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 Making it Count (Your Vote, That Is)

In these last days before the presidential election, the media is making much of “undecided” voters. Not just any undecided voters, mind you, but those who live in the, so-called, battleground states. These are the states considered by candidates and pudits to still be in-play and not sewn up for either party. While New York will surely go to the Democrats and Mississippi to the Republicans, Colorado, Oregon, Ohio, Michigan, Philadelphia, New Mexico, and, of course, Florida, might just as easily turn up blue as red on the CNN election night map.

It is in these states, and several others, where the campaign is now being waged with do-or-die intensity while the rest of the country is virtually ignored. Why is this? Because our election system does not use the popular vote to determine a winner. Rather, the United States assigns a certain amount of votes to each state, which are then cast by electors in the Electoral College. The majority of popular votes cast in a state theoretically determines who gets the electoral votes. However, these votes are not divided relative to votes counted.

No, this is a winner-take-all arrangement. Any candidate who wins over 50% of the ballots in a given state customarily receives all the electoral votes of said state. In this way, for instance, Al Gore won the popular vote in 1999, but lost the electoral vote — though Americans may never be entirely certain of that. That’s why there is no need for the candidates to waste their time or money in places where the majority vote is a forgone conclusion.

As just described, this Electoral College voting method does not sound like democracy in action — at least not the way we imagine it — where the majority rules. In fact, though booster organizations, like Rock the Vote, would have one believe that every voice counts, it is not necessarily true. If you live in a state where the majority of ballots are cast for someone other than the person for whom you voted, your ballot, essentially, does not count at all.

Though the founders of our country were, in general, groovy guys and visionaries, they were not perfect. The fact that they thought slavery was acceptable or that women didn’t need equal protection under the law can be seen, retrospectively, as archaic judgments characteristic of their era.  However, when those ideas no longer served Americans there were provisions made available by the founders to abolish them (more or less and with much fighting, but abolish nonetheless). The Electoral College is also the product of eighteenth century thinking, and certainly the time has come to revoke its legitimacy.

Let me reiterate. No matter who wins the coming election, reform of the voting system must be enacted, and soon. After the Supreme Court took it upon themselves to decide the last national election, one might have imagined that a vociferous cry would have rung out across the country demanding an end to the Electoral College. Certainly the majority party, the one that lost, would have had much to gain from working toward a paradigm where each vote is weighed equally. Yet, after the debacle of 2000 there was little talk of this. Neither major party introduced legislation to reform the manner in which votes are counted — except to put faulty electronic voting devices into polling places from coast to coast. This may have been because most Americans and their representatives were, at first, too shell-shocked by the stolen election and, later, too preoccupied by the search for fictional WMDs and the bloody war in and occupation of Iraq, to think about reforming the system that had created those very things.

Instant Run-Off Voting

By contrast, while the Democrats and Republicans have been whiling away the years flogging each other over who’s more patriotic, third party candidates, in part out of necessity, have taken up the banner to reform American elections. Most of them favor a process that is known as instant run-off voting. Presidential contenders, David Cobb (Green), Michael Anthony Peroutka (Constitution), Michael Badnarik (Libertarian) and, of course, Ralph Nader, all advocate this voting system which is currently used in democracies such as Australia, Ireland, Great Britain and France.

Here’s how IRV elections work. On the ballots, voters rank candidates in numerical order. The candidate the voter most wants gets a one, their second choice gets a two, and so forth. If a voter’s first choice candidate is not elected and no candidate receives half of the vote, his or her ballot will be re-examined for its next preference. The point of this system is to elect the candidate who can build an absolute majority of support in the electorate rather than the simple majority required in each state to ensure capturing only the necessary electoral votes.

Using this model, citizens could vote their conscience from among a substantial list of choices, rather than voting for the one person out of two who seems the least dangerous. IRV would eliminate the prevalent practice of voting for the “lesser evil,” or worrying that voting one’s preference will label them a “spoiler.”

As John Anderson, president of the Center for Voting and Democracy, former Congressman and 1980 independent presidential candidate said, “Having an election between two candidates is obviously better than a one-party dictatorship, but having an election among more than two candidates is better than a two-party duopoly. Our primitive voting system is this year's biggest spoiler. Instant runoff voting would give us a more participatory, vital democracy, where candidates could be judged on their merits and the will of the majority would more certainly prevail.”

