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.

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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

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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

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