Outwit the Gerrymander
What if we could make Gerrymandering irrelevant and actually empower all voters?
Politicians of both major parties are up to no good. Across the nation, Democratic and Republican legislatures are redrawing congressional districts in order to tighten their own party’s grip on power. In the process, they are disempowering Republicans in blue states, Democrats in red states. It doesn’t matter now who started it. The net effect will be millions of Americans without real representation in the House of Representatives, the body meant to be the people’s house.
Dry details; critical consequences.
For most normal humans, any conversation about the arcane aspects of voting systems will quickly send them into a stupor of boredom. They’ll start scanning the room for anything to do other than pay attention to someone droning on about redistricting. Unfortunately, the subject just happens to be essential to our survival as a nation. On Tuesday, May 19, Ezra Klein dropped a new episode of his podcast, discussing one way to fix our broken electoral system. I recommend giving it a listen, if you’re not familiar with proportional representation, the system that many other countries use.
There’s a growing recognition among honest observers that our system has to change. Countless ideas for reform abound. I want today to look at one aspect of wise reform that the Ezra Klein episode did not cover: changing our voting system.
Scholars of electoral systems have been studying, debating, and sometimes heatedly fighting over which systems are the best for a long time. There simply is no perfect system. Each one has its flaws. The question is not which one is perfect, but which ones are better than what we have now. That’s a pretty low bar, since the current system is clearly not producing wise leaders. We can do better.
When experts talk about voting systems, they tend to toss around jargon that only they can understand. I’d like to simplify some concepts because those of us who are not specialists in election law or Ph.D.s in political science are going to need to start thinking more about reforms, if we hope to change our current trajectory. Here’s one aspect of voting reform made simple.
What is approval voting?
In approval voting, you simply vote for every candidate of whom you approve. When the votes are tallied, the candidate with the most approvals wins. Instead of one person, one vote, it’s one person, many votes. To most Americans, that sounds undemocratic, but it can actually produce a more democratic result.
One of the benefits of approval voting is that it, at least in theory, greatly reduces negative campaigning. There’s no incentive for candidates to sling mud at each other, as this usually turns off many voters. In approval voting, each candidate wants to appeal to the largest number of voters, in order to win their approval. It makes sense for candidates to seem pleasant, since any voter at all could approve them while also approving their preferred candidate.
Why should voters approve more than one candidate? Simple: if your most preferred candidate does not win, you can help swing the election to another candidate who, though not your favorite, would still be acceptable to you. That’s why it’s worth approving everyone you like and not approving those you don’t.
Another benefit is that approval voting encourages moderation. In our current system, candidates with extreme views flourish during primaries. They can convince voters within their party that their opponents are not ideologically pure enough. Once they advance to the general election, they simply need to attack their opponent in the other party enough to win by a slim majority. In practice, it means that the winner might represent only 51% of the voters, leaving 49% dissatisfied with the election’s result – and that’s a lot of unhappy voters. Think about how angry Americans are these days. This is one reason why. They see that their elected representatives don’t represent them.
But with approval voting, extremists are at a disadvantage. Moderates are more likely to win the approval of more voters. Some extremist voters will only vote for their extremist candidate, but some of them might give an approval vote to a moderate, especially if they suspect that their preferred candidate is too extreme to win, and the other candidates in the race seem too far on the opposite extreme. Moderate voters, in contrast, will not typically approve of extremist candidates because they don’t need to. They know that moderates are more likely to garner more approval than those on the extreme. In short, approval voting favors moderation and helps weed out extremism.
How is cumulative voting different?
Just like with approval voting, each voter casts multiple votes. But where approval voting lets you cast only one approval vote per candidate, cumulative voting lets you cast multiple votes for the same candidate, though within a fixed limit. You get to bundle a fixed number of votes however you wish. If there are five seats needing to be filled, each voter has five votes to allot in any way they wish.
Here’s how it works ideally in some corporate board rooms. Let’s say you need to elect 5 new board members. 10 or 20 people might be running to fill those 5 seats. It doesn’t matter how many candidates are running; you get as many votes as there are seats to fill – in this case, five.
