Repairing Democracy

And while I'm posting tonight, I will put up something political as well.

I think I've figured out what this country needs. I just don't know how to make it happen, because it runs counter to the interests of the very people who would have to make it happen.

We know that the two-party system is failing us. We know that those two parties have come to realize that they are never seriously at risk of losing power (except back and forth in the eternal tug of war with each other), and so they've both reached a level of corruption that never quite goes away, merely hides effectively when the pendulum has momentarily swung in the other direction.

We also know, as a society, that a vote for anyone but one of the “big two” is a “wasted vote” in all but an extremely limited set of races. And worse than a wasted vote, if you know that it's almost certain that one of two candidates will win, a vote for anyone else is essentially a lost vote for whichever of the two you consider least odious. Casting a vote for Perot because he more closely matches your conservative values than George H. W. Bush essentially robs Bush of a vote, and puts Bill Clinton one step closer to winning the election. A vote for Ralph Nader takes a vote from Al Gore or John Kerry and puts George W. Bush on a path to (re)election.

Third party candidates do not win elections in the major races in this country, they merely split the vote with whichever candidate's philosophy they are closer to and help to elect the candidate most distant.

For some time, I've thought the solution was to make our elections more complicated, with a ranking system and a complex formula for determining who wins, each voter ranking the candidates in order of preference, so that a vote for a third party candidate doesn't remove all support for the more likely winner that the voter considers the lesser evil.

The problem with that solution, of course, is that our voting system is open to all comers, and anyone who was around for months of discussions of “dimpled chads” and “hanging chads” and the like realizes that some among our fellow citizens can barely be trusted to punch a single hole in a ballot card, these people do NOT need a more complex voting system. And yet they still have a right, in a democracy, to be heard.

Then I had a discussion with some of my co-workers in Belgium, and the solution hit me: Run-off elections. It's what they do in Belgium and a number of other countries. The solution is simple, to win an election, you must get half-plus-one of all of the votes cast. If no one gets that many, a runoff election is held among the top vote getters, and in the runoff election there can be no write-in candidates.

Of course the cost of having a second election and the hassle of getting an American populace that rarely turns out in numbers higher than 40% to begin with to show up a second time are both problems to be overcome, but think of the results: We've all, at one time or another, been so fed up with both the Democrats and the Republicans (or more correctly, their candidates in one race or another) that we'd really have loved to vote for someone else entirely, but most of us have eventually held our nose and voted for the lesser of two evils. But in the runoff election world, we COULD vote for someone else, because our lost vote could not give the election to the candidate we liked least: If he or she took more than 50% of the cast votes, our having voted for the opposition wouldn't have changed the outcome. And if the opposition took LESS than 50%, we get another chance to vote in the runoff.

It's beautiful and would break the two party system more effectively than any impotent campaign finance reform, because as soon as we got used to it, we'd start voting as a population for the person we really thought best for the job, not one of the two we liked least, but were the only ones with a shot of winning.

There are, of course, details to be worked out, but imagine a Congress where the largest single party controlled maybe 25% of the seats. Where instead of having a majority party that could just dictate to the minority party, there'd have to be consensus among various factions to pass anything, and there would have to be real debate, real compromise, real cooperation helping to keep the pork barrel spending down and the bills more honest.

Maybe I'm hoping for too much, but we need a change. We need a fresh look at how we do things. We need to get away from the Democrats and the Republicans as our only choices, as they pay lip service to our fundamental beliefs and then give away the store to corporations, rich donors and special interests.

Liam.