FairVote Feed: Fair Voting/Proportional Representation

Philippines Holds Elections Using Degree of Proportional Representation

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:23:58 -0700

The results from Monday's midterm elections in the Philippines are in, with President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III's Liberal Party and his ruling coalition "Team PNoy" (named after their leader) coming out on top. Although President Aquino himself was not up for reelection (his 6-year term expires in 2016, after which he may not run again), success in the elections was considered vital for his agenda. In addition to maintaining its control of the House of Representatives, Team PNoy is poised to pick up nine of the 12 contested Senate seats this cycle, making Aquino the first president since the restoration of democracy in 1986 to have majorities in both houses of Congress.

As a former American colony that elects a component of its national legislature using proportional representation, the Philippines' elections are of particular interest. But because of the unusual nature of the proportional seats and the unique characteristics of the politics of the Philippines, few conclusions can be drawn from these elections about how proportional systems could work in other American-style democracies.

The elections in the Philippines come on the heels of a controversial decision by the country's Supreme Court on its party list system, used to elect 20% of the seats in the House of Representatives. Under the terms of the Philippines' 1987 Constitution, 80% of the seats in the House are comprised of single-member geographic districts, with the rest of the seats reserved for at-large party list seats. The party list component of the House does not follow the traditional model of simply giving each party seats in proportion to their nationwide vote share. Instead, the framers of the 1987 Constitution mandated that the party list must represent "labour, peasant, urban poor, indigenous cultural communities, women, youth, and such other sectors as may be provided by law, except the religious sector." The goal of this system, as articulated in a 1995 law, was to "enable Filipino citizens belonging to the marginalized and underrepresented sectors, organizations and parties... to become members of the House of Representatives."

The results of the party list have been mixed. Because parties running for list seats needed to be independent of the national parties, the system provides the opportunity for marginalized groups to express themselves in government. In reality, however, critics have noted that many of the representatives coming from the PR tier are relatives of the prosperous and well-connected political elite that dominates Philippine society. Nevertheless, the party list has created a small degree of proportional representation and allowed groups representing senior citizens, women, farmers, and others to participate in governance.

The manner in which parties are elected to the PR tier is unique and somewhat complex. All parties that receive 2% or more of the vote receive a seat, although a party receiving 6% or more of the vote is capped at three seats. Since a 2009 Supreme Court ruling, any of the 55 seats in the PR tier that remain are allocated to parties receiving less than 2% of the vote until all seats are filled.

That brings us back to the most recent Supreme Court ruling on April 5^th, 2013, which altered the nature of the PR tier just over a month before the election. The Court ruled that national and regional parties could now run in the party list along with marginalized and underrepresented groups. The Court remanded to the Commission on Elections (Comelec) the petitions of 39 parties that Comelec had previously denied entrance to the party list. Although the major parties, such as Aquino's Liberal Party, may not run directly in the PR tier, the ruling allows for larger parties, potentially affiliated with the major parties, to run in the elections.

Reaction to the ruling has been divided. Unsurprisingly, previously-banned parties that are now allowed to participate, such as the Ako Bicol party, support the ruling, arguing that it provides much-needed reforms and includes safeguards to protect the system from abuse by the rich and powerful. Constitutional scholar and retired justice Vicente Mendoza lauded the decision as well, noting that the intent of the Constitution all along was to open up the party list to non-sectoral groups after a certain amount of time. Criticism of the ruling, however, has been strong as well, with party list groups as well as watchdogs warning that the decision "opened the floodgates for powerful, filthy rich and long-established personalities and groups to infiltrate and dominate the world of real marginalized and underrepresented sectors," as one recent op-ed in the Philippine Daily Inquirer put it.

But a look at the party list winners of Monday's elections shows that the claims of both those supporting and opposing the ruling were likely overstated. The latest vote totals released by Comelec show the Buhay party list in the lead, with a little over a million votes (4.7% of total votes cast). Buhay is a pro-life party founded by the multimillionaire leader of the charismatic Catholic religious group El Shaddai, Mike Velarde, and had been allowed to run and win seats in the 2010 election. Fourth-place finisher Akbayan, meanwhile, has members serving in the executive branch and was explicitly endorsed by President Aquino; it too has been running in the PR tier for years. The Court's ruling did little to affect the underlying fact of the concentration of political power in the elite families of the Philippines, a problem that is by no means unique to the party list. Philippine society on the whole is dominated by celebrities and a handful of political dynasties. The presence of the wealthy elite in the PR tier is less a cause than it is a symptom of deeper problems in the politics of the Philippines.

Consequently, the success or failure of the Philippines' current party list system cannot be used to predict the results of applying proportional representation to other countries currently using winner-take-all, simply because the system itself and the politics surrounding it are so unusual.

Furthermore, there is not an obvious electoral solution to prescribe for the Philippines to address all the unique challenges its political system faces. However, many of the problems that continue to plague elections in the Philippines, such as uncompetitive elections and distorted outcomes, are common in winner-take-all systems. Shifting away from the current party list system, which comprises a small tier that gives a few representatives to minor interests, to a more broadly proportional system that accurately represents all parties, viewpoints, and interests in the nation would likely benefit the Philippines in the long term.

The Elizabeth Colbert-Busch Guide to Running in the Other Party’s Safe Districts

Wed, 08 May 2013 15:51:07 -0700

AP Photo

It's no secret that congressional elections have a bit of a competitiveness problem. Most congressional districts invariably vote for either Republicans or Democrats. In those districts, the minority party's candidates have no hope of winning elections, and their voters have no hope of winning representation. Take the 2012 election, when Democrats didn't pick up a single seat in the 201 districts where Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama by more than 4% and Republicans didn't pick up a single seat in the 167 districts where Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney by at least 11%. That's an awful lot of safe districts.

