Tag: Ranked Choice Voting

Can We Become A Representative Democracy Again?

The Daily Escape:

Toroweap Point, North Rim, Grand Canyon NP, AZ – August 2022 photo by Andrei Stoica

Our democracy is teetering. Minority states representing a fraction of the whole population of the country, have an outsized representation in the Electoral College and in the Senate. This has helped ignite an acute threat to American democracy that’s based in Red State America. The NYT’s David Leonhardt quotes Harvard’s Steven Levitsky:

“We are far and away the most countermajoritarian democracy in the world,”

One reason is that the more populous states over the past century have grown much larger than the small states. That means the bigger state residents now hold (relatively) less political power in the Senate and the Electoral College than they did in the 1900s.

This was something that the founders understood and agreed on. At the time, there was an alternative discussion about maintaining proportional representation in the House. In the first US Congress, (1789-1791), James Madison had proposed 12 potential Constitutional amendments. We all know that ten amendments were quickly ratified as the Bill of Rights. Another amendment was ratified in 1992 as the 27th Amendment which prohibits salary increases for House and Senate members to take effect before the next election.

The only one of the 12 amendments passed by Congress that wasn’t ratified is the Congressional Apportionment Amendment (CAA). The CAA was designed to let the number of seats in the House grow to meet future population growth.

A majority of the (then) states ratified the CAA. But by the end of 1791, it was one state short of adoption. No other state has ratified this potential amendment since 1792. Here’s the text of the proposed CAA:

“After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.”

The CAA lays out a mathematical formula for determining the number of seats in the House of Representatives. Initially, it would have required one representative for every 30,000 constituents, with that number eventually climbing to one representative for every 50,000 constituents.

But the amendment wasn’t added to the Constitution. Today, Congress controls the size of the House of Representatives. They had regularly increased the size of the House to account for population growth until 1911, when it fixed the number of voting House members at 435. Today, that’s about 761,000 Americans per House seat. Miles away from 50,000.

Delaware leads in the malapportionment with 990,000 people per representative, about 250,000 more than the average state. Rhode Island has the most democratic apportionment with 548,000 people per representative. Both are small, Blue states.

The small Red state Wyoming has 578k/representative. All of the big states are higher than the average: NY has 777k, and CA has 761k, while Florida has 770k and Texas has 768k.

This also impacts the distribution of Electoral College votes, which equal the apportionment of House seats. As a result, the Electoral College is also becoming less representative. David Leonhardt points out:

“Before 2000, only three candidates won the presidency while losing the popular vote (John Quincy Adams, Rutherford Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison), and each served only a single term.”

But two of the past four presidents (Trump and GW Bush in his first term) have become president despite losing the popular vote. Small states represent a fraction of the whole population of the country yet, absent something like the CAA, have an outsized representation in both the Senate and the Electoral College.

This was on purpose. But when the filibuster was added in the Senate’s rules, it changed everything. The filibuster has been part of the Senate in many forms, but in 1975, the Senate revised its cloture rule so that three-fifths of Senators (60 votes out of 100) could limit debate.

With the Senate roughly equally divided, each Party has about 50 votes it can count on, but it needs 60 to pass most legislation. This means that the small states have more power in the Senate than they had before.

Using the 2010 US Census as an example, the US population was 308.7 million. If the CAA was in effect, the number of representatives in the House would be more than 6,000. That’s surely unwieldy, but is there a number of House seats between 435 and 6000 that would be more representative?

Our form of proportional representation needs an overhaul. Some changes to consider:

  • Better proportional representation in the House (via the CAA?) to help make the Electoral College more representative than currently
  • A version of ranked choice voting for all state-wide races
  • Overturning Citizens United
  • Ending gerrymandering by using independent commissions to establish district lines

Since only a few hundred people currently control the democratic direction of our country, can these ever be addressed?

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No Cake For You, No Democracy For Me

The Daily Escape:

Manhattan, NYC skyline viewed from Brooklyn – 2018 photo by Max Guilani

The gay wedding cake ruling was absurd. If a wedding photographer didn’t want to take photos at the wedding, it would be understandable, because then they’d be present at the ceremony, in some way, participating.

But a person baking and decorating a cake? The baker isn’t participating in the event, and the cake isn’t usually at the ceremony either. The cake can’t represent a religious belief unless it’s actually a religious cake.

There’s a difference between freedom “from” and freedom “to”. This case, and a few others, notably Hobby Lobby, have swung the pendulum in the direction of “freedom to”. That could be the freedom to refuse to serve a customer, to refuse to provide health coverage, to claim an infringement of your religious rights, to say that baking the cake causes undue harm to your right to believe as you do. Much of what the Right touts as freedoms fall under this category, like the freedom to bear arms.

But at the same time, will the court protect those groups who need freedom “from” something, like freedom from discrimination, or harassment?

So, here we are in 21st century America: Stuck, this time by the Supreme Court.

And most of the time, we are stuck by the House and Senate’s inability to move the country forward. The question is: How long will the majority of Americans consent to be governed by the minority?

This, from David Brooks:

Now the two-party system has rigidified and ossified. The two parties no longer bend to the center. They push to the extremes, where the donor bases and their media propaganda arms are. More and more people feel politically homeless, alienated from both parties and without any say in how the country is run.

Our system of democracy must evolve. Under our winner take all rules, the minority can control the country with say, 20 million votes, representing about 6% of the population.

Consider that every state has two senators. The 22 smallest states have a total population less than California.  If the Senate’s filibuster remains in effect, just 21 States can stop any presidential appointment, or any legislation. Even without the filibuster, it takes 26 states to stop legislation.

And the smallest 26 states have a population of about 57 million, less than the population of California and the New York metro area. And today, neither major political party commands more than 30% of the voters.

How long can the country sustain this lack of balance and democratic fairness? The competing interests that the framers tried to balance in 1789 have been overtaken by newer competing interests that they never envisioned.

Maybe it’s time to seriously rethink our electoral processes.

In a recent column in the NYT (quoted above), David Brooks recognizes the problem, and argues for multi-member House districts and for ranked-choice voting (RCV). Russell Berman explained how it works in The Atlantic:

Ranked-choice voting, which cities like San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Portland, Maine, use to elect their mayors, has been likened to an “instant runoff”: Instead of selecting just one candidate, voters rank their choices in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first-place votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and whoever their voters chose as their second choice is added to the tally of the remaining contenders. That process continues until there are only two candidates left, and the one with the most votes wins.

Supporters say RCV ensures that candidates with the broadest coalitions of support will win, and that it allows voters to choose the candidate they prefer, without splitting the vote and handing the election to the other party. They also say RCV will inspire more positive campaigning, because candidates will aim to become voter’s second and third choices instead of targeting each other with negative advertisements. Further, they hope that RCV could create room for third-party candidates to succeed.

Wrongo thinks something needs to change. We can’t keep a system that allows the minority to run the country, especially if it is persistently a racist minority, a misogynist minority, a fundamentalist minority, and a cruel minority.

Wrongo grew up believing that having public education, public housing, public transportation (including roads) and human services paid for by the public in proportion to their income or wealth, was what created a civilized nation, an educated populace, a world-class work-force. Now, Wrongo really worries about our current political situation. He worries about his grandchildren. Unless there is political change, their future looks grim.

Herbert Stein said: “If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.”

We have to change our electoral process.

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