US Election Day’s unsung races

Beyond several “off-year” and special elections with or without predictive significance for major future races, there were several ballot measures or elections today involving STV/IRV, including:

• One on a new IRV implementation (at time of writing, it looks good);
• One on a new STV implementation (at time of writing, it doesn’t look good;
• One on whether to keep IRV;
• One advisory vote on whether to keep IRV;
• One first-time use of IRV;
• Three uses of IRV for the second or more times;
• And two uses of STV in the same town, continuing an almost 70-year run with the system.

Over the last decade, we’ve accumulated quite a set of referenda on these systems. That set does not include legislative votes (probably several) or statewide referenda (one). It would be interesting to identify patterns in support for these measures.

Can the Democracy Index cause election reform?

There is much ado in the blogosphere this week about the Democracy Index. Briefly, Yale law professor Heather Gerken has proposed ranking US states by level of quality of election administration. Her proposed index includes framework-based indicators (i.e. voting equipment integrity and registration procedures) as well as implementation indicators (i.e. time spent waiting to vote).¹ Rick Hasen calls the book “highly recommended,” and it has drawn the attention of AEI, the Pew Center on the States and Brookings, among others.

Many believe the index will create incentives to reform election management procedures. While Gerken’s project portends the systematic gathering of useful data, I am less convinced by claims about its capacity to foment reform.

According to the authors, the index should advance change in three ways: giving policymakers an empirical basis for standards development, informing voters so they can hold politicians accountable, and making states want higher rankings. This last point is getting the most play.

According to Gerken:

[The index] should work for the same reason that college rankings have such a dramatic effect on university decision making: no one wants to be at the bottom of the list.

Ed Foley offers further thoughts on the university rankings analogy:

Building upon a similar call by my Moritz colleague Dan Tokaji for the collection of reliable statistics relevant to policy judgments about election administration (as Gerken graciously acknowledges), the piece seeks a hard-number formula that would embarrass states with low scores. This embarrassment, in turn, would generate momentum for reform that would feed on itself in a cyclical “race to the top,” as low-scoring states leapfrog over previously higher-ranking ones, which having now slipped in the rankings would undertake initiatives to reestablish their superiority, and so forth.

Anyone familiar with how similar numerical rankings exert competitive pressures on law schools (and universities generally) to improve their performances according to the criteria used to determine these rankings, a phenomenon Gerken herself invokes in support of her proposal, knows the power of these numbers and thus the truth of Gerken’s insight.

Andrew Gelman shares this optimism:

What makes Gerken’s proposal particularly appealing is its feature of using open sharing of information to create incentives for states and localities to improve their electoral systems, by setting up specific targets that voters can follow.

Because the average voter’s expected benefit from election reform is relatively low, election management quality rankings will not work the same way that university rankings do. Consumers choose universities² according to their rankings, but voters are unlikely to move to higher ranked states. First, the cost of exit is too high. Second, even if it were not, voters almost certainly choose where to live for other reasons: economic conditions, climate, proximity to family, et cetera.

Democracy rankings are similarly unlikely to cause voters to vote out politicians who are not progressive about electoral reform. Most people simply care more about other issues. Even in good economic times, taxes and gay marriage will be higher priorities than maximizing the ease of voting or, for that mater, the competitiveness of a state legislative district.³

Finally, thinking that states – or the politicians in them who actually make decisions – will maximize state rankings overlooks the extent to which election administration is politicized. In an ideal United States, the default would be for government to maximize everyone’s ability to vote. In a world without 100% turnout or valid ballot rates, however, affecting those rates often has partisan implications.⁴ Consider Bush v. Gore, which permitted Florida officials to stop counting votes to the benefit of George W. Bush. Or Ohio 2004, when officials set unreasonable paper weight requirements for voter registration forms. Or recent broils over voter ID, persistent opposition to more universal voter registration, and the Rhode Island governor’s repeated refusal to let high school students pre-register. In close elections, control of the system is control of the outcome. Most politicians maximize partisan control, not democracy scores.

That said, I share the passion of Prof. Gerken and the other commentators for data and research-based advocacy. I also share her passion for raising election reform in voters’ preference orderings. If the index does effect reform, though, it likely will be through those rare but crucial public officials whose charisma and agenda-setting ability sometimes result in fairer elections.

1. Andrew Gelman notes how it also could incorporate minor parties’ concerns about issues like ballot access.
2. Especially law schools, where rankings heavily influence the prospects for job interviews after graduation.
3. California voters’ passage of independent redistricting may seem an exception. However this did not depend on “throwing the bums out,” as the reform (narrowly) passed at referendum.
4. ADDENDUM 4/6/09: Simon Jackman has a good post arguing that compulsory voting is the main reason for Australia’s high-quality election architecture. Quote: “In short, if the state wants to make something compulsory, then it has to make compliance easy, and that is essentially one of the chief things the AEC does, and does pretty well.”

Preferential voting is not too difficult

Several political scientists have advocated for preferential voting systems as conflict management devices in divided societies.¹ The most common criticism I hear is that they are too complicated. I do not believe this, at least where literacy rates are reasonably high.