But maybe you're foolhardy enough to believe you could actually break through those impenetrable partisan walls. You're a Democrat in a red district or a Republican in a blue district, and you want nothing more than to represent your district in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Well, with this election-tested* guide, you too can fruitlessly struggle to overcome our increasingly hyper-partisan winner-take-all congressional elections. If you follow the guide closely, you might even feel like you have a real chance at winning your race before your inevitable failure on Election Day.

Before we get started, it goes without saying that you need to run a strong campaign, not have any personal baggage, raise at least twice as much money as your opponent, and decisively win any debates.

Once you've got that down, just follow these four simple steps.

*Guide tested in South Carolina District 1 special election between Elizabeth Colbert-Busch and Mark Sanford, May 7, 2013. SC-1 voted for Mitt Romney at 11 points above his national average in 2012. Sanford won the election with 54% of the vote.

1. Timing is everything. Whatever you do, don't run in the general election. General elections have a high turnout and are highly predictable. Voters are unlikely to split their tickets.

Instead, wait until a special election - that is, until your current representative is appointed to a higher office, retires mid-term, resigns in disgrace, or dies. It should happen eventually, if you don't die of old age first yourself. Special elections tend to garner national attention, and they allow more emphasis to be placed on the individual candidates.

2. Support the other party's policy positions. There's no way you can get elected just by representing the viewpoints of your party's supporters. Don't completely forsake them, but also don't be afraid to register your opposition to your party's most important legislative accomplishment in recent memory.

3. Family fame. You're going to want to have a close relative who is a popular celebrity. Not just a B-lister; this should be someone who has a personal legion of fans from both parties and, preferably, a TV show on which to advertise your candidacy and mock your opponent.

Speaking of which...

4. Choose your opponent wisely. This may be the most important step. If you're facing an average or even mediocre candidate from the other party, you will lose. Your opponent needs to be embarrassing.

Here's an example of an opponent who was bad, but not bad enough: in 2008, Representative Henry Brown (R), incumbent of South Carolina's District 1 (61% Republican), was forced to pay a fine for starting a fire that ended up burning down 20 acres of a national forest. Brown still won his election by 4%.

No, you'll want an opponent who's done something even more embarrassing than recklessly causing massive environmental destruction. Something like a sex scandal. Better yet: a sex scandal funded by taxpayer money.

In case the scandal took place a while ago, try and keep it current. Make sure your opponent does something new to remind everyone of the really scandalous thing he or she did, like trespassing on an ex-spouse's property. It should ideally be shameful enough that your opponent's national campaign committee pulls out all its funding from the race.

DISCLAIMER: If you somehow manage to make all of that happen, don't get too excited. You will still almost certainly lose. And if you do win the special election, you'll probably just lose in the next general election anyway. But at least you did everything you could to strike a blow for disenfranchised minority party voters all over the country!

Except for one thing: if you get tired of waiting for that perfect storm to hit your district, you could always help the U.S. House switch to using multi-member districts elected under fair voting methods that would guarantee minority party voters the ability to elect a candidate in every district in the country. No sex scandal necessary - just a federal statutory change.

How Districts Plus Has Worked for German Elections

Fri, 03 May 2013 09:44:35 -0700

FairVote has posted several times recently about the benefits that a Districts Plus electoral system (also known as mixed member proportional representation) can confer: namely, combining the advantages of local, personal representation with overall proportionality. But you don't have to take our word for it. Districts Plus-like systems have been proven to be effective in national elections in some of the world's most robust democracies.

Headlining that list is the Federal Republic of Germany, which has used a version of mixed member proportional since the Bundestag was established in 1949 under the guidance of the United States. Germany's current system allows voters to cast two votes: one for a representative in their single-member district, and another for a nationwide party list that will compensate parties for any distortions caused by the single-member districts. Thus, Germans have both local representatives and a parliament that accurately represents the political views of the whole of Germany.

Despite its success, the German electoral system has attracted some undeserved negative attention of late - enough that in November of 2012, Foreign Policy ranked Germany at the bottom of its list of the five electoral systems worse than the Electoral College. But this criticism has been enormously overstated.

Here's the background: on July 25, 2012, Germany's Constitutional Court ruled the current electoral system unconstitutional due to the problem of "overhang seats." It was the second time that the court had declared the system unconstitutional in four years, and it temporarily left Germany without an electoral law.

The issue, in short, was that Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Party was winning so many constituency (single-member district) seats that the party list seats were unable to compensate for the distortion. After the 2009 election, the 598-seat Bundestag proportionally reflected the votes that each party received in Germany's states. Because the CDP won more seats via constituencies than its proportion of the vote in several states, however, these extra or "overhang" seats were added to the Bundestag, creating a legislature of 622 seats.

Of course, the extra seats created a small degree of disproportionality in CDP's favor. The overhang seats also led to the unusual phenomenon where voting for a party in a region where they won overhang seats could actually lead to that party winning fewer nationwide seats, which is what the court objected to.

It's worth remembering that these problems only seem significant in the context of an electoral system that is almost completely proportional and in which opportunities for strategic voting are minimal. In the U.S., our distorted and strategy-prone electoral system wouldn't register an issue this miniscule. Given that context, Foreign Policy's dubious honor is absurd.

