Improving America’s democracy

The Commission on Federal Election Reform, a panel headed by former president Jimmy Carter, released a report yesterday detailing the state of American voting. According to the Post, the report states that our elections are sloppily managed and have so many problems that overall public confidence in our election system itself is waning dangerously. Notably absent from the report is any mention of DC voting rights, opposed by congressional Republicans because Washington would be sure to vote Democrats into office. As DCist points out, “any continued denial of voting rights in D.C. places in question the entire country's commitment to democracy”. Could it be the public is losing confidence in the system because the system is so obviously corrupt?

Anyway, the problem is of course partisanship (and not just on the right side of the aisle, although I do think the GOP is worse about it), and partisanship is such an issue because we have only two legitimate parties, both of which have been entrenched against one another for 150 years. Third parties aren’t the answer, because our system is set up to favor only two parties. In the wildly unlikely event that a third party became successful it would simply replace one of the existing major parties and nothing would change. In fact, that’s exactly what happened when the Republicans came on the scene in the 1850s, replacing the Whigs, who had fractured over the issue of slavery. No, the only way to get out of our two-party rut is to change the way we hold elections. Personally, and I know this is blasphemous, I favor the French model. In the US we have primary elections where parties choose their candidate and a general election where voters select between the parties. In France there is an additional layer, a run-off election after the general election between the two highest vote-getters from the previous round. The result is votes for alternative parties in the general election aren’t wasted (even the highest vote-getter in France’s last presidential election got less than 20% of the vote in the general round), which ultimately means no two parties can maintain a stranglehold on national politics for very long. Logically, if no two parties can maintain a monopoly of power then partisanship between those two parties isn’t likely to overshadow the needs of voters. Sounds good to me.

Tags: politics