WARNING: LONG, TEDIOUS, SOAPBOX RANT OF AN OP
Our existing election laws were written, and practically all of our state constitutions drawn up, by Democrats and Republicans. They are designed to freeze out third-party competition. In some respects, as with ballot-access laws that require third-party candidates to gather petition signatures to get on the ballot while the major-party nominees get placed automatically, this intention is plain and obvious. In other respects, the two-party tendency of the system is not so obvious until you look closely.
I say this is a Bad Thing. That is not based on any assessment of the characters of the two parties we’ve got now. It would not improve matters significantly if the Reform Party were simply to replace the Democrats or the Republicans the way the Republicans replaced the Whigs, leaving us with a new two-party system. I say a TWO-PARTY SYSTEM is a Bad Thing, or at least not as Good a Thing a MULTIPARTY SYSTEM. The truth is there are MORE than two sides to any important question, and we don’t really have an effective democracy unless all sides have a fair chance to get a fair hearing in the public forum. In our present system, everything gets simplified to the least common denominator, and all political argument is pitched to the tiny minority of “swing voters” in the middle, who are the only people whose votes really count, in that they are the ones whose votes can make an election go one way or another.
There are three major reforms we can adopt to pave the way for a multiparty political system in America. In order of increasingly radical effect, they are ballot fusion, instant-runoff voting, and proportional representation.
BALLOT FUSION:
In “fusion” or “cross-endorsement,” one candidate can run as the nominee of more than one party, making it possible for several small parties to pool their strength. The candidate might get a line on the ballot for each party nomination, or might get just one ballot line with several parties’ names after the candidate’s name.
If the candidate is also a major-party candidate, that gives the minor parties who endorsed him/her continued influence after the election – e.g., an acceptably progressive Democrat, who got into Congress because the local Greens also endorsed him/her and tipped the balance, knows he/she had better please the Greens while in office, at least a little, for the sake of re-election. In some situations, several minor parties might form a coalition and elect a non-major-party candidate.
Fusion is legal in New York, Vermont, Connecticut, South Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas, South Dakota, Utah and Idaho. In all other U.S. states, fusion is illegal or effectively banned.
The New Party, a non-socialist left-progressive party founded in 1992, made fusion the core of its strategy. It was effective, but only at the local and state levels and only in states where fusion was legal or possible. The New Party brought a First-Amendment-based court challenge to Minessota’s ban on fusion; it went up to the U.S. Supreme Court – I can’t find the cite, but I think the case was styled “Timmons v. Twin Cities New Party.” The New Party lost. You can read the details in Micah Sifry’s recent book, “Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America.”
After the Timmons case, the New Party became more or less inactive on the nationl level, though New-Party-spawned local organizations still exist at the state level – most notably the Working Families Party in New York. There are also NP groups active in Arkansas, Illinois, Massachusetts, Montana, Oregon, and Wisconsin. The New Party, as a national organization, still maintains a nominal existence, and a website at www.newparty.org (which has not been updated in a long time), but most of its leaders’ energies have gone into a new organization, the New Majority Education Fund – www.nmef.org – which is a single-issue organization, dedicated to spreading the word about fusion.
INSTANT RUNOFF VOTING:
In any American partisan election where more than two candidates are running, a third-party supporter faces a dilemma: Hold your nose and vote for “the lesser of two evils”; or vote your conscience and split the opposition, increasing the chances of victory for the candidate you like the LEAST. Nader supporters faced this dilemma in 2000, Perot voters in 1992 and 1996.
Instant runoff voting eliminates this dilemma. It works like this: If more than two candidates are running for a particular office, you, the voter, instead of picking just one, get to rank-order them by preference, e.g.