Fortunately, Germany now seems to have addressed the small flaws in its system, as the Bundestag passed a new electoral law in February that guarantees that parties will receive "balance seats" to compensate for any disproportionality caused by overhang seats. While this new law may result in a larger legislature, it will ensure that the Bundestag more accurately reflects the votes of the German electorate.

The overhang seat controversy has shown that Germany is able to recognize the flaws in its electoral system and correct them. The United States would do well to follow its lead. While a German-style Districts Plus system could not be implemented nationwide in the U.S. without a constitutional amendment, it could realistically be used by many state legislatures that suffer from distorted outcomes and uncompetitive elections. In fact, FairVote has proposed such a plan for the Michigan State House of Representatives.

To be a voter in Germany is to know that your vote will always have an effect on the outcome of an election, regardless of how competitive your local district is. Even when large parties such as the Christian Democrats prevail in the Bundestag elections, other parties and viewpoints are still able to win representation and influence policy. American voters need look no further than Germany to see just how much better their experience with democracy could be.

Winner-Take-All Elections Exacerbate Kenya's Ethnic Tensions

Thu, 02 May 2013 08:49:25 -0700

On March 30th, the Kenyan Supreme Court upheld the election of Uhuru Kenyatta to the Kenyan Presidency, dismissing claims of electoral fraud brought by his primary challenger, Raila Odinga. While the court's decision was met with some protests and scattered reports of violence, these disturbances paled in comparison to the chaos surrounding the 2007-2008 Kenyan electoral crisis, which left over 1,000 people dead and many more injured. The relative peace surrounding this year's contest, along with Odinga's decision to respect the court's ruling instead of calling for mass demonstrations, have led some to declare the 2013 elections a victory for Kenyan democracy.

Still, the election's results demonstrate that politics in Kenya remain highly contentious, with the electorate fracturing sharply along ethnic divides. Despite concerted efforts to push voters away from ethnic politics and towards consideration of the candidates' résumés and policies, the largest parties in the political coalitions that nominated Kenyatta and Odinga are each closely tied to one of Kenya's largest ethnic groups. Kenyatta is Kikuyu, while his running-mate, William Ruto, is Kalenjin. The pair won lopsided victories in areas with majority Kikuyu and Kalenjin populations. Odinga, who is Luo, and his running mate Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka, who is Kamba, won by wide margins in Luo and Kamba areas of the country.

These ethnic divides are more salient in Kenyan politics than any regional or ideological differences. As the New York Times noted after this year's election, "some areas voted 95 percent for the politician from their ethnic group, while other areas, equally poor, with people in very similar circumstances, voted 95 percent in the opposite direction." The dominance of these ethnic cleavages is reinforced by the traditional practice of Kenyan leaders rewarding their ethnic constituencies with land, import licenses, and other benefits, to the exclusion of other groups. Though Kenyatta has billed himself as a reformer, there is little evidence that he will depart from this pattern of ethnically-based patronage politics.

Kenya's largely winner-take-all electoral system exacerbates these ethnic tensions in ways that other electoral systems might avoid. Like many former British colonies in East Africa, most of Kenya's legislators (47 of 68 senators, and 337 of 349 members of the National Assembly) are elected through winner-take-all contests in single-member districts. Because Kenyan counties tend to be much more ethnically and politically homogenous than Kenya as a whole (while Kenyatta received just over 50% of the vote nationally, in most districts he received either over 80% or less than 30% of the vote), minority groups in many of these districts stand little chance of ever electing representatives to the Kenyan National Assembly or Senate.

Non-competitive elections like these are a common feature of single-member district systems around the world. Winner-take-all also often leads to distortions between the demographics of the electorate and the composition of government, as has been the case in previous Kenyan elections. For example, in 1992 the Kenyan African National Union party (KANU) won a 53.2% majority of seats in parliament with just a 24.5% share of the popular vote. In 1997, KANU again won a majority of the seats in parliament, this time with 38.4% of the popular vote.

Kenyans of all ethnic groups would be better served if country's newest constitution, adopted in 2010, had abandoned the British tradition of single-member districts and winner-take-all elections in favor of a multi-member district system of proportional representation. If each Kenyan electoral district elected multiple representatives, Kenyans of ethnic groups that are in the minority in their district would still be able to have their voices heard in government, and the potential for continued distortions between the popular vote and government would be reduced.

The single transferable vote method of electing representatives in multimember districts, which FairVote refers to as choice voting, would provide Kenyan politicians with much-needed incentives to reach across ethnic divisions in order to earn high rankings from voters in other groups. This would have a moderating effect on Kenya's polarized ethnic politics, as candidates would be rewarded for broadening their appeal beyond their ethnic base. Instant runoff voting could provide similar benefits in elections for single-seat offices such as the Kenyan presidency by encouraging candidates to build broad coalitions and reach out to their opponents' supporters, potentially reducing the likelihood of future post-election violence.

The tendency of ranked choice systems and proportional representation to foster constructive dialogue and deescalate political tensions should make it an attractive choice not only in the ethnically-polarized Kenya but also in the increasingly dysfunctional and partisan political environment of the United States.

FairVote’s Top Ten List: The Breakdown of Winner-Take-All Elections

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:35:12 -0700

Want the facts faster? Take a look at this one-pager on our top 10 indicators of the breakdown of winner-take-all.

Geography has become an increasingly rigid indicator of which political party will win a state or legislative district in the United States. Voters are far more likely to vote only for candidates from a single political party, and to vote for that same party from election to election. When there is a shift in an area's underlying partisanship, it is now more likely to be away from the national political center than towards it.

