The Democratic Piece

David M. Mason, chairman of the Federal Election Commission, has rejected Senator John McCain’s request to pull out of the Presidential Primary Matching Payment Program that he entered when his campaign was in the doldrums. Mason has cited two reasons: 1) the FEC has only 2/6 seats filled at present and so lacks a quorum and, 2) McCain used the program as collateral for a loan he took out from a bank late last year. The details of the second point are not fully clear and it appears that there may be two loans involved and not just one loan from a Bethesda bank that the Washington Post talks about.

But who cares about the FEC? What should the Federal Election Commission have to do with this anyway? That’s what former FEC chairman Trevor Potter, McCain’s “top lawyer” seems to think. From the Post’s story: “‘We believe that Senator McCain had a clear legal right to withdraw from the primary matching fund system, and he has done so,’ Potter told the Associated Press. ‘No FEC action was or is required for withdrawal.’”

I enjoy it when former top officials of a given agency, with the change of a hat, suddenly seem to think that the rules of their previous institution of employment are mere suggestions. Potter’s lack of respect for the FEC’s rules demonstrate the most egregious problem in Washington, D.C.: the fact that politicians believe that they are above the law when it inconveniences them. Jan Baran, a lawyer quoted in the Post’s article, is entirely right: “Ignoring the matter on the grounds that the FEC lacks a quorum, Baran said, ‘is like saying you’re going to break into houses because the sheriff is out of town.’”

If we want to improve the American political system, we can start by empowering politicians who respect the rule of law. Good-bye, George. Good-bye Hil.

The big news out of Wisconsin and Hawaii is that Barak Obama won in two states that he was expected to win. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on whether or not you are “on the hope train,” this news is not very big at all. In fact, most news outlets have decided to focus their articles on Obama’s win streak or what the exit polls tell us or both.

I’d like just to pause for a moment and bask in the meaning of Wisconsin and Hawaii. The fact that Obama won these states expectedly, particularly Wisconsin, which is seen as a swing state, is a very big deal. Had Hillary won, or even come close, the tenor of the post-February-19th-primary news cycle would have been entirely different.

Because Obama won Wisconsin and Hawaii, two weeks of news will focus on the despair and frustration of the HRC campaign rather than the hopeful optimism that might have been. She will fuel this descent by truncating her articulation of purpose and harping the urgency of her cause. Her message of hope, which was over matched by Obama’s in the first place, will be replaced by attacks on his. Hillary will blame the media for taking her statements out of context and for siding with Obama. No, it couldn’t be her fault that she’s struggling to hang on. Maybe she needs a new campaign manager.

Of course, most of the things I’ve written above have been characteristics of Hillary’s campaign for quite some time. They are more descriptive than predictive. Wisconsin and Hawaii prove that Hillary began digging her grave prematurely: despair became her story even though destiny was still something she could control.

Now, all she has is despair. She may want to make some campaign visits to churches, where maybe she can pray for a prayer.

As the Obama movement proceeds to overtake Hillary’s support base, Hillary has done a good job convincing voters that her campaign is struggling. In January, Hillary had to loan her campaign $5 million of her private funds, which contrasts just a bit with the $32 million raised by Obama. Then, Hillary gets trounced in 6 primaries and caucuses over the weekend and her campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle ‘quits.’ Nothing says ‘desperation’ like firing your go-to-gal in the heat of battle. If voters were not convinced enough that the once overwhelming inevitability of a third Clinton White House was all but a memory, she gets a lashing in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia just a few days later.

What is most troubling about Hillary’s demise is her offensive against the nomination system, a system that has its pluses and minuses, but was adopted by the DNC to act as the rules of the game for this primary. Now that she is losing, Hillary does not like these rules very much anymore. Hillary’s excuses for failure wreak of desperation and a callous disregard for the rules of the game when they do not work in her favor. She must have learned this from her husband; a man who thinks he can get away with anything by questioning the definition of the word ‘is.’

According to Politico, Hillary “has sought to cast doubts on the legitimacy of the process by which pledged delegates are chosen, arguing that caucuses aren’t true reflections of the will of the people, and that the exclusion of Florida and Michigan voters because of a dispute over the primary calendar taints the official tallies.”

