Unrigging America's elections
Center for Voting &
Democracy
How instant
runoff voting works
A Proportional Representation
Fact Sheet
Few reforms are more essential to reviving American democracy
than the institution of proportional representation in our elections.
The following fact sheet is based on material prepared by Steve
Hill of the Center for Voting & Democracy:
WHY PR WORKS
Proportional representation means that political parties or
like-minded constituencies win representation in proportion to
their voting strength. If a political party wins 10% of the popular
vote they win 10 percent of the legislative seats, 40% of the
vote wins 40% of the seats and so forth.
PR opens up the system to all sorts of people who can't win
representation now, including women (only 12 percent in the U.S.
House), racial minorities, political minorities, Democrats living
in Republican districts, Republicans living in Democratic districts,
etc..
PR is used by most of the established democracies in the world,
because it gives voters more choices at the polls, allows more
voters to vote for winners, and dramatically increases voter
turnout to 70-95% of eligible voters U.S. voter turnout for 1996
congressional elections was 44% of eligible voters. The US currently
has the lowest voter turnout of any established democracy and
other countries using winner-take-all systems also suffer from
low turnout. One reason is that voters have very little choice
since most races are so non-competitive, hence many voters vote
for losers. It is hard to go to the polls if you don't feel your
vote counts.
PR has a positive impact on campaign finance. Because candidates
need less votes to win, they don't have to spend as much money
to win those votes. Also, because PR elects representatives from
multi-seat districts, there aren't any head-to-head battles that
so often intensify the need for money. Candidates also can run
together in slates and pool their resources.
In the U.S., voters are often stuck with choosing between
the "lesser of two evils," instead of voting for who
they truly like. Voters have to vote "against" their
fears, instead of "for" their hopes. This dynamic,
of always voting "against" something instead of "for"
something, has a very debilitating effect on the voter's enthusiasm.
Every 10 years, the incumbent politicians and their parties
gerrymander the districts to ensure "safe" seats. Eighty
percent of U.S. and California congressional seats in 1996 were
"safe." Over one third of state legislative races weren't
even contested by one of the major parties. This reduces competition
and increases the sense that voting doesn't count; quite literally,
in redistricting politicians pick the voters before the voters
pick them.
With PR there are no districts to gerrymander, voters have
more choices at the polls, and more voters will cast a vote for
a winner. voters can listen to a range of political perspectives
and policy options, and vote for the candidate or party that
best represents how they feel. Voters can vote for their hopes,
instead of their fears.
The trend in the world is toward proportional systems and
away from "winner take all". In recent years, the countries
of South Africa, New Zealand, Scotland, Wales, Japan, Russia
and Mexico have all adopted some form of PR. All the countries
of the former Communist bloc adopted PR instead of "winner
take all". The United Kingdom, the grandmother of "winner
take all" democracies, recently adopted PR for elections
to the European Parliament, to the London city council, adopted
Instant Runoff Voting for the London mayoral election, and may
have a national referendum soon on adopting PR.
HOW PR WORKS
There are many different types of PR, and because it is flexible
it may be adapted to the situation of any city, state or nation.
Here are a few of the most common varieties:
List System -- the most widely used form of PR. The voter
selects one party and its pre-determined slate of candidates
to represent them. Party slates can be either "closed"
or "open," the latter allowing voters to indicate a
preference for individual candidates, the former decided by the
party. If a party receives 30% of the vote, they receive 30%
of the seats in the legislature, 10% of the vote receives 10%
of the seats, and so on. A minimum share of the votes may be
required to earn representation-- typically 5%. This type of
PR is ideal for large legislatures on state and national levels.
Mixed Member -- This German hybrid elects half the legislature
from single-seat, winner-take-all districts and the other half
by the list system. Those elected under the list system are seated
in a such a way that the whole legislature reflects the proportion
of the votes received in the list ballot.
Choice Voting -- Allows constituencies of like-minded voters
to win representation in proportion to their voting strength.
The voter ranks candidates in an order of preference (1,2,3,4,
etc.) Once a voter's first choice is elected or eliminated, excess
votes are "transferred" to next choices until all positions
are filled. Voters can vote for their favorite candidate(s),
knowing that if that candidate doesn't receive enough votes their
vote will "transfer" to their next choice. With choice
voting, every vote counts and very few votes are wasted. Choice
voting is ideal for non-partisan elections.
