Curt at Hunting the Muse has an excellent, and pragmatic, perspective on third-party preference voting and how wise leftists would be to set their preferences aside for now and work within the existing system.
Over the last couple of years, I have done quite a bit of research into U.S. political voting systems and various vote-counting methods. I've come up with the following conclusions:Curt's analysis is pretty spot-on, although I disagree with some of his conclusions. We both agree that the Electoral College isn't going anywhere, but I think that's a Good Thing. Given that political reality, Curt has some advise for far-left voters who are inclined to vote with their principles rather than support the Democratic party.1. The presidential race should absolutely not have third-party candidates.
2. Preference voting is not the answer for presidential voting while the Electoral College exists.
3. Democrats and Greens need to share fault for 2000, and share the responsibility to join forces in 2004.
4. Bush technically had more electoral support than Gore even without the 5. Supreme Court's help.
But imagine what would happen should a Green, Libertarian, or Reform candidate get enough support to actually win a state or two. First, absolutely nothing happens for the third-party candidate. They would have to win at least the eleven most populous states (which includes California, Florida, and Texas; a strange trifecta). But, what would happen is that either the third party would be ideologically similar to one of the two major parties, splitting its support, or it would lead to none of the parties getting 270 votes.Curt then goes on to suggest that third parties form coalitions -- similar to what happens in parliamentary governments -- but it's clear to me that such coalitions would be powerless, in practice, apart from their major party member, as long as we stick with the present electoral system. (Coalitions would only be dragged towards the fringe by the junior partners, to the detriment of all in the coalition.)When no candidate gets 270 votes, the election goes to Congress for them to decide among themselves. And unless the third party has strong congressional representation, they are out of luck.
The long and short of it is that if a third party wants to become president, they are either going to have to have a strong enough national party to enable them to win several states outright, or they are going to have to have a strong enough national party that they would have a plurality of congressional representatives in Congress. Either way, it requires a strong national party with significant local and statewide support and a significant number of elected officials. None of our third parties have this level of strong support at this time.
I know many people don't like the electoral system, but that's generally because their views are so far from the mainstream that they have no power under our winner-takes-all system. The Electoral College almost requires two major parties, and it also serves to drag both parties towards the "center" of the political spectrum. That fringe groups don't have representation isn't a bug, it's a feature. The electoral system serves to dampen out the political noise that can hamstring government, as can be seen in many European nations. When governments are forced to depend on coalitions, junior partners have an extraordinary amount of tie-breaking power that's vastly disproportional to their size. See, for further example of this effect, both the Democrat and Republican primaries.
Another way to look at the differences between our system and a Parliamentary system -- In either system, compromises are made to gain and hold power. In a parliamentary system, the horse-trading occurs after the electorate has had their input, and so has no further control over which compromises are made among coalition blocs in the government.
In a two-party system like ours, the same coalitions can exist, but the horse trading goes on before the general election, giving the electorate a better idea of what legislative agendas they are voting on.
What parts of the Electoral College make it a Good Thing to you? I personally like its effort of regional representation - I think the E.C. should be a compromise between population and regional representation, much like how our Congress is. (Although the respective weightings could be quibbled about since it's pretty arbitrary.)
However, I really don't like the winner-take-all nature of each of the states. It reduces the motivation for people to participate.
Finally, I guess the hidden bias behind my piece is that I think our government is *overly* stable - meaning, not responsive enough. Whether it's due to gerrymandering, the old "two-party duopoly", special interests, the E.C., whatever, it's just not responsive enough. I'd eventually like to see all our analyses and opinions result in recommendations for incremental change. As it is, the only "constructive" efforts I see are for a nationwide popular vote, and vague calls for Instant Runoff Voting, both of which are short-sighted.
My best idea so far is to allow Condorcet voted state races to award fractional electoral votes, proportionally awarded to all candidates in that state race depending on where they placed. Unfortunately that's basically mathematically impossible, impractical, and unincremental. :-)
Curt: I agree that the federal government is too unresponsive. One of the best steps I think we could take would be repealing the 17th Amendment. As a leftist, what do you think of that? In my opinion, repealing the 17th should have bipartisan appeal among the population, although both parties would likely oppose it.
