Dec '00 / Jan 2001
A
Gift Given, A Gift Received: Water
to Iraq
By Edilith Eckart
Election Analysis Progressive
Directions?
By Bill Thomson
Modernizing Our Electoral Rules
&
Practices
By Rob Richie
Democracy 101
By Blair Bobier
Clean Money: Campaign Finance
Reform
By John Moyers
Book Review: The Cultural Creatives
Paul H. Ray & Sherry Ruth
Anderson Reviewed by
Peter Montague
Remembrance: Robert Theobald
By Bob Stilger
Transforming Our Dreaming
By Josˇ Stevens
Democracy and the Airwaves
By Suzi Aufderheide
StarLink: More Bad News for Biotech
by Ronnie Cummins
The US Is Warned "Wake Up
To Global Warming Threat"
By Environmental News Service
U.S. Position Threatens to
Derail Climate Change Negotiations
By Cat Lazaroff
Martin Luther King, Jr: Global and
Social Shaman
By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.
Sexual Union, Inside and Out
By Peter Moore
A Pagan Speak to Jesus
By John Darling
Cosmic Calendar
By Salina Rain
Democracy
101
By Blair Bobier
The presidential election, considered by many to be "the great American
farce," has come and gone. Well, almost gone. As of this writing, we
still don't know for sure who the next president will be.
And even though 10 days after the election we still don't know who the winner
is, the exciting and confusing finale made us forget how long, boring, meaningless
and ridiculously expensive the entire charade was. So irrelevant is the election
that half of those eligible to vote boycotted the process. Let's repeat this
important and often ignored fact: One out of two eligible Americans refused
to vote. No wonder, why should anyone think their vote will matter? Despite
losing the popular vote, George W. Bush, an aristocrat's son who spent record-breaking
millions to buy the office, is poised to be sworn-in as the next president.
If nothing else, the bizarre conclusion of the 2000 race should put Americans
on notice that whatever we call our electoral process, it's a stretch to call
it democracy. This season's particular anomaly-the winner losing the popular
vote but winning the electoral college-is only the most noticeable quirk of
a system that, by and large, doesn't fairly and accurately reflect the will
of the people.
Let's put aside for a moment the all-important fact that half of eligible
voters don't vote. Even a majority of actual voters are regularly denied their
choices. George W. isn't the only one who lost the popular vote. Bill Clinton
was elected twice (43% in '92 and 49% in '96) with less than a majority of
votes. This is now the third election in a row where a minority of voters
have elected the president. It's pretty hard to call this democracy with a
straight face.
For starters, we need to abolish the electoral college. Like powdered wigs,
it's an historical anachronism which serves no valid function today. But an
even more important improvement, which would have produced a clear winner
in each of the last three presidential races, is the adoption of Instant Run-off
Voting, or IRV.
Run-off elections ensure that a candidate wins with a majority of votes and
that the will of the people is respected. IRV is a simple and efficient process
which combines the usual two-tiered run-off into one vote. Voters simply mark
their ballots by ranking their preferences for candidates. For example, suppose
in this past election that someone in Florida wanted to vote for Ralph Nader
but was concerned that the Democrat/Progressive vote would be split which
would result in electing Bush (which some would say has happened). This voter
would rank Nader 1, Gore 2 and, for simplicity's sake let's say, Bush 3.
With IRV, a candidate
wins on the first vote-count if the candidate captures a majority of first
choice votes. If no one gets a majority in the first round, then the candidate
with the fewest first place votes is eliminated and the voters who picked
the eliminated candidate then have their votes transferred to their second
choices. So, for example, if Nader had the fewest votes, he would have been
eliminated from consideration and Nader voters would have then (presumably)
had their second choice votes go to Al Gore. This would eliminate the so-called
"spoiler" situation and ensure that the winning candidate had both
a majority and a mandate to govern.
While IRV may have resulted in a clear Gore victory, it could have also demonstrated
the power of the Green vote. Suppose enough people voted their conscience
without having to worry that a vote for Nader might elect Bush. Nader could
have garnered 10 or 20% of the vote and the Green Party would have both federal
matching campaign funds and new-found respect and influence.
But just because some Nader voters may have been willing to accept Gore as
a second choice using IRV, this doesn't mean that these same Nader voters
would have automatically voted for Gore this time around. Speaking personally,
there's no way that I would have voted for Gore and it's presumptuous for
others to make self-serving, simplistic assumptions about my voting choices.
There's a terrible tendency among humans to create scapegoats and there are
those who are blaming Nader, or those who supported him, for Gore's loss.
Never mind that the antiquated electoral college denied Gore a rightful victory,
or that Bush raised millions of dollars from the corporate elite of America,
or that the VP ran a lousy campaign-it's all Ralph's fault? I think not.
I will, however, admit that the prospect of another Bush presidency has, at
times, scared the pants off of me (not that I would have changed my vote).
But then I thought, hey, what could this guy possibly do? Bomb third-world
nations? Cut down pristine Ancient Forests? Have indiscretions in the Oval
Office? Clinton's already done all that and we've survived so far.
My vote for Nader was far from wasted, as many have charged. If anything,
it was part of a collective shot heard 'round the world, and I guarantee you
that American politics will never be the same again. The Greens' challenge
now is to channel the energy and awareness raised during Nader's campaign,
while the challenge for all Americans is to reform and reinvigorate our democracy
so our elections truly reflect the will of we, the people.
Blair Bobier, an environmental and political activist, was a founder of both
Oregon's Pacific Green Party and the Northwest Democracy Institute. He can
be reached at blairbobier@hotmail.com
IMAGINE
-Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister and that former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation's secret police (CIA).
-Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some old colonial holdover (electoral college) from the nation's pre-democracy past.
-Imagine that the self-declared winner's victory' turned on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother!
-Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.
-Imagine that that members of that nation's most despised caste, fearing for their lives/livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy.
-Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner's brother.
-Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and that the self-declared winner's 'lead' was only 327 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting machines' margin of error.
-Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district.
-Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a governor of a major province, had the worst human rights record of any province in his nation and actually led the nation in executions.
-Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation.
None of us would
deem such an election to be representative of anything other than the self-declared
winner's will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page
thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre-or anti-democracy peoples
in some strange elsewhere.
One of the myriads of forwarded emails circulating after November's election
(source unknown):