The end results of these trends include:

- A Congress that is more partisan in its voting behavior than at any time in recent history, and legislative leaders who consistently use every procedural tool available to dominate the opposing party when in the majority, or to obstruct it when in the minority.

- A partisan voting consistency that means less ticket splitting in votes for president, Congress, and state elections.

- A pattern of majority domination that removes that vast majority of states from the battleground in presidential elections. This pattern incentivizes candidates to allocate more than 99% of their attention and resources on courting voters in just 10 states.

- A partisan consistency in congressional districts that makes it difficult for either party to make gains in the House outside of a shrinking band of competitive districts. The vast majority of incumbents are secure in their districts and do not have to worry about reelection.

Top political analysts have been addressing these trends, including the Washington Post's Dan Balz, the Cook Political Report's Charlie Cook and Crystal Ball's Rhodes Cook. But one factor consistently overlooked by these analysts is that this partisan gridlock can be remedied with a simple change in electoral rules. By doing away with winner-take-all voting laws, by which 50% + 1 of the vote earns 100% of representation in a single state or district, political polarization could be substantially remedied, and voters would find themselves more accurately represented in their legislative bodies.

Many people wring their hands over how district lines are drawn, highlight the dangers of voting laws designed to reduce voter participation, or bemoan the role of money in politics. But however important these issues may be, they collectively have a minor effect on electoral outcomes when contrasted with the overwhelming power of winner-take-all voting rules. Under winner-take-all, once a candidate in a race for a congressional seat or a state in a presidential race has a partisan balance three percentage points or more away from the national vote, the odds of a victory for supporters of the minority party plunge.

Once an area's partisanship is six percent or more away from the national vote, any party shift is nearly impossible.

Fortunately, we can ditch the winner-take-all voting laws that have impaired our electoral process for far too long. With simple changes to federal and state statutes, the US can be on its way to better and fairer elections. The United States has a long history of using different voting rules that would, absent any other changes, dramatically improve elections, representation, and legislative behavior. To underscore the urgency of consideration of these reforms, FairVote has made a list of the top ten biggest indicators that winner-take-all elections have contributed to the polarization and stagnation that plagues our political process.

Definition of terms:

A swing state or congressional district is one that voted within three points of the national popular vote for president (47%-53% partisanship), meaning that their partisanship leaning is similar to the nation's as a whole. Presidential elections in states and congressional elections in districts (especially if there is an open seat or a first-term incumbent) within this partisanship band are likely to be competitive in a nationally competitive election.

A safe state or congressional district is one that voted at least 8 percentage points more Democratic or Republican than the national popular vote for president (42%-58% partisanship). Barring a landslide election for one party nationally, there is virtually no chance that any of these states or districts held by the majority party will be won by the minority party.

Presidential Elections

1. Decreasing state competition: In 1988, safe states collectively held only 40 electoral votes. In 2012, they held 247 electoral votes. During that time the number of electoral votes held by swing states shrunk by nearly half, from 272 to 140.

2. Consistent voting patterns: Between 2000 and 2012, 41 states voted for the same party in every presidential election. In both 2008 and 2012, 35 of these states received less than 1/100th of the attention from the presidential campaigns that they would have received if every state received attention in proportion to its population.

3. More partisan rigidity: The number of states where partisanship shifted by five or more percentage points between elections has decreased from an average of 23 states between 1960 and 1976 to an average of three between 2000 and 2012.

Congressional Elections

4. Decreasing district competition: Between 1998 and 2012, the number of swing districts decreased from 121 to 47. There are now 284 safe congressional districts, up from 179 in 1998.

5. Increasing dominance of partisanship over local factors: Only six incumbents remain in seats that favored the other party by a margin of more than eight percentage points in the 2012 presidential election, down from 34 such incumbents after the 2006 election and down from 47 after the 1992 election. In 2012, neither party took a seat away from the other party in a district that favored the opposing party by more than eight percentage points. Only six percent of districts (26) voted for different parties for president and Congress in 2012.

6. More partisan rigidity: Comparing partisanship in current congressional districts based on the 2008 presidential elections and 2012 presidential elections, only 30 districts (7%) experienced a partisanship shift of five or more percentage points - and all but four of those districts trended in the direction of the previous majority party, making them less competitive.

7. More regional domination: In 2012, large areas of the nation were dominated by one party. Democrats swept all 21 House seats in New England while Republicans won all 22 seats in the belt of states running from Arkansas through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. In 1992, Republicans held 10 House seats in New England and Democrats held 14 House seats in this line of midwestern and western states.

8. More racial connection to partisanship: White Republicans represent 66 of 70 majority-white U.S. House districts in the adjoining nine states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. In 1991, 50 white Democrats represented these states, nearly all in white majority districts.

State Elections

9. More monopoly-controlled states: In 38 states, one party controls the governor's mansion and both state legislative houses - and the presidential candidate from the same party won 31 of those states in 2012. This is the largest number of states with one-party-monopoly governments since World War II.

10. More partisan rigidity: In North Carolina's 2012 elections for its 120-seat House of Representatives, 119 seats were won by the candidate with a partisan advantage in his or her district. In New Jersey's first election since its new two-member legislative districts were drawn by a commission in 2011, all 40 assembly districts elected two members of the same party.

As we can see, the phrase "all politics is local" has been replaced with "all politics is partisan." To see how we can fix presidential, congressional, and state legislative elections, visit

Presidential Elections: www.fairvote.org/national-popular-vote

Congressional Elections: www.fairvoting.us

Have your own favorite example of winner-take-all breakdown? Send it to us at info@fairvote.org.

