SENTIENT TIMES Dec/Jan 2001
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):
SENTIENT
TIMES
PO Box 1330 Ashland, OR 97520
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