Our System of Elections: Structurally Unrepresentative

Stoney Bird is a former international corporate business lawyer. He changed course after moving to the Skagit Valley in 1990. He has lived in the York neighborhood in Bellingham since 2011, and endeavors to reduce corporate power over local communities and expose the inadequacy of the so-called “environmental” laws, which he feels are basically there to grant permits for harmful projects.

Part 5

This essay began with the January 2014 issue of Whatcom Watch. For an overview of the series, see that issue.

The electoral system that we use in the United States is one that we inherited from the British Empire two or three centuries ago. It was quite a progressive step back then but, in light of advances in the intervening centuries, now falls short. The thought that the United States could be behind the times may come as quite a surprise to many readers.

What I hope to demonstrate in the rest of this essay is that our system of elections produces representative government only in a crude and distorted way, if at all. Next month I’ll describe other ways of structuring elections that are much better at electing representatives who better reflect the overall political perspectives of our society .

Along with money in politics and the structure of government that the Constitution sets up and that I talked about last month, the structure of elections is a fundamental barrier to actual government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

The Structure of Elections in the US Produces Unrepresentative Government

Barring the weird system for electing the President through that eighteenth century holdover, the Electoral College, which exhibits its own unrepresentative features, Americans elect their officials through one of two systems. For Congress and the state-level elections, the system is nearly always single member plurality. In county and city elections, the system is often by at-large elections.

What I want to illustrate first is what these two systems consist of — and how their actual structure affects the degree to which the resulting governing body is representative. We’ll see that our electoral system in and of itself causes at least half of the people who voted to be unrepresented after every election. One of the consequences has been that this system tends to suppress third parties. It systematically excludes political perspectives held by many in the electorate, and because of this has been abandoned by nearly all democracies in the world.

For years, I’ve had a strong sense that Congress and the government generally have not been addressing our needs. By large majorities, the people of the US want money out of politics, a single-payer health care system, actual withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq (and many other places), a sharp reduction in the military budget, humane immigration reform, adequate funding for education, to name just a few issues. Congress sits on its hands.

A recent study by political scientists from Princeton and Northwestern discovered that, in 1,779 decisions that Congress had to make between 1981 and 2002, the expressed preferences of the public taken separately exercised influence on the decision a statistically insignificant number of times. When the preferences of the public happened to coincide with the preferences of the wealthy, Congress acted accordingly.1 I talk to many people who claim that their votes do not matter. The Gilens and Page study confirms this. We only have what the authors describe as “coincidental democracy.”

In single member plurality elections, the relevant territory is divided into electoral districts. The elections result in one person being elected. That’s the “single member” part. Whoever has the most votes gets in whether that person received a majority of the votes (more than half) or not. That’s the “plurality” part.

So, what are the features of such a system that lead to its being unrepresentative? At first glance such a charge seems unfair: whoever gets the most votes gets into office, so it must be representative! But if you look closer, you begin to see the failings.

For one thing, this kind of system means that whoever voted for another candidate is unrepresented. In other words, a number of the people in the district do not have their views represented in the body that is supposed to represent them. Their votes are in a very strict sense wasted. If there are two candidates, this number of unrepresented voters may be up to a half of the electorate. For example, if Henry gets 60 percent of the vote and John gets 40 percent, then the 40 percent who voted for John do not have their views adequately represented — or represented at all — by the candidate from “their” district. In a certain sense the (one vote less than) ten percent that Henry got above what was needed to beat John are also wasted. They did not contribute to Henry’s victory, since he already had enough votes to win. These votes would have meant something if they had been cast in an election where they actually contributed to getting someone into office. In other words, no matter what the margin of victory in a single member plurality election, just short of half the voters have wasted their votes.

The situation gets worse if there are more than two candidates. Let’s say Henry gets 40 percent of the vote and John and Stanley each get 30 percent. Then, the 60 percent of voters who voted for John and Stanley are left out in the cold. The more candidates there are, the greater the possibilities for adverse effect on representativeness. If there are five candidates, for example, the winning candidate could have just over 20 percent of the vote, leaving nearly 80 percent of the voters in the district unrepresented.

