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Party Poopers: How plurality-based elections in a two party-system undermine democracy, and what we can do about it.
By David Preston
In his farewell address of 1796, El Presidente Numero Uno, George Washington, tried to warn his countrymen about the emerging threat of political parties:
The spirit [of the political party] serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion.
Riots and insurrections? Foreign influence? Obviously, Washington needn’t have fretted on that score. Still, at the heart of his words, we sense a concern that Americans might be tempted to seek office for the benefit of themselves or their party, rather than for the benefit of the nation. And to some extent that concern has been borne out.
Since Washington retired, political parties have come to play an increasingly key role, not just in funding and promoting candidates for office, but in determining what those candidates do once they are in office. As a result, elected officials (especially at the national level) tend to remain loyal to the party machines that helped elect them. This attitude was epitomized by Vice President Dick Cheney, who was asked by journalist Bob Woodward whether George W. Bush’s razor-fine edge in the 2002 election had made him want to proceed with caution in taking the helm of a divided nation. According to Woodward, Cheney replied that he had considered the matter for about thirty seconds and then moved on. “We [Republicans] had an agenda,†Cheney said. “We ran on that agenda, we won the election. Full speed ahead.â€
Beyond the rise of party politics per se, a variety of factors in national politics (the rise of corporate and media influence, the complexity of the modern world) have left Americans with just two “serious†major parties to choose from: Democrat and Republican. In order to assure their continued ascendancy, both of these parties actively discourage so-called third parties from entering the ring, and one of the ways they do that is by framing third-party candidates and the people who vote for them as vote splitters or spoilers. Their arguments usually go something like this:
You third-party voters support some of our platform, but you’ve got your guy and we’ve got ours. You know your guy can’t win the election, so why split the vote and keep our guy from winning?—especially when you share many of our beliefs? You know you don’t like the other candidate, and if he gets in because you split the vote, it will be a disaster. But worse than that—it will be your fault.
Offering a carrot to go along with this stick, the major party might then adopt some of the third-party candidate’s platform, or even “draft†the third-party candidate in exchange for his agreement to drop out of the race. (This happens quite frequently in the primaries, where second- and third-place contenders for a major party nomination play the role of third-party challengers.)
Unfortunately, third-party voters may be susceptible to the “don’t rain on our parade†arguments of the major parties—even if they end up voting for their preferred candidate. Then, depending on how things turn out after the election, they may feel guilty for having voted their conscience, or lousy for not having voted it.
Surely democracy is not supposed to work like that. In a truly representative system, voters should be able to vote their conscience without guilt. At the same time, there are valid reasons for major parties to fear third-party candidates—reasons that have nothing to do with party ideology, but have everything to do with the way the American electoral system works. The first of these is our system of plurality voting. The second is our winner-take-all method of allotting political representation.
Plurality voting is a system whereby the person who gets the most votes in an election wins, even if that person has less than an overall majority (i.e., 50% of the votes cast, plus 1). Plurality voting works perfectly in elections with only two candidates. In that case, the winner will always have an overall majority as well. But what about elections with more than two contenders? Imagine a closely contested election with four candidates. Three candidates get a total of 70% of the votes between them, split three ways, and the fourth candidate gets 30%. The fourth candidate, with less than one third of the total vote in his favor, would win.
Winner-take-all (or direct election) is a system under which the right to keep a chair warm in Washington, D.C. is given to the person who wins the election, as opposed to the party that does. Although this system seems natural to Americans (since we’re so accustomed to it) it’s not the only way to have a democracy. Britain and a few other countries use a parliamentary system whereby voters vote for parties, not candidates, and the parties are then given a share of seats in parliament based on the percentage of votes they get in the polls. Although such proportional representation systems are far from perfect, they do allow for representation of minority parties who would be completely excluded from power in our winner-take-all system. In the 30/70 election described above, a candidate with only 30% of the vote would end up representing 100% of his constituents in Congress, including the 70% who didn’t vote for him. In a proportional representation system, by contrast, the 30% party would get only 30% of the seats, while the parties accounting for the other 70% would get a share according to the support each one had among the voters. Or at least, that’s the theory. It usually doesn’t work out so tidily in practice.
In any case, given the combination of plurality voting and winner-take-all representation, it’s no wonder that the two major parties collude to keep out third-party candidates. There is too much at stake for either one to risk losing an election—and being out of power for several years—by allowing a third-party challenger to split the vote. Nor is it an idle claim when the major parties decry third-party challengers for costing them elections in real life. Although it is impossible to know how any historical election would have turned out if the conditions were different, in two recent presidential elections, (1992 and 2000) third-party challengers did garner enough votes to have theoretically swung the election. (See Web pages below.)
1992 Vote Count: http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?f=0&year=1992
2000 Vote Count: http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=2000
Moreover, in the same way that the winner of an ordinary plurality vote might not represent the preference of a majority of voters, the winner of an election where there’s a split may be even less representative of the voters’ will. Let us assume (correctly or otherwise) that Ross Perot’s 1992 voters would have voted for George H. W. Bush if Perot hadn’t been on the ballot. Given that assumption, then Bush would have won with a comfortable majority of the popular vote. Yet, as we know, Clinton won that election, and it’s quite possible that a majority of voters were dissatisfied with the result. Similarly, in the 2000 election, if just a few of Ralph Nader’s Florida voters had voted for Al Gore instead, Gore would have won the state of Florida, and also the presidency. (At 48.38%, Gore already had a plurality, though not a majority, of the popular vote. The reason Gore lost is because the Electoral College, which actually decides presidential elections, allots votes on a state-by-state basis, and not a national one.) In any case, as we know, Bush won the election. Sort of.
Surely, it cannot be a democratic result when a candidate who is not wanted by a majority of voters is elected. But, by the same token, it cannot be a democratic election when third-party candidates, no matter how “serious,†are discouraged from running.
So what to do? There are voting reform movements afoot here in the U.S., and a recent issue of the New Yorker magazine gives some good background on many of them.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/07/26/100726crbo_books_gottlieb?currentPage=all
In an upcoming post, I or one of my fellow pundits here on the Blog will be discussing those reform movements, with a particular emphasis on the one known as Instant Runoff Voting, or “IRV.â€
David Preston is a freelance writer and editor based in West Seattle. He can be contacted directly at DP_Editor at Comcast dot net.
(Nils Enevoldsen contributed material for this article.)
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OK, JoB. If you find little reason to talk to me, then don’t.
I know you’ll be back, though.
You just can’t seem to stay away . . .
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