FairVote Feed: Innovative Analysis

The Supply Side: Alternative Reform Approaches to Campaign Finance

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:19:30 -0800

Last Saturday marked the two-year anniversary of the controversial U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Citizens United overturned decades of campaign finance law by extending First Amendment protection to political expenditures by corporations and unions. In tandem with other court rulings and with decisions by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Citizens United allows independent expenditure committees (Super PACs) to collect unlimited sums from individuals, labor unions, and corporations. Super PACs can spend unrestricted amounts of money on ads in support of or opposition to candidates, provided they do not donate directly to or coordinate with them.

The ruling became an instant fault line in American politics, leading to heated debate and one of the most incendiary issues of 2010. The decision itself was highly contested, with Justice John Paul Stevens authoring a strongly worded dissent. In the weeks after the decision was released, an ABC-Washington Post poll showed that 80% of those surveyed opposed the ruling, sentiments that President Barack Obama echoed in his 2010 State of the Union Address. Justice Samuel Alito’s mouthed retort left commentators across the political spectrum arguing about potential breaches of decorum on both sides.

“Occupy the Courts,” a movement part of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests, has lambasted the decision for enabling wealthy donors to bombard swing state voters with negative advertisements. Even comedian Stephen Colbert has made a mockery of the lack of regulations regarding what Super PACS can and cannot do by creating his own Super PAC. Currently, opponents of the decision are considering unlikely range of tactics in response, including constitutional amendments.

The 2012 election is the first election for president to take place with the influence of Super PACs. Notre Dame Law professor Lloyd Mayer, in an interview with The Politic, predicts that, “Super PACS will likely target presidential swing states and close federal and state elections, ignoring other sates and elections.” This conclusion is reinforced by data derived from the CRS Super PAC report. Of the $40,841,528 Super PACs spent on 2010 senate races, $28,422,989 (70%) was spent on just seven races ranked by RealClearPolitics as “toss-ups,” which accounted for only 19% of contested seats. As Mayer predicts, Super PAC money was strongly concentrated in the small number of truly competitive races. Furthermore, this money appears to primarily fund negative campaigns, adding to what many Americans feel is a growing problem of divisiveness and negativity in politics. For instance, approximately 80% of ads in the Republican primary funded by Super PACs were attack ads.

Money has been an integral part of political campaigns long before the Supreme Court made its 2010 ruling in Citizens United. The 2008 presidential campaign saw record-breaking fundraising efforts with Barack Obama raising a total of $745.7 million in private funds after declining to receive public funds. Money will continue to be important in politics, unless we look at the issue from an alternative perspective.

Most reformers focus on how to affect the supply of money in politics. When it comes to money in politics, FairVote’s focus is on electoral reforms that will reduce the demand for money in politics by reducing the impact of money. We examine the way the electoral system creates incentives for politicians to target expensive campaigns at the handful of “swing” voters that decide election outcomes and to rely on excessive negative advertising. Changing the electoral system, and thereby changing the incentives, is a promising means to “keep money in its place.”

The underlying problem behind the lack of meaningful elections in America is the winner-take-all rule. Winner-take-all is an electoral rule wherein the candidate with more votes than any other candidate wins the election, without taking into account the preferences of voters who did not vote for the winning candidate. This system traps most voters in elections they have no hope of affecting, accentuates the effects of gerrymandering, and encourages presidential candidates and big money interests to focus on the small set of swing states and swing districts where persuading 4%-5% of voters will change who’s in the White House, runs Congress and runs our state legislatures.

With winner-take-all rules, political activity only makes sense when candidates are not comfortably ahead or hopelessly behind Long before the Citizens United decision, the majority of senate and congressional races, as well as the presidential race in most states, were and are considered “safe” for the Democratic or Republican Party - which is just another way of saying that the elections in those states and districts have been reduced to meaningless formalities.