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Of course, today is Super Tuesday. If you’re in one of the states, please go vote for whomever you support. If you don’t, I reserve the right to ignore your complaints about politics till November and you can redeem yourself.

Anyway, I just received an interesting e-mail from the Obama campaign. It invited me to help make get out the vote (GOTV) calls to voters in Super Tuesday states. Here is the page linked in the e-mail. Having worked on a few campaigns before, this is a typical exercise done in the lead up to election day. However, it is typically done in a campaign headquarters by volunteers that the campaign workers have talked to and know. By having the volunteers sit in their offices, they can monitor the progress of the volunteers and remove people who fail to stick to the script or are not very good at “cold calling” people.

The Obama campaign has taken an approach that is much more like a issue based or social movement. The page allows Obama supporters to log-in and pick a super Tuesday state to call. The volunteer is then given links to 20 voters to call along with an interface to register if the voter is an Obama supporter or not. These decentralized tactics are used by other mass-based groups such as Moveon.org or Sierra Club.

I am pretty impressed by the level of trust that the Obama campaign has for their supporters to make an good case for Obama and get out the vote on their own. It seems that the Obama campaign may have as much faith in their supporters as they do in him.

UPDATE: Clinton and Edwards have similar programs. My friend from the Edwards campaign said that if you wanted to make calls, someone from the campaign would still talk to you first to walk you through the steps and vet volunteers a bit.  Checking the McCain and Romney websites, it doesn’t appear that they have similar programs in place.

Candidates running for their party’s presidential nomination have two distinct goals.  The first is the formal goal of obtaining party delegates.  The second is winning the informal quest for momentum with the end result of obtaining the status of inevitability.  In previous primaries, the informal pursuit of momentum has led to the attainment of inevitability, and consequently, party delegates.  Candidates’ decisions to embark on this path has been reinforced by the non-stop news cycle that modern technology has rendered ever so hungry.  Even in the Republican race, where, due to the majoritarian system of awarding delegates used in a number of states a candidate can trounce his opponent on Super Tuesday, the rules of the momentum game do not necessitate inevitability.  How is this possible?

In this morning’s New York Times, Adam Nagourney warns that: “the winner of the states is probably going to be known well before the delegate counts are finished, and that is going to color the way the results are reported on television and in newspapers.”  As such, on the Republican side, Nagourney explains that the two most important states to watch are California and Massachusetts: the former because polls show that Romney may pull out a tight victory there, and the latter because a McCain victory in Romney’s home state, combined with some other expected victories by McCain, could spell the end of Romney’s White House bid.  In the Republican race, acquiring delegates is an element in an equation that leads to one candidate’s popular image of inevitability.  Yet, a victory for Romney in California or his defeat in Massachusetts are the pivotal points that are likely to swing momentum in his or his opponent’s favor.

The Democratic race is similarly dependent on momentum, and perhaps even more so due to the PR system of delegate allocation mandated by the party in each state.  As a result, neither candidate is likely to have a significant lead in the delegate count when the results of Super Tuesday are finally tallied.  Thus, the real story is about momentum.  Because Clinton possessed double-digit leads in a number of Super Tuesday states until recently, the question is how close Obama will come to beating Clinton in the popular votes in important states, even though these overall totals do not matter for the delegate race.  If Obama wins, or even comes close to winning, in states like California, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts, then he will continue to ride the wave of momentum that has helped him cut into Clinton’s leads across the country.

The power of momentum is in maintaining control of the news cycle.  Consider how the Obama campaign has succeeded in this venture since trouncing Clinton unexpectedly in South Carolina (despite adding marginally to his delegate count).  Obama’s impressive victory speech was embraced by the press and has received over 500,000 hits on youtube.com.  He then received the endorsement of Caroline Kennedy, who called him “A President Like My Father,” and Ted Kennedy, the longtime senator and democratic party institution.  This was followed by the announcement in late January that Obama received donations of $32 million in that month alone.  Since these events, all of which graced the front pages of newspapers and websites as well as taking up valuable airtime on television and radio politics shows, the Obama campaign has continued to dominate the news through reports on the massive crowds he has been able to draw at campaign events and the campaigning of his surrogates, such as Oprah Winfrey and the Kennedys (including Maria Schriver).  Not only has Obama gained momentum, but his momentum has become the actual story. 

