Rationally Speaking
A monthly e-column by Massimo Pigliucci
Department of Botany, University of Tennessee
N. 7, February 2001: "The Greatest Democracy in the World and the Unfairness of American Elections"
The
United States of America is the self-professed greatest democracy
in the world. Besides the obvious offensiveness of such claim to countries
that are equally democratic and that can claim a longer history of
civil liberties than the US can, the very idea flies in the face of
the actual structure of the American electoral system. This has been
painfully demonstrated by the recent squabble between George Bush
and Al Gore on who really won the election.
Let's
start with democracy 101. Ever since ancient Athens, democracy means
the rule of the people (though for a long time the "people" have not
included women, economically "lower" classes and slaves). By that
simple criterion, the American system is undemocratic because it allows
someone to win the presidential election even though she lost the
popular vote‹as has just happened to Gore and did happen a few other
times before. This bizarre situation can occur because in the US the
people don't really vote, electors chosen by each State do. And since
each State is guaranteed a certain number of electoral votes which
is not commensurate to its population, rural states are over-represented
and Mr. Bush won by acreage rather than votes. As a citizen of New
Hampshire put it recently during one of many interviews the media
broadcasted after the 2000 elections, "If we went to a proportional
system, New Hampshire would count for nothing." As it should, if this
were really a democracy.
According
to historians, there was originally a good reason for such a peculiar
system. The United States were not really united, but rather resembled
a loose confederation of largely independent entities, Swiss-style.
Under those conditions, it was only natural to give precedence to
the abstract entity of a "State" rather than to each of its citizens.
Of course, the United States has never really become a nation‹witness
the harsh debates and court rulings on the limits of State vs. Federal
power, but the fact remains that such a system is anything but
democratic.
A
second major fault with the greatest democracy of the world is that
typically a minority of its population bothers to go to the voting
booth. Furthermore, Republicans in Congress have strenuously fought
to keep it that way, for example opposing bills such as the motor
registration act, which would make it easier for people to register
to vote. Now, in real democracies, the percentage of people casting
their ballots is much higher than the pitiful American average, and
people are automatically registered based on their biographical data
(they receive the registration at home when they turn 18‹but of course
this would mean that the Government needs to know who you are and
where you live, God forbid).
The
situation is so bad that several years ago the Christian coalition
devised a tactic to get their favorite people elected, called "the
12% strategy." Since about 50% of eligible Americans are actually
registered to vote, and of these little more than half bother to show
up to cast their ballots, you need to get the vote of half of these
(roughly 12% of the whole population) to be insured victory. On top
of this, add the even stranger primary system, in which only a tiny
fraction of really devoted people vote, thereby dramatically influencing
the general election by eliminating candidates that might do well
with the population at large but don't fit the opinions of a skewed
minority of activists. Here is some food for thought: twenty more
millions of people watched the 2001 Super Bowl than cast their vote
in the 2000 elections.
One
could go even further and suggest that no current voting system
is actually democratic, no matter the country in which it is implemented.
A recent article by Dana Mackenzie in Discover magazine (November
2000) clearly demonstrates why. It turns out that people have been
studying voting systems for quite a while, and better options than
the proportional system adopted by most countries have been clearly
devised‹indeed, they have been historically used by different cultures
in different times.
Perhaps
the simplest alternative is what is known as approval voting,
which dates back to the 13th century, when it was used
in Venice to elect magistrates. In this system, a person casts one
vote for every candidate that she considers qualified. It works much
like an opinion poll, with the difference that the results are added
up to determine the winner. One of the advantages of approval voting
is that you can vote for a candidate likely to loose‹say, Ralph Nader‹and
don't feel like you are wasting your vote: he will get a good percentage
of points while you can also cast your vote for somebody who is more
likely to actually win. If approval voting had been used in the 2000
US elections, John McCain would have won, based on polls conducted
in February. Furthermore, approval voting would have spared Minnesota
from electing Jesse Ventura, and New Hampshire from handing the State's
primary to Pat Buchanan in 1996.
Another
alternative to standard voting systems is the Borda count,
named after a French physician and hero of the American Revolution.
This system was actually in use in the Roman senate at least since
105 CE. It is similar to the method used to rank football and basketball
college teams: each voter ranks all the candidates from top to bottom.
If we take a poll by the Sacramento Bee during California's
open primaries in 2000, McCain would have beaten Gore 48 to 43, Gore
would have bettered Bush 51 to 43, and McCain would have surpassed
Bush 50 to 45. Overall, the final rank would have been McCain 98,
Gore 94, and Bush 88. Quite a different outcome from what actually
happened!
In both the approval and the Borda systems voters
are asked something that is missing from the current system: they
need to choose who they will pick if their favorite is eliminated.
More powers to the voters, a better democracy.
Of
course, neither system is perfect, but the point is that most people
in the US don't even realize that their way is one of the worst among
those currently practiced by the world's democracies, and serious
discussion hasn't begun in any country on how to improve the actual
democratic value of our voting systems. Given that we have to live
with the results for several years to come, wouldn't it be worth taking
a serious look at the alternatives?
Next Month: "Game Theory, Rational Egoism and the Evolution of Fairness"
© by Massimo Pigliucci, 2001