But what if every election was meaningful? What if presidential elections depended on more than a handful of swing states, Senate races provided more choices than the party-appointed candidates, and voters were not locked into congressional districts designed to re-elect incumbents? FairVote’s proposals to change winner-take-all voting rules would reduce the impact of money by increasing the impact of voters. When it comes to a general election choice between candidates representing different parties, most voters know what they want – freed from winner-take-all, their power to earn representation is not affected by money.

Each of FairVote’s core reform proposals in their own way would reduce the power of money in politics. Let’s review them briefly:

A constitutional right to vote and reforms to enhance voting rights and participation: A great deal of money is spent trying to get people to vote – or to get people not to vote. If we developed rules and cultural norms promoting high participation, such spending would be less affective.

A national popular vote for president: Today, 99% of campaign spending in the final months of the general election for president is focused on “battleground” states” representing about a third of Americans. In those states, it is focused heavily on swing voters. If every vote counted in every election, that money would need to be dispersed more widely- -and create new incentives for grassroots organizing to build and sustain voter turnout in every election.

Instant runoff voting: This ranked choice voting systems makes it easier for more than two candidates to seek a winner-take-all office by essentially eliminating the “spoiler” problem associated with our plurality voting system. It would make negative campaigns a losing proposition because winning candidates would have to appeal to voters rather than drive away their opponents’ voter in order to receive second- or third-choice support. Negative attacks designed to hurt a candidate are less certain to help the perpetrator of such attacks when there are more than two candidates. That helps explain why in a number of major instant runoff voting elections for mayor in recent years, candidates better at grassroots organizing and coalition-building defeated candidates who spent much more money.

Proportional voting: Most fundamental of all, proportional voting provides an alternative to winner-take-all elections for legislatures. It allows most voters to help elect a candidate of choice by joining with like-minded voters: 10% of the vote earns 10% of seats, 33% of votes wins a third of seats, 51% of votes wins a majority of seats and so on. The many voters not affected by money in their voting decisions would be liberated to elect candidates they like.

FairVote understands why the campaign finance debate generally focuses on the regulations under which campaign funders operate. But we offer an alternate perspective: by changing the incentives that motivate campaign funders, we can change the way campaigns are run.

________

Colbert Photo Credit: Tyler Sadonis

Understanding how the Iowa caucuses work – and don’t work

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:49:55 -0800

The national media is in a frenzy about the Republican contest in tonight’s Iowa caucuses. Unfortunately, most journalists seem to be getting the story wrong – and a key reason is not understanding or even thinking about the rules and their implications.

First, we shouldn’t obsess over who gets the most votes in the caucuses -- seriously. Several candidates are polling in double digits, but none are getting more than 25%. If that holds up, then the “winner” will have been rejected as a first choice by as many as four out of every five caucus participants.

Depending on the candidate finishing at the top of the heap, that winning total in fact might be closer to a ceiling of support rather than a floor. In other words, that winner might have been landslide loser if facing off against just his or her strongest opponent in a runoff.

Furthermore, Republicans aren’t allocating delegates on a winner-take-all basis. Indeed, they aren’t awarding national convention delegates at all tonight – the final Iowa delegates won’t be chosen for months at the state convention. Tonight is really more of a straw poll.

Given that it’s a straw poll and the media obsession with “winning,” it’s a shame that Iowa isn’t using instant runoff voting rather than plurality voting. Plurality voting simply isn’t designed for elections with more than two choices. In 2008, for example, John McCain’s nomination became inevitable due to low-plurality wins like his 37% in New Hampshire, 33% in South Carolina and 36% in Florida.

Ironically, the GOP field has several candidates who may have benefited from plurality rules. In 2006, for example, Rick Perry’s re-election bid in Texas drew just 39% when opposed by a Democrat and two strong independent candidates. In 2008, Michele Bachmann earned only 46% in her re-election to the U.S. House.

Given that Iowa Republicans are stuck with plurality voting, though, journalists should calm down about “winning.” It’s the same with most other primaries and caucuses before April 1st due to the fact that most states use variations of proportional representation for allocating delegates Proportional voting means that the statewide winner is only likely to earn more delegates, not all delegates. With only South Carolina and Florida using a statewide winner-take-all rule that shuts out opponents, candidates can come back from defeats.

