In case you missed it (I certainly did), White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on Monday unexpectedly reiterated the president’s position on an issue close to our hearts. From the briefing transcript:

Q:    Can I ask you one more question, just quickly, on sort of a D.C. issue?  And that is, why hasn’t the President changed his license plates on the presidential limousine?  Is he planning to change them to the “Taxation Without Representation” plates or –

MR. GIBBS:  I think rather than change the logo around the license plate, the President is committed instead to changing the status of the District of Columbia.

He is? It’s not news to us that President Obama is in favor of DC voting rights; he’s an original co-sponsor of that very bill, and he has quietly expressed support for statehood. But since the apparent death of the latest version of the DC Voting Rights bill, few expected this:

Q:    . . . When you say “changing the status of the District,” what do you mean?

MR. GIBBS:  Giving it voting rights, giving it statehood.

We haven’t heard this expressed this succinctly in a while, and it’s fairly encouraging. Of course, one must keep in mind that Gibbs was trying to dance around the question about the president’s limo. But certainly, Gibbs is essentially correct that the president’s policy regarding voting rights is far more important than what is on the back of his car.

That said, I became a bit more confused when the exchange took this turn:

Q:    What are you guys doing on that?

MR. GIBBS:  I think the legislation is making its way through Congress, with the support of the President.

Well, to the best of our knowledge here at FairVote, it’s not making its way through Congress, as the latest DC Voting Rights bill was besieged by an amendment eviscerating DC’s gun laws, dooming the bill to near-oblivion — a comatose state certified last month by Steny Hoyer when negotiations fell apart. But perhaps Mr. Gibbs knows something I don’t (not by any means out of the question). It would be terribly exciting to know that a renewed effort was being waged on behalf of the District. One can hope.

Last week the LA Times, not content to let the issue fall off the radar, sharply suggested that the person to “push this issue to the forefront” should probably be the District’s “most celebrated resident.” I hope that the president was listening. But regardless, it’s good to hear such clear support from the White House for the enfranchisement of the citizens of the nation’s capital, whatever the context. What we need to see next is this support put into action.

Seems like someone, somewhere, within the depths of the Federal bureaucracy committed an Electoral College fail–and I’m not talking about the “wrong winner” elections of 1876, 1888, and 2000.

The federal agency the Election Assistance Commission has an Overview of the Electoral College available for download on its website. You might expect an unexceptionable, just-the-facts-ma’am explanation, but you’d be wrong. Instead, the document has some questionable assertions and omissions.

Where to begin? Maybe with the final sentence, which gives us this strikingly “Whig” interpretation of history: “The Electoral College may have been a system the founding fathers regarded as imperfect, but it remains likely the only way Americans will continue to elect their president.” Well, it will with that attitude, but…. Americans widely dislike the Electoral College, with about 75% preferring a direct election, so there’s plenty of public appetite for a better system. Luckily, there’s a reform effort on the table, the National Popular Vote, that’s already been enacted by five states with 61 of the 270 electoral votes needed for us to attain “one person, one vote.”

To be fair, the EAC document, dated October 2008, does mention the National Popular Vote effort, albeit without noting the string of successes it has had since its introduction in 2006. But there are a few other oversights in the Overview. Such as…

–No Mention of Slavery. Anywhere. You don’t need to be a cynic to recognize that some of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had a, shall we say, peculiar objection to direct democracy. Here’s what James Madison — a private backer of a national popular vote himself — had to say about why the convention wasn’t going to establish a direct election to pick the president:

There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections.

New Yorker senior editor Hendrik Hertzberg has much more on this issue. Maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised that the document also neglects to mention the current Electoral College system’s disproportionate adverse impact on African-Americans, Latinos, and other minority populations that are under-represented in the current swing states.

–Uncritically Adopting the “Small State” Myth. The document claims that “one of the central reasons for adopting the Electoral College—to ensure more populace [sic] states do not have an unfair advantage—still applies today.” That would come as news to residents of Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Hawaii, Vermont, Maine, Rhode Island, Delaware, and DC…12 of the 13 smallest-population states. But don’t worry, neither California nor New York has an “unfair advantage” today–in fact, the two largest population states have almost no influence during the general election campaign. That seems odd…there must be some place…somewhere…with that unfair advantage…

–Forgetting about Swing States and Safe States. Red, blue, swing, safe. All of these terms, juvenile as they may be, are items in our common political glossary. All of us are too well aware of the unbelievably concentrated attention that 15 or 16 “battleground” states receive every four years. All of us except for this EAC analyst, it seems–when the document was produced in October 2008, its authors must have been living in a cave without cable TV.

David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, told Portfolio magazine after the election that his team “viewed the campaign as essentially 16 different campaigns”–one for every battleground state. Not one campaign for every one of the 50 states, or one for all of America, but a collection of swing state contests, and even more specifically, fights over swing voters in those swing states.

The facts from 2008 are staggering:

* More than 98% of all campaign events and more than 98% of all campaign spending took place in only 15 states representing 36.6% of the nation’s eligible voter population, effectively sidelining nearly two-thirds of all Americans.

* Voter turnout in those 15 contested states was 67%, while turnout in the remaining states was 61%. Voter turnout declined in more a third of  states despite the public’s high level of interest in the nation’s first open-seat presidential election in half a century.

It’s a bit surprising that none of these widely-known flaws in the current system made it into the brief section called “Weaknesses of the Electoral College.” But then again, maybe it’s best that we not talk about what’s wrong with the Electoral College, since “it remains likely the only way Americans will continue to elect their president.” Let’s hope not–maybe we can do something about it.

California’s complex voting and election system has recently been faced with another obstacle. The California Appellate Court in Greene v Marin County Flood Control District is currently debating whether the secret ballot ought to be mandated in certain special elections.

