By
Madeleine Kando
It’s election time and many of us are biting our nails, to see what will emerge after November 8. It’s like watching a football game: Two teams against each other. Or fighting with your sibling on which flavor ice cream your mom should buy, except the store only sells chocolate and vanilla.
But why is it like that? I come from a tiny country where there are no less than 17 political parties represented in the Legislature. Why is the US so stingy with its political parties?
To be fair, we really have four political parties rolled into two. We have the Sanders Democrats and the Biden Democrats on one side and the Trump Republicans and ‘Rino’s’ on the other side. Both parties have always been ‘big tents’, but now the ‘centrists’ are being so radicalized by their own extreme wings that they might not survive. Then all hope of compromise and working together goes out the window.
The two-party system is an outlier in the modern world. Wouldn’t it make sense to allow for these four parties rolled into two to legitimately exist on their own? This could only happen if we changed the way we vote.
In the US we have what is called a First Past the Post electoral system, or winner takes all. The candidate who receives the most votes wins. Sounds fair? Not really. If there are more than two candidates, that candidate could win with a minority of the votes. That is why we have red states and blue states. About a third of Massachusetts voters are Republicans, but since we have a ‘single member district’ voting system, all our Representatives are Democrats.
The First Past the Post electoral system does not allow for third parties to emerge. If you vote for a budding third party that has no chance of winning, you take away a vote from your preferred major party and the party you don’t like, wins. It’s called the spoiler effect. Ralph Nader caused Al Gore to lose the presidency in 2000.
What if you could have a system in which your vote did not ‘spoil’ the outcome? That system is now used in Alaska and Maine. It’s called Ranked Choice voting. You rank your candidates in order of preference. If you like a third party the best, that’s your first choice, but you can rank your preferred major party second. That way, even if your first choice doesn’t win, your vote goes to your second choice. The spoiler effect is gone.
But Ranked Choice Voting in itself still produces a single winner. In order to change the two-party doom loop, we have to change the single member district system. Right now, every district in the country has one representative. Since we only have two parties, it’s either a Democrat or a Republican.
What if we combined districts into multi-member larger districts? For example, in a hypothetical 10-seat district, where 40% vote for liberal candidates, 20% vote for moderate candidates, and 40% vote for conservative candidates, the district would then be represented by 4 liberals, 2 moderates, and 4 conservatives. This also would break the power of gerrymandering.
To make things worse, America is also stingy with its representatives. The House of Representatives has 435 seats, one voting member for every 747,000 or so Americans. That’s by far the highest population-to-representative ratio among industrialized democracies, and the highest it has been in U.S. history. Compare that to France, for instance, with a ratio of 1 representative per 100,000 citizens, or Norway with a 1 to 25,000 ratio. The size of the House is capped by law but the country’s population is growing, so it will only get worse. In order to have a better population-representative ratio, we you would have to increase the size of congress, which is not undoable. Too many representatives would make it unwieldy, but at least keeping pace with population growth is not too much to ask.
The only thing we are extremely generous with, are our elections. Americans are asked to vote for more than 500,000 officials in national, state, and local elections, from the president down to township posts and school boards. Right now, my poor daughter who lives in California is faced with 21 ballot measures, 11 state level positions from Governor to Attorney General and numerous local San Francisco elections from school boards to local judges. How does one find the time? The resources? No wonder the voter turn-out is so low in America.
We all suffer from voting indigestion. It also results in our representatives spending their time in office campaigning for the next election.
It is ironic that in one of the most diverse countries in the world, there should be such an absence of political diversity. This leads to extreme politics. Sometimes countries can be politically divided and still remain democratic, but in the majority of cases Democracy will suffer. America is already downgraded from a full Democracy to a flawed Democracy by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).
All this might sound like pie in the sky. But the structure of our political system was created by men. It wasn’t dictated to us by God. If enough of us want to change, who is to say we cannot? Let us at least try, before it’s too late.
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Wednesday, November 9, 2022
Do Voting Systems Matter?
