Florida's electorate.
While you're resolving at least to think about a system of proportional representation, you might take a look at the idea of preference voting. If it's wrong to disenfranchise voters whose presidential candidate loses by even the tiniest margin, it is also wrong to penalize those who vote for their preferred candidate by transforming that vote into support for their least favorite candidate.
That is precisely what happens now. A vote for Pat Buchanan in the recent election, for instance, translated into a vote for Gore, even though it is unlikely that Gore would have been that voter's second choice. Ralph Nader probably took enough Florida votes that otherwise would have gone to Gore to hand the election to Bush. Under a preference system, voters could list, say, Buchanan as their first choice and Bush as their second. If no candidate received a majority of the total vote, then second-choice ballots would be tallied -- in effect an instant runoff.
The obvious result would be that no candidate would be elected with less than a majority of the vote. But another, far more important, outcome would be the empowerment of third parties. It would be significantly easier to build third-party movements if supporters knew they weren't helping to elect their least-favored major-party candidate. In addition, it would give third-party supporters more clout with the major parties, which would be tempted to modify their campaigns to make their candidates attractive at least as a second choice.
Just a suggestion.
No More Spoilers: A better way at the ballot box
Sierra Magazine, Jan/Feb 2001
Last November's election had the unfortunate effect of creating a rift between environmentalist supporters of Al Gore and those of Ralph Nader. With the major-party candidates neck and neck in a handful of swing states, Gore backers claimed (with some justification) that a vote for Nader was a vote for Bush. Nader rejected the spoiler label, but many of his supporters were anguished by the political cost of their votes of conscience.
It didn't have to be that way. With a simple change to our electoral process, Nader could have easily doubled his numbers and made a powerful statement about the environment, trade issues, and corporate influence without sabotaging fellow environmentalist Al Gore. That change is called instant runoff voting. In this system -- already being used to elect the president of Ireland, the senate in Australia, and the mayor of London -- voters rank candidates 1-2-3, in order of their preference. A candidate winning a majority of first preferences is, of course, elected. If no one reaches that mark, however, the candidate with the fewest votes drops out, and the second choices of his or her voters are then distributed to the remaining candidates. This process is repeated until one candidate gains more than 50 percent. In last November's election, instant runoff would have worked like this in New Hampshire, for example: Gore received 47 percent of the vote, Bush 48, Nader 4, and three minor candidates the other 1. Let's say that all of the three minor candidates' second-choice votes went to Bush, giving him 49 percent. Next Nader would drop out, and four out of five of his second-preference votes would boost Gore over the top.
Without such a system, the growing numbers of independent voters and third parties ensure the current trend toward political leaders elected by plurality (that is, the greatest number of votes, but not necessarily a majority). In the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections, only a quarter of all states were won by a clear majority. "There's nothing in the Constitution that ordains we should have plurality voting," says John Anderson, who polled 7 percent of the national vote as a third-party presidential candidate in 1980. He is now president of the Center for Voting and Democracy, which seeks to popularize voting reforms. Instant runoff, he says, would also save third parties from their spoiler role of benefiting the majority party that they have least in common with. In his campaign in 1980, says Anderson, "the spoiler charge definitely took its toll; I could have done two or three times as well if that incubus had not been hovering over the race." As for Nader, beyond reaching the 5 percent of the vote needed for federal matching funds, he might even have garnered the 15 percent necessary for inclusion in future national debates.
An end to the spoiler effect should appeal equally to the major parties. In several recent congressional races in New Mexico, for example, the Green vote threw races to Republicans. And in Alaska's 1994 gubernatorial race, votes for Libertarian and Alaska Independent Party candidates siphoned votes from Republicans, electing Democrat Tony Knowles.
The Sierra Club Board of Directors recently voted "to support alternative electoral methods that better reflect the diversity of public opinion," including instant runoff. Shifting to instant runoff could be accomplished by state legislatures or by popular referendum. Alaskans will vote on the issue in 2002, and Vermont and New Mexico are also considering the system. The main opposition, says Anderson, comes from "institutional inertia." If we can get past that, voters may finally be able to vote their hearts without fear of bringing on their worst nightmare.