Suppose you like 3 of the 5 candidates. You could give two of your 5 votes to candidate A, 2 of your 5 votes to candidate B, and your remaining fifth vote to candidate C. You have just essentially spent your allotment of 5 votes. By not voting for candidates D and E, you have withheld your approval of them. Alternatively, you could express your strong preference for candidate A by giving her 4 of your 5 approval votes, and then giving your remaining one vote to another candidate whom you find acceptable. Or you could give 1 vote to each of any 5 candidates you like. It’s entirely up to you.
What does all this have to do with the Gerrymander?
Cumulative voting has a built-in advantage for minorities. In the board election example, a group of minority voters could cooperate to back a minority candidate. Instead of each minority voter casting one vote for the minority candidate, every minority voter could decide to cast all five of their approval votes for that one minority candidate. This would make that minority candidate flush with votes and likely to win a seat on the board. The result is that minorities are likely to have someone representing their interests on the board. It might be only one representative, but one is better than none.
In contrast, in the voting system we use for most American elections, it’s winner takes all. Minorities only have a chance when they are the majority within a given Congressional district, which is exactly what the latest Gerrymandering craze is meant to undo. By ensuring that minorities remain minorities in a winner takes all system, minorities are unlikely ever to have representation in government. That’s not just true for racial minorities, but for political minorities as well: think Republicans in blue districts or Democrats in red districts.
But how could cumulative voting work in Congressional elections?
At first glance, cumulative voting would not seem like an option, since there’s only one seat to fill per district. The solution is simple, though not obvious: bundle districts into groups. There’s no need to change the number of districts or the number of seats or the boundaries of any district. All of that would remain the same. But a Congressional election could combine five districts in one election, giving voters 5 cumulative votes to cast in what are called multi-member districts. In fact, some states already use a variant of this system. Illinois used a variant for a century and discarded it only in 1982.
Why doesn’t everyone use this system?
First, the party establishments resist change because it might weaken their grip on power. “You’ll never get that passed,” critics insist. Of course, they say that about pretty much every major change we’ve ever adopted, from women’s suffrage to civil rights to gay marriage and more. When enough people demand change, change happens. And then the things that once seemed impossible later seem inevitable.
Ezra Klein’s guest addressed this problem directly with a clever solution. How do you get politicians to vote for something that could cost them their seats? Increase the number of seats in the House. Incumbents would not necessarily lose their seats in the new system; there would just be more House members. After all, we didn’t always have 435 House seats. That number grew as the country grew. It stopped growing in 1911, but the population didn’t stop. We now have roughly three times the population as we had in 1911. It’s time to consider expanding the number of Congressional seats to represent us all.
The second problem with cumulative voting is that, like every voting system, it can be manipulated. Clever people often find ways to defeat wise systems. Unfortunately, once the system appears to fail, it gets abandoned. Instead, we should seek ways to refine it to limit its vulnerabilities. Like a software program with bugs, hackers are always trying to find vulnerabilities to exploit. But we don’t throw out the software; we patch it up as best we can and keep trying to make it more secure. We need to do the same as we reform our voting systems.
Wisdom sometimes comes from trying something new, failing, and trying again. If we want wise leaders, we’ll need wiser methods of electing them. I don’t know exactly what that system is. I doubt anyone does. But I do know that better systems exist than the one most of us are using. Let’s be open to learning about and trying something new. Our democracy might depend on it.
Further Reading.
If you want to dive deeper into the details of voting systems and how they can be gamed – and honestly, who doesn’t? – I recommend a wonderful old book as your first step.
Riker, William H., The Art of Political Manipulation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986).
For a quick summary of multi-member districts in America, visit:
https://ballotpedia.org/State_legislative_chambers_that_use_multi-member_districts
Douglass List is a retired corporate executive in Virginia. He is currently advocating a twist on cumulative voting, which I described above. His idea is to limit the number of seats in a multimember district to a maximum of five. He is currently developing a paper on the subject, and I thank him for bringing it to my attention.
And if you want to go hog wild on voting systems and election law, see:
https://fairvote.org/