Taking on American Political Dysfunction without Changing the Constitution

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:15:58 -0700

In his draft paper on Political Dysfunction and Constitutional Change, University of California-Irvine professor Rick Hasen makes a powerful case for the need for out-of-the-box thinking on American political reform. But he also makes a curious omission. Fair voting alternatives to winner-take-all elections do not receive a single mention in the paper, even though they were promoted in one of Hasen's major sources, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein's 2012 book It's Even Worse Than It Looks.

Hasen has a well-deserved reputation as one of our most thoughtful law professors, and his paper has generated considerable reaction in the political blogosphere. It posits three basic claims: 1) The government of the United States is currently dysfunctional, 2) that dysfunction could be solved by switching to a parliamentary system of governance - that is, government where the executive is chosen by the legislature, and 3) if the problem of dysfunction does not eventually solve itself, none of the commonly proposed subconstitutional rule changes will end dysfunction without switching to a parliamentary system.

Hasen's first claim is difficult to dispute. Between the never-ending budget crisis and a consistent inability to enact policies that most Americans favor, the U.S. government - in particular, Congress - is simply not doing its job effectively. The cause, as Hasen correctly points out, is increasing polarization within Congress, which is at its highest point since the end of Reconstruction. That polarization in turn is grounded in most voters' increasingly rigid party preference - a trend that FairVote has highlighted for more than 15 years.

We're not going to argue one way or another on Hasen's second claim about a parliamentary system. While it's true that switching to a system in which the majority party could pass any law it wanted would increase legislative output and decrease gridlock, doing so would be a drastic step that would require a complete restructuring of American politics. No reform option should be dismissed just because it is unfamiliar, but as Hasen himself writes, "we should not lightly change the fundamental rules of our governance."

We do take issue with Hasen's third contention that, absent adoption of a parliamentary system or government dysfunction correcting itself with time, no subconstitutional changes proposed by others are likely end such dysfunction. On the one hand, Hasen convincingly explains the limitations of some subconstitutional rule changes, most notably filibuster reform, independent redistricting and the adoption of open primaries. Fairvote has also pointed out the limitations of open primaries and independent redistricting as reform solutions, although the latter certainly has merit if applied consistently and with attention to fair representation. As for the filibuster, we have drawn attention to its problematic nature over the years, dating back to when the debate centered on Republicans complaining about Senate Democrats blocking the majority. Even so, while filibuster reform would allow more bills to make it through the Senate, it would do nothing to address the underlying causes of polarization.

After dismissing those three reforms, however, Hasen jumps straight to the conclusion that "tinkering with the internal rules of Congress or the external rules of election are likely to make only modest inroads at best in the polarization and dysfunction currently affecting our national politics." That's true, if you're only tinkering. But we're not limited to merely tinkering with our election rules; in fact, the electoral reforms mentioned by Hasen are just the tip of the iceberg of possible changes that could be made to American elections without requiring a constitutional amendment.

The biggest oversight is the potential use of candidate-based methods of proportional representation proven in American elections, which FairVote calls "fair voting." Fair voting is based on the simple and intuitive principle that legislatures should more accurately reflect the political views of all Americans. Voters would still vote for specific candidates under fair voting, but those votes would give them legislators who represent them philosophically as well as geographically. Our preferred fair voting method, choice voting (also known as the "single transferable vote"), encourages candidates to campaign for support outside of their base because it allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference.

We've drawn fair voting plans for every state, showing how combining existing districts into larger districts with between three and five members would have a dramatic impact on voter choice and fair representation. A fair voting plan could be implemented nationwide through federal statute, and would be fully constitutional. Fair voting methods have already been used effectively in important American elections, including for more than a century in elections to the Illinois House of Representatives and for local elections in major cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Sacramento and New York. Proponents of fair voting for congressional elections include the Democrats' third-ranking House Member James Clyburn, along with intellectual heavyweights like Mann and Ornstein (who also advocate for the consideration of another FairVote proposal, ranked choice voting in single winner office elections).

Unlike the "tinkering reforms" Hasen dismisses, adopting fair voting would have real and powerful effects on American governance. No longer would only two party poles be represented in Congress. Instead, viewpoints from varying degrees of the right, center, and left of the American political spectrum would all have a voice in the legislature. With a stronger political center and nearly all Members of Congress sharing constituents with Members from another party due to the use of multi-member districts elected under non-winner-take-all rules, Members would be much more likely to cooperate across the aisle. Because fair voting would make every district competitive in every general election, the phenomenon of legislators being threatened only by politically extreme primary challengers would disappear.

Hasen is clearly willing to look abroad for reforms, suggesting the British Westminster system as one possible model for an American parliament, but he avoids the fact that most of the world's robust democracies have rejected American-style winner-take-all voting rules.

It is possible that Hasen omitted fair voting just because he doesn't think it's a realistic or achievable reform. But for someone considering rewriting large swaths of the U.S. Constitution, that's not a very persuasive reason (not that it's a good argument for anyone to ignore fair voting, as FairVote pointed out last month in challenging another election law luminary, Nathaniel Persily, to acknowledge the potential of fair voting).

The paper concludes on a note of caution, as Hasen writes that "it is worth waiting to see if the political system self-corrects" before shifting to a parliamentary system. That could be a very long wait, with a lot of ineffective governance and harm done to the American people in the process.

There's no need to wait to adopt fair voting. The negative effects of winner-take-all congressional elections have never been clearer and fair voting is completely consistent with American political traditions. Even if the current era of partisan gridlock does prove to be a transitory phase, fair voting would still have numerous other benefits for American elections. For one, if implemented in tandem with independent redistricting commissions, fair voting would effectively remove all partisan bias in House races - a bias that currently leaves Democrats needing more than 56 percent of the vote to earn a one-seat majority in 2014.