Preference or Instant Runoff Voting -- Ideal when selecting
a single winner such as president, mayor, governor or district
representative who must win a majority. Like choice voting, the
voter simply ranks candidates in an order of preference (ex.
1. Nader 2. Perot 3. Clinton). The candidate with the least number
of first place votes is eliminated, and their votes are "transferred"
to their 2nd choice, 3rd choice and so on, until a candidate
has a majority. It's like doing a traditional runoff, but doing
it all in one election.
Most U.S. elections are held under plurality voting rules
in which the candidate with the most votes wins. If three or
more candidates run in the race, then the winner can have less
than a majority of the vote. But the question always arises:
was that winning candidate really preferred by most voters?
-- The instant runoff ensures the election of the candidate
preferred by most voters.
-- It eliminates the problem of spoiler candidates knocking
off major candidates.
-- It frees communities of voters from splitting their vote
among their own candidates.
-- It promotes coalition-building and more positive campaigning
A FASCINATING
WEB
SITE
gives some of the history of proportional representation in New
York City, where PR played an important role until the elite
got concerned that too many blacks, communists, and other troublemakers
were getting elected. PR was the outgrowth of a charter commission
launched by the reform mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia. Among the beneficiaries
was Adam Clayton Powell who won a seat on the city council. Writes
Dan Prosterman: "Between 1936 and 1947, the New York press
turned a concerted about face with regard to PR. In the 1930s,
city newspapers supported PR as a method of combating corruption
in local government. A diverse group of papers, including the
New York Times, Daily News, Herald-Tribune, Brooklyn Eagle, and
the Communist Party-run Daily Worker, supported the 1936 PR referendum.
Muffled cries against PR as "confusing" or "expensive"
swelled into outrage with the election of Communists in 1941
and 1943. Many editorials decried PR as a subversive threat to
American democracy. By the repeal referendum of 1947, nearly
all of the city's press vehemently opposed PR."
Unrigging
America's Elections:
Proportional Representation
By Sam Smith
From the November 1992 Progressive
Review
For a few months earlier this year it
looked like the United States was headed for extreme constitutional
confusion if not what the media likes to call a "constitutional
crisis." The problem would have been precipitated by flaws
in the American system of elections that, at the presidential
level, include the baroque electoral college and the potential
that the choice of president would be turned over to Congress
-- or (to be more precise) the Supreme Court, as litigation would
have inevitably flowed. The potential for chaos was resolved
by Ross Perot's decline in the polls and his temporary withdrawal
from the race, but this serendipity in no way makes our electoral
system any less of an accident waiting to happen. Nor any more
fair. Once again, we were just lucky.
Nor is the problem limited to presidential
contests. The country that calls itself the world's greatest
democracy uses an electoral system so demonstrably undemocratic
that even the former Soviet bloc looked elsewhere to find a way
to vote.
The core of the problem is that our
elections are based on the principle of first-past-the-post or
winner-take-all. The winner need only be first, not necessarily
the choice of the majority of voters. Nor is there any serious
provision, except in rare instances, for political parties other
than the two major ones. This latter defect has been elevated
to a virtue by the assiduous obeisance paid it not only by representatives
of the two parties but by the media as well, which quickly warns
that any retreat from political duopoly will result in "instability,"
although it is not a phrase that springs to mind when one considers
Germany, Norway, Switzerland and the Netherlands, all countries
that use a multi-party system.
In fact, when you look at the major
democracies of the world, including the new ones of the former
Soviet bloc, you find that the United States is largely in the
company of countries that once comprised the British Empire.
Even here there are defections: New Zealand has recently moved
towards proportional representation and Australia favors preferential
voting.
The American system fails on a number
of counts:
* It does not provide for a majoritarian
decision. As just one example, both the present and former mayor
of Washington were chosen with less than 35% of the vote in primaries
that were tantamount to election.
* It clearly discriminates against minorities
and minority views. The district system used for elections to
the House, for example, has consistently produced under- representation
of latinos and blacks, in the current House by as many as 37
seats. [See Progressive Review 299 for more on this]. The attempt
to squeeze civil liberties into the district voting system has
produced the degrading and ineffective anomaly of "minority
districts," a sort of separate but equal politics, and guarantees
decennial attempts at gerrymandering. Further, non-geographically
defined minorities or under-represented groups --such as gays,
women, Libertarians and Greens -- are often not helped by such
artificial machinations. The present US Congress, for example,
is only about 5% female as opposed to 8% in the legislature of
Ireland, 12% in Italy, 18% in Austria and 36% in Norway.