Just like Tim Pawlenty must be regretting his decision to drop out after finishing “only” third in the August straw poll in Iowa, candidates should consider staying in the race, making their point and giving more of the nation’s Republicans a chance to weigh on in on their nominee.

So, political junkies, sit back, and eat your popcorn as you watch the pundits go crazy tonight. But let’s keep things in perspective –and be open to sensible changes to improve the process.

Lower Presidential Election Turnout in Safe Republican States

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:38:42 -0700

Thirteen states have voted for Republicans in every presidential election since 1980: Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Wyoming. This track record makes them the most consistently safe Republican strongholds in modern presidential politics.

To study the effects of living in a safe state on voter turnout, FairVote compared the combined turnout in these 13 states with the turnout in the remaining states over the last six elections, starting with the Bush-Dukakis election of 1988 and ending with the Obama-McCain election of 2008.

In 1988, these states' turnout barely trailed that of the rest of the country, by 2.56%. But in every election since, these 13 states have fallen further behind. In 2008, their turnout was 6.22% behind the rest of the nation.

Meanwhile, the safest Democrat states (the 12 states that went for Obama in 2008 by more than 10% and for either Kerry or Gore by more than 10%) have experienced a similar trend as turnout lessened compared to the rest of the country in each election from 1988 to 2004 (although their turnout started off higher than the safest Republican states).

Our findings should come as no surprise. Under the Electoral College system as currently constituted, people vote for president at the state-level. Once all votes are tallied in a state, the winner of the statewide popular vote receives all of the state's electoral votes. This is known as the winner-take-all rule, in place as a statute in 49 of the 51 states (including the District of Columbia, which has electors).

Due to this winner-take-all rule, presidential candidates focus solely on the few swing states that could affect the election. States with more distinct political leanings are ignored. As demonstrated by our findings, voters in the safest states are treated as less relevant - and as a result are less inclined to vote.

By Any Other Name - It's A Party

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 16:14:57 -0700

It's only a matter of time when the right combination of political message and social networking will capture the imagination of enough people to bring in a successful new party to American politics. And it will happen, in part, when this group admits that they are actually a political party!

The notion of the Internet “start up” is already legendary. You know the story, the one about the person with an idea that harnesses the power of technology and how it takes off to bring them, and their investors, billions of dollars. A similar vision is emerging in our democratic system but with policy entrepreneurs seeking to make their mark with politics in the United States.

Political “start ups” have been emerging. Most recent are, NO Labels and Americans Elect, respectively. Both decry the current state of partisanship and are trying to appeal to moderate voters. These efforts are web-based organizing but stop short of declaring themselves a new party.

I attended the NO Labels kick off in New York City last year. It was impressive. They had Mayor Michael Bloomberg there along with former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and other major politicians. New York Times columnist David Brooks gave the key-note. No Labels seeks to have local chapters advocate centrist issues to lawmakers. This is a version of Meetup, the social networking tool that broke a lot of ground in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary.

Americans Elect have their eye on the ballot line itself and are planning an on-line nominating convention for voters to pick a presidential ticket next spring. This innovation means that Americans Elect are leading in transforming the presidential nominating system – a process that many say is failing. Some states are even cutting the funding for presidential nominations.

Even though the fundamental function of a political party is to nominate candidates, and their nominees will appear on the ballot with the Americans Elect imprimatur – this group still claims they’re not a party! Regardless, they are offering people a “party like” buy-in. Their site offers:

“As a Delegate, you will help shape the rules, craft the platform of key questions the candidates must answer, and ultimately choose the nominees. You also can draft your favorite leaders to run”.

It will be interesting to watch what nominees of an on-line convention will do with the mantle of Americans Elect and the crucial ballot access the group is gaining in individual states.

At this point, NO Labels and Americans Elect give a glimpse of the potential for democracy in the digital age.

Like the commercial realm, there’s risk in new ventures where many ideas won’t take off, while others can soar. The Internet is rooted in association. People are coming together on-line regarding any endeavor imaginable. They’re banding together, creating groups, forming leagues or societies & networking. Call it what you will, if it’s a political association, I still say it’s a party.