With fair voting, Republicans could win seats outside their strongholds, helping to broaden the appeal of the party in a way that would make them more competitive in presidential elections. If Jonathan Bernstein is right in his response to Hasen that a broken Republican Party that is the real source of government dysfunction, fair voting would give Republicans the right incentives to get their party back on track.

Furthermore, fair voting would be an ideal solution to controversies over how best to elect racial minorities, as explained by FairVote staff in a recent University of Richmond Law Review article and a blog post on Congressional elections in the South. It would very likely boost representation of women far more than millions of more dollars spent on funding individual women candidates, as highlighted by FairVote's Representation 2020 project. It would give every voter a meaningful choice, far more than any redistricting reform proposal that keeps winner-take-all elections in place.

To be sure, we still may well get presidents of one party and congressional leaders of another. No system can guarantee effective governance, but fair voting would give us a more representative legislature with individual members having more freedom and opportunity to work across the aisle to get things done. We would need to pay attention to details like handling constituent service demands, but the longstanding use of multi-seat legislative districts in many states shows that can be done well.

Hasen is right to look beyond the status quo of Washington politics toward real reform options. But he's wrong to ignore lessons from our own history and the powerful logic that the single-member district is a poor way to elect an increasingly diverse population. Let's evaluate all the options for making the current Constitution work - not just the timid ones.

Electoral Reform on the Move in Canada

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 12:15:17 -0700

Things are looking up for electoral reformers in Canada.

A new poll from Environics, a Canadian research firm, shows that 70% of Canadians would favor a move to proportional representation for Canada's Parliament. That support transcends party lines, with at least 60% of Conservatives, Liberals, and New Democrats preferring any kind of proportional representation to Canada's current winner-take-all system. Respondents identifying with the New Democratic Party, which currently controls nearly a third of seats in the House of Commons, were especially enthusiastic, backing proportional representation at an 82% rate.

FairVote Canada has led the movement for fair voting, and the conversation about serious electoral reform is likely to be particularly relevant in advance of the 2015 elections, as national polls show an electorate split among Canada's three major parties.

And it's not just proportional representation - last week, the Liberal Party held its leadership elections using ranked choice voting. The elections went smoothly, though the winner was never in doubt: Justin Trudeau received over 78% of first choice rankings en route to a landslide victory. Trudeau himself has advocated for using ranked choice voting for the House of Commons, and the Liberal Party as a whole voted last January to support ranked choice voting for all future national elections.

The Liberal Party used a somewhat unconventional method of ranked choice voting in its leadership election, as Trudeau was not elected by direct popular vote. Each Canadian federal district (a "riding") received an equal number of points, and those points were allocated to candidates in each riding in proportion to the number of first choice rankings they received. Had no candidate won a majority of points after the first round of point-allocation (as Trudeau did), the voters who ranked the candidate with the least number of points first would have had their votes transfer to their second choices, giving points to those candidates instead. That process would have continued until a candidate had a majority of points, as in a traditional instant runoff voting election.

Regardless of the added complexity of the point system, however, the Liberal Party's use of ranked choice voting allowed voters to honestly express their preferences on their ballots, preventing any possibility of "spoiler" candidates or a candidate winning with a small plurality of support.

Meanwhile, the movement for ranked choice voting is gaining steam in Toronto, where Dave Meslin is leading an initiative to win RCV for Toronto's mayoral elections. With the backing of FairVote Canada, Meslin's Ranked Ballot Initiative of Toronto (RaBIT) has a strong chance to succeed in advance of the mayoral election in 2014. Toronto is certainly a city in need of voting reform - its current mayor, Rob Ford, won election without a majority of support in 2010.

As the United States makes slow but steady progress toward a fair electoral system, it's nice to see our northern brethren keeping up.

Japan's Electoral Unfairness Goes Deeper than Malapportionment

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 12:58:17 -0700

On March 26, Okoyama's High Court ruled that Japan's 2012 lower house elections were invalid. The case followed several other similar decisions by courts throughout Japan, including from the Hiroshima High Court the day before and from Tokyo's High Court on March 6. The issue of contention is the apportionment of representatives to voters - that is, the relative weight that each Japanese voter receives in terms of seats in the legislature. In the 2012 election, some voters - mostly those in rural districts - had as much as 2.34 times as much voting weight as others.

The apportionment crisis is undoubtedly damaging to the legitimacy of Japanese democracy. All votes should, indeed, carry roughly equal weight. But malapportionment is not the source of the most pernicious unfairness in the Japanese electoral system. Japan uses a parallel system for electing its lower house, analogous to the similarly problematic Egyptian system we critiqued last month. While 180 of the Japanese parliament's 480 seats are elected through closed list proportional representation, the remaining 300 representatives are elected in winner-take-all, single member districts. In a parallel system, proportional representation seats do not compensate for distortions caused by winner-take-all seats.

There was plenty of distortion left uncorrected after December 2012. The story of the election was that the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had held power almost without interruption since 1955 before finally being defeated by the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in 2009, bounced back to win the election in an apparent landslide. The LDP and its coalition partner, the New Komeito Party, now control a supermajority of more than two-thirds of seats in the House of Representatives, which would seem to imply broad popular support for their policy proposals. In reality, the LDP actually received about four million fewer votes in 2012 than in their 2009 defeat.