It discourages voting. If you are a
minority by race, sex or political inclination, there is little
opportunity for your views to be heard, let alone represented
under the American system. This contributes to the extraordinarily
high level of voter apathy in the US compared to those with proportional
representation.
It gives too much importance to personalities
and too little to issues: With only two parties that pretend
to represent the country's entire political spectrum, it is nearly
impossible for either party to propose a coherent program or
even a new idea. Too many intra-party compromises have to be
made. Since the political parties don't have much ideological
meaning, it is inevitable that American elections tend to focus
excessively on the personalities of the candidates. We end up
talking about draft dodging, for example, while avoiding any
real debate over health care. If we had a multi-party system,
it would be likely that at least one of those parties would have
pushed for national health insurance this year, raising the visibility
of an issue that the parties and the media would just as soon
we didn't consider.
* It is not flexible. The genius of
a well-working democracy is its ability to adapt to new social
conditions and values. The first-past-the-post and district election
system places an artificial barrier in the way of the country's
politics adjusting to new social realities. When combined with
election laws that are cynically protective of the existing major
parties, these barriers become a broad moat around the status
quo, almost guaranteeing that change will be dilatory and quarrelsome
at best, and chaotic and violent at worse. For example, something
like two- thirds of the American people think a new party would
be a good idea, but there is absolutely no way under the present
ground rules they are going to get one with any clout absent
the collapse of one of the two major parties or a major political
firestorm.
Fortunately, there are few constitutional
bars to correcting this situation. The Constitution does not
mandate congressional or legislative districts nor prevent the
preferential election of senators. By state action, larger states
could switch to proportional representation now. By congressional
action, the House of Representatives could be enlarged -- despite
our enormous population growth it's the same size as in 1910
-- to allow other states to do likewise.
While the electoral college would need
to be abolished by constitutional amendment, nothing in the Constitution
prevents the use of proportional representation in the selection
of electors. In fact, the Constitution gives states considerable
leeway in selecting the way it votes for federal officers. Lots
of choices There are a variety of ways that America could improve
its elections. Each of these ways has advocates who can verge
on the fanatical. There are, as well, political scientists and
statisticians who can offer comprehensive, if sometimes opaque,
analyses of the effect of each of the systems, factoring in such
matters as strategic voting (i.e. the voter trying to get an
edge on the system through, say, bullet voting when several votes
are allowed).
Then there are the non-objective considerations.
Can the public understand the system? Does it seem intuitively
fair? Whose ox gets gored?
New Zealand dealt with all these problems
by naming a national commission to study and present to the public,
in clear and unbiased fashion, the major alternatives. The result
was an overwhelmingly favorable non-binding vote for the German
system, which combines the virtues of the district system and
proportional representation. On the other hand, France in 1986
handled the matter as pure politics. The Socialists killed PR
because they thought they could do better with a run-off system.
Given the vagueness of the Constitution
on the matter, however, we have the option of testing out various
systems. One state might choice the German approach, another
pure PR, another preferential voting and so forth. Presumably,
over time, the virtues and defects of each would become clearer.
Any of the standard alternatives would
more closely approximate real democracy than our present system,
ending gerrymandering, giving more voice to minorities, increasing
voter turnout and providing a forum for issues not heard about
in our current two-party campaigns. Single office contests To
understand the alternatives it helps to make a distinction between
single-office contests (the presidency or mayor of a city) and
multi-seat contests (Congress or a city council). Here are the
major alternatives for single-office contests:
First-past-the-post: This is our current
system. Under it, in a three-way race, for example, the winner
might theoretically get as few as 33.5% of the votes.
Run-offs: In a single-office contest,
even a run-off system -- as used in the America south and in
France -- is at least arguably better than the first-past-the-post
now common in the US. One of the major problems with run- offs,
however, is the expense of holding a second election and the
fall-off in voter turnout for it.
Preferential voting (also called the
alternative vote): In the classic system of preferential voting,
if no one wins a majority of the votes, the votes of the least
successful candidate are redistributed according to his or her
supporters' second choice. Let us imagine that an election produced
the following results:
Karen South: 370
Kwami East: 340
Sarah North: 220
Bill West: 70
Under the current system, South would
be the winner even though she fell quite short of a majority
(501). In typical preferential voting, the votes of West would
be redistributed according to their second choice. Since this
would still not produce a majority for any candidate the votes
of Sarah North would be redistributed in like manner. Given the
closeness of the race, either South or East might win in this
instance.