Special elections in California are used in exceptional situations, such as the recall of an elected official, a vacancy to be filled, or a special ballot measure that needs to be voted on before the next regular election. Special elections are largely unique to California, and they tend to involve a complicated system of inauguration, often because of other, sometimes contradictory, laws in the state.

Proposition 218, which was passed in 1996, mandates that voters must approve of all taxes and most charges on property owners in order to limit potential abuses of government revenue-raising power. 

Prop 218 took the form of an amendment to the Constitution, creating Article 13, section D of the California Constitution. A quick text excerpt: “Voter Approval for New or Increased Fees and Charges. Except for fees or charges for sewer, water, and refuse collection services, no property related fee or charge shall be imposed or increased unless and until that fee or charge is submitted and approved by a majority vote of the property owners of the property subject to the fee or charge or, at the option of the agency, by a two-thirds vote of the electorate residing in the affected area. The election shall be conducted not less than 45 days after the public hearing. An agency may adopt procedures similar to those for increases in assessments in the conduct of elections under this subdivision.”

Prop 218 also inspired the Proposition 218 Omnibus Implementation Act of 1997, which detailed the procedures for the principles outlined in the Constitution. Part of the Act specified that the ballot must be “in a form that conceals its contents once it is sealed by the person submitting the assessment ballot” and, once received by the agency, must “remain sealed until the tabulation of ballots . . . commences.” And during and after the process of counting the ballots, they become “disclosable public records . . . equally available for inspection by the proponents and the opponents of the proposed assessment.”

Notably, the Act also required that the special elections “shall not constitute an election or voting for purposes of Article II of the California Constitution or of the California Elections Code.” The California constitution requires secret voting in Article 2, section 7. The text simply says, “Voting shall be secret,” but it is under the Article 2 heading of “voting, initiative and referendum, and recall,” which does not explicitly include special elections.

This confusing theoretical situation of whether or not special election ballots ought to be secret is compounded by the facts of the case. In Greene v Marin County, voters’ names and addresses were printed on the ballots, and voters signed their ballots. Because the ballots become public record as soon as the election has ended to ensure tabulation accuracy, it seems as though there is no voter privacy at all.

This issue will (hopefully) soon be decided by the California Appellate Court. Although the Constitution does not explicitly require the votes to be secret, a secret ballot is integral to the functioning of a democracy. If the court ruled that way, it would only necessitate a more logical ballot design, so that special elections can be run like regular ones. And if the court rules the other way, the elimination of secret ballots bodes for an ominous future for the safe functioning of Californian democracy.

Though red-carpet glamor is hardly a typical subject of FairVote’s work, I’m happy to provide an exception today.  Yesterday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences shocked the cinemaphile world with its announcement that there will be 10 nominees for Best Picture in 2010, double the usual number. I’ll leave the qualitative discussion of how this alters the characteristics of the eligible movies and the entertainment value of the ceremony in other, more qualified hands; instead, I’ll focus on the process by which the nominees are chosen.

As a colleague of mine noted earlier this year, choice voting has been used to select Academy Award nominees since the 1930’s. The Academy wants the nominees to reflect the views of as many Academy members as possible so that they feel well-represented  by their choices on Oscar night. Each of the five nominees has the strong support of nearly a fifth of Academy voters, collectively making nearly every Academy voters invested in the outcome.

The importance of using choice voting with ranked ballots can be illustrated by a quick thought experiments. Suppose the Academy used a winner-take-all method for nominees, with each voter having five votes. Oscar night would quickly lose some of its entertaining diversity, with one kind of acting or one sort of movie dominating each category.

Or suppose the Academy instead used a non-transferable ballot system, with each member casting only one vote, and the top five vote-getters becoming nominees. There are at least two ways such a “single non-transferable vote” system (which in fact is the system used in Afghanistan) could easily produce skewed results.

For the purposes exercise, let us presume that 10% of the voters suffer an unfortunate head injury which compels them to vote for last year’s insipid Mike Myers vehicle The Love Guru. Considering the extent to which votes are likely to be divided among the plethora of other candidates, The Love Guru would have a good to excellent shot at becoming a nominee. Choice voting prevents this tragedy from happening; the voters in full command of their faculties will not rank Myers’s comprehensive demonstration of lame bodily function humor, allowing better films to win as preferences are allocated in later rounds.

The other possible misfire would occur in a year when one film receives an overwhelming number of votes. Suppose The Love Guru was stacked up against Titanic, or Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, both of which were tipped to take the statue well before the nominations were announced. If one of these films received – for example — 75% of the nomination votes in a plurality contest, it would be quite easy for an aesthetic tragedy to win a place in the sharply reduced vote pool (7% of the vote would ensure a place and 4% might be enough). Thus, choice voting serves as a safety, producing reasonable consensus outcomes in a massive field.

Once the nominees are chosen, however, the Academy likes surprises. The winner is determined by plurality vote. Right now, in a fractured field, the winner could have as little as just over 20% of the vote and actually have little support from nearly 80% of Academy voters. With the expansion to 10 nominees, the winner actually could have the support of barely 10% of Academy voters - about the same as it takes to get a nominee for best picture with the doubling of nominees and halving of the “victory threshold.”

Yes, the Academy enjoys those surprises, but perhaps it’s time  for it to adopt instant runoff voting for best picture. Academy voters certainly are already experienced at ranking candidates, and perhaps surprises due to the distortions of plurality voting are best for lesser categories than the best picture of the year. True, the Academy is not an institution that needs to be held to exacting democratic standards, but its example provides an excellent case study in support of the practicality and fairness of choice voting — and could do so for instant runoff voting.

NB: The harsh view of The Love Guru contained in this post is mine alone, and has nothing whatever to do with FairVote’s official position of neutrality in artistic matters.