Note: this is a longer version of an article I wrote for the Register Forum, including some things that were cut for length and a lot more images. Enjoy!
Plenty of ink has been spilled explaining how America’s system of government is anti-democratic and unrepresentative of the will of the people. The Electoral College and the Senate give disproportionate weight to white, rural voters, who currently skew Republican. Evidently, these institutions are biased towards the GOP by 3.5 and 6.6 points, respectively. After the 2010 midterms, Republicans gerrymandered House and state legislative maps to lock themselves into power. In 2012, the GOP held their House majority despite winning fewer votes than the Democrats, and in 2018, Wisconsin Republicans won 63 out of 99 seats in the State Assembly, despite Democrats winning 54% of the vote. The Senate is currently split 50-50, even though Democrats represent 41.5 million more people (that’s over a quarter of those who voted in the 2020 election). Clearly, our system of government is broken. Here’s how we can fix it.
In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency despite losing the popular vote by 7 million and came within 43,000 votes in the battleground states of doing the same in 2020. While the Electoral College is currently biased in favor of Republicans, that hasn’t always been the case. If 180,000 Ohioans had voted differently in 2004, John Kerry would have been the 44th president. Instead of this arcane and antidemocratic system, America should elect its presidents by popular vote. A Constitutional amendment is unlikely to pass in the face of Republican opposition. But there is another way: the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Essentially, this is an agreement between states that they will collectively allocate their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, taking effect only when the signatories of the agreement have enough electoral votes to decide the outcome of the presidential election (270 at the time of writing). The deal is probably constitutional, as the Supreme Court unanimously held that states could allocate their presidential electors as they see fit in Chiafalo v. Washington (2020).
The Senate also needs reform. We can start by abolishing the filibuster, a Jim Crow-relic that allows 41 senators representing as little as one-quarter of the population to block policies supported by the vast majority of the American people. The version of the Senate where 60 votes are required to pass anything is also a historical anomaly—as you can see in the chart below, filibusters used to be quite rare.
The filibuster encourages gridlock, obstruction for its own sake by the minority party, and bad legislation to be crammed through budget reconciliation in five-thousand-page omnibus bills because there is no other way to pass anything.
It was also created by accident; the founders never intended the Senate to have a supermajority requirement for passing legislation. It’s time to scrap it.
We also need to rebalance the Senate, which over-represents white and Republican voters. We can start by granting statehood to Washington, D.C., whose citizens are subject to federal taxation but lack Congressional representation, and to Puerto Rico, which approved a nonbinding referendum on statehood last year. Doing so would reduce the racial and partisan skew of the Senate, but we can go further. Large blue states like California, New York, and Massachusetts could be split up to counter the influence of small red states. There is precedent for adding new states to change the partisan balance in the Senate—Lincoln and the Republicans did so after the Civil War, and in this case, the new states would remove an existing partisan bias, not create a new one in the opposite direction1.
Tom Hofeller quipped that “in redistricting, the politicians get to pick the voters.” Hofeller was a mapmaker hired by the GOP to draw districts in North Carolina, maps that were later struck down by the Supreme Court as racial gerrymanders. All across the country, Republicans have used gerrymandering to pervert democracy, allowing them to win a majority House in 2012 and a near-supermajority in the Wisconsin Assembly in 2018 despite losing the popular vote in both cases. When in power, Democrats have been just as aggressive—having gerrymandered maps in Georgia in 2001 and Illinois and Maryland in 2011. There’s a deeper problem in our politics: the two-party duopoly, which forces people with views as different as Joe Manchin and Bernie Sanders or Charlie Baker and Ted Cruz to be members of the same parties. This is due to our electoral system—single-winner plurality, also known as “first past the post.” Under such a system, a candidate who has the most votes but falls short of a majority in a three-way race will win office, even if the other two ideologically similar candidates’ combined support constitutes a majority (the “spoiler effect” was notably seen in the 2000 presidential election in Florida). Thus, Duverger’s law holds that first past the post voting will result in a two-party system, even if such a system does not properly capture the ideological diversity of the body politic.
Fortunately, ranked-choice voting can solve both problems: it ensures that the winner of an election actually commands the support of the majority of voters, better captures the nuanced views of the people and forces candidates to appeal to those outside their base. In a proportional representation system, if one party wins 45% of the vote, it will get approximately 45% of the seats, making gerrymandering obsolete. Ranked-choice voting can also be used for this purpose, under a system called the single transferable vote. Representatives are elected in multimember districts, where voters cast a single ballot where they rank the voters. Tabulation occurs the same way it does in an instant runoff election, with one key change: the percent threshold for victory is defined as one hundred divided by the number of seats in the district plus one (e.g., 50% for a single-member district, or 20% for a four-member district)2. This system is already used in Cambridge for city council and school committee elections, and as you can see it produced fairly proportional partisan results in the 2020 Irish general election:
And there’s already a bill for that: the Fair Representation Act, which would transition all House elections to a single transferable vote system3. This would negate any attempts at gerrymandering, ensure that the views of the people, women, and minorities are fairly reflected in Congress, and encourage bipartisanship by ensuring that Democratic and Republican members of Congress would have to appeal to each other’s voters. This system or similar proportional representation systems like “districts-plus” (known internationally as mixed-member proportional) should be adopted in state legislatures to counteract the even-more egregious gerrymandering inflicted there.
