(Originally posted: 1/10/2012)
In the last post, I suggested that one of the reasons that Congress (and the government in general, but especially the legislature) seems to have so much trouble getting anything substantial done is its sociopolitical organization. In this post and the next, I’ll suggest some changes to the political process to fix that. Click through to the full story for my ideas.
The problem in Washington is that the structure of the political community encourages legislators to have a collective sense of self, and to identify primarily with their political party. Any success or defeat for the party then becomes a personal success or defeat, and they logically try to avoid losses. This hardens the positions of the two dominant parties, making them prefer to accomplish nothing rather than risk losing anything.
What needs to happen is for that primary identification with the party to go away. We need to reform the process so that legislators identify with all their colleagues, rather than just party-members. Then partisanship will naturally dissolve (since there will be no significant factions to be partisan to), and things will start working more smoothly. How to do that? The salience of party affiliation needs to be removed from the political process, or at least minimized. Beginning political science classes claim that political parties exist to advocate for the election of candidates, but in fact they do much more than that, with even the organization of Congressional committees determined by party affiliation. If we created a system where parties really did finish their jobs when the votes were cast, I think thinks would be much better.
The reforms I suggest to accomplish this will probably require some Constitutional amendments, but I believe they will realign the process with the ideals and intents of the people.
First, all elections for federal offices (i.e., Congress and the presidency) should be federalized. Allowing each state to set rules and procedures for electing its own representatives made sense in the 18th century, but no longer. Our country is too integrated today to survive 50 different election processes. It leads to absurdities like Newt Gingrich not getting on the primary ballot in his own home state.
Next, as part of the federalization of elections, all elections need to go to a hybrid electronic/paper balloting system. I don’t mean anything radical like Internet voting; I mean simple, stripped down systems custom-built to be tamper-proof that record votes both electronically and on human-readable paper ballots. A lot has been written about the security vulnerabilities of various electronic voting machines, but as far as I can tell, most of those try to use standard computer components and software. A system designed to have virtually no input/output capability exceptlegitimate voting should work fine with the same level of security already present at voting sites.
Along the way, I’d also suggest a revision of ballots. Right now, most ballots (all the ones I’ve seen, at least), list the candidate’s name next to his or her party affiliation. This inextricably links the name to the party, and candidates are led to understand that their election and their party are the same thing. Instead, with full-electronic voting and touchscreen technology, it’s possible to design “ballots” that change in response to the voter’s choices. Imagine this: For a given election (say, president), the voter is first presented with a question: “Would you like to vote for president by name or party?” There are two buttons, one for each choice. If the voter chooses to vote by party, he or she is presented with a list of the party affiliations of candidates, but no names, in random order. Touching any of them will record the vote. If the voter chooses to vote by name, he or she sees the candidates’ names, but not their parties, again in random order. At any time, the voter can switch to the other view, but every time the screen changes, the order of choices is randomized.
What this change will do is to separate the name of the candidate from the party of the candidate, both visually and conceptually. Republicans can still vote for the Republican candidate, and Obama supporters can still vote for Obama. However, the choice is no longer between Obama-the-Democrat and <whoever>-the-Republican. Importantly, the voting computers should not distinguish between party and candidate votes. After the fact, there should be no way to distinguish, even in aggregate, how people voted. This maintains the secrecy of the balloting.
Finally, and most radically, I’d suggest an overhaul of the whole primary system. Right now, more or less, primaries (and caucuses) are private events held by party organizations. Especially in closed primaries, one must belong to the group to cast a vote, and even though changing your registration on the day of the vote is often possible, the idea that “We are Democrats determining who our Democratic candidate will be” enocurages factionalism among the eventual legislators.
Even worse, the primary system actually serves to exacerbate the differences among those elected in the fall. Many people in the US seem to be just as disillusioned with the Republican party as they are with the Democratic party. Everyone “knows” (and it’s a statistically good bet) that minority parties have no chance of winning in the fall, so there’s little reason to look there for candidates to support. If both the major parties are equally disappointing, it doesn’t really matter who gets elected, especially if participating fully means voting in January for an election that won’t be resolved until November. Hence, voter turnout in the primaries is usually abysmal. Most people simply aren’t motivated to participate. So who does partiicpate? The “party faithful,” those who feel most strongly about issues–regardless of which end of the political spectrum their feelings fall on. To appeal to those voters, the primary candidates must “play to their base,” or appeal to the more extreme views in the party. Republican candidates become more conservative and Democratic candidates become more liberal during the primaries. Then, in the general election, they have to appeal a much broader swath of the political spectrum. Nevertheless, after the election, those who go to Congress remember “I was elected to be a conservative,” or “I was elected to be a liberal,” and they stick all the more strongly to those ideas–which leads to gridlock and no progress.
Instead, I’d suggest turning the primary process into the first round of a run-off election, like many other nations already have done. All candidates, from all parties, appear on the same ballot in the spring. The top two vote-getters go on to face off in the fall. Given the political realities in the US, this will usually be one Republican and one Democrat, so there’d really be little change in most cases. Nevertheless, having all primary candidates on the same ballot would force Republicans to appeal to Democratic voters, even in the spring, and vice versa. Candidates who get to the fall election would be more centrist, more likely to see both sides of a complex issue, and more willing to find real solutions.
And what about the situation where two Republican candidates get the most votes in the spring vote? For the Republican party, that’d be a huge win–they are now guaranteed to have a Republican in that office come the fall, and they don’t have to invest millions in an expensive campaign. The party’s job is done. For the Democrats, it’s a sign that, in that jurisdiction, they really have to change their strategy. The constituency clearly doesn’t respond to their message, and they find this out before they waste money on a campaign they’d lose come November, anyway. Their job for the next election has just begun, but now they have months more time to prepare.
All this, taken together, would still (for the most part) allow voters to express their will in the same ways they do now, still allow parties to form and promote candidates in the way they do now, and still respect the spirit of American democracy. But instead of the incessant Republican-vs-Democrat partisanship we see today, the focus would return to candidates and their own ideas, and parties would recede to their proper place. After a few election cycles of adjustment, those in office would see themselves primarily as all the same, and government might start working a bit better.
In the next post, I’ll suggest some changes for how Congress and the presidency can operate, after the elections and inaugurations are done, to minimize party partisanship.