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Boston Review
The Blame Game: the real problem
behind the 2000 election
by George Scialabba
April/May, 2003 In
December 2000, as Americans debated the Florida vote count, the
eminent conservative judge and author Richard Posner pronounced the
Florida election “a statistical tie.” No sensible observer could
disagree. Like molecular trajectories, vote counts cannot, even in
principle, be measured with limitless accuracy. Since the meaning
of a tie is that neither side has won, let us leave Florida aside.
In the other forty-nine states Al Gore received half a million more
citizens’ votes and twenty-five more Electoral College votes than
George W. Bush. That margin would have been considerably larger if
not for a third-party candidate, most of whose supporters (according
to exit polls) preferred Gore to Bush. Nonetheless, because of the
peculiar character of the American electoral system, George Bush was
declared president. Since then, despite assuming office with a lower
level of voter support than nearly any other in the nation’s
history, the Bush administration has been one of the most partisan
and high-handed ever. Its judicial nominations, policy-level
appointments, and legislative proposals have been extreme and
one-sided; its openness to media scrutiny and citizen participation
have been minimal; its public rhetoric has been deceptive and
uncivil; its deference to Congress’s war-making power has been
grudging. Evidently democracy was not well-served by the
presidential election of 2000. Who’s to blame? Almost unanimously,
Democrats and liberals blame the third-party candidate, Ralph Nader.
Nader, they say, ought to have recognized that his candidacy might
well tilt the election to Bush and that such an outcome would be of
far greater consequence than winning federal funds for the Green
Party. Nader supporters reply that Gore cost Gore the election, and
did so by not sounding more like Nader. Gore’s voter support rose
and fell, they point out, with his willingness to take strong
populist, egalitarian, environmentalist, and good-government
positions. Both sides have a point. Though second to none in
admiration for Nader, I accept the “lesser evil” argument. A Gore
administration would have been a routine misfortune: tepid,
unimaginative, deferential to corporate and financial elites. The
Bush administration has been a catastrophe: destructive of fiscal
stability, heedless of civic solidarity, indifferent to
environmental health, hostile to workers’ rights, contemptuous of
international law, disdainful of world opinion, and (as New York
Times columnist Paul Krugman has demonstrated week in and week out
for the last two years) brazenly and relentlessly dishonest. Nader
ought to have foreseen this, acknowledged it, and either withdrawn
late in the race or urged supporters in closely contested states to
vote for Gore (or to trade their votes with Gore supporters in less
closely contested states). On the other hand, Gore lost the election
not only because of his robotic centrism, but also through his
pusillanimous and unsporting refusal to debate Nader. A direct
appeal to Nader voters on lesser-evil grounds might well have won
over enough of them to have elected Gore. What is surprising,
though—amazing, in fact—is how few on either side have blamed our
electoral system. The American electoral system is an affront to
reason. To start at the top: the Electoral College has no function
except to frustrate equal political representation, i.e., to prevent
each vote cast in presidential elections from counting as much as
every other vote. The framers of the Constitution may have
envisioned the College as a deliberative body, but it has not
deliberated once in 200 years and never will. Actually, the framers
were ambivalent about the Electoral College and rejected it several
times, finally approving it just before the Convention adjourned.
That was a mistake. In no fewer than four presidential elections,
the candidate with the greatest number of popular votes was not
chosen as president. Overwhelming majorities of voters regularly
tell pollsters that the Electoral College should be abolished. Seven
hundred proposals to reform or abolish it have been introduced in
the House, the most recent of which passed in 1989 with an 83
percent majority. As always, the Senate blocked any action. Why?
Because the Senate itself is a deeply undemocratic institution.
According to Article V of the Constitution, “no state, without its
consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.”
That is, each state, regardless of population, was to have two
senators. As a result, two centuries later, half the U.S. population
sends eighteen senators to Washington, while the other half sends
eighty-two. Twenty senators represent 54 percent of the population;
another twenty represent less than 3 percent. California gets two
senators; the twenty least populous states, which combined have
roughly the same number of people as California, get forty senators.
Senators elected by 11 percent of the population can kill proposed
legislation with a filibuster; senators elected by as little as 5
percent of the population can block a constitutional amendment.
Besides these constitutional absurdities, there is the historical
absurdity of the two-party duopoly. As Michael Lind has written,
“Because of our peculiar electoral law, the American government is
divided between two parties. The American people are not.” Nine out
of ten incumbents who seek reelection to the House of
Representatives win. And yet, because of low voter turnout and our
“winner-take-all” electoral rules, only about a quarter of Americans
are represented in Congress by someone they actually voted for.
