The Rage Driven Pendulum Part III — Basic Reforms and the Presidency
As a quick recap of parts 1 and 2, American politics have been steadily polarizing for several decades now. With less and less overlap between the parties there is little incentive for bipartisanship either for party leaders or rank and file elected officials. Cooperative politicians will be labelled collaborators in their next primary, and the party leaders understand that a significant swathe of the American public will attribute all positive and negative changes in their life to the president and his party. The result is American politics have settled into a pattern of several cycles of obstruction followed by a single cycle of productivity when one party manages to gain unified control of the federal government. Multiparty systems do not, at least on the party level, suffer from these bad incentives. Coalitions are formed, they govern, and when they fall apart new elections are called. The people in the coalition get to deliver things to their constituents. The people outside the coalition mostly spend their time complaining, but can’t hold up the business of government. Sadly, the United States is going to remain trapped in a two party system until we institute an election process that is doesn’t suffer from the spoiler effect.
The good news is there are two basic reforms that can go almost all the way to making our political system functional again. For a complex system this is about as close as you’ll ever get to a silver bullet solution. First, for elections where more than one office of equivalent stature is being filled simultaneously we should combine districts. Having multiple elected officials from a single district allows for more proportional representation of the district’s constituents, and prevents gerrymandering. In the 43 states with more than one Representative in the House, elections would become more like a city council or school board race. Allowing multiple candidates from the same party to run in a general election would make primaries far less important. Moving to multi-member districts also dovetails nicely with the second reform: replacing our current plurality or “first past the post voting” system, with a system that allows individual voters to express their preferences amongst multiple candidates.
One straightforward implementation of these two principles is called multi-winner ranked choice voting. Also referred to as single transferable vote (STV), this system allows voters to list the candidates for office in order from most to least preferred. The essence of ranked choice voting is that ballots that would ordinarily be wasted, i.e. votes for long shot candidates or very popular candidates, continue to participate in the process by transferring to support the voter’s second choice candidate once the first choice is elected or eliminated. This process continues until the ballot either: counts towards a candidate’s election, all the candidates selected by the voter are eliminated, or every available seat is filled. Multi-winner ranked choice voting is explained in more depth here, and there is currently a bill in congress that would implement both of these changes for the House of Representatives. Implementing these two reforms would: reduce the importance and vitriol of primaries, render gerrymandering ineffective, and greatly reduce the number of “safe” districts where politicians feel pressure only to appease primary voters. Ranked choice voting also significantly reduces the threat of the spoiler effect. Civil campaigning, fair districts, and the better incentives of a multiparty system would go a long way to blunting the momentum of our political pendulum. So let’s go though the elected branches of the federal government and do out best to bring them in compliance with the basic principles laid out above.
The White House
The office of the President of the United States needs little introduction, and at first glance can pass for democratic. It also is not a candidate for the creation of a multi-member district, however, there is still plenty of room for improvement.
As you may remember from your high school government class and two of the last six presidential elections, the electoral college is the solemn process by which we as Americans occasionally elevate the 2nd place candidate to the presidency of the United States. The flaw at heart of the electoral college is it’s aggregation of 150 million individual decisions into a series of 56 winner-take-all elections (Nebraska and Maine apportion an electoral vote to their overall winner while giving 1 electoral vote to the winner of each of their House districts). This means that the overall winner of each state receives 100 percent of the state’s electoral weight. This is somewhat akin to the NFL updating its rules so that the team who scores the most points in each quarter will receive all the points scored in that quarter. The glaring flaw in this system is that the wrong team would eke out a win a decent amount of the time. Less frequently the wrong team would win while being badly outscored (theoretically the electoral college allows fewer than 20% of all voters to elect the president). There are also more subtle flaws to a system of winner-take-all contests. Under a system where the winner of each quarter got all the points, football coaches would adapt by only competing on offense when they thought they had a chance of winning the quarter. Once a team fell behind in a quarter they would, intelligently, stop scoring points. This is essentially what we see on a state by state basis in presidential campaigns.
Because everyone knows the Democratic candidate is going to win California and the Republican candidate is going to win the Deep South both campaigns shift resources from these states to states where the outcome is not yet certain. But California contains multitudes, in 2016 4.5 million Californians cast votes for Trump, half a million for Gary Johnson (Libertarian), and nearly half million more voted for other third party candidates. California had the 3rd most Trump voters behind only Florida and Texas. Gary Johnson got more votes in California than the actual winner of 14 states. That these voters do not contribute to electing the president is unfair on its face, and it isn’t just a problem for California and states in the South. The vast majority of states are not competitive, and serve only as fundraising stops for the candidates who need to spend money in a few big swing states. In fact, the swing state bias is so pronounced that in 2016 just 6 states received two thirds of all campaign events, while more than half of states saw no campaigning at all. A knock-on effect of this process is that voters in non-swing states (aware of the preordained nature of their state’s presidential contests) tend to stay home on election day. Having fewer voters choosing a president isn’t great, but reduced participation in down ballot races where even small shifts in voting can decide elections is really bad. So what is to be done?