The System Excludes Third Parties

These inequities produce a strong tendency in single member plurality systems to aggregate the voters into two parties only.2 For one thing, voters become reluctant to vote for a party (one that they really favor) when they think that voting for that party will reduce the vote for a party that they feel doesn’t represent their views but at least is less bad than the other major party (“the lesser of two evils”) and may prevent the really bad candidate from getting into office. In the United States, for example, many people find that the Green (or Libertarian parties) Party actually represents their views, but feel they must vote for one of the two corporate parties in hopes of keeping the “worse” corporate party from getting in. The second reason that the electoral system itself tends to reduce the number of parties to two is its tendency to produce unwarranted representation in the legislature for the larger party and less than full representation for the smaller party. So, how does that happen? To pick an illustrative (if extreme) case, let’s suppose that in a state with ten Congressional Districts like Washington State, the Democrats and Republicans were evenly spread among the districts. Let’s suppose that at the state level the Democrats had a 55 percent majority and that this majority was maintained in all of the congressional districts. In the election, the Democrats would win all ten seats — with no more than 55 percent of the vote statewide or in any district — leaving 45 percent of the voters unrepresented.

If there are more than two parties involved in the race, this “manufactured majority” effect gets worse. In the Maggie Thatcher years in Great Britain, for example, the three parties were the Conservatives (Thatcher’s party), Labor, and the Social Democrats and Liberals. During these years (1979-1997) the Conservatives never achieved more than 45 percent of the popular vote, but consistently had substantial Parliamentary majorities. Table 1 (above) shows the unbalanced relationship between the popular vote and representation in Parliament that resulted in the sample year of 1987. Many more examples could be produced.

With such results, desperate voters will want to vote for the “least bad” of the two corporate parties no matter what, and the system will continue on its systematically unrepresentative path. Relatively few people get to vote for someone or a party that they can actually get behind with enthusiasm. This is not a recipe for representative democracy.

By suppressing third parties, the system impoverishes the political dialog in our country. Many issues that should be actively debated in Congress and in electoral campaigns are not even mentioned. Instead we get staged and scripted events like the so-called presidential “debates” in which the two corporate parties decide in advance which issues to take up, leaving out others of great interest to the voters. Until 1984, the League of Women Voters was the sponsor of the debates. When the two major parties, acting in concert, began pressuring the League about the scope and format of the debates in 1988, the League pulled out, and now characterizes the debates as “a charade in debate’s clothing.”  3 There is not space to discuss this aspect of the system in detail in this article.

At-large Elections Are Similarly Unrepresentative

The other major voting system in the United States fares little better. This is the at-large system used in many American cities and counties. There are variants, but the basic principle is that all the voters in the city or county vote for all the positions to be filled. In Bellingham, for example, with its seven-member city council, six are elected (in the words of the City Charter) “by ward” and one elected “at-large.” 4 These descriptions of the procedure are misleading because the only connection between the “by ward” council persons and their wards is a) they have to be residents of their respective wards, and b) if there are more than two candidates from a ward, the voters from the ward select in the primary which two will go through to the general election. The “by ward” council people are actually elected in the general election by a majority of all the voters in the city (an at-large election), not just by those from their ward.

Without going into details too much, the unrepresentative results are of the same type. In Whatcom County, for example — where, like Bellingham City Council members, the County Council members are elected by the electorate of the whole jurisdiction — we recently had an election of four members of the County Council. Perhaps the major issue was the proposed coal port at Cherry Point. Opponents of the coal port devised a highly successful campaign to elect candidates who had a “tendency” to oppose the project, and those candidates collectively gained 53.3 percent of the vote. This was viewed as a “victory” for the opponents that had campaigned so hard and so well, but what of the other voters? Where was their representation? They had achieved 46.7 percent of the vote and their representation as a result was precisely zero. This is not a complaint about the Cherry Point opponents having “won,” but it is a complaint about the unrepresentativeness of the election system.

