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Further reading:
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The United States of America is the
self-professed greatest democracy in the world. Besides the obvious offensiveness of such
claim to countries that are equally democratic and that can claim a longer history of
civil liberties than the US can, the very idea flies in the face of the actual structure
of the American electoral system. This has been painfully demonstrated by the recent
squabble between George Bush and Al Gore on who really won the election. Let’s
start with democracy 101. Ever since ancient Athens, democracy means the rule of the
people (though for a long time the “people” have not included women,
economically “lower” classes and slaves). By that simple criterion, the American
system is undemocratic because it allows someone to win the presidential election even
though she lost the popular vote—as has just happened to Gore and did happen a few
other times before. This bizarre situation can occur because in the US the people
don’t really vote, electors chosen by each State do. And since each State is
guaranteed a certain number of electoral votes which is not commensurate to its
population, rural states are over-represented and Mr. Bush won by acreage rather than
votes. As a citizen of New Hampshire put it recently during one of many interviews the
media broadcasted after the 2000 elections, “If we went to a proportional system, New
Hampshire would count for nothing.” As it should, if this were really a democracy. According to
historians, there was originally a good reason for such a peculiar system. The United
States were not really united, but rather resembled a loose confederation of largely
independent entities, Swiss-style. Under those conditions, it was only natural to give
precedence to the abstract entity of a “State” rather than to each of its
citizens. Of course, the United States has never really become a nation—witness the
harsh debates and court rulings on the limits of State vs. Federal power, but the fact
remains that such a system is anything but democratic. A second
major fault with the greatest democracy of the world is that typically a minority of its
population bothers to go to the voting booth. Furthermore, Republicans in Congress have
strenuously fought to keep it that way, for example opposing bills such as the motor
registration act, which would make it easier for people to register to vote. Now, in real
democracies, the percentage of people casting their ballots is much higher than the
pitiful American average, and people are automatically registered based on their
biographical data (they receive the registration at home when they turn 18—but of
course this would mean that the Government needs to know who you are and where you live,
God forbid). The
situation is so bad that several years ago the Christian coalition devised a tactic to get
their favorite people elected, called “the 12% strategy.” Since about 50% of
eligible Americans are actually registered to vote, and of these little more than half
bother to show up to cast their ballots, you need to get the vote of half of these
(roughly 12% of the whole population) to be insured victory. On top of this, add the even
stranger primary system, in which only a tiny fraction of really devoted people vote,
thereby dramatically influencing the general election by eliminating candidates that might
do well with the population at large but don’t fit the opinions of a skewed minority
of activists. Here is some food for thought: twenty more millions of people watched
the 2001 Super Bowl than cast their vote in the 2000 elections. One could go
even further and suggest that no current voting system is actually democratic, no
matter the country in which it is implemented. A recent article by Dana Mackenzie in Discover
magazine (November 2000) clearly demonstrates why. It turns out that people have been
studying voting systems for quite a while, and better options than the proportional system
adopted by most countries have been clearly devised—indeed, they have been
historically used by different cultures in different times. Perhaps the
simplest alternative is what is known as approval voting, which dates back to the
13th century, when it was used in Venice to elect magistrates. In this system,
a person casts one vote for every candidate that she considers qualified. It works much
like an opinion poll, with the difference that the results are added up to determine the
winner. One of the advantages of approval voting is that you can vote for a candidate
likely to loose—say, Ralph Nader—and don’t feel like you are wasting your
vote: he will get a good percentage of points while you can also cast your vote for
somebody who is more likely to actually win. If approval voting had been used in the 2000
US elections, John McCain would have won, based on polls conducted in February.
Furthermore, approval voting would have spared Minnesota from electing Jesse Ventura, and
New Hampshire from handing the State’s primary to Pat Buchanan in 1996. Another
alternative to standard voting systems is the Borda count, named after a French
physician and hero of the American Revolution. This system was actually in use in the
Roman senate at least since 105 CE. It is similar to the method used to rank football and
basketball college teams: each voter ranks all the candidates from top to bottom. If we
take a poll by the Sacramento Bee during California’s open primaries in 2000,
McCain would have beaten Gore 48 to 43, Gore would have bettered Bush 51 to 43, and McCain
would have surpassed Bush 50 to 45. Overall, the final rank would have been McCain 98,
Gore 94, and Bush 88. Quite a different outcome from what actually happened! In both the approval and the Borda systems voters are asked something that is missing from the current system: they need to choose who they will pick if their favorite is eliminated. More powers to the voters, a better democracy. Of course,
neither system is perfect, but the point is that most people in the US don’t even
realize that their way is one of the worst among those currently practiced by the
world’s democracies, and serious discussion hasn’t begun in any country on how
to improve the actual democratic value of our voting systems. Given that we have to live
with the results for several years to come, wouldn’t it be worth taking a serious
look at the alternatives? Next Month: "Game Theory, Rational Egoism and the Evolution of
Fairness"
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Further reading:
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Web links:Discover magazine, where the article that
inspired this column originally appeared. Yahoo!’s
gateway to electoral systems, a very valuable comparative resource. The Ancient City of Athens, where
democracy was born—a photographic tour. |
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Rationally Speaking
This column can be
posted for free on any appropriate web site. 
