FairVote Feed: News

FairVote's Leadership on Right to Vote

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:31:26 -0700

May has been a big month for FairVote's work advancing a right to vote in the Constitution. In Congress, representatives Mark Pocan and Keith Ellison introduced bill for a right to vote amendment along lines that we have recommended, featuring quotes from FairVote in their news release.

Locally, our hometown of Takoma Park (MD) became the first to pass a resolution in support of a constitutional right to vote and is making concrete commitments to expand suffrage and boost turnout. One significant change: Takoma Park will become the first city in the United States to extend voting rights to residents after they turn 16.

FairVote news release and Rep. Pocan press release on right to vote amendment
The Nation's John Nichols on amendment, with Rob Richie quote
Takoma Park's right to vote resolution and FairVote's Promote Our Vote project
Rob Richie's Huffington Post article on Takoma Park's voting rights advancements

FairVote's 2014 Congressional Analysis

Wed, 01 May 2013 06:38:27 -0700

Every two years, FairVote conducts a thorough analysis of congressional elections, pointing out problems and making predictions in U.S. House of Representatives districts in all 50 states, that we call Monopoly Politics. We recently released our first projections for the 2014 congressional elections, including publishing a downloadable spreadsheet with partisanship data for every congressional district in the country. Check out the media coverage of our 2014 projections, our Monopoly Politics 2012 report, and our resources on the fair voting solution:

Monopoly Politics 2014 in the New York Times and on Chuck Todd's The Daily Rundown
In part one of the 2014 Monopoly Politics report, FairVote Releases Projections for the 2014 Congressional Elections.
Download the spreadsheet with all our data on every congressional district, or view it in your browser.
View our full Monopoly Politics 2012 report and see the Fair Voting Solution
Read about the fair voting solution in the U-Richmond Law Review and in Salon

FairVote's Major New Publications & Opeds

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 08:23:30 -0700

FairVote regularly publishes op-eds, blogs and longer articles. Rob Richie and Andrea Levien have an upcoming article on the National Popular Vote plan for president in the prestigious Presidential Studies Quarterly, and Richie and Drew Spencer have a new University of Richmond Law Review article on the case for choice voting as an alternative to winner-take-all elections in the United States. Read examples of recent publications:

U-Richmond Law Review: "How Choice Voting Will End Gerrymandering and Expand Minority Voting Rights, From City Councils to Congress"
Every Vote Equal: A State-Based Plan For Electing The President By National Popular Vote 2013 edition of the comprehensive analysis of presidential elections coauthored by Rob Richie
Widely-published oped on women's representation by Patricia Hart & Cynthia Terrell
Rob Richie in Huffingtonton Post: "Major Media: Stop Perpetuating Myth That Electoral College Rules Help Small States"
Andrea Levien: 'BattleGround Texas' Years Away
Devin McCarthy & Sara Helmi: Japan's Electoral Unfairness Goes Deeper than Malapportionment

FairVote Testimony on Independent Redistricting in Maryland

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 13:22:08 -0700

Testimony of FairVote - The Center for Voting and Democracy

Devin McCarthy, Research Fellow and Drew Spencer, Legal Fellow

HB 233

Presented to Rules and Executive Nominations Committee, March 11, 2013

About FairVote

FairVote - The Center for Voting and Democracy is a non-partisan, non-profit thinktank and advocacy organization working since 1992 on reforms ranging from election administration to electoral systems. Based in Takoma Park, FairVote works locally, statewide and nationally. FairVote has advised non-governmental organizations and policy-makers at all levels on the conduct of elections including U.S. Representative John Tanner on the Fairness and Independence in Redistricting Act (2005) and U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney on the Voters' Choice Act (1999).

Summary

FairVote supports HB 233 and the creation of a Study Commission on the Redistricting Process in Maryland. We believe that the Study Commission should examine use of non-winner-take-all election methods within current districts. Independent redistricting plans can avoid efforts to put partisan interests above the public interest, but inevitably result in conflict among important values such as voter choice, geographic compactness, racial fairness, representation of women, and leadership accountability. If given the authority to implement candidate-based forms of proportional representation in multi-member districts, however, independent redistricting commissions would be able to achieve all of these goals in creating districting plans for Maryland.

