election reform – PoliBlog

Election reform and the Oscars

As you may have heard, the Academy Awards will be happening on Sunday night. Although Avatar seems like the inevitable choice for best picture (although I’m hoping that my personal favorite, “A Serious Man,” is a Serious Dark-Horse Candidate), there are certain aspects of the best picture race that still make it intriguing AND tie in to election reform, as unlikely as that might seem. First, there are ten best picture nominees, the most since 1943. This is a good thing publicity-wise, promoting interest in lesser-known but high quality films. But, with so many candidates, how well will the winner actually reflect the will of the voters?

The answer is instant-runoff voting. Election reform advocates have been working for this type of voting system for a while but it has yet to catch on widely. In a typical, single-round election with more than two candidates, the winner only needs a plurality to win: he or she needs only to garner the most votes of anyone on the ballot, not necessarily a majority–50% plus 1–of voters. This is obviously problematic because the system fails to adequately register voters’ preferences. Let’s take as an example the 2000 presidential elections, specifically in Florida. Let’s say that your absolute favorite candidate is everyone’s favorite elderly consumer-rights advocate, Ralph Nader. If Nader doesn’t win, though, you’d MUCH prefer Gore to win over Bush. However, you’ve only got a single vote, and by awarding it to Nader, you’ve essentially helped Bush by depriving Gore, the only other candidate you like, of your vote. If the margin between Bush and Gore is small enough, a very small number of Nader voters who would by all accounts prefer Gore to Bush can tilt the election toward Bush.

This is a systemic problem with the American voting system: a vote for a third- (or fourth-) party candidate is essentially a vote for your least-favorite candidate. This has resulted in a panoply of ills: a rigid, two-party system, national politics that is dominated by corporate money, personality politics and frivolity, and the inability of many views to be represented at all. The two major parties are, of course, opposed to election reform because our current system is heavily weighted against the emergence of strong third parties, which is part of the reason it’s so difficult to effect meaningful change in the first place. Regular runoffs–where a second election is held with the top two vote-getters if no one candidate garners a majority–are a definite improvement, but they still typically result in a vote between the two establishment candidates.

In instant-runoff voting, voters rank their preference for every candidate in order. In the 2000 election scenario, a Nader voter would rank Nader 1, Gore 2, and Bush 3. Now here’s the cool part: if no candidate has a majority, the votes start being re-allocated. Since Nader is the lowest vote-getter, his voters’ votes will be allocated to whatever their second preference is, in this case Gore. In other words, there would no longer be wasted votes: expressing your preference for a minor candidate would not prevent your vote from going toward a more viable candidate, if your first choice is the lowest vote-getter. (Note that for fields of more than 3 candidates, this process is iterative: the votes of the lowest vote-getter are reallocated, then the next-lowest etc. until at least one candidate has a majority).

The Wall Street Journal had a really interesting story up recently about the advantages and disadvantages of this approach for Oscar balloting, and the implications for political elections. Who knows, maybe instant runoffs will start catching on!

Prison-based gerrymandering

Today on NPR, David Sommerstein from the Prison Policy Institute–based in nearby Northampton!–talked about prison-based gerrymandering. As with many stories that have been featured in the run-up to the 2010 census, this one has implications beyond simply accounting for the number of people in a given area.

It turns out that prisoners’ legal residences are their prison cell, not where they call home or where they were living before they were convicted. However, since in most cases prisoners can’t vote, the actual voting populations in precincts that host prisons have disproportionate influence. This is because for congressional districts that wouldn’t meet the minimum population requirement except for their prison population, fewer voters are controlling a single representative, giving each voter more pull over the political process than voters in districts that meet the minimum requirement.

The United States has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world: as of 2008, 1 in 100 Americans was in the penal system. One reason for this is cultural: the prevalence and fear of violent crime and American ethos of individualism and personal responsibility mean that being “tough on crime”–showing zero tolerance for law-breakers and making the penal code ever more punitive–is always a political winner. Since prisoners–and in many states, ex-cons–cannot vote, there is insufficient countervailing electoral influence against these policies by those with a personal stake, which is undemocratic on its own.

Another reason for our high incarceration rate is economic. Prisons are a key source of employment in many areas with few other options, particularly rural areas. This primes the pump for even increasing incarceration rates. As long as there is a net transfer of population to rural areas from urban areas, where most crime happens, the voting power of people in those rural areas will increase relative to prisoners’ urban points of origin. These people will then use this power to support policies that they may already agree with–e.g. mandatory minimum sentencing–but that also happen to correspond with their economic interests. This trend is self-reenforcing: building more prisons will bring more electoral power, which will lead to more prisons, and so forth. In essence, this system incentivizes voters to increase the punitiveness of law enforcement for reasons that have nothing to do with crime prevention or prisoner rehabilitation; in fact, this system has an interest in locking up as many people as possible (despite the fact that the violent crime rate has been falling for decades–see the Prison Policy Initiative’s website for a multitude of data).

Moreover, we are not just talking about individual voters making self-interested decisions. The so-called Prison-Industrial Complex is by some accounts a $50 billion industry, and the companies that run private prisons have every incentive to expand their operations. Like any other industry with an interest in political outcomes, operators of private prisons are able to influence voters and public officials to further their desired outcomes. Here that means more prisoners and more prisons.

The outrageous racial, gender and class inequalities perpetuated by the prison system notwithstanding, this is just one of numerous situations where people have noticed a flaw in the election system and used it to put their thumb on the scale of political power to accomplish ends that benefit them but incur costs on society. Yet, the solution to this electoral loophole would be simple: count prisoners as residents of their own communities, not their prison cells.