This recent election exposes a further defect in winner-take-all systems. If in this election only 3.3 percent of the voters had voted differently, the election results might have been reversed for all four positions. In a system that was actually representative of the views of the electorate, a change in the views of such a small percentage of the voters would not produce such a radical change in the composition of the body being elected.

Up to now, we’ve been talking about the features of these electoral systems that produce unrepresentative government without human intervention, so to speak. Now we’ll see how they seem to present an irresistible temptation for tampering by the legislative powers that be.

Gerrymandering: Legislators Pre-deciding Election Results

A fundamental feature of the single member plurality system is that those “single members” are each elected from a defined electoral district.5 As we will see, this feature in itself produces unrepresentative results, even without political tampering. What we are talking about at this point is politicians predetermining the results of future elections, a power that they have engaged in since the early days of the republic. 6

Here’s how gerrymandering works. I’ll use the example of Washington State, although the principles apply — and are used by politicians — everywhere in our sadly corrupted political system. After each decennial census (called for in the Constitution), a great redistricting effort occurs. In some states, this is done by the legislature itself. In Washington State, it is done by a Redistricting Commission appointed by the (both Democratic and Republican) political party caucuses in the legislature.7 The Washington State Redistricting Commission is nakedly political in its origin and, as we will see, in its operations.

Once the Redistricting Commission is appointed, the basic principles are clear: they are about to determine the results of most legislative elections for the next ten years, the two parties have to agree (because they have equal voices in the decision-making Commission), and the interests of the incumbents (who appointed them) must be served. The result is that the district lines they come up with — by intent and by explicit calculation — guarantee the re-election of incumbents for both the Assembly and the Senate in most legislative districts. A few districts are left as “swing” districts. In those, the voters are allowed to have an influence over election results. In the remaining “safe” districts, the voters are basically out of the picture.8

A few years ago, the former Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Finkbeiner described how the Redistricting Commission uses detailed demographic data available block by city block as they devise the district lines.9 Implicit in his piece, an Op-Ed in The Seattle Times, was his shame at having participated in such a transparently corrupted proceeding. One may ask why his fellow legislators are sitting silent.

The most recent efforts of the Washington State Redistricting Commission took place after the 2010 Census, and had effect for the 2012 elections. Their manipulations controlled the elections of that year and will also control the elections of this year (2014), 2016, 2018, and 2020 — ten years of elections in total.

What’s more, their work makes these decisions not just for the state legislature, but for the state’s Congressional delegation as well. For example, after the 2010 Census the Commission contrived a safe district for the Congressman who in principle serves Bellingham, Rick Larsen. Reaching from Bellingham south through Everett and into Lynnwood, Mukilteo and Mount Lake Terrace, the Second Congressional District has a clear majority of voters likely to vote for Democrats.10 The Republicans who live there will only have votes with effect if they move away or the state adopts a more representative voting system.

Our System is Inherently Arbitrary in Results

Gerrymandering is bad enough, but it is important to realize that this predetermination of results is not just the result of the machinations of politicians. It is inherent in the single member plurality system itself. One can imagine a body charged with drawing district lines that is completely out from under the influence of the political parties. The district lines would still have to be drawn somewhere. Since the distribution of political preferences is uneven — there are Democrats here and Republicans there — some districts will have a commanding majority of one party or the other and the second party in that district will basically be shut out for an indefinite period of time. This feature is intrinsic in the single member plurality system of elections. Gerrymandering just exacerbates it.

The system is not only inherently unrepresentative, but the way the lines are drawn can produce wildly different results, while the overall views of the voters remain the same. This happens whether there is gerrymandering or not. Let’s take the hypothetical Washington State Congressional delegation that I mentioned earlier, consisting entirely of Democrats because the hypothetical Democratic 55 percent majority was spread evenly among the ten Congressional Districts. In every District the split was 55 percent-45 percent in favor of the Democrats, so they won every seat, excluding from representation the 45 percent of the voters who were Republican. One can easily imagine a situation where the Ds and Rs were distributed differently among the various districts, and the election results would be quite different — up to the Republicans even winning eight of the ten seats, even though the Democrats still had a 55 percent majority at the state level. These two extreme cases are shown in Table 2 (below). They and every result in between are possible simply because of the act of drawing district lines.