That's partly because voter turnout decreased significantly in 2012 from 2009, but the LDP still received less than 28% of the PR vote and less than 40% when combined with the vote share of New Komeito. That's a higher percentage than any other party or coalition, but far from a majority - much less a supermajority - of nationwide support. The distortion stems from the fact that the LDP won 79% of the winner-take-all seats that comprise the bulk of the House.

LDP leader and current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has translated his party's plurality support into an aggressive policy agenda, confronting China over the Senkaku Islands and implementing a dramatic economic stimulus program. Regardless of the merits of these policies, they were not voted for by most of the Japanese electorate. Yet because the House of Representatives can override any veto by the upper House of Councillors, voters will not even have the power to affect Abe's policies in this July's upper house elections.

Malapportionment may have contributed to the distorted outcome in 2012, but significant distortions can easily occur in single-member district systems regardless of whether there are equal numbers of people in each district. Japanese electoral reformers should be most concerned with eliminating the parallel nature of Japan's voting system. One option that Japan could consider is moving to what FairVote calls a "districts plus" system, where the 180 proportional seats would be allocated to parties to compensate for any distortions caused by the single-member district elections. Similar systems are used in national elections for countries such as Germany and New Zealand, and are typically referred to as "mixed member proportional representation." Incredibly, even allocating all 180 proportional seats to non-LDP parties would not have been enough to give each party the seats they deserved based on their share of the proportional vote, but it would have at least forced the LDP to form a coalition to control a majority of the House.

Districts plus systems not only guarantee more representative governments, but they also greatly simplify the districting process. If every vote counts equally towards the composition of the legislature, the import of where district lines are drawn is significantly lessened. Cases of malapportionment in Japan and partisan gerrymandering in the U.S. would be rendered inconsequential under districts plus. The Japanese courts are right to be taking action to correct the flaws in the Japanese electoral system - but simply redrawing district lines is not enough to ensure fairness.

How to Guarantee Accountable Legislatures Under Choice Voting (Without Hurting Third Parties)

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:49:55 -0700

As I detailed on this blog last week, Malta recently held a general election using choice voting, a fair voting system with a long history of use in the United States. The election had an exceptionally high turnout, as is typical for Malta, and produced a decisive winner.

But the history of choice voting's use in Malta has not been entirely seamless. In December of 1981, Malta faced an electoral crisis after its national elections gave the majority of seats in Parliament to the Labour Party, who had led the previous government, even though the challenger Nationalist Party received the most first choice rankings. Labour successfully formed a government, but the Nationalists walked out of Parliament. Despite the use of choice voting, Malta's electoral system had produced an unaccountable government: one that was not removed from office by a majority voting for change.

Since choice voting is a proportional system, how did this disproportionate outcome happen? In any election in which seats are allocated within geographic districts (single-seat or multi-seat), wrong-winner elections can occur. Seat-to-vote distortions are most common and severe in winner-take-all elections, such as the election for Michigan's House of Representatives last November in which Republicans retained control of the legislature even though Democrats won 54% of the vote.

But wrong-winners can occasionally occur under fair voting systems as well, particularly when districts have a relatively high threshold for election - the 16.7% threshold in Malta, for instance. Furthermore, because of Malta's small legislature size and evenly divided partisanship, even a small amount of distortion can be enough to produce a wrong-winner legislature.

While this issue does not diminish the many other benefits that choice voting has given to Malta's elections, it does merit being addressed. Malta has tried to do so, modifying its choice voting system after 1981 with a series of amendments that add seats to the legislature to ensure that the party with the most first choice rankings receives the most seats. The seat addition system Malta most recently settled on is complex, but this gist of it is that any party that wins seats at a seat-to-vote ratio lower than that of the party with the highest seat-to-vote ratio will be awarded additional seats until that distortion is corrected.

These changes came at a cost, however. Because they evaluate distortions only based on first choice rankings, they removed one of the biggest advantages of choice voting: namely, the elimination of strategic voting by allowing voters to rank their choices sincerely without any worry that their votes will hurt their desired election outcome. In Malta's current system, votes for minor parties that are unlikely to win any district seats do not affect the allocation of compensatory seats, thus diminishing the voting power of voters who choose to break from the two-party structure.

Fortunately, this tradeoff is not necessary. It is possible to implement a choice voting system that guarantees an accountable government without forcing voters to choose between ranking a minor party first and helping their preferred major party get the most seats in the legislature. FairVote calls such a method a "Districts Plus" system.

Here's how it could work in Malta. There are currently 65 district seats in Malta's legislature, with five representatives from each of the island's 13 districts. Districts Plus would add "accountability seats," which would compensate all parties for any distortions caused by the district system. Based on Malta's recent electoral history, it is unlikely that it would be necessary to add more than five seats after any given election.

There would be a moderate minimum threshold for parties to win accountability seats - let's say 4%. Ballots with first choice rankings for candidates of parties that did not surpass that threshold would have their accountability vote count toward the party of the next different-party candidate ranked on the ballot. After all ballots for parties below the threshold had been distributed, distortions between a party's candidates' share of the vote and the party's share of seats would be determined. The accountability seats would then be filled by the losing candidates from the disadvantaged party that had the most votes when they were eliminated from the original count.

In this way, voters would feel free to rank minor parties first but still have their ballot help their preferred major party be elected. The major party with the most first choice rankings would be guaranteed to win the most seats in Parliament. It is a simple fix and a clear improvement over the false choice between accountability and voter choice that Malta has operated under for the past 30 years.

Malta's most significant third party, the Green Party, has already proposed a similar modification to the one described here, in which any party could win nationwide seats if they surpass a low threshold of votes.