Recent American experience with ranked voting systems shows that a little voter education goes a long way. Burlington, VT just held its second ever instant runoff voting election. Of 8,980 total ballots, only four were invalid. That’s a 0.04 percent error rate. Less fatally, only one voter did not use all five of his/her rankings, according to Rob Richie.²

Here is an example of the ballot voters used.

1. Donald Horowitz has advocated instant runoff voting/alternative vote. Ben Reilly and Andrew Reynolds have variously advocated and highlighted the single transferable vote.
2. UPDATE: Actually, the voter did not specify a first choice.

It’s called “Elections”

In today’s “The Conversation,” a new discussion format by the New York Times that pits columnists against each other, David Brooks makes a sloppy error that I couldn’t help blogging about (for the first time in several months).  In a discussion about the new stimulus bill, Brooks responds to Gail Collins’ argument that unfettered markets are not the savior that many right wingers want them to be with the following:

As for the broader point that capitalists can be pretty dumb. Granted. But the market does have a mechanism for educating itself: prices, and in some cases bankruptcy. Government lacks a self-correction mechanism, or at least a good one.

Democratic governance features a number of “self-corrective” mechanisms, perhaps the most obvious of which is elections.  For example, when it became obvious that the Republican administration’s policies were no longer effective for the country, voters pulled the plug on the Bush administration and many Republican congress members lost their seats.   This is how democracies self-correct – purge the old and bring in the new.

Perhaps Brooks thinks that this is not a “good” mechanism of self-correction, but I doubt that.  By virtue of the fact that it’s better than all the others, democratic elections appear to be a pretty good check.  This is particularly true when coupled with other checks and balances in addition to protections that permit political oppositions to thrive.

PR-STV on the ballot in Cincinnati

The Hamilton County, OH Board of Elections yesterday certified a petition by the Cincinnati NAACP to put proportional representation on the November ballot.

If the measure passes, voters will use the single transferable vote to elect a nine-member city council, renewing a 30-year good government experiment that ended in a vitriolic 1957 repeal effort:

The single transferable vote had allowed African Americans to be elected for the first time, with two blacks being elected to the city council in the 1950s. The nation was also seeing the first stirrings of the Civil Rights movement and racial tensions were running high. PR opponents shrewdly decided to make race an explicit factor in their repeal campaign. They warned whites that PR was helping to increase black power in the city and asked them whether they wanted a “Negro mayor.” Their appeal to white anxieties succeeded, with whites supporting repeal by a two to one margin.

I have tried recently to focus on international democracy assistance, but this could be a major development in the history of American democracy and world of electoral systems.

Today only Ireland, Northern Ireland, Australia, Malta, New Zealand, Scotland (h/t to James) and Cambridge, Mass. use STV (of the multimember variety) for governmental elections, so Cincinnati would add a case to that family.

Cincinnati is the next page in a long and underexposed history of election reform in America. From the Progressive Era through the Civil Rights movement, 22 US cities (or 24 depending on definitions) used PR-STV for local elections, many of which were in Ohio. The second to last experiment ended in 2002 with the disbanding of New York City’s school board.

While system performance varied by city and indicator, STV’s overall record was positive:

On the whole, from the available evidence, proportional representation seemed to have a beneficial effect on the cities that adopted it. It clearly produced more representative government and, where voters wanted it, a more diverse party system. Large increases in the number of effective votes were also enjoyed in these cities. It may not have resulted in the substantial increases in voter turnout that proponents predicted, but neither did it produce the increases in voter alienation that critics feared. And finally, even though PR city councils were often more diverse politically, this did not seem to impair their political efficiency or effectiveness.

Good sources for more specifics are Doug Amy’s site linked above and Robert Kolesar in Proportional Representation and Election Reform in Ohio, Kathleen Barber ed., OSU Press 1995.

STV seeks proportional results and maximizes ‘votes that elect’ by transferring votes in excess of a quota to voters’ next-ranked choices. With nine seats in Cincinnati, it will take 10 percent of votes to win each. There are different ways to transfer surplus, and Cincinnati would use the quasi-random “Cincinnati method.”

Who cares? American reformers, for one, but the ends they are pursuing should not be lost on the international democracy assistance community, which has engaged in electoral engineering from Afghanistan to Nepal over the past few years.

As Donald Horowitz, Ben Reilly and others have noted, STV (and its single-winner cousin) can benefit divided societies through the incentive it presents to campaign for second- and third-choice support outside one’s group. Because it’s a proportional system, STV prevents exclusion of significant minority groups, especially as the number of seats to elect increases. As a candidate-centric system, STV emphasizes entrepreneurial campaigns over party labels. Finally, as a system based on multimember districts, it reduces incentives to gerrymander.

Not all contexts would benefit. Innumeracy can be a barrier to a method based on ranking, and places with highly fragmented party systems probably need stronger incentives for cohesion. These caveats notwithstanding, democracy promoters should embrace the wealth of lessons learned – and to be learned – about the growing number of STV cases at home and abroad.