(I have devised a template for a web-based party. The idea is rooted in letting members have ownership).

California's Proposition 14: Weaknesses and Remedies

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 12:02:31 -0700

On June 8, 2010, the voters of California approved Proposition 14, “The Top Two Primaries Act,” (“the Act”) with 53.7% of the vote. In its own words, the Act’s intention is “to protect and preserve the right of every Californian to vote for the candidate of his or her choice.” All general elections will be won with a majority of the vote, and voters in the primary are generally free to vote for their true first choice with little fear that doing so will help elect their least favored candidate. Many of its backers argued that by giving independent voters more influence in determining which candidates advance to the general election, the Act would result in more moderate politicians and less gridlock in the legislature.

The Act and associated statutes establish a system in which all registered voters can participate in a primary to be held in June and cast one vote for the candidate of their choosing for each office. Instead of separate primary contests according to party affiliation, there will be an “open primary” where all candidates compete against one another. Candidates may choose either to be unaffiliated or to identify with a state-recognized party, and voters can vote for any candidate, regardless of party. In the November general election, voters choose between the two candidates who received the most votes in the primary. No other candidates are permitted on the ballot, nor are write-in candidacies allowed.

While FairVote respects the decision of California voters and applauds the goal of giving voters more choices, more competitive elections and fairer representation than that provided by the system replaced by the Act, we have concerns about several ramifications of the hastily-drafted language of statutes implementing the Act. Several of the Act’s problems are wholly or in part caused by these statutes rather than the language of the Act itself. We recommend that the legislature enact several statutory changes that will not require any further changes to the state constitution. We believe these changes will make the Act more likely to succeed in its intent of providing voters with more choice and better representation. We do not believe they should be controversial. Indeed, several of our recommendations are already part of Washington State’s version of the Top Two law.

After explaining our concerns about the Act and associated statutes, we detail our recommended statutory changes to mitigate the impact of these defects. We also explain more substantial changes involving establishing an “Open General Election” that would require amending the Act in California, but should be considered by states or jurisdictions interested in the open primaries model.

Iraq’s 2010 Parliamentary Election – Part 7: Politics Blowing Up Democracy

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 13:17:50 -0700

Last time I wrote a post on the Iraqi election, I was explaining why de-baathification should not affect the post-election political balance. However, it seems more and more obvious that political maneuvering is clouding Iraq’s future.
52 candidates, including two of them who won seats for the Iraqiya list, have been retroactively disqualified from the ballot by the judicial commission in charge of de-baathification, and their votes discarded.

The Iraqi electoral system is based on open-lists. In a list system, seats go to parties according to their fair share of the vote, and then are awarded to candidates from the winning lists. In the Iraqi open-list system, Iraqis chose a party, and then had a possibility to choose one candidate from their favorite list, but voting for a candidate was optional. Seats are thus still distributed among the parties first, and then among candidates from those parties with the most popular votes.
This means that the repartition of seats among the candidates from one party should not affect the seat’s distribution among the other parties. This is precisely what the electoral law states: each party should be able to replace blacklisted candidates with its next top-voted candidates.
However, since the votes of the 52 candidates are discarded (both those from winners and losers), the Independent High Electoral Commission considers that the votes received by the parties are also discarded and is willing to recalculate results in all of the affected districts. This could shift around some seats, which is fundamental, since there is only a two seat difference between the top two winners. But above all, it skews the process of fair representation for political reasons.
In fact, it specifically penalizes voters who fully used the open-list system, whereas if a voter did not choose a candidate, his or her vote would not be cancelled. This is putting at risk the whole idea of democracy in Iraq and stealing votes from Iraqis, without any legal basis.

