The Democratic Piece

Disgusting is the politician who uses his opponent’s skin color and religion to fear people into voting for you.  Hillary became disgusting when she said Obama’s not a Muslim “as far as I know“.

Pathetic is the politician who attacks people because they disagree with him, especially when he is incredibly wrong.  This is what Hillary became today.  From Reuters:

“I’m not going to put my lot in with economists,” Clinton said when asked to name an economist who backed her proposal.

“We’ve got to get out of this mind-set where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans,” said Clinton, a former first lady who would be the first woman president.

Sadly, the attack-when-wrong tactic is a tried and true method of convincing people that you are right.  But if this is your strategy, then who needs to be right?  Tired is the politician who conforms the world to his worldview, rather than making the adjustments to his worldview that would cause it to fit the world.

“Mission accomplished,” right?

I’ve had enough of this bullshit for the last 8 years to last a lifetime…  how about you?

London, England had local elections on May 1. As far as local elections go, the city has quite an interesting set-up.

The mayor is elected using the supplemental vote, which is a cruddy variant of IRV. Voters get two choices. If no candidate has a majority of first choices, the top two compete in an instant runoff of sorts.

All the other candidates are eliminated but the second choice votes on their ballot papers are reviewed. If they are for either of the top two candidates these votes are added to their totals.

The candidate with the most first and second choice votes wins. If there is a tie then the Greater London Returning Officer draws lots.

The 25-member assembly is elected under MMP: 14 seats in single-member plurality districts, 11 from party lists.

Some are upset that proportional representation let the British National Party win a seat, but that’s no reason to toss out the baby with the bath water. Undesirable causes can prevail under any voting system, and PR also lets forces for good win seats where they might not otherwise. As the Make Votes Count campaign notes:

However, the way the London Assembly elections work has also given anti-racist campaigners the opportunity to organise, campaign and get out the vote in their own areas, in an effort to push up turnout and raise the threshold needed for the BNP to gain seats. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the message that votes in the London Assembly London-wide Members ballot in effect counted twice – once for the party they support, and once against the BNP – motivated numbers of people who otherwise may not have voted to make the trip to their polling station.

Those believing ‘we’ve always had winner-take-all elections’ will be surprised to know Louisiana just held two for the first time since 1976. (On a Saturday, no less.)

In the 1st district, Steve Scalise (R) won a four-way race with 75%. Voters in the 6th district, formerly held by Richard Baker (R), elected Democrat Dan Cazayoux with 49% of votes. The big news, some say, is that the national swing favoring Democrats in 2006 seems like it will persist into November 2008. In other news, the new winner-take-all system wasted 50.8% of votes in LA-06.

Louisiana used to use a ‘cajun primary’ for all its elections until legislation last year brought congressional races in line with the national norm.

The cajun primary is an open-endorsement two-round system (TRS). All candidates compete in the first round of voting. If no candidate has a majority, the top two face off in a later round. The system makes it somewhat difficult for parties to discipline candidates and organize voters, which are features I like given the context. On the other hand, the top-two logic of the first round makes it easy for like-minded voters to spoil their own candidates, which I do not like. With its single round of voting, sequential (versus batch) elimination, and majority requirement, IRV is a better option for parties and voters alike.

Unfortunately Louisiana did not go that route. Happily, though, the federalism of electoral system design (versus election administration) holds out the possibility for such innovation. If only states could control district magnitude too.

Anyone with time and interest should read this column about the genesis of the single transferable vote and its history in America. It’s written by someone at Princeton U who knows her stuff.

There was controversy recently at Princeton over their STV student government elections. As with Georgetown undergrads earlier this year, calls for repeal were rooted in misunderstanding of the system.

Good article, Josephine.

Earlier this week, I called the Indiana voter ID decision American-style backslide. For those outside the jargon community, “backslide” happens when a regime becomes more authoritarian. It is an action (i.e. raiding an opposition party headquarters) or structural rules change (i.e. making it virtually impossible for opposition parties to get on a ballot) that effects a persistent chill in democratic contestation.

“Backslide” usually describes “developing” democracies, but I (with some academic backers) reject the notion that the “consolidated” democracies are fully “democratized” and therefore immune to description as “backsliding.”

My own colleagues pushed back. I was being extreme in my characterization of the decision, they said. Countries do not move along a simple democracy-authoritarianism continuum. They become less perfect democracies, but they do not become authoritarian. Ok. Maybe.