This arbitrariness of results is an inherent feature of the single member plurality system. Not only does the system systematically exclude up to a supermajority of voters from representation in every election, but the overall results for a delegation are inherently unrelated to the overall political leanings of the voters. It’s as if we had the germ of an idea (representative government) and had put it into practice in the first way that occurred to us, and 250 years later still hadn’t cottoned onto understanding that the way we had adopted was undercutting the very principle that we wished to follow.

Media and Politicians Keep Us in the Dark

Our famous corporate media occasionally complain about gerrymandering (but not very often). What they appear to be mainly interested in is the horse race features of our elections: who is ahead in the polls, who has raised the most money, who has committed the worst campaign gaffs, who has the most effective campaign ads. Disclosing the inherently defective character of the system itself just is not among the things that they talk about.11 The two corporate political parties and those elected through them are equally mum.

-h Next Month

A System of Elections That Works. The sad thing is that there is a system of elections that reliably produces a much closer mirror of the political views of the electorate in their richness. It’s a system that has been known since the early years of the nineteenth century. The great English political philosopher, John Stuart Mill, thought it “among the very greatest improvements yet made in the theory and practice of government.” 12 Nearly all of the democracies of the world have adopted one version or another of it. We’ll talk about it next month. It’s called proportional representation.

Endnotes

1. Gilens, Martin, and Benjamin Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens,” to be published in the Fall 2014 Issue of Perspectives on Politics, http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf.

2. The tendency is so strong that it is viewed as a “law” of political science, one of the most widely known. Maurice Duverger, a French political scientist working in the 1950s, was the first to describe it. Duverger, Maurice, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, London, 1954.

3. http://www.lwv.org/multimedia/league-women-voters-and-presidential-debates viewed June 7, 2014.

4. Bellingham City Charter, Sections 2.01-2.03, available through www.cob.org/government/rules/index.aspx.

5. In Washington State, we have a slight variant. In each legislative district, there are two representatives. Their each being elected to a unique “position” produces the same anti-democratic effects.

6. The name “gerrymandering” comes from Elbridge Gerry, who as governor of Massachusetts in 1812 contrived to redraw the electoral districts in his state to favor his party, the Democratic-Republican Party (predecessor of the modern Democratic Party). Gerry was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and participated in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, though he refused to sign the Constitution.

7. In Washington State, the Redistricting Commission has five members. One is appointed by the Democratic caucus in the state Assembly, one by the Democratic caucus in the state Senate. Two are appointed by the corresponding Republican caucuses in the House and the Senate. The last, non-voting member is non-partisan, and is appointed by the other commissioners. http://www.redistricting.wa.gov/commission.asp.

8. A recent article by John Stang in Crosscut describes only ten of Washington’s 49 legislative districts as being, at least to some extent, “in play” in 2014. Of these, Stang assesses only five as actually capable of switching from the incumbent party. http://crosscut.com/2014/05/06/under-the-dome/119928/democrats-start-behind-take-offense-battle-state-

9. http://seattletimes.com/html/opinion/2011962081_guest27finkbeiner.html

10. According to The Center for Voting and Democracy, Larsen had a 61.1 percent majority in 2012, and is projected to win by 59.4 percent this year. With a winning margin of around 20 percent, his district is rated “safe.” https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiqV5h2y6423dG1RNFhVbThtMFJrQmhZYVZHeHRweGc&usp=drive_web#gid=0

11. There are exceptions. After searching on the web, I found an interview relating to proportional representation on KUOW (www2.kuow.org/mp3high/mp3/Conversation/ConversationC20100528.mp3) and several articles in the Huffington Post (e.g., http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/proportional-representation.) In 1993, the New York Times gave us an editorial on proportional representation that misrepresented the subject in significant respects. http://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/24/opinion/proportional-representation-flunks.html.

12. Mill, John Stuart, Considerations on Representative Government, 1861. Viewed May 27, 2014 at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5669/5669-h/5669-h.htm