Two-party dominance allows disproportionate influence to swing
voters, single-issue constituencies, and campaign contributors; it
promotes negative, contentless campaigns; it rewards grossly
inequitable redistricting schemes; and it penalizes those who
disagree with both parties but fear to “waste” their votes (which is
why Nader probably lost many more voters to Gore than Gore lost to
Nader). And then there is behind-the-scenes hardball. The historian
Walter Karp put it colorfully: “Challenge a local party syndicate in
a mere state legislative district and you will find your ballot
petitions falsely voided, your district lines redrawn, your votes
miscounted, your supporters bribed, threatened, or beaten—not in
some benighted backwoods but in a middle-class neighborhood in New
York City in this very year of grace [1979].” Those who criticize
Nader for not running in the Democratic primaries underestimate the
extent to which party regulars and Gore operatives probably stood
ready to sabotage his—or any other insurgent’s—candidacy. What
should we the people do about all this? We should do what nearly
every other established democracy has done: change our
“first-past-the-post, winner-take-all” system to proportional
representation (PR). Under our current system, a party that gained a
one-vote plurality in every electoral district would win 100 percent
of the seats in the legislature. Even if the two major parties
received all votes cast, this would leave 49.999 percent of voters
unrepresented—hardly fair. Or a party could win half-plus-one of the
electoral districts by one vote each, receive no votes whatever in
all the other districts, and still control the legislature. This
would leave a huge majority of voters unrepresented—even less fair.
These precise results are not at all likely, of course; but some
version of them, with some, perhaps significant, overrepresentation
and underrepresentation, is quite likely. (The Electoral College and
the Senate are guaranteed to produce unequal representation—that’s
what they were designed to do.) In a proportional system, the
number of seats each party gets corresponds to the percentage of
votes it receives (as long as it reaches a specified minimum, e.g.,
5 percent). There are several varieties of PR, including some that
allow for geographical representation (the sole basis of the current
U.S. system) and others more adapted to non-partisan elections like
city councils. But in any form PR is a ticket of admission for small
parties and new candidates; it liberates them from the role of
“spoilers;” and it spells an end to the stifling dominance of the
two major parties. Defenders of the two-party system argue that
multi-party PR societies are prone to gridlock, citing Italy and
Israel. But it isn’t so. Other PR societies, like Germany,
Switzerland, Sweden, and the Netherlands, are much more efficient
than the United States at enacting policy. Besides, are
winner-take-all rules discredited by the fact that imperfect
democracies like Algeria, Pakistan, and India have adopted them?
America is, as we all know, the greatest country that ever was. But
might not the rest of the world be right about something? According
to the Center for Voting and Democracy (an invaluable resource for
voting reform; see www.fairvote.org): “Currently there are 41
well-established democracies with at least two million inhabitants
and high ratings from the human rights organization Freedom House,
and of these 41 nations only two—the United States and Canada—do not
use a form of proportional or semi-proportional voting systems to
elect one of their national legislatures.” (How Canada can be
enlightened enough to have a single-payer health care system and at
the same time benighted enough to have a winner-take-all electoral
system is something of a puzzle.) And according to Arend Lijphart
(past president of the American Political Science Association) and
other researchers, PR democracies generally outperform
winner-take-all democracies on such measures as voter satisfaction,
accountability, and macroeconomic management. The office of the
presidency being (for better or worse) indivisible, the president
cannot be elected by PR. But there is another simple reform that
would enhance equal representation: instant-runoff voting (IRV).
Even if the Electoral College were abolished, the winner of a
three-way race for the presidency might very well not be the choice
of a majority of voters. To take another hypothetical case: if
candidates A and B each receive 33 percent of the vote while C
receives 34 percent, then even if the second choice of all A’s
voters is B and vice versa, C will nevertheless become president.
Once again, this particular example is unlikely, though spoilers and
split votes are hardly uncommon. If, however, voters are allowed to
rank the candidates in order of preference, it is a simple matter
for modern voting machines to calculate which candidate has the most
popular support. Two years ago this system would have prevented many
lame jokes, not to mention awarding the presidency to a man whom the
majority of voters did not want to have it. Do PR and IRV sound
impractical, even utopian? Actually, there are flickers of progress:
cumulative voting systems in Amarillo, Texas, and Peoria, Illinois;
an instant-runoff ballot measure in San Francisco; IRV legislation
in Vermont; and good words from maverick political figures like John
McCain and Howard Dean. Not a tidal wave, but a steady trickle. As
a further antidote to skepticism, a little historical perspective
may be useful. Many practices that now seem patently
indefensible—the divine right of kings, the union of Church and
State, racial segregation, the subordination of women, child
labor—once seemed perfectly natural to most people, even if to
others it was plain that they could not survive indefinitely. Our
electoral system is just such a dinosaur. It has nothing going for
it except the inertia of the many and the interests of a few (i.e.,
those who own the Democratic and Republican parties). Our
descendants will wonder what we were thinking of to let it go
unreformed for so long. One thing is certain: if
proportional representation, instant-runoff voting, and kindred reforms had
been in place in 2000, not only the voters but all three
leading presidential candidates as well would be better off today.
George Bush could have played golf all winter and sailed his father’s
boat all summer. Ralph Nader would have successfully launched the
Green Party into national politics. And Al Gore would be in the
White House. (George Scialabba writes about
books in Boston Review, the Boston Globe, and
elsewhere.) |
