The Democratic Piece

There is a bill on Gov. Schwarzenegger’s desk to legalize the single transferable vote for use in California’s municipal elections. San Francisco already uses it (albeit a single-winner variant), and there’s a formidable reform movement in the state centered around the Californians for Electoral Reform. But, for most towns, STV is illegal.

This bill is important in that most local jurisdictions are not able to use ranked voting systems under current law, and this bill would permit them to do so. Today only charter counties or charter cities can use IRV, but over three-fourths of cities and counties are general law jurisdictions and don’t have these options. Over half of Californians live in a general law city, a general law county, or both. AB 1294 would give these jurisdictions these additional options, but would not mandate that any jurisdictions use these systems. In other words, it is simply permissive and gives local governments the tools they need to respond to the wishes of their voters.

STV, often called choice voting and, for single-winner elections, instant runoff voting, has an interesting history in the United States. By the end of the Progressive Era, some two dozen municipalities were using it to elect their local councils. By the 1950s, opponents began capitalizing on racism and McCarthyism in a series of repeal measures. STV as an available city plan was shortly eliminated from the Massachusetts state constitution with Cambridge grandfathered in. Following elimination of the New York City school board in 2002, Cambridge became the last STV town in America.

Residents of Davis, CA supported STV/choice voting by 55% in an advisory referendum last November. By signing California’s AB 1294, Governor Arnold can reopen a long-closed wing of America’s democracy laboratory.

WARNING: This post will be of interest to a narrow group of readers. My aim is to put the information into the blogosphere in an easily Googlable form.

Roy Rupert asks of my blogfather:

“What is the secret formula for apportionment? Hundreds of web sites - not one bit of hard facts!”

I believe I have found the answer in the final report of the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. See page 156 of the PDF aforelinked. The answer is Hare quota with largest remainders.

Ontario, Canada’s upcoming referendum on mixed member proportional representation made the Economist today.

So far, the ‘no’ side has raised $500 CDN for a lit piece. And that’s it.

A “Vote for MMP” campaign has set up an office in Toronto and claims a dozen chapters in the province; its opponents have managed to raise just C$500 ($470) to print a leaflet. Both are relying on a C$6-7m educational campaign by the election agency.

For the referendum to pass, that educational campaign has to convince 60% of voters and majorities in 60% of ridings. Maybe that’s why the ‘no’ side doesn’t seem too worried.

According to the Economist, “unstable minority governments” are the main opposition talking point. They really mean coalition governments, and there’s nothing inherently unstable about one of those. I’d argue a “minority government” is something else, and the article gives a good example of one:

At the last provincial election in 2003, the Liberals won 46.5% of the vote but 70% of the seats.

This will not be news to some DP readers. On October 10, voters in Ontario, Canada will decide whether to switch to a mixed-member proportional (MMP) voting system for provincial parliamentary elections.

MMP was born in post-war Germany, where its name roughly translates to “personalized proportional representation.” The basic idea is to have two tiers: a dominant collection of single-member plurality districts and some set of list seats. List seats are allocated to parties in order to even out any disproportion of seats to votes resulting in the districts.

In other words, the district elections “personalize” the PR resulting from the list tier; having ‘one’s own MP’ counterbalances the party-strengthening tendency of list PR. Much opposition nonetheless is based on a fear that party control of who gets to be on the lists will shift the balance in favor of elites at the expense of voters. An op-ed in today’s Toronto Star holds this as a principal reason for MMP’s 2005 defeat in Prince Edward Island.

There are variants of MMP. Party lists can be polity-wide, or they can apply to smaller multi-member districts. List votes can be determined from voters’ district votes, or voters can have two votes (allowing them to support a party and split their ticket at the district level, if they so choose). The list and district tiers can have a fixed number of seats each, or the magnitude of the list tier can fluctuate (as happens in Germany).

The Ontarian proposal calls for a two-vote system with fixed shares (90 districts, 39 list seats). To win list seats, parties must cross a province-wide 3% threshold. If a party wins more district seats than entitled to by its province-wide vote share, it will keep the seats (versus fluctuating the size of the legislature, above). Specifics are available at a very user-friendly website the government has put up as part of its public information campaign.

To pass, the proposal will require a 60% super majority province-wide and simple majorities in 64 of 111 ridings (single-member districts). A 2005 proposal in British Columbia to switch to the single transferable vote required a 60% province-wide and majorities in 60% of the province’s ridings. That vote fell barely 3% short province-wide. Another referendum is expected in 2009.