A few other quick notes about what happened recently:

We’re not likely to have final results of the parliamentary elections for a few weeks, since votes are going to be manually recounted at least in Baghdad, at Maliki’s request. Furthermore, Allawi is about to ask for a new vote, based on the premise that the political post-election de-baathification deliberately targets his party. This is indeed the reason why I have not provided you with an analysis of the results yet: I want to wait until all the results are finally certified.
The Sadrists, who won 39 seats in the 325-seat parliament, hold a referendum to decide who should be the next Iraqi Prime Minister. This initiative deserved to be noticed, even if it has no legal authority and mostly attracted Sadrist backers, because Iraqis were consulted on a national matter. With 24% of the 1.5 million of casted votes, Ibrahim al-Jaafari won the referendum, with Jaafar al-Sadr coming in second with 23%, and could appear as a compromise candidate.

The political situation in Iraq is now getting messy. No judicial decision is very clear, there are obvious legal gaps and political rivalries dominate. However, since an Iraqi court ruled that any party leader could form a new government, as long as he is able to assemble a large enough parliamentary coalition, parties should be working on building an inclusive government, rather than fighting for one or two seats nationwide!

Stay tuned for our next analysis on the Iraqi election!

French Regional elections: With "proportional" system, the devil is in the details...

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 07:37:15 -0700

On March 14th and 21st, French voters elected their 26 regional councils (Conseil régional in French), which are the local governments of each of France’s 26 regions. Used, since 2004, the voting system combines elements of winner-take-all elections and proportional representation, and gender quotas have resulted in a a remarkable growth in representation of women.

In France, regions do not have any legislative autonomy, but they manage significant budgets and have a certain freedom of administration as part of the decentralization process. Thus, the responsibilities of the elected regional councils cover a wide range of fields, such as high schools, apprenticeships, vocational training, regional public transport systems, economic development, employment and regional spatial planning.

The left, taking 54% of the vote at the national level, won control of 21 of the 22 regions in mainland, and of 23 of the 26 regions. The National Front, a far right party, also did well with 11.42% of the national vote in the first round. Those results, combined with the historically poor score of the Presidential majority, which is the coalition supporting Sarkozy and his government (27% in the first round, 35.4% in the second round), constituted a major electoral setback for President Sarkozy. In addition, the turnout dropped to a historic low, barely reaching 46% in the first round and 51% in the second round.

A main point of interest, beyond the results, is how the number of seats won by parties, at a regional and national level, does not mirror the electorate. For instance, nationwide, the left received 68% of the seats with 54% of the vote and the Presidential Majority won 29.7% of the seats with 35.4% of the vote. Indeed, the semi-proportional system used for the regional elections distorts the electoral dynamics. This is why you want to take a closer look at it.

Critics considered that the closed-list system of proportional representation (PR) used before 2004 enabled third parties such as the National Front to be kingmakers. Since the 2004 elections, a majority rule has been added to the regional party-list system to ensure more efficient governance. Consequently, in each region, the list that receives the most votes (either a majority in the first round, or a plurality in the second round) automatically wins 25% of the seats, as a bonus. And in the case of a runoff, because no list won a majority in the first round, only the lists that won at least 10% of the votes in the first round are allowed to compete. As to the three other quarters of the seats, they are proportionally allocated between the parties that were part of the final round, according to their fair share of the vote. As a result, the party winning the most votes is likely to secure a majority in the regional council.

However, despite three quarters of the seats being allocated proportionally, the system does not provide voters with fair representation. The bonus given to the list with the most votes, and the threshold to be part of the runoff, significantly skew the process in each region, favoring major parties and providing voters with a representation that does not match reality: the left won 14% more seats nationwide than they should have according to their share of the vote and the Center party hardly got any representation at all (0.58% of the seats nationwide), despite winning 4% of the vote in the first round.

Another main point of interest of those elections, more encouraging, is women’s representation. The electoral law, since 2004, requires each regional party list to alternate genders to achieve equal representation of men and women in the elected regional councils. As a result, nationwide, 48% of the members elected in 2010 are now women, when women were only 27.5% of the members in 1998.