Expectations About Legislative Districts

In general, there are four categories of criteria we would like to satisfy when settling on a districting plan. One is aesthetic; how does it look on a map? A district that looks gerrymandered seems intuitively unfair; it looks like, during its construction, some other concern took precedence over having genuine competitions for office. This was Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's concern inShaw v. Reno (1993) when she argued that a majority-minority district in North Carolina was "so bizarre" that the map must be held to strict scrutiny. Furthermore, districts preserving local political jurisdiction lines establish a more coherent political experience for voters.

Another set of criteria necessarily leads to the purposeful creation of 'safe' districts. A critically important goal of elections is fair representation of different viewpoints and different communities. It seems intuitively wrong to divide pre-existing communities of interest exhibiting relatively cohesive voting patterns. It is illegal under the Voting Rights Act in certain protected districts to dilute racial minority voting strength by dividing those populations among other districts. It seems unfair to punish a several-term incumbent by eliminating his or her district solely because 'rampant incumbency' is in the public eye. From a more technical perspective, safer districts minimize wasted votes; the more people who vote for winning candidates, the fewer voters walk away from the polls with their ballots not having mattered.

At the same time, it's important to have 'in play' districts, both so that voters have real choices and a reason to vote and so that they can hold their elected leaders accountable. Incumbency rates are very high in Maryland. Some districts are so noncompetitive that challengers have stopped running, and parties have chosen to ignore them in favor of concentrating on districts where resources might be more effectively used to target voters. Overly safe districts, moreover, can mean a lack of accountability; the representative is beholden to no one if he or she has minimal concern about losing the next election. Leaders can act with impunity if they know they are almost impossible to displace from power through elections.

What Independent Redistricting Can Confer

Independent redistricting can be a useful tool for ensuring fairer, more legitimate legislative elections because it takes overt partisanship out of the process. It can prevent the partisan gerrymandering efforts seen in several states in the 2011-2012 redistricting process, which had substantial effects on the partisan composition of the U.S. House of Representatives and several state legislatures.

The intrinsic value of independent redistricting is the public legitimacy it brings to legislatures and legislative elections; voters have the sense that elected officials have not determined election outcomes before elections are even held. Its instrumental value is that it makes redistricting processes capable of giving fair consideration to criteria other than the benefit of the dominant party. Independent commissions can draw safer districts where the Voting Rights Act and historical communities of interest compel them to do so. They can ensure a proportion of in-play districts where voting behavior is somewhat predictable but populations are more heterogeneous. They can endeavor to minimize "bizarre" looking districts.

What Independent Redistricting Cannot Confer

Independent redistricting processes cannot achieve all of the desirable goals listed above for every voter or likely even for most voters while operating under the structure of winner-take-all elections. Each of the criteria may be met by some districts, but few if any districts will meet all the criteria.

A geographically compact district is not necessarily competitive, nor does it preserve a contiguous community of interest or color. A competitive district, by definition, cannot guarantee one group the ability to elect a candidate of choice. A competitive district, by definition, will maximize wasted votes. The ideal competitive district is one that, based on historical voting patterns, is drawn to contain equal numbers of voters from either major party. In any given election, roughly half the voters in that district will have wasted their votes and be effectively without representation. Voters in safe districts, meanwhile, will have little chance to affect election outcomes. Safe districts are the price of maximizing effective votes.

The cases of states that are currently using independent redistricting demonstrate that several of the above qualities are mutually exclusive. Arizona, for instance, had very few competitive elections in the decade after its independent redistricting was established in 2002. When it had more competitive elections in 2012, Democrats won one more congressional seat than Republicans while receiving fewer votes; its representatives were thus not accountable. Despite its use of independent redistricting and the Top Two primary system, California has a high rate of noncompetitive elections, with over 90% of state and federal legislative races decided by a greater than a 5% margin in 2012, and only four of 53 districts with a partisan balance that will lead them to be consistently competitive in the general election.

In Iowa and Arizona, two of the states garnering the most attention for independent redistricting, women have done quite poorly since its adoption. In fact, a woman has never represented Iowa in Congress, and women have only won six of Arizona's 49 House races since the adoption of independent redistricting in the state. While more accurate representation of women may not be a conventional districting criterion, women as a group remain severely under-represented at all levels of government in the United States.

