By Madeleine Kando
Depending on where you live in the world, voting systems vary greatly. In some countries, people don’t vote at all. They live in dictatorships. In some other countries, voting is restricted to certain parts of the population (usually men). Universal suffrage is shockingly recent. Before World War II, women couldn’t vote in 155 of the 195 countries in the world. Whether you lived in beautiful France, Switzerland, or sunny Spain, women had no voice. Saudi Arabia allowed women to vote only 8 years ago!
Types of Voting Systems
There are two predominant electoral systems in the world: Plurality voting and Proportional Representation.
Plurality Voting (also called “first-past-the-post” or "winner-take-all") awards a seat to the candidate who receives the most votes. It need not be a majority (50%+), so long as the candidate has a larger number of votes than all other candidates. Plurality voting does not represent all (or even most) voters. Since a candidate needs only a plurality of votes, most voters may have voted against the winner. One attempt to improve this non-representation model is a system called Ranked Choice Voting or Instant Runoff.
The Single Transferable Vote is an important form of proportional representation. It is used in Ireland, Australia, and Malta for national elections. Other countries use it in local elections, and even some communities in the United States (such as Cambridge, MA) use it today. According to the Democracy Index, the STV is the most democratic system in the world.
Democracy
The whole point of a voting system is to allow citizens to decide who will govern them. The word democracy was first used in ancient Athens. It is a combination of two Greek words: demos (a citizen of a city-state) and kratos (meaning ‘power’ or ‘rule’). It means ‘the rule by the people’.
According to the Global Democracy Index, there are four levels of democracy. There are full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid democracies and authoritarian regimes. Out of 195 countries in the world, only 24 have full democracies, covering only 8% of the world population. 48 countries have flawed democracies, 36 have hybrid democracies and a total of 59 countries have authoritarian regimes.
The relationship between Democracy and Voting
According to the Electoral Reform Society, the Single Transferable Vote system far outperforms all the other systems. This system is used in Ireland and Malta on a national level, but is now gaining traction on the local level in many towns and cities in the US.
The problem with an established voting system is that it is resistant to change. Changes at the local level are more likely to succeed. That is why here in New England, efforts are underway to make this happen under the banner of Ranked Choice Voting. Especially the Single Transferable Vote, which would add a Proportional Representation element to an existing FPTP system.
Cambridge, Massachusetts has used STV for decades, and 19 communities around Boston, including Boston proper, have now submitted or are in the process of submitting Home Rule petitions to the Massachusetts State Legislature.
The Human Freedom Index
Promoting freedom is one of the main goals of a democracy. Dictatorships do not allow people much political, economic, or social freedom and, hence, are not democracies. The human freedom index is a measure that quantifies the level of personal, civil, and economic freedoms in a country. It takes into account various factors such as the rule of law, property rights, freedom of speech and religion, and access to economic opportunities.
The countries that took the top 10 places on the Human Freedom Index, all have Proportional Representation voting systems. They are: Switzerland, New Zealand, Estonia, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Since these are relatively small countries, maybe it is an indication that in a country the size of the US, change is bound to happen at the grassroots level.
The Single Member District system, part of the First Past the Post scenario, guarantees that a large portion of voters will not be represented. The laws are vague on whether the single-member district system is Constitutionally locked in, or whether States have overriding authority on how to select their representatives.
Either way, the message here is clear. We need to change America’s plurality voting system. It is the least democratic system on earth. We, the citizens, are the ‘will of the people’ and it is up to us to make America truly democratic.leave comment here