The electoral law also requires the regional governments elected by the regional councils to be equally composed from men and women. As a result, women now constitute 48% of the regional governments nationwide and 11 regional governments are made up of at least 50% women. Only two regions (Martinique and Guyane, which are not in mainland) fail to meet their obligations, with only 41.67% and 44.44% of women in their regional government.

Women’s representation still can be improved though, as to the region’s presidency: only two regions have elected a woman as their president, one of them being Ségolène Royal, who ran for president in 2007.

Usually elected for six years, the members of the regional councils elected last month have a four-year mandate, as part of a reform of the local government. Efforts to merge different levels of local governments have led to devising a new electoral system: 80% of the members of the local governments would be elected through a first-past-the-post system and the last 20% through PR. This proposed electoral system is definitely a step in the wrong direction: equal representation of women and men won’t be guaranteed anymore, and smaller parties will hardly get represented at the local level. Instead, it would make more sense to keep more list seats, and, for the district seats, to consider instant-runoff-voting, where voters have a real chance to express their preference.

Iraq’s 2010 Parliamentary Election – Part 6: De-Baathification Should Not Affect the Post-Election Political Balance

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:30:04 -0700

This post was supposed to focus on the March 7th election results. However, the ongoing post-election maneuvering deserves some extra attention. Iraq’s Accountability and Justice Commission has sought to disqualify 52 candidates, six of whom actually won seats, because of their alleged ties to the Baath party. The legitimacy of the de-baathification process itself is not being called into question here, but rather its implications for the election’s outcome.

The de-baathification process started under the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003. In January 2010, the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) followed the Accountability and Justice Commission’s recommendation by disqualifying 511 candidates because of their alleged ties to the Baath Party. Many of those candidates were part of former Primer Minister Allawi’s Iraqiya coalition.

A few days before the election, the “de-baathification committee” sought to blacklist 52 additional candidates, but the IHEC allowed them to run. The Accountability and Justice Commission now challenges their eligibility and expects their votes to be stricken. Consequently, a court will have to decide whether the six winning candidates (four from the Iraqiya, one Kurdish and one from the State of Law) can be part of the new legislature and whether the votes received by the 52 candidates should be thrown out.

However, regardless of the court’s decision concerning the banning of candidates, it should not change the seats’ distribution, let-alone the election’s outcome! And here is why:

The elections have been held on the basis of an open list system.

This means that Iraqi voters expressed their preference for a list and then had the opportunity to also mark their favorite candidate within that list. Seats were awarded based on each list’s share of the votes in a constituency.

As a result, challenging the victory of some candidates within a list should not have any implication for the seats’ repartition between parties. According to the electoral law, each party should be able to replace blacklisted candidates with its next top-voted candidates.

A court’s decision to disregard the votes received by the blacklisted candidates is likely to lack any legal basis and would be highly political.

First of all, the electoral commission allowed those 52 candidates to run, which means the votes they received as alliances’ candidates are valid and should still be counted for the seats’ repartition between parties.

Furthermore, the current Accountability and Justice Commission’s power is uncertain, since it is attached to the Council of Representatives, which is no longer in session. Besides, its heads ran as parliamentary candidates: Ahmad Chalabi won a seat in the new parliament, and Ali Faisal al-Lami was unsuccessful. This pretty looks like an obvious conflict of interest.

It is also clear that the disqualification effort could prove critical to the election’s outcome, since Allawi’s Iraqiya won only two seats more than al-Maliki’s State of Law, and four of the six challenged candidates are from the Iraqiya alliance.

An Iraqi court ruled that any party leader who is able to assemble a large enough parliamentary coalition can be chosen to form the new government. It does not have to be the alliance that won the most seats in the March 7th election. As a result, both al-Maliki and Allawi can work on building an inclusive coalition government. This is why de-baathification should not affect the post-election political balance.

Check-out my response in the National to an article about the March 7th elections.

Stay tuned for a detailed analysis of the March 7th election results in our next post!