Our ultimate goal should be to shift to a voting system that makes it possible to honestly express preferences between multiple candidates without having to worry about 2nd order concerns like the spoiler effect. Ranked Choice Voting has the most momentum behind it at the moment and a record of surviving court challenges, but Ranked Choice also has a younger better brother called STAR voting, a simple sturdy cousin called approval voting, and a zany uncle RCIPE (pronounced “recipe” which modifies RCV to mollify election science nerds). If you’d like to see adorable animated blobs holding elections for a single office under plurality, ranked choice, and approval rules the Primer youtube channel has you covered.
Switching away from plurality elections would mitigate or eliminate a number of the current system’s problems. Third parties could contest elections with little fear of damaging mainstream candidates the most similar to themselves. Politicians would be incentivized to campaign in a more decent and less insulting manner as being highly ranked overall would become an important consideration for candidates. Ballots would convey more information about voter’s preferences between candidates. Party primaries would become much less important as multiple candidates from a single party could appear on the final ballot. Of course, all of these benefits would be for naught if the electoral college wasn’t fixed to be compatible with the new voting system. This could mean: eliminating the electoral college and moving via constitutional amendment to a nationwide vote; in which case STAR voting would be preferable. A somewhat more conceivable solution is to sidestep the electoral college once a critical mass of states agree to cast their electors for the winner of the popular vote. This would maintain the solemn rigamarole of the Electoral College and technically preserve the over-representation of low population states while replicating the outcome of a popular vote. Although, the Interstate compact needs major renovations to be compatible with electoral systems other than plurality. While we’re breezily solving major problems a constitutional amendment requiring no “undue burden” be placed on third parties seeking office would make a lot of sense. Ultimately, voting reforms are going to have to trickle up from the local to the state level to the federal level, so the highest office in the land will probably be the last of the federal branches to get a renovated voting system.
Airing of Grievances
Objection 1: The founding fathers designed the electoral college to protect small rural states from being bulldozed by big urban states. We can’t abandon small states!
Response 1: The first thing to remember is that in the 18th century every state was predominantly rural and agrarian. Virginia was by far the biggest state with a population of just under 750,000 at the 1790 census. At the same time Richmond, Virginia’s largest city, had a population of less than 4,000. Objections citing the urban-rural divide are grafting more modern concerns onto the founders. Similarly, many of the hot button issues in 1787 that lead to the creation of the electoral have little bearing on the politics of today. For example, some framers wanted the president elected by congress; others wanted a pure popular election. Delegations from small states were hoping each state would get one vote for president, but in the face of big state opposition settled for slight over-representation and one vote per state in the case no candidate won the election outright. Southern states wanted a system that would allow them electoral weight equivalent to their population even if a significant fraction of their population would not be voting due to their legal status as property. More to the point, if you’re worried about big states pushing around little states you should favor reforming or removing the electoral college which theoretically allows a bare majority of voters in the 11 biggest states to elect a president with zero votes from any other states. Put another way, the electoral college as currently constructed could allow a measly 20% of the nation’s population situated in a handful of big states to elect the president. A travesty of this magnitude is obviously unlikely, but it illustrates the instability introduced by our klugey electoral system.
Objection 2: Okay, but I still like the fact that the small states are guaranteed 3 electors.
Response 2: I don’t love it since it violates the basic “one person one vote” principle, that lies at the core of democracy. However, it is less distortionary than the winner take-all nature of the E.C., so the overrepresentation of small states is something of a secondary concern. Further, the constitution pegs each states’ number of electors to their congressional representation, so fully untying the knot would require a constitutional amendment. In contrast, revoking or modifying 1929’s Permanent Apportionment Act which capped the House of Representatives at 435 would be relatively easy. We could kill two birds with one stone on this issue by expanding the House and the Electoral college making both more representative without hurting anyone. We will get to the House and it’s potential for expansion later on.
Objection 3: The electoral college is a gift from the founding fathers. By electing groups of civically minded citizens to choose the president we reduce the risk of unfit demagogues hijacking the most powerful office in the land.
Response 3: Name one demagogue the Electoral College prevented from winning an election.
Objection 4: I can’t, but perhaps that is because the Electoral College is such a good demagogue deterrent?
Response 4: I’m not sure that argument has held any water since Andrew Jackson. After all, it was horse trading in the house of representatives, not faithless electors, that foiled Jackson’s first run for President, and the E.C. only magnified his victory in the Election of 1828. The selection of electors is controlled by state parties, and as a result there are zero noncombatants on the slates of electors. The Democratic electors are drawn from each state’s stable of Democratic donors, elected officials, and acolytes. The same is true of the Republican electors. Lastly, whatever pretense of thoughtful consensus-driven decision making remained was removed last summer when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of laws preventing electors from exercising choice in their selection of the President and Vice President (currently 33 states and have “faithless elector” laws on the books).
Objection 5: My objection didn’t appear on this list of objections.
Response 5: Perhaps it appears on this list?
