The Blogg

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

There has been some recent debate in the state courts over the eligibility of Green party candidate Carl Romanelli to challenge Democrat Bob Casey and Republican Rick Santorum for one of Pennsylvania’s seats in the Senate. The law, as it stands, requires that any person who wishes to appear on the ballot must provide a petition signed by 2 percent of people who voted who voted in the previous election. The furor in this case stems from a difference of opinion regarding which previous election should count and from questions about the validity of some signatures collected by Romanelli. The entire story is summarized reasonable well here.

This debate underscores what I believe is a fundamental need to break away from the current two-party system that controls United States politics. The two-party system is flawed for the following reasons:

• It discourages independent thinking. Although exceptions exist, far too much of legislation and debate ends up “toeing the party line”.
• It leads to an “us or them” mentality among elected officials.
• It allows party bosses to not only decide what becomes law, but what even gets discussed.
• It is self-perpetuating; no one in power has any incentive to work towards a different system and every incentive to retain the status quo.
• It encourages extremism in both parties.

This particular circumstance is a perfect example of the major parties doing what is in their best interests rather than what is right. It is perceived that a Green party candidate would take more votes from another leftward-leaning party, the Democrats, than they would from the Republicans. As a method of reducing the number of votes for their most feared opponent, the Republican party in Pennsylvania provided finances and manpower to the fight to get Romanelli on the ballot. I would love to think that they are acting out of a sense of fairness and empowerment for all people, but I doubt they would be so enthusiastic about a right-wing minor party, such as the Constitution party. The Democratic party has lobbied vigorously (and it appears successfully) to deny Morganelli the privilege of running, presumably because winning an election is more important to them than offering choice to their constituents.

Could we have an electoral system in which the inclusion of party A could not provide any benefit to party B over party C? Absolutely! Although I know of no nations that use such a voting system to elect officials, they have been proven sound by other organizations. Specifically, I would suggest that we abandon our first-past-the-post system for something similar to Schwartz Sequential Dropping or another Condorcet method. The actul choice of a winner in these systems can be a bit difficult to explain, but the idea is simple. Each voter ranks the list of candidates from most preferred to least preferred. Absolute position on this list means nothing, only the ordering of each candidate pair. For example, a voter might rank the above candidates as Romanelli, Casey, Santorum; as Casey, Romanelli, Santorum; or as Casey, Santorum, Romanelli. Although their choice among these three options would have an effect on Romanelli’s chances of winning, each would equally choose Casey over Santorum. I believe this is quite straightforward, although others may disagree, and it is provably fair. Moreover, it would allow each voter to order candidates as they really feel, rather than being forced to vote for a suboptimal candidate to prevent an even worse one from being elected.

The issue of determining who goes on the ballot remains, and is perhaps a trickier issue. The current case demonstrates that the requirement of a petition from 2 percent of persons who voted in the previous election is both too stringent and poorly defined. Although a petition-based approach could work if the required percentage was lowered and the courts made it clear exactly what the previous election was, I think a better system would be based on the existing voter registration database. Any party that has some fixed percentage of the registered voters within a representative region would be allowed to run a candidate for offices in that region. More research would be necessary to determine a percentage that offers a fair trade-off between giving all people a voice and keeping the ballot manageable. My guess is that somewhere in the range of 0.5% would be appropriate.

As an aside, I fail to see how it can be that difficult to implement a secure electronic voting system. Consider the following option: Each voting machine is assigned a range of identification numbers far in excess of the number of registered voters that could use that location. When a voter enters his preference, he is randomly assigned one of these identification numbers. His selection is stored with that identifier in the machine and both the identifier and selection are printed on a slip of paper given to the voter. When the election is finished, all individual votes are posted on a website with an easy look-up mechanism. These are not identifiable to an individual, only to a voting district. Thus, no one’s privacy is significantly compromised. Every voter is encouraged to visit this website and verify that their slip of paper matches the entry for their identifier. If this is not the case, the voter can inform their election official and start a formal investigation.

I can think of very few ways a malfunction or intentional fraud could go uncaught in such a system. Any tampering with votes would have a high risk of people checking. Extra fake votes could be generated, but a careful count in each district by electoral officials would provide a test against this. People could steal each other’s electoral slips and then claim error, but this would cause a second vote in that district at worst, which would confirm the initial results.

Back to the issue of minor parties, another problem is the correlation between money spent and votes “earned”. This makes parties and candidates beholden to the wealthy and to corporations, unions, and other large organizations that provide campaign finances. I think it would be fairly straightforward to even the playing field for this as well. This would also use voter registration records to determine the percentage of registered voters affiliated with each party. I would suggest that parties with more than a certain threshold (again, probably around 0.5%) be given opportunities to get their message out by the goverment. For example, there could be a major datacenter at political-parties.gov.us, with a branch provided to each such party, provided that they use the space to publish their platform and policies. Public librarians and other staff would be trained to help anyone who requests to find the literature of any party from this website. Given that the FCC grants the privilege of broadcasting over the airspace to television stations, I think they could probably convince stations to dedicate a 2-minute commercial to each recognized party each week free of charge, with rotating schedules to prevent unfairness. I would expect newspapers to be quite glad to dedicate a section to the platforms of each party several times a year, providing content with no cost to themselves.

The idea of another party being relevant may seem hopeless, bu there is precedent. The Democrats and Republicans were preceeded by the Federalists, the Democratic-Republicans, the Whigs, the “Know-Nothings”, and other smaller parties. Few other nations with elected legislatures are dominated so extremely by two parties. How can this reform be accomplished when the current political system works so well for those within it? I believe minor parties must join together in some kind of a Coalition for the Advancement of Minor Parties. Constitutionalists, Greens, Libertarians, Communists, Anarchists and other people for whom the current political system does not work have wildly differing opinions on the typical political issues. Despite these differences, I believe it is both possible and necessary to put these differences aside and jointly campaign for a single candidate on a platform of political reform and a middle-of-the-road approach to other issues. Furthermore, minority parties need to forget about the “big prize”, governorships, the Presidency, and so forth. Not only are these goals currently unattainable, they are also misguided. Even though the power of the executive seems to grow with every term, the ability to enact this kind of reform lies with the legislature. A coalition such as I propose should be targetting Congressional districts in which they have a strong base and neither major party is offering an attractive candidate. Even a few Congresspersons who can convince one of the major parties to stand with them will be able to have a salutatory effect on the government.

Of course, other orthogonal reforms of the legislative process are necessary as well. Full disclosure of financial ties between lawmakers and lobbying groups is essential and lacking in the Pennsylvania state legislature. The practice of bundling unrelated issues into a single bill to attempt to provide all swing votes with their pork must be abolished. Whenever possible, non-urgent changes in the law should be ratified by voter referendum before being signed into law. Outdated and unenforced laws should expire unless explictly extended.

Is their a chance of any of this happening? I hope so. Some people would certainly respond that these reforms sound good on paper but would be impossible to implement. Although I have no political science or public service background on which to base my opinion, I disagree. If I did not have a good idea of what I needed to be doing for the next few years, I would seriously consider running for the Pennsylvania legislature. I can’t claim any experience or expertise, but just being able to say, with a straight face, that I would put the interests of my constituents above my own would be revolutionary.