Iraq’s 2010 Parliamentary Election – Part 5: Familiar Politicians, Redefined Alliances

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:25:08 -0700

Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission released final results of the March 7th election last Friday. Former Prime Minister Allawi’s secular coalition Iraqiya scored a narrow victory with 91 seats, edging out Prime Minister Al-Maliki’s State of Law Coalition that won 89 seats. I am going to spend time analyzing the results in the next few days and share my thoughts with you about them. In the meantime, giving you some background on the political forces in Iraq should be very useful to fully understand the ongoing negotiations to form a new ruling coalition.

In terms of political alliances, the situation has evolved considerably since 2005. In the January 2005 election, 111 lists were competing and by the December 2005 election, 228 lists were registered. However, Iraq’s major parties had formed three main blocs: the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (won 47% of the seats), the Kurdistani Alliance (won 20% of the seats) and the Sunni Iraqi Accordance Front (won 16% of the seats).

Those large coalitions broke apart ahead of the 2010 election, ending an era of Iraqi politics with parties split along clear sectarian lines. As a result, 306 registered political parties participated in the March 7th election, with seven main alliances competing for seats:

The Iraqi National Alliance

al-Hakim

The Islamic Iraqi National Alliance, supported by Vice President Abdul Mahdi, is the successor of the United Iraqi Alliance that almost won a majority of seats in 2005 and dominated the government since. It mainly comprises religious Shia elements, such as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq led by Ammar al-Hakim, the Badr organization and the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and openly appealed to the Shia religious elements in its campaign.

The State of Law Coalition

al-Maliki

The State of Law Coalition is led by Prime Minister Al-Maliki and dominated by the Islamic Dawa that left the United Iraqi Alliance. It regroups tens of small parties, in an attempt to create a trans-sectarian, nationalist alliance, and campaigned on the success of Maliki’s government in restoring security in Iraq.

The Iraqi Accord

al-Samarrai

The Sunni Iraqi Accord is nominally a relict from the Iraqi Accord Front that won 16% of the seats in 2005. After losing its more secular leaders, it is almost entirely made up of the Iraqi Islamic Party, and supported by the speaker of the current Parliament, Ayad al-Samarrai. It focused its campaign on the two provinces where they were likely to get the best elections results: Nineveh and Anbar.

The Iraqi Unity

al-Bolani

Partly derived from the Iraqi Accordance Front, the Iraqi Unity intended to be a secular alliance bringing together Shiites, such as the interior minister al-Bolani, and Sunnis, such as the tribal leader, Sheik Ahmed Abu Risha. However, the de-baathification process disqualified many of its candidates, which significantly weakened the alliance.

The Iraqi National Movement / Iraqiya

Allawi

The Iraqiya coalition is a largely secular and anti-sectarian alliance that relies on strong political personalities. Its campaign focused on a nationalist theme as well as on restoring Iraq’s greatness in the region. Led by the former Prime Minister Allawi, a Shiite with strong links to Western countries, and Vice President al-Hashimi, a Sunni, it quickly emerged as a key challenger in the March 7th elections, even if some of its key leaders were banned because of alleged ties to the Baath party.

The Kurdish lists : the Kurdistani Alliance versus Gorran

Talabani

Mustafa

For the first time since 2003, the Kurds did not have a unified coalition, but still did not show any desire to join non-sectarian alliances, campaigning on Kurdistani issues. The Kurdistani Alliance still brings together the two parties administering the semi-autonomous Kurdish region: the “Kurdistan Democratic Party” and the “Patriotic Union of Kurdistan,” which used to be engaged in a war with each other and won 20% of the parliamentary seats in 2005. However, its preeminence in the Kurdish region has been weakened by an opposition movement, Gorran, which means Change, which emerged in reaction to corruption within Kurdish politics and won a quarter of the seats of the Kurdistan's parliamentary in 2009.

The release of final results officially started the process of forming a new cabinet. With its alliance winning the most seats, Allawi has 30 days to form a government. But if he fails at getting a coalition that holds a majority of 163 seats, the leader of another political list will be designated instead. As a result, those seven major coalitions are going to be battling to form the coalition government.

Stay tuned for our next post that will provide a detailed analysis of the March 7th election results!

