Choiceless elections. Suspicious voting equipment. Partisan election officials. Superficial political debate. American democracy is suffering through its worst crises in generations, and most Americans don’t know what to do about it. Here, finally, is the plan – 10 steps to repair American democracy.
In his inspiring blueprint for renewing America, Hill makes a stirring call for national election standards, nonpartisan election officials, a voting day holiday, and other repairs to the nuts and bolts of our system. He takes it a step further, calling for the end of winner-take-all elections, fairer representation in the U.S. Senate, universal voter registration, public financing of elections, free air time for candidates, and new media regulations that will open up our politics and broaden political debate.
Drawing upon the author’s 20 years of democracy advocacy, scholarship, and two previous books, 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy outlines the looming problems with American elections and proposes ten specific reforms to reinvigorate our republic. It also includes a trenchant foreword by Hendrik Hertzberg, senior editor at The New Yorker.
Steven Hill is the Director of the Political Reform Program of the New America Foundation and co-founder of the Center for Voting and Democracy. His articles and commentaries have appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times,Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, Ms., Salon.com, and American Prospect.
His previous book, Fixing Elections: The Failure of America’s Winner Take All Politics, has been called by author Michael Lind “the most important book on American democracy that has come out in many years.” He has lectured widely in the United States and Europe, and has appeared on C-SPAN, Fox News, National Public Radio, and numerous radio and television programs across the nation and in Europe.
In 2004, he managed the successful campaign to pass instant runoff voting for Board of Supervisors elections in San Francisco. “More recently, he also helped organize the successful effort to establish public financing for the city’s mayoral campaigns.
Report card for ranked choice voting
Steven Hill
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
San Francisco Chronicle
Article Link
What are you doing today? How would you like to be voting in runoff elections for the Board of Supervisors? That’s what many would be doing if San Francisco hadn’t voted in 2002 to replace the old December runoff system with an “instant runoff” system known as ranked choice voting.
Whether using ranked choice voting or December runoffs, the goal is the same: to elect officeholders with majority support from the public. But with ranked-choice voting, you accomplish this in one November election.
We now have had five elections since 2004 using ranked-choice voting to elect the mayor, Board of Supervisors and other offices, providing some basis for assessing its impact. One significant difference between ranked choice and the old December runoff has been a dramatic increase in voter turnout. By finishing the election in November when voter turnout tends to be highest (because voters are showing up to vote for president or governor), a lot more San Franciscans are having a say in who represents them on the Board of Supervisors.
For example, this year in the District Three race, 22,407 voters participated in the final round of the instant runoff, with the winner of that race having 13,316 votes. In the December 2000 runoff election to decide the same District Three seat, only 12,414 voters participated, with the winner garnering 7,202 votes. Voter turnout dropped by 40 percent between the November 2000 election and the December runoff, and surely would have done the same this year following a high turnout presidential election.
Instead, in all supervisorial races in 2008 the number of voters participating in the ranked-choice voting races was much higher than in previous December runoff elections, even when accounting for higher turnout in the 2008 presidential election over the 2000 presidential election.
San Francisco taxpayers also are saving millions of dollars by not holding a separate runoff election in December. Based on numbers released in 2003 by the Elections Commission, it costs at least $3 million to administer each citywide election.
With ranked-choice voting, San Francisco avoided a citywide December runoff for assessor-recorder in 2005, as well as for 10 supervisorial races from 2004 thru 2008. That means approximately $6 million in savings on administrative costs, as well as several hundred thousand dollars more saved on the costs of public financing for supervisor runoffs. A couple million dollars have been spent on voting equipment and education to implement ranked choice voting, but that has more than paid for itself. While democracy shouldn’t have a price tag, there is no point in spending money needlessly on two elections when you can finish the job in one.
In terms of representation, the Board of Supervisors that was just elected via ranked-choice voting will be the most representative in the history of San Francisco. Seven out of 11 members are racial/ethnic minorities, three are women, the gay community is represented, and there is a range of ideological viewpoints.
Statistical analysis also shows that voters are handling the task of ranking their candidates. In 2008, San Francisco voters on average used 2.3 of their 3 rankings, with voters in the highly competitive races using slightly more, 2.5. That means most voters are using all three of their rankings, while some use only two rankings and a few only one ranking.
The number of overvotes – ballots where voters picked more candidates than they are allowed, rendering them invalid – is a good measure of voter confusion. Overvotes occur in all races, even for president or state Assembly when some voters erroneously vote for more than one candidate. While the rate of overvotes in ranked choice voting races is a bit higher than in non-ranked-choice races, it still has been low, generally less than 1 percent of voters.
Several exit polls have been conducted asking voters their opinions about ranked choice voting. The most thorough of these, conducted by San Francisco State University, found that 87 percent of those polled said they understood ranked choice voting, while 61 percent preferred it over the old runoff system (only 13 percent preferred the December runoffs, while 27 percent said it made no difference).
Certainly there is room for improvement, but by any objective measurement San Francisco has taken to ranked-choice voting elections, and is leading the nation in this important reform.