The EC is currently a compromise between populational and regional representation, so is it the ratio you don't like? I think eliminating the WTA aspect of the EC would greatly reduce it's effectiveness by giving more power to the large states. Consider, GWB may not campaign in California at all, thinking he can't win there, but if he could win 40% of the electoral votes he'd put a lot more effort into the state. Likewise, small states would become powerless, since a 60/40 split of 3 electoral votes isn't even worth spending money on to influence.
I read once that the EC is--by far--the single most challenged aspect of the government. I think that it's like that quote about democracy: it's the worst solution--except for all the other ones. It may lead to suboptimal responsiveness on the part of the government but overall I would prefer that to the relative chaos of European governments, which fall with a disturbing frequency. And, of course, the previously-mentioned tendency to force the two major parties centerwards has to be more of a good thing than a bad one.
Oh, and another thing. The article you quoted makes a point about disenfranchised felons and ex-felons in Florida, and how they would probably have voted for Gore, giving Bush a "fraud factor" of 0.5-1% by his count. If we're going to play that game then we need to take into account the absentee ballots that were never counted, and which were likely to go overwhelmingly towards Bush.
Rick C: Like I said, I don't agree with all of Curts conclusions or opinions. If anything, the Democrats generally out-fraud the Republicans, as should be expected given that local voting bureaucracies in every state and county in the country are dominated by Democrats.
I honestly haven't thought about the 17th amendment in depth before. Your entry about it makes an interesting suggestion. It doesn't do much to prove that repealing it is a good thing to do, but it's fun to consider.
It sounds like the basic idea is to allow the state legislatures to have a more direct effect on national government. Without putting my own value judgment on it, I can imagine why there'd be little support behind repealing it, because right now it is "the people" electing representatives, and "the people" electing senators. There's a parallelism there, and breaking it would be a really tough sell. There's an emotional comfort zone there that I think the voters would be possessive about. And, of course, the current Senators would as well. ;-)
As a "leftist" (I don't even know if that's an insult anymore, but I don't refer to myself that way), I would prefer to have our national policy be a compromise between public will and publicly verifiable fact. Out here on the West Coast, we've got far too much direct democracy and it's frustrating. If we had a populace that was more committed to being informed, then maybe it would be okay, but leaving every little issue to be voted on through referendums leads to reflexive voting, which is exactly what representation is designed to avoid.
So, intellectually, I sorta like the idea of state legislatures appointing Senators. The big premise you have to swallow here though is that the state legislatures are qualified, reflective of the state's population, knowledgable, and fair. And that premise isn't uniformly true, not even close.
In short I don't think you can convincingly argue that state legislatures appointing Senators would lead to higher quality Senators than who we have now. That's not to defend our current Senators. I just think it would be tinkering with the situation rather than improving it. (This is assuming the goal is to end up with Senators of overall higher quality, and not to end up with Senators more likely to enact certain partisan goals.)
I think a lot of good could be done by having a nationwide standardized effort for nonpartisan commissions to draw competitive legislative districts. The House is supposed to be responsive to changes in the national will. I'd love to see how the nation would work if that were actually the reality.
Tangent: Rick, give me a source on the Florida absentee ballots that were never counted. My impression is that they were counted, including ones that shouldn't have been had they followed the standards set by the state legislature.
Curt
Oh, and regarding ratios. I don't know how I feel about the regional part of the ratio being too big or too small. It just doesn't make much sense to me. I don't remember the source, but I believe the original ratio was different, and then populations grew for a while, and the ratios changed for reasons that didn't have anything to do with how powerful people wanted states to be. So the end result is that the ratio of state power to population power is sort of arbitrary. It is just silly to me when the structure of a system is divorced from its original intent. Now the ratio is just the way it is because we're used to it being that way. I don't like that.
