Democratic Allergies

Last week the world witnessed a historic election in Great Britain. Following a tightly fought campaign, the country emerged not only with its youngest Prime Minister in two hundred years and its first coalition government in sixty years, but it also with the first Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition in its history.

This change didn’t come about easily. The elections didn’t give any party a clear majority, leaving the parties to hash out a coalition government. Several tense days of backroom negotiations followed. Eventually, the Liberal Democrats threw their lot in with Conservatives—for a hefty price. Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, wrangled the position of Deputy Prime Minister, and six other Liberal Democrats secured ministerial posts in the new government.

Equally importantly, the Lib Dems secured a Conservative promise to put an important piece of election reform before the voters—a proposal to switch from first-past-the-post voting to an alternative vote system where voters rank their nominee preference (known in the U.S. as an instant run off system). The change could have serious consequences—according to some estimates the Liberal Democrats would have picked up fifty more seats with the alternative vote. Lib Dems have argued that in the first-past-the-post system a third party vote is often thrown away—something that third parties in the U.S. can surely sympathize with. But why has bringing this relatively straightforward issue before the voters been so difficult? The fact that Lib Dems could only secure the promise for a referendum now, after years of effort, when they were essentially placed in the role of kingmakers, gives some indication of how hard it can be to bring about electoral reform even in advanced democracies.

The last truly tumultuous election in the U.S. occurred in 2000. But for all the anger and disappointment that election caused, the 2000 election led to very little discussion, much less change, in our electoral process. Indeed, there seems to be an unnatural allergy to even discussing alterations. For example, one of the last major third parties movements in the U.S., the Green Party, was blamed for Democrat’s loss of the Presidential election in 2000. The fact that the Green Party won millions of votes in Florida, and that the Democratic Party won many millions more than that, however, didn’t lead to a discussion of why Florida’s electoral votes should all go to the Republican candidate. Similarly, even though the Electoral College gave the Presidency to George Bush despite the fact that Al Gore won the popular vote, no movement materialized to remove that antiquated mechanism. And anger at the Supreme Court didn’t lead to a discussion of term limits for Supreme Court justices or of the merits of judicial review of non-constitutional questions.

A more immediately relevant example is the issue of redistricting. Following the 2010 Census the governing party in many states will have the chance to redraw electoral district lines. In theory, the lines should be redrawn to reflect changes in population, but the reality of redistricting—so long accepted now as to be taken for granted—is that it gives the ruling party the opportunity to draw lines around its constituency. It is the democratic process backwards: The representatives are choosing their constituency.

While the newspaper editor who coined the term “gerrymandering” should receive great credit for cleverness, he did no favor for democracy. The term allows too many people, including those who know better, to think of the practice as an excusable eccentricity; a benign oddity of the U.S. system. In truth, the world would be a better place if the gerrymander were extinct. Incumbents should not be able to tailor their districts to ensure their reelection. How can an election be free and fair when one side is choosing who votes?

This failure to discuss inadequacies in our electoral processes is particularly odd for a country that takes such pride in its democracy, and that exports it so vigorously. Indeed, it is in the best of American traditions to innovate, to take risks, and to continually pursue perfection. These attributes are needed as much, if not more, in the realm of governance than business. Yet it is there that they are almost completely lacking. The U.S. would be much better off if we, like our cousins the British, worked to develop a resistance to this highly peculiar, and insidious, allergy.