Iraq’s 2010 Parliamentary Election - Part 4: Iraqi Women’s Political Reality

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:00:32 -0700

This blog series on the 2010 Iraqi parliamentary elections is all about how Iraq has been working on building an inclusive, fair voting system. So far, the main focus has been on the Iraqi open-list form of proportional representation (PR), designed to overcome sectarian rifts and stabilize the country. It is now about time to take a closer look at women’s role in the Iraqi electoral process.

Iraq’s 2010 parliamentary elections took place on the eve of the March 8th International Women’s Day, whose theme was “Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities.” The closeness of the two events is a great opportunity to think about gender issues.

First of all, the Iraqi constitution states that all Iraqis are equal before the law without discrimination based on gender (art. 14), which of course means that women are allowed to vote and to run as candidates.

Let’s consider some numbers. Women currently make up 25.5% of the Iraqi Council of Representatives, in comparison to 16.8% of the U.S. House of Representatives. According to the data collected by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the Iraqi level of female representation in parliament is also higher than the world average of 19.1%, and a lot better than in any of its neighboring countries. These figures are encouraging for the fledgling Iraqi democracy and revealing of a political will to establish high-quality representation.

The Iraqi Constitution requires at least one quarter of the Council of Representatives’ members to be women. This provision translated into a quota reserving 25% of the 325 seats for them. Concretely, the electoral law expected, for each list, at least one woman to be among the first three nominees, at least two women to be among the first six nominees and so on until the end of the list.

However, the 2010 election was held under an open list system, which means that for each winning list, the candidates with the highest number of votes will be elected, compared to the candidates listed first. As a result, ensuring that each third candidate is a woman won’t necessarily result in women being a third of the elected members. This is why a corrective mechanism will be applied if less than 82 women initially get elected through the open list system. To make a long story short, women who received the most votes without winning a seat after the initial allocation will be moved up the list to replace winning male candidates, until the total number of female winners reaches the quota. This is a way to protect women’s participation in the Council of Representatives.

It should also be noted that in a country where women constitute a majority of the population, ensuring that they receive a quarter of the seats was not an extreme measure. In fact, initially, the quota was to be set to 40%, but women’s rights were not American officials’ priority back in 2003 to 2005 when they were participating in the drafting of the Iraqi democratic system.

My point is not to discuss the benefits and disadvantages of a quota for women in itself, but rather, to show how its implementation was relevant in Iraq. In fact, the quota has been used in the male-dominated Iraqi society to give women a chance to have a political role and prove their competence and reliability in politics. And the quantitative results are good: a quarter of the current Council of Representatives’ members are women and out of the 6,200 candidates running for the March 7th election, 1,801 were women (30%).

From a larger perspective though, attitudes still need to evolve. Under the closed-list system, parties had a tendency to nominate women they could control. What’s more, in 2009, only five Ministers out of 40 were women and their portfolios were focused on what is generally perceived as “women’s issues,” such as Women’s Affairs and Human Rights. Besides, contrary to minority groups that won strength by constituting substantive groups in the Council of Representatives, women stayed marginalized despite being a quarter of the Parliament: they disagree on core issues, which prevents them from having a meaningful voice in the debate. However, by largely participating in the committees, they have begun to have a significant role in Iraqi politics.

The 2010 campaign for the March 7th election has undeniably showed improvements in Iraqi society's view of women. For the first time since Saddam Hussein’s ouster, some female candidates, such as Fairuz Hatem for the Iraqi National Alliance and Safiya al-Souhail for the State of Law Alliance, campaigned without any veil and appeared with their uncovered heads, wearing business suits and makeup on election posters and in televised debates. An all-female political party has also been created, which seeks to empower Iraqi women in the educational and economic sectors and has won the support of the Iraq Unity Alliance, a secular, cross-sectarian coalition.

Iraqi women now hope that their capability and ability will be widely recognized, so that they’ll be able to get rid of the quota system. For now, as long as some structural barriers remain, the quota system helps improve Iraq’s representation and gives women a say in the political process.

Stay tuned for our next post featuring the role of political coalitions in Iraq!