Even academic debate over voter ID takes its democratic compatibility for granted. Much of the discussion on the election-law listserv is dryly empirical. What are the effects of voter ID on turnout? To what extent does it really disenfranchise the groups activists claim it will? How can we operationalize those questions? Most - but thankfully not all - talk of voter ID is in terms of an utilitarian harm calculus. Regardless of the policy, democracy is safe in America.

I disagree. Democracy is relatively new in America, and “backslide” can describe our country as anyone else’s. The Polity IV index (PDF) considers America a stable democracy since 1809, even though slavery persisted for 56 more years. I would argue the transition to democracy happened over a century later, when federal voting rights legislation overturned systematic, mass disenfranchisement at the state level. One might argue the transition is still happening. Where is our enshrined right to vote? Why do elected officials control the elections that elect them?

In today’s NY Times, Adam Cohen draws on history to make the point much clearer than I had using comparative examples. Voter ID, he says, is a “modern poll tax.” Calling for federal regulation and standardization of election administration, he writes:

It is chilling to think that state legislators and election officials would intentionally try to make it harder for Americans to vote, but they always have — with poll taxes, literacy tests and gerrymandering. There was a time when the Supreme Court regularly struck these restrictions down. In 1966, it held Virginia’s $1.50 poll tax unconstitutional. In 1972, it ruled that Tennessee’s one-year residency requirement for voting violated the Constitution.

Now the Supreme Court has switched sides. This week, it upheld a harsh Indiana voter ID law that could disenfranchise many poor, elderly and student voters. The ruling will make it even easier for other states to block voters’ access to the ballot box

Read the article, especially the first few grafs, for appalling worst practices. Here’s a teaser: former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell in 2004 trashed voter registration forms printed on the ‘wrong’ paper weight.

Voter ID is contrived, incremental disenfranchisement through legal channels. It is consistent with historical stains on America’s democratic process, and it is consistent with contemporary examples of backslide worldwide: opposition-fragmenting districting in Morocco, ballot access restrictions and election ‘reform’ in Russia, and power-consolidating election ‘reform’ Kyrgyzstan, to name a few. As we promote democracy elsewhere, we should remember how new and fragile it is at home. We should promote it here too.

As a start, we should see the federalism of election administration for what it is: an excuse for states to inscrutably limit voting rights.

Hawaii’s state legislature has overridden the governor’s veto of the state-based plan to elect the president by national, popular vote, according to a Common Cause news release. That means the compact now has four member states accounting for 50 total electors: MD, IL, NJ and the Aloha state.

Until now, the only states to ratify NPV have had united, Democratic governments. Otherwise it has died on Republican governors’ desks or in Republican legislatures. Hawaii is the first state to break the pattern - sort of.

See plan co-author Rob Richie’s comment on NPV’s background and prospects from the perspective of a movement leader. Just because Hawaii only breaks the pattern “sort of” doesn’t mean we can’t have a normal presidential election by 2012. After all, electoral reform is about defying the model predictions.

I stumbled across an interesting post from Sean’s Russia Blog detailing a new amendment to Russia’s media law that passed late last week that expands the ability of the Kremlin to go after media outlets. Sean writes:

the Duma passed an amendment to the mass media law that adds slander to the list of unmentionables such as revealing state secrets, supporting terrorism, advocating pornography, and promoting violence. The law doesn’t use the word “slander” but redefined it with “intentionally false information,” which, of course, is just about anything. Perhaps more important than the vague, elastic language is the fact that the amendment gives the Ministry of Justice the power to issue warnings to media outlets for publishing slanderous and libelous material. Two warnings in twelve months allows Justice to shut the media outlet down pending trial.

As Sean also notes, this come on the heels of a recent newspaper being shut down for publishing a story detailing an alleged affair between Putin and a former Russian Olympic Gymnast turned Duma MP. Putin denied the probably false rumor, but the newspaper was shut down days later because of “funding problems.” It is not hard to imagine that this amendment may even be in response to the irresponsible story of a single paper, but I guess the Duma has a duty to protect the integrity of the state Putin.

While Russia has had loose “libel laws” that allowed individuals to sue media organizations for what they print, this is a marked step in a direction towards legalized state coercion of the media - although they already own (partially or in full) most of the television and radio outlets.

This event also dovetails nicely with Freedom House’s recent annual report of Global Press Freedom in the World. Freedom House found, unsurprisingly, that the freedom of the Russian press had declined. (The draft text, maps and pretty charts are available here.)

This report was drafted before this amendment was passed. Putin’s Russia is surely in a sad state when a Freedom House report is out of date before it’s even off the presses.