Steven Hill is director of the Political Reform Program at the New America Foundation and author of “10 Steps to Repair American Democracy” (http://www.10Steps.net).
This article appeared on page B – 7 of the San Francisco Chronicle
THE WORK CUT OUT FOR US
Book review by George Scialabba
The Nation
posted January 11, 2007 (January 29, 2007 issue)
…We now have a bit of breathing space, thanks to the midterms. It’s time
to consider how the right got away with it and how to prevent it from
happening again. The most useful of these books (along with Sirota’s
splendidly hard-hitting and extraordinarily well-documented Hostile
Takeover) is Steven Hill’s 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy. “To ponder
the shortcomings of our political system is to court despondency,” Hendrik
Hertzberg observes in his foreword. The Electoral College, the Senate, the
disenfranchisement of the District of Columbia, the two-party duopoly, the
winner-take-all principle, partisan redistricting, 95 percent incumbent
re-election rates, media concentration, Buckley v. Valeo, the K Street
Project, voter turnout below 50 percent, shortages of voting machines and
poll workers–this is a functioning democracy? If these travesties of logic
and fairness promoted majority rule rather than prevented it, they would
doubtless have been abolished long ago. Hill’s recommendations, beginning
with proportional representation and instant-runoff voting, invariably hit
the mark, and each of them is accompanied by links to groups already on the
case. Perhaps his most radical notion–as he says, it goes “to the very
heart of our political system”–is that representation should no longer be
based on geography. Because of partisan residential patterns, more and more
election districts are noncompetitive even without gerrymandering. Tens of
millions of votes in American elections don’t really count; and, perhaps as
a consequence, millions more are never cast. Making representation
correspond to what voters think rather than where they live is now perfectly
feasible, as Hill makes clear. When (if) the Democrats regain the
electorate’s trust, they should consider proposing that, procedurally
speaking, the United States join the modern world.
Hill’s book is a no-brainer–there’s simply nothing in it to disagree with.
… But in a democracy, if a large enough majority of citizens want economic
populism plus cultural conservatism, isn’t that what there ought to be? And
if that’s not what there is, then it’s not much of a democracy, is it? What
these truisms imply is that perhaps the right thing for progressives to do
is not hire ever cleverer triangulators but, instead, first make sure
American democracy works (for which, see 10 Steps to Repair American
Democracy) and then get most Americans to agree with us.
REFORMING AMERICAN POLITICS: A TIMELY ‘ONE STOP’ GUIDE
By Neal Peirce
The Washington Post
American democracy, once the wonder of the world, is working about as well as the levees around New Orleans — “degenerated into a partisan brew of spin, scandal, name-calling, money chasing and pandering.”
That’s the charge of reform advocate Steven Hill, and who’s to doubt his indictment? Elections are marred by suspicious voting equipment. TV blanks out most serious campaign debate. Congressional and state legislative elections are increasingly less-competitive as “red” and “blue” voters cluster in their own partisan enclaves. The presidential election system focuses all attention on a tiny band of swing states — and can easily make the popular vote loser the winner. Citizens increasingly wonder: why bother to vote at all?
What’s to be done?. In his new book, “10 Steps to Repair American Democracy,” Hill abjures piecemeal reform and instead provides a “‘one-stop shopping guide’ to what’s broken about American democracy and how Americans can help fix it.”
From Hill’s list of 10, I’d pick five indispensable first steps:
Secure the vote. Butterfly ballots and hanging chads in Florida in 2000, thousands of low-income voters effectively excluded from polls in Ohio in 2004 — the scandals are well known. A comprehensive Caltech-MIT study found a stunning 6 percent of ballots cast nationwide in 2000 weren’t counted because of faulty voting machines, poorly designed ballots, or foul-ups with absentee ballots. Private voting machine companies have been shown to have egregious partisan ties.
Hill would have us create — with federal dollars to help — a new, professionalized cadre of professional election officials free of direction by partisanly-chosen or motivated secretaries of state. A national elections commission would be empowered to create minimum standards states must follow to assure honest elections. And there’d be a “voter-verified voter trail” for ballots cast by computerized voting equipment, ensuring honest recounts.
His next proposal: expand voter participation by a “right to vote” constitutional amendment, universal registration (everyone 18 and over automatically registered to vote, as most modern democracies do), and prohibiting voter intimidation.
Reclaiming the airwaves comes next — obliging broadcasters (licensed to use public frequencies) to provide ample free media time for candidates, more political news and balanced coverage. Hill also urges a more robust public broadcast sector (TV and radio) to counterbalance our increasingly powerful (and monopolistic) corporate media.
To minimize the overbearing role of money in elections, he suggests public financing of all campaigns at local, state and federal levels, and at least trying to limit donations and set spending caps on candidates.
There’s one more reform on Hill’s list I’d call absolutely essential: direct popular election of the president. Sticking with the founding fathers’ jerry-rigged electoral college system makes zero 21st century sense.
Hill then has three reforms I’d call intriguing next steps, experiments we ought to try.