Moving Government from “Spectacle” to “Spectacularly Great Entertainment”

Without in any way endorsing anything McCain has said today, particularly moving the goal posts yet again in Iraq to 2013 (conveniently enough JUST after his presumed re-election against a candidate urging to “cut-and-run”), I do have to say that I like his urging to bring UK-style question sessions to the President. Aside from my belief in the necessity of such things for the health of a democracy, I also believe this type of procedure makes for fantastic television.

I have come to believe that one of the greatest tragedies of the Bush 2 presidency has been the complete transformation of the presidency into a carefully controlled photo-op. While this has helped to reduce unfortunate gaffes by this particularly prone president, it has also turned the most powerful democratically elected office in the world into a complete spectacle. I believe that this has had two harmful consequences:

1) It leaves the American public feeling cut off from their elected leaders, thus reducing government legitimacy and public participation.

2) It leaves the American government cut off from the American people, and worse, cut off from even the most marginal inquiry.

While #1 is unfortunate, I believe that #2 has been disastrous. Perhaps the reason why we’ve seen policy after policy which should never have been implemented is that nobody was ever actually able to ask the President a meaningful question about the policies he wanted to implement. Instead, we received a classic case of cabinet groupthink and, well, we see what we’ve ended up with.

I’m not sure that a “Questions” session is the perfect answer to this problem, but it’s a great place to start. If a President can’t be bothered to learn enough about why a policy should be implemented to defend it to the lawmakers who fund it at the taxpayers expense, well, then maybe that policy shouldn’t be pursued any further. It may not actually bring information feedback back to American government, but it should make for some great entertainment.

Jim Crow lives

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 joins National Popular Vote

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.

Backslide, American-style

Monday’s Supeme Court upholding of Indiana’s voter ID law deserves comment on a blog about comparative democracy.

The short story: you cannot vote in Indiana unless you present valid, state- or federal-issued photo identification. The longer version: there is a fairly narrow list of accepted forms. If you don’t have one, you can fill out a provisional ballot and sign an affidavit as to your identity. If you want that vote to count, you have to go to the county seat within 10 days and sign another affidavit.

I have nothing against voter ID, even if solves a problem that doesn’t really exist. Except for people who don’t want their pictures taken, there nothing intrinsically wrong with voter ID…

…as long as the state accepts responsibility for issuing IDs to all citizens in an equal and accessible manner.

The social inequality of the policy as-is will be clear to anyone with SES columns in his spreadsheet. To vote without ID, you need a car and/or public transportation and considerable free time to dance with bureaucracy. To get a free ID, you need a car and/or public transportation and a valid birth certificate, which, if you don’t have one, means you need a car and/or public transportation and the free time to go get all this stuff.

This certainly will not increase turnout in the world’s most low-turnout established democracy. Especially among the poor and elderly – those without cars, mobility, free time, money or jobs that give them time to vote.

But these old arguments will be familiar to TDP’s Americanist audience. Rather than rehash the projected effects and underlying methodologies, I want to make three comparative points.

One. If the US constitution contained an equal and affirmative right to vote, no amount of judicial balancing would have produced this outcome. Unlike in the world’s other, established democracies, no such right exists. As such, SCOTUS has opened the door to similar policies in states itching to promulgate them.

Two. Even right-to-vote countries risk social inequality spilling over into political inequality. That’s why Canada’s electoral management body goes to people’s houses registering voters. With its policy of compulsory voting, Australia is similarly proactive about filling its rolls.

Three. Some say voting is a right, not a responsibility. If you want to vote, get off your lazy duff and make the preparations. That argument is a mask – one that secures buy-in among libertarian-oriented masses – for systemic efforts to steal elections where technology and learning make overt fraud obsolete. Around the world, parallel vote counts and international pressure have forced authoritarian leaders to “upgrade” their methods. By squeezing participation, restrictive electoral laws let dictators steal elections long before election day. As the number of competitive federal jurisdictions in America drops, state-level entry barriers make electoral conclusions more foregone in all but the most competitive years.

American democracy will survive voter ID, but it’s a step in the authoritarian direction. The short-term solution is affirmative state action to issue those IDs. In the long term, we need a federally guaranteed, equal right to vote.

Domestic observers will monitor PA primary

According to a press release I just received (emphasis mine):

Common Cause’s election reform team will monitor voting problems and concerns that may arise tomorrow during the Democratic presidential primary in Pennsylvania, where an unprecedented turnout is expected, including a huge surge of new voters.

Some 7 million Pennsylvania voters are expected to vote tomorrow on paperless electronic voting machines that lack the ability to do a recount. Common Cause will help monitor problems reported to the Election Protection Coalition’s national voter hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

Pennsylvania election officials are bracing for unprecedented turnout in a state with a recent history of voting machine problems, and where voter registration and registration changes have surged in recent months.

How will PA affect the big picture? Not very much, according to PoliBlog:

I must confess, it is difficult to get too excited about the Pennsylvania primary, given that no matter the result, we will be in basically the same position: Obama with more popular votes and pledged delegates, and therefore on the surer footing for the nomination.

Another part of the big picture concerns close elections. As Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 taught, close elections strain the legitimacy of rules otherwise considered minutiae. Will voting equipment and voter rolls join Michigan and Florida as flash points in the Clinton-Obama saga?