Multi-seat Districts with Fair Voting

Fair voting systems - that is, alternatives to winner-take-all elections based on voting for candidates in multi-seat districts - have a long history of use in municipal and even state legislative elections in the United States. As one example, New York City was one of two dozen American municipalities using such a format to elect its city councils during the Progressive Era. Illinois elected its state legislature in three-seat districts using a fair voting system from 1870 to 1980, with the result that fewer votes were wasted; downtown Chicago districts would elect one Republican and districts in DuPage Country would elect one Democrat.

Under fair voting in a three-seat district, each candidate needs to win just over a quarter of the vote to earn a seat and just over half the votes to win two. By contrast, in a winner-take-all district, a group needs to equal over 50% of the population to be guaranteed the opportunity to win representation. The benefit of fair voting in multi-seat districts is straightforward: it can allow an independent redistricting commission to meet more criteria simultaneously for the same district and the same voters. For example, a geographically compact district can be drawn that ensures a VRA-protected community can elect a candidate of choice while allowing the political minority there to cast a meaningful ballot at the same time. Multi-seat districts-already used to elect the Maryland House of Delegates-encourage the nomination of female candidates because parties are more likely to nominate a gender-diverse slate of candidates when multiple candidates are running in the same geographic area. By eliminating the dichotomy between 'safe' and 'in play,' fair voting systems ease the legal and partisan balancing acts independent commissions can face following a census.

Note that there are different fair voting methods that can be used within multi-seat districts. The Illinois House of Representatives used cumulative voting, a system where voters have as many votes as seats and can choose to allocate more than one of their votes to a single candidate. The Goldmark Commission in New York State in the 1990s recommended the one-vote system for elections to a state constitution convention, which would mean that all voters have one vote each to cast in a multi-seat election. The City of New York used choice voting (also known as single transferable vote) for its five city council elections from 1937 to 1945, and choice voting is used today for national elections in Ireland and Australia as well as some local elections in Minnesota and Massachusetts. All fair voting systems are candidate-based and all can be tailored to accommodate the criteria of a fair and effective redistricting plan that are impossible to balance within single-member districts.

FairVote recommends that any redistricting commission be given the power to consider multi-seat district plans with non-winner-take-all election methods. At the very least, such plans should be strongly considered by a study commission on redistricting. We appreciate that the commission created by HB 233 would include representatives from local organizations like ours with expertise in redistricting issues.

We thank you for your consideration of these ideas and suggestions and would be pleased to provide additional information.

Right to Vote in the Spotlight

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:36:34 -0800

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in an important case involving the Voting Rights Act, while FairVote is stepping up its campaign for Congress to uphold federal law and stop blocking commissioners to be seated on the Federal Election Commission. We're also excited about our new Promote Our Vote campaign designed to generate local actions to expand and protect suffrage. See:

FairVote's Promote Our Vote campaign

Overview of Shelby County case on Voting Rights Act

Put commissioners on the Election Assistance Commission

Shelby County's history with fair voting

Report on Voter ID laws fudged turnout data

The Daily Show skewers opponents of the Voting Rights Act

NEW: March 2013 articles call for constitutional right to vote in The Nation and Democracy

Try Ranked Choice Voting!

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 08:47:57 -0800

Whenever a race for a single seat has more than two candidates, more than half the voters can strongly oppose the "winner" in a traditional plurality system. To eliminate "spoilers" and embrace voter choice, a growing number of cities and colleges are moving to the instant runoff form of ranked choice voting (RCV). It's used to pick the Best Picture Oscar and is now under serious consideration for statewide elections.

Experience RCV yourself through mock Oscar elections, a great new explanatory video, and more!

