In my last post, I explored a handful of myths surrounding the electoral college, and broke down how it essentially failed on every level this year. (The electors haven’t actually voted, but it would be astounding, and extraordinarily unlikely, if more than one or two “faithless electors” actually follow through on any of their nervous threats to not vote for Donald Trump. So it’s safe to assume that they will vote the way they’re supposed to and give the election to Trump.) Basically, the electoral college an obsolete system (although, at the time it was invented, it might have been a logistically reasonable solution to a paranoid situation) based on racism (and those who wanted to compromise with racists) was devised to (imperfectly) reflect the will of the people, but was built with a safety valve that allowed an aristocratic few to overthrow the will of the people when they think it’s in the people’s best interest. This year, a minority candidate won the election despite the fact that the will of the people went for his opponent, an opponent whom the aristocratic few would choose if they were allowed to fulfill their original Constitutional duty.
So the electoral college failed in both of its duties this year. It didn’t reflect the will of the people, and given the chance to deny the candidate who is clearly not qualified and unprepared for the job with possible conflicts of interest with foreign powers, the electors are voluntarily abdicating their responsibility.
So, the electoral college needs to be retired. Repeal it … but what to replace it with?
What the current electoral system gets right
There’s really only one thing that the current system gets right: At some point in the process, one candidate ends up with a majority … of something.
It starts with the popular vote, which the electoral count is supposed to mirror. If someone actually cracks 50 percent of the vote (which no one did this year), they should also win the electoral vote regardless of state-level gerrymandering. The Republic did outlast one instance where a candidate cracked the 50 percent mark in the popular vote but still lost: In 1876, Samuel Tilden got 50.9 percent of the vote and yet still lost the election to Rutherford B. Hayes in one of the most tremendously fucked up elections and subsequent political bargains in our nation’s history. (Basically, 20 electors refused to vote for him. In return for allowing those 20 to vote for the Republican Hayes instead, the Unionist Republicans agreed to pull federal troops out of the South and return control of the South to the sons of the Confederacy, who then promptly began the era of Jim Crow.)
But in all other instances, no one every won a majority of the popular vote and lost the election. In the other four instances, the winner of the popular vote and “loser” of the election never actually got a true majority of total votes. (Andrew Jackson got 41.4 percent in 1824, Grover Cleveland got 48.6 percent in 1888, Al Gore got 48.4 percent in 2000, and Hillary Clinton got 48.1 percent this year.)
The popular vote translates to the electors who represent them, and then a candidate has to win a clear majority of electors. If no one clears that, the process goes to a vote in the House who decides it. If, somehow, there’s a tie in the House, then the Senate votes for the vice president. And there can’t be a deadlock in the Senate, because the sitting vice president as president of the Senate would cast the decisive vote to break the tie, thus picking the new vice president, who would then become the new president.
So that’s the ONE thing the current system gets right. It ensures a certain minimal level of legitimacy for whoever is coming into office next. And at that very low bar, the system has been a successfully stable institution. With President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2008, we’ve now had 43 peaceful transfers of power, with only once secession. That’s a pretty tremendous track record. No other country in the world have that level of stability for that long.
One person, one vote
But we still need to change the system, because the current convoluted mess not only has denied the people’s will two out of the last three elected presidents (not counting incumbents getting reelected), which means that two of the last three new administrations are, in a sense, illegitimate. It was a flawed system, but now it’s clearly broken.
We need the popular vote to be paramount, because in the type of egalitarian nation that we like to pretend we are, every person’s vote should count equally. Right now, that’s not the case. Right now, your vote has different weight, depending on the state you live in. Because of the winner-take-all nonsense, if you live in a noncompetitive state, your vote has little importance. If you’re a Republican in New York, your vote has little importance. For that matter, if you’re a Democrat, your individual vote has little importance as well. It only is really important for you to vote, and whom you vote for, if you live in a handful of mid-size competitive swing states. Having lived in both New York and Virginia, I will tell you from experience that it makes an enormous difference on how you feel as a voter to live in one of those swing states. Your vote matters. For real. And it’s a lovely feeling (whether your side wins or loses). Everyone deserves to have that feeling.
In addition to the fact that “one person, one vote” is the right thing to do, even the current proportional electoral representation is skewed in a way that is unfair and dispiriting. Citizens in states with smaller populations end up with a massively outsized influence on the election. According to the latest tally from the Cook Political Report, Californians cast 14,141,284 votes for their state’s 55 electoral count while Wyomingans cast 225,849 votes for their 3. That means every California elector represents 257,144 American citizens whereas every Wyoming elector represents 75,283 American citizens. Or, another way, that the vote of someone in Wyoming is 3.42 times “more important” proportionally than the vote of someone in California. That’s fucked up.
So, the criteria …
Before we decide on a proper replacement system, we should then reiterate the criteria that we need in a new system.
Egalitarianism of the Votes: Every vote should count equally. Period. Regardless of race, sex, gender, geographic location, religious persuasion, sexual persuasion, income, ethnicity, or any other factor, every U.S. citizen’s vote should count no more and no less than any other citizen’s vote.
Legitimacy of the Vote: At the end of whatever process is decided on, there needs to be a victor with a true majority to ensure that everyone involved recognizes the legitimacy of the new president.
Just dumping the top-level electors won’t cut it
If we took the current system and simply dumped the extra layer of the electoral college and just took the winner of the popular vote as we tally it now, it would fall way short of Criteria 2. About a third of all past elections would have resulted in an “illegitimate winner,” because while the winner of those elections may have won a plurality, he didn’t win a majority.