First there’s runoff voting, now being used in San Francisco’s mayoral elections, Utah Republican primaries and other places. Voters list their preferences – #1, #2, etc. If no candidate gets a majority of the #1 choices, immediate recounts include voters’ second (or even third) choices. The lowest vote-getter is eliminated on each count, until there’s a majority. The method has big pluses: diminished campaign mudslinging, incentives for higher voter turnout, and less impact by spoiler candidates (like Ralph Nader in 2000).
Hill would also scrap — especially for legislative races — the “winner-take-all” election system that so often leaves political minorities and our many racial and ethnic groups unrepresented. His model: Illinois’ success, from 1870 to 1980, with three-seat state House districts. Voters could cast all their three votes for one candidate, or distribute them as they chose. Result: any candidate who got over 25 percent was likely to win. More mavericks, willing to buck their party’s leadership, got elected. Bipartisan coalitions were commonplace.
Now Hill suggests three-seat districts, not just for legislatures, but congressional seats too, a big break for “blues” in “red” areas and “reds” in blue areas, plus election of more Latino and black representatives.
Americans, he suggest, need to shake off the anti-government ideas born in the Reagan era, and begin to embrace government as a positive good providing it’s run efficiently to meet real needs — from hurricane relief to universal health care protection.
Hill includes two ideas I’d call impractical outliers — reforming the Senate to give heavily populated states more seats, and the Supreme Court by shifting confirmation power from the Senate to the House, limiting Justices to 15-to-18-year terms, and requiring they retire at 70 or 75 years.
Hearing this spate of ideas, some may grouse: Why change the ground rules? Didn’t our Founding Fathers know best? Yet in his introduction to Hill’s book, Henrick Hertzberg of the New Yorker has it right. Reinvigorating the republic is a way to keep faith. “The question isn’t: What way back then, did Jefferson (and Madison and Hamilton) do? The question is: What would they do now?”
The Washington Post Sunday, July 16, 2006
© 2006 Washington Post Writers Group
DEMOCRACY (STILL) IN CRISIS
Phil Tajitsu Nash
AsianWeek.com
Asian Pacific Americans are devoting more time to gaining power through the political system. We are running as candidates, making donations and serving in appointive positions.
Unfortunately, we are trying to get involved in a system that is fundamentally unsound. APAs need to get involved in the current political system, and fix the system before it undermines the freedoms of all Americans.
Much was made of Bush’s veto of a stem cell research bill last week, but the most important issue it raised was barely mentioned in the mainstream media: Why was this Bush’s first veto of his entire presidency?
Bush issues “signing statements” as he signs bills so that he can ignore the will of the elected representatives of the people if he feels that following the laws that Congress has passed will impede his presidential powers. As even the American Bar Association has recently concluded, this is the attitude of an emperor, not the leader of a democracy.
Fortunately, a new book has come out that provides a blueprint for how we can jump-start our democracy and bring it into the 21st century: 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy by elections expert Steven Hill, summarizes the problem in a comprehensive way, offers holistic and realistic solutions, and gives us resource links so that we can continue the analysis on our own.
If you read DailyKos.com or other political blogs, you have seen some of these ideas before. And Hill himself has written columns for most of the major newspapers as well as Fixing Elections, a well-regarded primer on election reform.
Ten Steps jumps right into the middle of hot topics in the electoral justice arena and uses them as a way to illustrate the problems that must be faced. For example, after an even-handed brief summation of the 2000 and 2004 elections, he concludes that the only honest way to describe the outcomes is to say that we do not know definitively who won either election.
He agrees with the National Research Commission on Elections and Voting, which said that there were “pervasive breakdowns in election administration and oversight,” that “make it impossible to definitively put theories and accusations of fraud to rest.” No matter whether you are a republican, democrat or a member of the largest group of voters, the 37 percent of us who are independents, the inability to guarantee the integrity and security of the vote is extremely disturbing. Turn to Chapter 1 of Hill’s new book and see how you can take action.
In case you are counting, the first five steps to repair American democracy have to do with voting: securing the vote, expanding the vote, expanding voter choice, scrapping “winner-take-all” elections, and eliminating that horrible vestige of slavery: the electoral college.
The other five steps address more systemic issues: restructuring or eliminating the Senate, using antitrust laws to break up media conglomerates, reducing the role of money in elections, restructuring the Supreme Court and restoring faith in government.
Hill is at his best when he uses history and global comparisons to remind us that some of his ideas are not really new, just new to this generation of Americans. For example:
• India and Brazil already have open source “public interest” voting equipment that is developed by the government and not a proprietary secret of a few election machine companies (as it is in this country).
• Illinois had proportional representation until 1980, and it produced statesmen like Sen. Paul Simon and political leaders of all parties who put the public’s interests first and narrow party interests second.
• Universal voter registration, found in almost every other democracy, would add 50 million voters in this country if we have the political will to do so.
• Canada implemented Citizens Assemblies to break the logjam between two political parties with entrenched interests, and the results worked so well that Australia, the Netherlands and the UK are considering them to solve their own intractable political issues.
Summertime is usually reserved for books that offer escape or entertainment. Save one evening to read 10 Steps, however, so that you can tell your grandchildren that you not only participated in democracy, but helped to keep it alive.
AsianWeek.com, July 28, 2006