In general I'd like less citizens per representative. Maybe it's the software engineer in me. I don't think our nation scales well. And I think I'd actually like a heavier state weighting. (But I'd also like California to be split in two, and DC to have more representation, so maybe that cancels out politically. ;-) )
As for removing the WTA... I guess I don't agree with your point because candidates are already minimizing the 3-EV states in favor of the Californias. Proportional awarding of EVs would basically make state boundaries less relevant over all, so the candidate would have more interest in widening their appeal rather than cherry-picking states. They'd have no more reason to focus on 54-EV California then they would of 54 EVs worth of small states. (And geographically, there might be areas of the country where there are more EVs in less square miles than CA, so it might even save the candidate money. :-) )
Finally, I agree that the EC is better than all the other solutions... so far. Doesn't mean there's not a clearly better one to be designed in the future.
Curt: I didn't mean "leftist" as an insult, it's just that most Democrats these days aren't really veyr "liberal" in the classical sense. You may be, it's just that I've kinda fallen into using that term.
As for the 17th Amendment, the goal wouldn't be to get "better" senators, per se, but rather senators who owed alliegiance to the state legislature rather than directly to the people. The state legislatures would want to preserve state autonomy, and thuse select senators who would protect their power in the federal government. More states rights, less garbage like ineffectual national education standards and so forth. Laws would probably vary a lot more between states, because the feds wouldn't have so many hands in the pies. I think it would make for much more responsive government, because the federal government would be smaller. Most leftists, however, tend to want more government, particularly at the federal level.
Regarding the electoral college, states have always had 2 senators, but the number of reps has been rising over time (by my recollection, which may be wrong). Perhaps the ratio has changed? If anything, it's more population-based now than it used to be, I'd bet.
I think House and state legislative districts should be county/city based. If some don't wind up being exactly equal, I don't really care that much. Just keep adding tows/cities/counties/neighborhoods in contiguous segments until the district is nearly the right size. I dunno, the details could be worked out, but I agree that gerrymandering is probably bad for voters, because it makes officials less responsive. Gerrymandering plus the 17th Amendment have nearly reversed the roles of the two chambers of Congress.
I'm not sure I agree with you regarding "too much direct democracy" here in California. I think our legislature is a horrible, corrupt, incompetent mess. I've met some legislators, and they're all moronic windbags. Mostly thanks to gerrymandering. And, honestly, many of the Democrats seemed terribly corrupt to me. I may be biased.
DC purposefully doesn't have representation, and I don't think it should. Cost of doing business, as they say.
I'd be interested in the classical definition of liberal. I'm not sure where I fit on that spectrum. I took that political test where you end up on a grid though, and I was pretty firmly in the lower-left (very libertarian, mostly left on social/economic issues).
I think there's a real problem with many historically democratic platforms. focusing on divisive gun-control issues drives away libertarians, who are honestly otherwise a better fit for democrats than republicans. aiming too much for federal standards can lead to too much homogeneity, which in my mind compromises individual liberty, something else that I believe democrats are better at defending. I really want there to be cultural diversity between states, so a citizen can move to wherever is the most comfortable to them. I hate suburbs where there's a McD or Wendy's on every corner, I hardly want the nation to feel the same way.
But there's also the thing about equal rights and individual liberty, which isn't about democracy's majority-rules. Just because a majority of a region might want it to be okay to kill people under five feet every second Tuesday doesn't mean they should be allowed to. So I like equal rights laws being asserted onto states from the federal level. In general I don't like federal taking away rights from citizens, but I do like federal forcing states to enumerate more rights for citizens.
regarding direct democracy, I'm mostly reacting to what it's like here in oregon. Our tax situation is a mess, and there have got to be *some* instances where it makes sense to raise taxes, but I get the feeling that more than half the state here would vote for a tax cut even if it meant our roads would turn back to gravel. I feel like, we put people in these leadership positions to make decisions, so let them make their decisions.