So what options do we have? Dylan Matthews over at Vox recently took a look at five different types of popular voting systems and if they would have affected the outcome. I don’t think most of those are really feasible for the American public (although there would be a few people amused that we choose the president with the same method that the Heisman Trophy winner is selected, I’m sure.)
Instant-Runoff Voting
Also known as Ranked Choice Voting, this was the one option from Matthews’ story that has been getting more widespread attention and is beginning to gain some traction. The nonprofit organization Fair Vote has been promoting the ranked popular vote as a reasonable and doable alternative.
How it works is that you get a ballot and instead of picking one candidate, you rank all of the candidate in the order that you like them. When the vote is tallied, the top two candidates remain and the other candidates are dropped. If your Number 1 candidate is not in the Top 2 and is eliminated, your vote then goes to the candidate left that has your highest ranking. So, in the last election, if your ballot was “1. Deez Nuts, 2. Gary Johnson, 3 Jill Stein, 4. Hillary Clinton, 5. Donald Trump” then your final vote would have gone to Hillary Clinton. But the raw vote would matter too, because it would help to grow third party candidacies and increase the scale of our democratic republic because people would be freed to vote their consciences, even though their pragmatic choice would end up winning.
Basically, if we had ranked voting in the last election and 60 percent of the people who voted for a third party in Pennsylvania and 68 percent of the people who voted for third party in Florida all ranked Hillary Clinton higher than Donald Trump on their ballots, she’d be the president today … even with the obsolete electoral system. Or, to put it another way, with no electoral system overlay, Donald Trump would have needed to be ranked higher on 68 percent of ballots than Clinton to retake her on the popular vote.
This is all fine, and about a dozen cities are already using this system in their municipal elections. And in 2018, Maine is going to be the first state to use instant runoff voting to select its governor and legislature. So we’ll all be waiting in anticipation for those results.
Runoff Playoffs
While instant runoff votes are a viable option, they don’t quite solve the bigger problem for me, which is the stilted, restricted, thoughtless, and relatively quality-void political discussion and thought that we have. And a lot of that blame falls on the two-party system. You see, because we’re essentially stuck with only the two major parties as realistic and viable options, a lot of political discourse has less to do with what candidates will do for us and more on how bad the other side would be for you. Essentially, the way that we choose to limit ourselves to two options means we kind of end up with no options.
So we need a way to get more and varied voices into the process early, but then end up with a small pool of options at the end that will result in a clear majority and a legitimate winner.
For that reason, I would prefer to see a series of runoff general elections.
It’d work like this …
Six months before the general election: We would have the first in a series of votes. Anyone, from any political party or political ideology, can get on this first ballot. Anyone … so long as they fulfill a couple of requirements. First, they need to prove they are Constitutionally eligible to serve as president if they win (from Article II: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”). Second, they need to get a sufficient number of signatures on their petition to make the ballot (which would be set by Congress at a high, but reasonable, number such as 100,000 signatures, as would a deadline for the signatures to be submitted). I mean, we don’t want every “Rent Is Too Damn High,” Vermin Supreme, or Deez Nuts getting on the ballot (although, since Mr. Nuts was discovered to be a 15-year-old kid from Iowa, he unfortunately would not have made it on the ballot).
That could be a ballot of 20 names, or 200 names, or even 2,000 names. But they’d all get an equal shot.
When the votes are tallied, the Top 20 finishers would then move on to the next round. (And you have to participate in the first round in order to qualify for the subsequent ones.)
Four months before the general election: The Top 20 candidates would face off again. This time the Top 6 candidates would move on to the next round.
Two months before the general election: The Top 6 candidates would face off again. This time, only the Top 2 candidates would move on to the final election.
The general election: The final two candidates would square off and the victor, with what would be a clear majority, would be next President of the United States.
This system would satisfy every criteria we need. It would be totally egalitarian in that everyone’s vote would count the same as everyone else’s. It would be legitimate, because the candidate would have had to pass through four levels of voting and end up with a clear majority in the final runoff.
But it would do more than that. This series of runoffs would give the American public the option of seeing a varied assortment of political ideas and platforms before making a decision, even giving them the option of voting their whimsy in the earlier rounds before getting more pragmatic in later rounds. Candidates with less-mainstream platforms that the major parties won’t touch with a 10-foot pole could still potentially catch fire with a larger number of people than you might think–like legalizing drugs and prostitution, or promoting a VAT tax or a carbon tax, or a guaranteed minimum income–if only given an outlet to be heard.
And maybe more importantly than even getting the American public to hear more ideas, this series of runoff elections would displace the political primaries, at least the way they are now. It would no longer be in the interest of a political party to whittle down their choices to a single candidate, but instead to get as many candidates into the first round of voting as they can and then promote and back the ones who have the best chance of going all the way, based on the results. In fact, keeping three to four candidates going throughout would be the best possible scenario for a political party, because by far the most favorable outcome would be to have the Final Two candidates both be from the same party.
Everyone’s vote should count. Equally. With as many political options as we can handle. And still end up with a legitimate winner at the end of the process. That’s the standard that we should be setting if we are indeed the greatest representative democracy in the world as we like to think we are.
And after we get that, it’s time to work on getting Election Day made into a national holiday … preferably a multi-day-long holiday weekend so that we can turn our elections into the celebrations they ought to be.