RCV mock elections at Washington Post and Oscar Votes 1 2 3

FairVote Minnesota presents a new video: RCV in 86 seconds

Top scholars support RCV in San Francisco

Maine wants RCV for gubernatorial elections

New York City may use RCV to elect its mayor

Over 50 college campuses use RCV, including recent elections at Texas A&M and Duke

Background: InstantRunoff.com and IRV Factcheck

Time for National Popular Vote, Not Electoral College Rigging

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 06:55:09 -0800

FairVote has been calling for a national popular vote for president for more than a decade, and the case has never been stronger. The current broken Electoral College system reduces campaigns to fewer than a dozen states and is now allowing partisans to attempt to hijack the presidency. In contrast to plans to divide electoral votes within states, the National Popular Vote is a nonpartisan plan that has support from across the political spectrum.

Our analysis on these partisan election-rigging plans has now been featured on both the Colbert Report and the Rachel Maddow Show. See:

Excerpts from the Colbert Report and Rachel Maddow highlighting FairVote's analysis
Rob Richie's December 2012 blog on how Republicans could lockdown the Electoral College
FairVote's 2011 report on the problems of dividing electoral votes within states
FairVote's 2011 testimony in Pennsylvania comparing different Electoral College approaches
Rob Richie's cover piece in the February 2013 edition of In These Times
Andie Levien's blog on Gallup poll showing the broad bipartisan support for a national popular vote

FairVote Chair Krist Novoselic on Democracy

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 13:26:20 -0800

As Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl of Nirvana reunite along with Paul McCartney to play at the 12/12/12 Hurricane Sandy benefit concert in New York, FairVote celebrates the role that Krist has played in fighting for reforms to improve American democracy. Krist has been chair of FairVote's board of directors since 2008.

Here are some highlights of Krist's FairVote career, including several articles authored by Krist himself:

Some greatest hits from Krist: "On Democracy"
New York Times review of Krist's book, Of Grunge and Government
Recent appearance on the Rachel Maddow Show
The Chairman's Corner: FairVote reforms featured in Mann-Ornstein book
PR Proposal for California: Interview with Michael Latner
Dawning Digital Democracy
A Free and Fair Vote Gives Power to the People
Voters Want Choices. And They Want to Be Heard

Thank you to Krist for all of your great contributions to FairVote!

2012 Congressional Elections Demonstrate Need for Fair Voting

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 08:21:25 -0800

FairVote has analyzed the 2012 congressional elections, and the results are conclusive: it's time to get rid of winner-take-all and elect Congress using fair voting methods. Here are some highlights from our coverage of the recent election:

Partisan Bias in U.S. House Elections: In a Washington Post op-ed, FairVote Executive Director Rob Richie argues that House elections have a significant structural bias in favor of Republicans as a result of winner-take-all elections
The Vanishing Congressional Moderate: Moderates in Congress have all but disappeared, and fair voting is the best way to bring them back
Most Voters Wanted a Democratic House: FairVote's unique analytic methods show that although the Republicans won the House, 52% of voters preferred Democratic candidates
FairVote Correctly Predicts 333 House Races: In July, FairVote made projections for 333 of the 435 congressional races in the 2012 election, all of which proved to be correct
Monopoly Politics 2012: Detailed state profiles and analysis about the 2012 House elections, including election projections
Fair Voting 2012: Comprised of the Fair Voting Interactive Map, Fair Voting Plans for 50 States, and supporting analysis and documentation, Fair Voting 2012 presents a new way of electing the U.S. House of Representatives that aims to correct the political impasse reinforced by our current winner-take-all system by instituting fair voting systems of proportional representation, grounded in our American electoral traditions
Examples of Fair Voting Systems: A description of four fair voting proportional systems that could be implemented under the Fair Voting 2012 plan

2012 Election Resources

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 11:24:31 -0800

FairVote is a reform-minded think tank that studies elections as they are and maps out how they could be. We have some valuable resources for voters and analysts in the 2012 elections. They include:

FairVotingUS.Com: FairVote's interactive map showing the current noncompetitive and unrepresentative Congressional landscape, and the fair voting solution
National Popular Vote: Will the 2012 presidential election be the last under current Electoral College rules?
Monopoly Politics 2012: Detailed state profiles and analysis about the 2012 House elections, including election projections
Presidential Tracker: Tracking the candidates' travels and spending by state
Presidential Election Analysis: When was your state last a battleground?
Voting Rights: Fighting to end the war on the right to vote
Ranked Choice Voting in the Bay Area: Four cities will be using Instant Runoff Voting in elections this November