Even without IRV, a system in which each vote was counted equally — where a candidate had to win the popular vote — would begin to address the problem of voter inequality. Just think, if candidates had to speak to the issues important to voters in states that had a majority of residents who did not generally vote for that candidate’s party, people in places like California might actually get a Republican candidate to pay attention to local objectives like environmental hygiene. Conversely, Alabama voters might get a Democrat coming by once in a while to tell them about how their high rate of poverty might be alleviated by higher taxes on those most able to pay them, rather than having candidates only pander to their fetus voting block.

Additionally, if presidential competitors had to appeal to voters in all 50 states, and not just accommodate those in one region, their campaign coffers would be spread so thin that no single constituency would be bombarded with the kind of repetitive, brain-numbing, negative advertisements that exist today. With no substantive campaign finance reform left on the Congressional table, this, by itself, would act as an inadvertent leveler. Conceivably, since no one candidate would have enough money to put forth 50 unique and costly messages they would have to articulate values that considered the nation as a whole.

Getting There from Here

The good news is that the move toward fair, representational elections, though glacially slow in light of other distractions and the pressing need for such, has begun. In March of 2002, San Francisco voters came up with a majority to enact IRV for all city offices. In that same year, Vermont citizens in 50 cities and towns endorsed a proposal to use IRV for electing statewide offices. In San Francisco, the election reform campaign was lead by the Center for Voting and Democracy and endorsed by more than a dozen organizations from the Sierra Club to Common Cause. In Vermont, the League of Women Voter’s-sponsored proposal was endorsed by, among others, Gov. Howard Dean (D). Sen. John McCain (R), who spearheaded the fight to reform campaign financing, also endorses IRV.

Better yet, since January 2003, the Congress of the United States and more than twenty state legislatures from Arkansas to Hawaii have considered legislation to enact fair election procedures like IRV and full representation systems. In October of this year, Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. (D) introduced a pair of bills aimed at just this kind of election reform. The first, H.R.5293 would require states to conduct general elections for Federal office using an instant runoff voting system. The second H.J.R. 109 would amend the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College and provide for direct election of the president by majority vote. Earlier this year he also introduced another Constitutional amendment, H.J. Res. 28, called the Right to Vote Amendment.

Americans will likely hear very little about any of these Jackson-sponsored bills before election night. However, if, as is likely, voter irregularities and re-counts occur on November 2, 2004 and beyond, these vital voting rights issues — rather than the silly horse race the media is covering now, between two variously-corrupted, corporate pawns — will move front and center where it belongs.

At this point, the afore-mentioned Center for Voting and Democracy is the main, non-governmental advocate of IRV. Visit them at www.fairvote.org to read more about the issues. As of this writing, another venerable voter rights organization, The National Commission on Federal Election Reform (www.reformelections.org) co-chaired by former presidents, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, has not yet taken up this case — though with a little urging they might. However, NCOFER does support making election day a national holiday, which is not a bad idea either.

In the meantime, not that there is much time left, citizens should consider contacting their Congresspeople (www.house.gov/writerep) to tell him or her that one supports these congressional bills to reform the American electoral process. Senators ove mail, too (www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm).

Decide Today, Reform Tomorrow

Finally, whatever else one does, it is imperative to keep voting. It doesn’t make all the difference that it should, but it does make a difference. Though voter registration in the United States is at an all-time high, voter participation is nearing an all-time low. The United States ranks 139th out of 172 democratic nations in voter turnout. Given our current system, where very few people can vote for a candidate they wholeheartedly support, this display of apathy is not surprising.

Despite that, there are clear distinctions between the two candidates in this election — and they have nothing to do with who will win the war in Iraq. The balance of the Supreme Court is on the line, as is Social Security as we know it, health coverage for all Americans, environmental well-being and a woman’s right to choose. Vote to keep the current president in office and kiss all of those things goodbye. Vote to elect the Senator from Massachusetts and retain hope that compassion and reason will be put back into government.

As a final litmus test for undecided voters, it is useful to ask oneself the question Ronald Reagan once posed, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” If you can’t answer that simple query in the affirmative, then it should be easy to decide.

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