While we’re on the subject of the House: it needs more members— the average congressperson now has to represent 750,000 people, and there are large disparities under the surface. Montana has nearly twice the population of Wyoming, but both states have one representative in the House. This is because Congress passed a law in 1911 freezing the size of the House at 435 members, even though it had previously grown with the population, in accordance with the cube-root law, which holds that the number of representatives in a legislature tends to be approximately the cube root of the population. Because of this, seats have to be shuffled around after every census, causing states like Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio to lose seats during redistricting in 2011 even as their populations grew. Since 1911, the population has nearly quadrupled, but the House hasn’t kept up. Congress can fix this problem by passing a bill to ensure the size of the House changes after every census in accordance with the cube-root law (that would be 693 representatives at the time of writing).4
All too often, Congress is so wracked by partisanship and gridlock that it cannot pass legislation to address current crises like COVID-19 or enact policies with broad popular support like legalizing marijuana, at least not in a timely manner. But it is all too easy to pass laws that benefit the wealthy and well-connected while doing nothing for (or even harming) the majority of the public. Seeing these problems in Gilded Age Oregon, progressive reformers like William U’Ren passed a constitutional amendment creating a system of initiatives, referendums, referrals, and recalls. The ballot initiative allows voters to bypass the state legislature and pass a law or constitutional amendment by popular vote, while the referendum allows voters to undo any bill passed by the legislature. The legislature can also opt to refer a bill it passes to the public for a confirmatory vote, and the recall election allows voters to vote corrupt or incompetent officials out of office before their terms expire. The “Oregon system” has since been adopted in over a dozen states, and should be adopted federally via a Constitutional amendment that specifies that all future amendments are passed by a supermajority in Congress (the current 2/3 requirement) and then a supermajority of the popular vote (say 60%) rather than three-quarters of the states. Doing so would allow the people to pass or repeal laws, remove a corrupt president from office if Congress failed to impeach and convict, and would prevent as little as 3.8%5 of the country from blocking amendments approved by the other 96% while still protecting the rights of the minority.
Finally, we need to take power out of the hands of billionaire ideologues, corporations, and lobbyists and return it to the people. First, we need a Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, a 2010 Supreme Court decision that allowed corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited sums of money influencing elections, claiming that restrictions would violate the groups’ right to free speech. Since the ruling, super PACs and dark money. (political spending by nonprofits that do not disclose their donors) have flooded elections, with expenditures of the latter going from $5 million in 2006 to $300 million in 2012. But the wealthy would still have an outsized voice in politics. One solution is public financing of elections, specifically small-dollar matching programs also known as “democracy vouchers.” Already implemented in some cities, this program would give every voter a voucher for, say, $200 for House, Senate, and presidential races that they could donate to candidates of their choice in the primary and/or general elections. Candidates would receive an additional $6 from the government for every dollar they received from vouchers as long as they accepted limits on campaign spending and certain kinds of outside spending. Vouchers would level the playing field between billionaires like Tom Steyer or the Koch brothers (well, now it’s just the Koch brother) and regular Americans while allowing candidates without support from the establishment or wealthy donors and corporations to be competitive.
Democracy reform is essential to protecting our republic from minority rule, gridlock, and corruption, both now and in the future. And it’s popular too: the For the People Act (H.R.1), which, among other things, bans gerrymandering and enacts small-dollar public financing of elections is supported by 68% of Americans, including majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents.
In 2020, Virginia voted two-to-one to take redistricting out of the hands of politicians and establish an independent redistricting committee.
Congress should move quickly to pass H.R.1, the Fair Representation Act, and a bill granting statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. If that requires eliminating the filibuster, then so be it.
The states should sign on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and move their legislatures to proportional representation. Over the long term, momentum for constitutional amendments enacting a nationwide Oregon system and overturning Citizens United must be created.
In the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln urged Union soldiers to keep fighting so that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The Trump presidency showed us the deep and enduring flaws in our democracy. Our government is too often controlled by a minority of voters, too easily captured by special interests, and too deeply divided between two big-tent political parties that don’t reflect our nation’s diversity of views. It’s time to build back better.
Alternatively, you could read the Constitution very loosely and apportion senators based on a state’s percentage of the population after each census, with each state being guaranteed a minimum of one senator. I’m somewhat skeptical of the constitutionality of this proposal, but it’s worth a read.
This method of tabulation is called the Droop quota. While Droop is the most common quota used for STV elections, there are others, like the Hare quota. Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages; Droop is the one used in the Fair Representation Act.
You can explore how the Fair Representation Act would affect final seat counts based on different splits of the two-party popular vote under the current 435-seat House using this spreadsheet.
The NYT districts aren’t fully realistic—to quote FairVote: “The maps are computer-generated based on user-specified criteria. Because the maps are computer-generated, they cannot take into account communities of interest and other considerations that an independent redistricting commission would. Instead, the program attempted to draw districts that would keep counties intact. We do not claim that these are the actual districts that would be used under the Fair Representation Act. They are examples.”
Based on the combined population of the smallest quarter of states, which could, in theory, block any constitutional amendment supported by the vast majority of Americans.