The combination of choice voting with Districts Plus would also be an ideal system for use in legislative elections in the U.S. In the Michigan State House of Representatives, for which FairVote has already developed a Districts Plus plan that maintains the single-member district system, Districts Plus could also be used to guarantee legislature accountability under a multi-member choice voting system. Michigan's 110-seat House could be made up of 30 three-seat districts supplemented by 20 accountability seats or 20 five-seat districts with 10 accountability seats. Because large distortions are much less likely under choice voting than under winner-take-all, fewer accountability seats are necessary to ensure an accountable government in a choice voting system. All other aspects of the Malta Districts Plus system described above could be applied to Michigan, or indeed any other state legislature in the U.S.

Again, it should be stressed that the addition of accountability seats is not necessary for a choice voting system to have a very high degree of proportionality. If the goal is to guarantee accountability, however, Districts Plus is the best way to ensure that voter choice and third parties are not harmed in the process.

Malta Elections Have 93% Turnout Using Choice Voting

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 12:39:37 -0700

On March 9, 2013, the citizens of Malta cast their ballots for their national Parliament and local governments. The elections were conducted using choice voting (also known as the single transferable vote), FairVote's preferred fair voting method of conducting multi-seat elections in the United States. There are, of course, inherent differences between elections in the small Mediterranean nation of Malta and in the U.S. But Malta's electoral experience demonstrates several of the ways in which choice voting could improve American elections - starting with the fact that Malta consistently finds itself atop the world rankings in voter turnout for countries without compulsory voting.

First, the election results: the center-left Labour Party defeated the center-right Nationalist Party, gaining control of the Parliament of Malta for the first time since 1998. Labour's candidates won a clear majority of 54.8% of votes as measured by first choice rankings. Because choice voting is a fair voting system (that is, a form of proportional representation), a change in leadership when the majority of voters decided they wanted a new government was guaranteed. That is not the case in the United States, in which the Republican Party won a large majority of House seats despite receiving fewer votes than Democrats in 2012.

Accountable governments are characteristic of all proportional systems, but choice voting has some unique benefits. Malta's national elections are most distinguished by their unusually high voter turnout - consistently well over 90%, including 93% this past Saturday. Though these high turnout rates are caused by multiple factors, political scientists have suggested that Malta's use of choice voting is at the very least a major contributor.

That's because choice voting maximizes the importance of a vote, allowing voters to rank candidates of all parties in order of preference and elect candidates with a relatively low threshold. Every district in the country is extremely competitive, as not only are both major parties represented in each district (all 13 districts will have bipartisan representation in the new parliament) but also candidates have to compete against other members of their own party. Parties often run more than five candidates in a district among which even strict partisans can choose. No voter is marginalized, and all have the ability to affect the election outcome with their vote.

It is worth mentioning what choice voting has not been able to accomplish in Malta: representation in Parliament of more than two parties. The two-party structure has a long history in Malta, and third parties have never been able to make much headway in spite of the low threshold to win a seat: just 16.7% of a district's vote. Things were made much harder for third parties when Malta modified its single transferable vote system to add seats after each election that ensure that the party that receives the most first choice rankings always gets the most seats, in response to a political crisis in 1981 when that did not occur.

While accountability is now guaranteed, voters are forced to use their first choice rankings strategically if they want to help their preferred major party win control of the government, instead of being able to vote for a third party candidate who might be their favorite option. Because of that, FairVote does not advocate for such a rule when choice voting is used in the U.S.

Though voters are, in practice, limited to two credible parties in Malta, they are still able to express their more nuanced political preferences by choosing candidates within a party. Because the biggest challenge for candidates is intra-party competition, candidates have an incentive to appeal strongly to a specific subset of voters. Incumbents most often lose because of shifting preference votes within parties, not by being defeated by the opposing party.

This effect can help to mitigate the political polarization in Malta's elections by ensuring that the slate of Members of Parliament (MPs) from a district represents the entire political spectrum, not just two poles. For one example of how this works in practice, take the case of Franco Debono, a former MP from District 5. Depono single-handedly brought down Lawrence Gonzi's Nationalist government by defecting to the opposition on a budget vote in December of 2012, forcing Gonzi to call elections. In the 2008 election, District 5 elected three candidates from the Labour Party and two from the Nationalist Party, one of which was Debono. Clearly, Debono was the more moderate - or at least independent-minded - of the two Nationalist representatives.

In 2013, Debono decided not to run for re-election in District 5. In a year that decisively favored the Labour Party, Debono's seat went to Labour, as four Labour candidates won election from District 5. Most likely, the Labour candidate who will be effectively "replacing" Debono will be similarly moderate.

This phenomenon is exactly what FairVote projects would happen if choice voting were implemented in five-seat districts in the United States. A district split evenly between Democrats and Republicans would elect both moderate and more extreme candidates from each party, with a moderate candidate elected from the middle seat on the spectrum that would switch between the parties depending on which party had the advantage in each election. Though the two-party structure is just as entrenched in the U.S. as it is in Malta, choice voting would allow voters to elect candidates from across the political spectrum in each multi-member district.

Choice voting in Malta is without a doubt a success story, and the 2013 elections were no exception. Malta's elections had far higher turnout, voter choice, and government accountability than their November 2012 counterpart in the United States. Though Malta cannot be directly compared to the U.S., the effectiveness of choice voting there tells a powerful story about just how much better American elections could be.

For more information on how choice voting works in Malta, check out this excellent explanatory video by Bernard Magri and this pre-election article from the Times of Malta.