In this unusual primary season, delegates may come to play a role if none of the candidates are able to embrace convince Americans of their inevitability.  But, if Obama’s momentum is substantiated by the popular votes in some of the states mentioned, he will have broken the early portrayals of Clinton as the inevitable victor, and could be on his way to embracing the democratic presidential nomination.  Formally, he’ll have to obtain enough delegates for this to happen, but informally, he will already have done so.

Via Josep Colomer comes notice of a new finding by Rein Taagepera, co-author with one of this blog’s patrons of Seats & Votes.

Given “simple” electoral rules, the number of effective parties can be predicted from average district magnitude and the number of seats in an assembly. Likewise, magnitude can be predicted from the number of effective parties (say, in a constituent assembly) and number of seats. “Simple” here refers to single-tier systems without thresholds (i.e. all SMD, all PR-STV, et cetera). Moreover:

Since, according to Taagepera, the number of seats of the assembly depends strongly on the country’s population (in a cube root relation), we can deduct from the above formula that, for similar number of parties, P, the larger the country, and hence the larger the assembly, S, the smaller the expected district magnitude, M. Very large countries, precisely because they have large assemblies, should be associated to small (single-member) districts. The institutional designers in India, for example, are likely to choose single-member districts, while the institutional designers in Estonia are likely to choose multimember districts, typically associated to proportional representation rules. Thus we should usually see large assemblies with small districts, and small assemblies with large districts. Which is what we indeed usually see.

And from the above, because assembly size is a function of country population, we should see smaller districts in more populous countries. Colomer goes on:

But now we could have an answer to the very intriguing question of why large countries, including the United States, in spite of the fact that large size is typically associated to high heterogeneity, keep small single-member districts and have not adopted proportional representation. The answer may be that in large countries such as Australia, Canada, France, India, the United Kingdom and the United States, a large assembly can be sufficiently inclusive, even if it is elected in small, single-member districts, due to territorial variety of the representatives.

With the caveat that I’m relying only on Prof. Colomer’s helpful summary, I’d make two comments. (One easily could make more; this is a big argument.)

One, the size of the US House has not approximated the cube root of the US population since 1912. Therefore N-seats no longer proxies very well for population in the American case. Of course, electoral rules are sticky, and there was more or less a settlement on single-member districts by 1912, even if a few states still used MMD.

Two, notwithstanding the above, one takeaway message might be: the nexus of a (more than less) large assembly and (effectively) two-party system satisfies elites who otherwise would agitate for reform. That institutional combo offers the likelihood for both factions to hold power at some point in the not too distant future. As such, it dampens the incentive for an out-party to increase district magnitude the next time it wins a seat majority.

This point is different from Colomer’s about territorial variety leading to inclusiveness, even when effective thresholds are high. I don’t believe that, all else equal, an assembly’s inclusiveness of opinion matters much for reform. In any normal year, the battle is in marginal districts for the favor of mercurial swing voters. As long as there is loose ideological correspondence between a party and its base, the state of affairs can roll along undisturbed.

Taagepera’s finding is interesting because it implies, if my understanding is correct, the probability of a future seat majority may override geographic incentives for proportionality in the now. In other words, we’d predict the Democrats to prefer the status quo over reform that maximizes the seat-winning efficiency of their spatially concentrated (i.e. “packed”) voter distribution.

Moreover, if I’ve done the math correctly, the model predicts PR-STV in three-seat districts - a reform I’ve elsewhere called modest - would result in six effective parties. That is counterintuitive given the landscape as we know it: Republican, Democrat, Green and Libertarian. Imagine how the landscape would look if the model does in fact predict the number of parties. Imagine what would happen to the coalitions we now call “major parties.”

And, assuming a constant number of effective parties (two), we would expect a decrease in the size of the House to present incentives for reform.