Both Ontario and BC’s proposals came from Citizens Assemblies - a group of ‘average people’ recruited (and modestly compensated) to learn about electoral systems, review the options and make a recommendation.

According to the Peter Baker’s article “As Democracy Push Falters, Bush Feels Like a ‘Dissident’” in the Washington Post, Bush’s democracy promotion efforts have been hampered by the ole’ Washington bureaucracy. The first six paragraphs of Baker’s article set up the argument that Bush’s plan to “spread democracy around the world… has [been] bogged down in a bureaucratic and geopolitical morass.” Baker states that officials within the administration, including Cheney have “undermined” the president’s “grand project.” He describes the crux of the problem as translating “vision” into “thorny policy.” In conclusion, democracy promotion is tainted by its association with the Bush administration he suggests, citing a Republican presidential candidate’s response to whether he agreed with Bush’s vision: “Absolutely not, because I don’t think we can force people to accept our way of life, our way of government.”

Of course, democracy promotion has very little to do with forcing anyone to accept our way of life or our way of government. If it were, democracy promotion would be called democracy compulsion and that is not what it is or what it was meant to be. In fact, the above quotation has little to do with democracy promotion and a lot to do with regime change and the U.S.’s experiences in Iraq. But regime change is not democracy promotion, so let’s not help our friends in the Kremlin, other autocrats, and aspiring autocrats by perpetuating a myth that suggests otherwise.

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Last Thursday the U.S. House of Representatives voted 241 to 177 on H.R. 1905, a bill that would give the District of Columbia a voting representative in the House, putting the District one step closer to enjoying the full benefits of American democracy.  In the video clip below, the District’s current Delegate to the House, Eleanor Holmes Norton, who can vote in committee but not on the floor, spoke in passionate defense of the bill.  While controversial and even inflamatory at times, Ms. Norton provides one of the best arguments I’ve heard for giving Dictrict residents Congressional representation when she is briefly interrupted by another member. In a speech reminiscent of such fiery American rhetoricians as Samuel Adams and Martin Luther King, Jr., who argued with equal force for equal representation in their own eras, she bases her argument on the fundamental, foundational right of representation we enjoy in this country.

I will not yield, sir.  The District of Columbia has spent 206 years yielding to people who would deny them the vote.  I yield you no ground, not during my time.  You have had your say, and your say has been that you think that the people that live in your capital are not entitled to a vote in their House.  Shame on you.

Congresswoman Norton’s remarks highlight one of the fundamental shortcomings of democracy in this country, and one that severely limits our credibility when we try to promote democracy abroad: that close to 600,000 U.S. citizens are legally disenfranchised because they live within the borders of our capital city.  The U.S. is the only democracy in the world in which citizens of the capital city lack representation in the national legislature.  But here’s the real hypocracy: the Bush administration strives to enshrine the promotion of freedom and democracy as a fundamental pillar of U.S. foreign policy and an important rhetorical justification for the global war on terror, yet they have shown at best a casual indifference toward efforts to secure democratic representation for those disenfranchised American citizens residing in the nation’s capital.

 While I believe promoting democracy is an important tool of U.S. foreign policy (probably for different reasons than many members of the Bush administration, however), with such glaring democratic deficiencies in our own backyard, literally right outside the President’s window, how can we possibly justify the time, effort, and now lives spent fighting for freedom abroad.  In this light, President Bush’s argument in his second inaugural address, that “[t]he best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world,” seems hollow and self-serving rather than principled and magnanimous.  As Americans, we need to take a hard look in the mirror so we know what face we’re presenting to the world when we promote democracy abroad.  Maybe then, we’ll know how silly we can look.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV3k8nERUOQ]

The Pew Center on the States, a division of The Pew Charitable Trusts, and the JEHT Foundation have announced $2 million in grants available to help diagnose how well U.S. elections are run and plan pilot projects to be conducted in 2007 and 2008. The request for proposals (RFP) is part of a larger Pew initiative called Make Voting Work. Make Voting Work is focused on improving the accuracy, convenience, efficiency and security of U.S. elections. Proposals will be accepted through June 4, 2007.

The RFP targets election officials and academics studying elections issues, diverse academic disciplines (e.g., computer science, economics, engineering, human factors and design, operations and management, mathematics), private-sector
companies with applicable expertise, non-profits and non-governmental organizations.

For more information please visit Pew Center on the State’s Web site at http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/ to read the RFP or Frequently Asked Questions with details on how to apply and get connected with potential partners.

The Pew Center on the States point of contact is Scott Cody, Research Director scody@pewcenteronthestates.org.