1st choice: Ralph Nader (Green)
2nd choice: Al Gore (Democrat)
3rd choice: Harry Browne (Libertarian)
4th choice: George Bush (Republican)
5th choice: Pat Buchanan (Reform)
(That’s how I would have ordered my choices, anyway.) If your first-choice candidate does not get a majority, your second-choice vote still counts toward electing your second-choice candidate, and so on. This eliminates the “opposition-splitting” problem. Nader could have run without taking votes away from Gore; in fact he would have provided more votes for Gore by increasing voter turnout. At the same time, Nader supporters, even if they couldn’t elect their candidate, would have had the chance to make a very visible and effective protest vote – just look at all those “Gore” voters who really preferred Nader! That’s something President Gore could not ignore in making policy decisions. IRV also substitutes for, and eliminates any need for, a costly runoff election between the top two finishers (hence the name, “instant runoff”).
San Francisco recently adopted IRV for its municipal elections, the Vermont town meetings recently endorsed adoption of IRV for state elections, and the following organizations are working to publicize and promote IRV:
The Center for Voting and Democracy – www.fairvote.org
California Instant Runoff Voting Coalition – calirv.org
Coalition for Instant Runoff Voting in Washington – irvoting.org
Fairvote Utah – www.utah.fairvote.org
Fair Vote Massachusetts – www.ma.fairvote.org
NYS-IRV – www.nysirv.org
Reform America Inc. – www.reformamericainc.org
The Independent Progressive Politics Network – www.ippn.org
Instant Runoff .Com – www.instantrunoff.com
Massachusetts Voting Reform – www.massvote.org
PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION:
Fusion and IRV are designed for “single-seat” elections, where there’s just one office to be filled and several candidates competing to fill it. This is the best we can do when the office is an executive one, such as president, governor or mayor. Whoever is elected, even if elected as a candidate of several parties, necessarily represents just one point on the political spectrum or compass, one set of views and values.
When we elect a multi-member policymaking body, on the other hand, we (potentially) have the luxury of making it much more representative of the whole people and the whole range of views among them.
Suppose you’re a Reform Party supporter. Suppose, in your state’s next round of legislative elections, a whopping 20% of voters in your state vote Reform. How many Reform members get seats in the legislature? NONE! Because even with that level of support, there will not be enough Reform voters in ANY ONE DISTRICT to elect a single candidate! That’s what is called the “single-member-district,” “winner-take-all”, or “first-past-the-post” system. We inherited it, more or less, from the British in the 18th Century. At the time, it was state of the art, but since then, a better system has been invented: Proportional representation.
Proportional Representation comes in many forms and mechanisms. All are designed with the same goal: In such a situation, if the Reformers get 20% of the votes, they should get (roughly) 20% of the seats.
MOST OF THE WORLD’S DEMOCRACIES USE PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION, in one form or another. The only ones that don’t are France, Britain, and most of Britain’s former colonies, including the U.S. New Zealand, however, switched over to PR a couple of years ago, and Australia is seriously looking at it. South Africa adopted a PR system when Apartheid was abolished. That was a necessary political compromise: A single-member-district system, combined with universal suffrage, would have left the white parties with no seats in Parliament at all; under the PR system, they at least have a minority bloc.
Most of the countries that use PR have done well by it. Israel and Italy change their governments with alarming regularity but I think that says more about their political cultures than their electoral systems. Furthermore, their instability comes from combining PR with a parliamentary system, where the majority in parliament, or a coalition of minority parties, have to “form a government.” In the U.S. this would not be a problem because we use the separation-of-powers system at both the state and federal levels: The chief executive, the governor or president, is elected independently of the legislature, has an independent mandate, and “forms a government,” that is, a cabinet, on his or her own authority, with varying degrees of legislative advice-and-consent, depending on the state.
I do not think PR would lead to political instability in America. Quite the contrary. Instability is what we’ve got now, when a minor fluctuation in the public mood among the “swing voters” can throw Congress to one party or another. The famous “Republican Revolution” of 1994 resulted from an aggregate, nationwide Republican Congressional vote that exceeded the Democratic vote by less than one-half of one percent. What is more, if the nationwide Democratic vote had exceeded the Republican by the same margin, that still could have produced a total Republican victory, depending on how the votes were distributed among the various districts and states. This makes elections, and the resulting public-policy environments, hard to predict and hard to plan for.