There is a variation of preferential
voting known as the Bucklin System. In it, if there is no clear
winner, all the second place votes of all the candidates are
added to the first place votes.
Approval voting:
Under this system, used by a few professional associations, but
as yet untested in a major political context, voters get to check
off every candidate of whom they approve, but not in order of
preference. Advocates claim this produces a fairer result, although
there is the practical question of whether voters wouldn't rather
rank the candidates. Multi-seat elections Here are the major
choices for multi-seat elections: District and at-large elections:
These typically American forms of election are responsible for
many of the least appealing aspects of US politics. The main
virture of district voting is that the district has someone with
power at the seat of government. But it also leads to gerrymandering,
minority disenfranchisement and intensely parochial decisions
on the part of legislators. The typical legislator spends more
time fixing problems for consituents than acting as a legislator.
At-large elections, in which the voter has as many choices as
there are seats available, leads to the majority of a community
magnifying its power to the exclusion of minorities, and has
been subject to successful assault in the courts on civil rights
grounds.
Proportional representation: Typically, various parties produce lists of
candidates between which the public chooses. These lists can
be either "open" or "closed." In the latter,
the party determines the order of the candidates, in the former
voters have some influence. Under PR, if the Sunny Day party
wins 45% of the vote, it gets 45% of the seats in the legislature.
In most cases the legislature is broken up into multi-member
districts, within which the proportional representation occurs,
allowing PR and regional concerns to work in tandem.
Single Transferable Vote: This is essentially the principle of preferential
voting applied to a multi-member body. Voters rank the candidates
and those surpassing a mathematically derived quota are considered
elected. To determine the other victors, the choices of the least
successful candidate are distributed to the other candidates.
This is the system used for years in Cambridge, MA, and in Ireland.
Mixed proportional representation: This is the system used in Germany in which
half the legislature is selected by district and half by PR.
Getting there Strange as proportional representation seems to
many, it has a history in this country going back to the progressive
era when nearly two dozen cities used it -- including New York,
Sacramento, and Cleveland. It disappeared not because it was
ineffective, but because the urban elites didn't like it, just
as the French socialists killed PR in their country because they
thought they could gain more power without it.
The story of Cincinnati is instructive.
Theodore Berry, a black member of the Cincinnati city council
won election in 1953 under proportional representation. Because
he was the highest vote-getter among councilmembers, by local
tradition he should have become mayor but his election was blocked.
In 1957, opponents of Berry convinced the city to do away with
PR entirely. Berry was finally elected mayor under a conventional
voting system in the 1970s, more than a decade after a major
American city could have had its first black mayor.
Similar resistances has cropped up in
New Zealand. New Zealand recently voted by a 70% margin in an
advisory election to adopt the German system of mixed PR. This
plan was initially opposed by the government, but after the election
the prime minister said he would not block a final referendum
on the matter. Later, however, he announced that a vote for the
new system would be linked to a highly controversial plan for
public financing of campaigns, thus lowering chances of final
approval.
Any campaign for electoral reform can
expect to be met by similar machinations. Yet the effort must
be made if the varied voices of America are to be heard. Advocates
of change repeatedly go down the futile path of attempting to
win under existing rules, with surprisingly little effort directed
at changing the rules.
The ways in which government rigs the
rules for elections is mind-boggling. There is a whole newsletter,
Ballot Access News, devoted to following the efforts by citizen
groups to overturn them -- challenging petition requirements,
filing deadlines, registration rules, and so forth. These gimmicks,
keep in mind, are all in addition to the fundamental inequities
created by the first-past-the-post and district election system.
Yet there is no greater hope than that
in the heart of one who dreams of a third party. So to recount
these problems often brings a glaze over the listener's eyes
or even the suspicion that one is a secret agent of the status
quo. One doesn't enter third party politics without a fervent
faith in one's cause, shored up by the belief that someday millions
will share it.
Maybe. But first you have to get on
the ballot. And while some third party efforts, notably the Greens
and the Libertarians, have been quite pragmatic and imaginative
in choosing where and when they will run, the general tendency
is to underrate the importance of one of the first rules we learned
on the playground as kids: before you play the game, make sure
the rules are fair.
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