As the 2010 US census nears, redistricting and reapportionment enter the news. CMC’s Rose Institute has pulled together a handful of snippets concerned with redistricting reform. For others, the apportionment question is equally interesting. How will 435 House seats be reshuffled among states whose relative populations have changed?

A spirited Pennsylvanian call for ‘fair’ redistricting touches on the problem:

With most of the nation’s population growth taking place in the South and West, Pennsylvania is on track to lose another congressional district — dropping to 18 — when reapportionment takes place after the 2010 census.

The Burnt Orange Report cites some projections from the Swing State Project on who’s likely to get what: four more for Texas, one or two for Florida, two for Arizona and one each for Georgia, Nevada, Oregon and Utah. Expected losers are mostly in the midwest and northeast.

The partisan desire to guard marginal advantage is strong. Majority parties fight independent redistricting initiatives tooth-and-nail. A modest reform like 3-seat STV is pie-in-the-sky.

But the House sets its own size. Why wouldn’t incumbents facing the axe move to add seats?

Bipartisan gerrymandering could shore up every incumbent. Increasing the size of the House could make new seats the battlegrounds, allaying fears about freezing a status quo.

I suppose it’s possible in theory.

While some jurisdictions had off-year elections yesterday, four others voted on instant runoff voting (aka IRV, alternative vote, single transferable vote applied to a single-winner election). Three others used IRV for public elections, and one other used STV (aka choice voting), crème de la crème of candidate-based, multi-winner methods.

On implementation/retention

In Pierce County, WA, IRV survived a veritable repeal attempt 66% to 34% just one year after its passage. Charter Amendment 4 would have restored the closed primary and delayed implementation until 2010.

Sarasota, FL voters passed IRV 78% to 12%. Implementation is pending compatible equipment at the county level.

In Aspen, CO, 77% approved IRV for mayor and a “multi-seat” variant for two at-large council seats. This was an advisory referendum.

In Clallam County, WA, IRV failed 55% to 45%.

Overall good news for the reform movement, which passed IRV and/or STV in four jurisdictions last November.

In public elections

Hendersonville, NC used “multi-seat” IRV for the first time.

Takoma Park, MD used IRV city-wide for the first time. Some voters had a first exposure last January in a special vacancy election. Takoma Park passed IRV in November 2005.

Once again, San Francisco voters ranked up to three choices on optically scanned IRV ballots. It passed there in 2002.

Finally, Cambridge, MA used STV to elect nine city council members and six school committee members. The quota: Droop. The surplus transfer: Cincinnati method. The count: electronic. (Yes, electronic. And surplus transfer might be fractional if not for politics over voting equipment and the city’s grandfathering post-statewide repeal.)

Cambridge has used STV since 1941. It’s the lone survivor of 24 (some say 22 or 23) Progressive Era municipal implementations, the rest of which faced racially and politically charged repeals through the 1950s. (However the NYC school board lasted until 2002). Cambridge itself survived several repeal attempts.

CA Congressman Darrell Issa (R-49) will help bankroll the effort to split California’s Electoral College votes by congressional district (CD allocation). And he’s defending it as a move to “proportional representation.”
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The Providence Journal reports City Council interest in adding some number of at-large seats to its ranks. Currently 15 councilpersons are elected in single-member districts.

Councilman Seth Yurdin, representing Fox Point, has put forth a plan that would dramatically increase the size of the council, to 21 members. It would keep the existing 15 wards, and add 6 at-large seats. The citywide seats would be elected by a method of proportional representation known as the single transferable vote to ensure that council members come from across the city, and not solely from economically powerful areas.

A competing proposal calls for adding just two at-large seats elected under the bloc vote.

Dubbing the PR plan “fifteen and six,” a good letter to the editor by a RI state legislator gets into some of the considerations: citywide accountability, campaign costs, women and minority representation and council size more generally.

Council domination - by a neighborhood, class or some organized interest - usually comes up when people start talking about moving away from wards toward at-large elections. STV is a good way to address those concerns.

Most (but not all) local-level electoral system reform talk happens on the west coast, so it’s fun to see the same in a ‘classic’ northeastern city like Providence.