Under PR, on the other hand . . .
The winner-take-all system forces very different groups and viewpoints to huddle under the “big tent” of a single major party, if they want to have any hope of success at all. This produces a system where the parties are ideologically incoherent, party labels are not very useful guides for the busy voter, and, in any given race, the Democrat might easily be more conservative than the Republican. I’m sorry, but a party that includes both Jesse Jackson and Al Gore makes no sense. Neither does a party that includes both Jesse Helms and John McCain.
If we adopted PR, conditions would change. There would be a period of instability as the two major parties split up along their natural fault lines, into smaller, more homogeneous and coherent parties. The Republican Party likely would break up into a Christian social-conservative party, a purely pro-business party, and an enlarged Libertarian Party (not the same thing – Libertarians are pro-MARKET, not pro-business, and would never endorse “corporate welfare”). The Democratic Party would break up into a centrist party, socially conservative but economically populist; an enlarged Green Party; and perhaps a new democratic-socialist or social-democratic party. There might also be a Buchananite populist-nationalist-isolationist party (he’s already started one – the America First Party), and a sort of populist-libertarian grouping along the lines of Jesse Ventura’s new Independence Party. (I do not allow for a revival of the original Reform Party, which is effectively dead and never had a coherent ideology in the first place, as evidenced by the radically different parties its breakup produced.) There might, just might, be a white supremacist party – a distasteful prospect, but it might be useful as a safety valve. Maybe if Timothy McVeigh had been able to look to Congress and see David Duke, or somebody like him, drawing a government salary to spout racial hatred in the public square, then he might not have felt so frustrated he had to turn to terrorism and murder as means of political expression. By the same token, Louis Farrakhan might lead the formation of the black nationalist party – again, useful only as a safety valve.
There would be a period of instability and reorganization, but after a few election cycles, everything would settle down and STAY SETTLED. Each party would have reached total saturation of its target-market, each and every potential Libertarian would have become a regular voting Libertarian, etc. From that point on, there would be no more electoral revolutions. The change in any party’s vote share would be slow and incremental – gain 2% more in this election, 3% more two years later. Drastic realignments would happen only on a generational time-scale.
As far as business (and everybody else) is concerned, this would be a salubrious state of affairs because it would be easy to plan for. The results of any election would be known pretty well in advance.
As for the effects on public policymaking: A lot of different kinds of politicians would get to say their say on any question – not just in floor debates and floor votes, but in all committee meetings, which is where most of the important legislative work gets done. Many of those would be people you consider nuts. On the other hand, NOTHING WOULD ACTUALLY GET DONE unless it were worked out as a compromise between several very different political camps. Therefore, the merits of any measure would have to be pretty clear and demonstrable before it were adopted. This is not a dangerous scenario.
The most important PR organization in the United States right now is the Center for Voting and Democracy, www.fairvote.org. Their website has a library of materials that explain PR in far greater detail, including all the various mechanisms that can be used to achieve it, and the curiously forgotten history of PR in state and municipal elections in 20th-Century America. You might also check out:
Californians for Electoral Reform – fairvoteca.org
Illinois Citizens for Proportional Representation – www.prairienet.org/icpr
Midwest Democracy Center – www.midwestdemocracy.org
FairVote Minnesota – www.fairvotemn.org
Washington Citizens for Proportional Representation – fairvote.net/washington
Fair Vote Canada – www.fairvotecanada.org
Electoral Reform Society (UK) – www.electoral-reform.org.uk
[The UK already uses PR for elections to the European Parliament, the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Regional Assembly. Tony Blair got elected on a promise to hold a referendum on switching to PR for elections to the national Parliament at Westminster. No sign of it yet.]
PR Society of Australia – www.cs.mu.oz.au/~lee/prsa
So what do you think?