What to do about rigged elections
Want another dirty little secret, from a former local government newspaper reporter and political science major?
U.S. government elections are rigged. All of them.
Now they aren’t usually rigged in the way that you think. It’s almost unheard of that someone will vote multiple times in one contest. Or vote when they are not eligible. Or that an official will dump a bunch of fake votes into one candidate’s count. No, those are sloppy, blatant, easy-to-catch ways of rigging an election.
They way it’s done in America is far more subtle. And powerful.
This week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that the state’s Congressional maps were an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” The backstory is that the U.S. federal government in 1965 passed the Voting Rights Act in part to keep southern states from rigging election maps and eligibility requirements to prevent Black citizens from voting and winning office. That forced changes in Louisiana, and beyond.
In an ideal world, elections would produce a legislature that reflected the population. The demographics of the legislators would match they people they represent – in geography, race, gender, and ideology. But creating an election system that produces that result has frustrated political scientists and leaders for generations.
Drawing district borders rigs an election. Deciding how people may vote rigs an election. Every decision that officials can affect an election’s outcome. Election results are determined as much by the design of the election as the will of the electorate.
Elections are the ultimate zero-sum game. Do something that inhibits support for one candidate and that benefits the others. So the Supreme Court’s decision this week to take away influence from Black voters does not mean that it has made the system more “fair.” It just has shifted more power to non-Black voters in the state.
The Voting Rights Act was designed to shift power the other direction, in response to decades of White politicians doing everything they could to suppress Black political power. It was intended to bring us closer to that ideal result that I described above. And it did, which is why those who lost the power that they had before have fought so hard to un-do what the Voting Rights Act compelled.
That’s the inherent problem with elections. Those who win can use the government power they obtain to tailor future elections to their benefit.
I live in California, and we could be about to learn a hard lesson about election design. Democrats hold a two-to-one registration advantage in the state, but its open primary system might be about to send two Republicans to the general election for governor. Neither Republican has polled over 20 percent, but with more than half a dozen major Democrats running against just two Republicans, the GOP candidates could claim the top two spots in the primary, despite having nowhere near majority support.
The solution would be to run the open primary with a ranked-choice vote, where voters could pick their second- and third-favorite candidates, and so on, after the top pick. Back in the day, we called this “instant runoff” voting.
The trouble with instant runoff voting is that it gets messy for voters when you have a huge field of candidates. That’s a lot of people to rank.
Instant runoffs also do nothing to address the problem of gerrymandered districts. That’s not an issue in statewide offices, but does affect who wins seats in the legislature that ultimately controls the maps in most states.
One way to help create elections that produce winners who look like the electorate is to increase the number of representatives we are electing. Back when the Constitution was enacted, each member of the House represented about 33,000 people. Today, with the House of Representatives’ size capped at 435 due to the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, members of the House each represent more than 787,000 people, on average.
Allowing the House and state legislatures to increase along with the population would make it much easier to draw fair maps that produced a truly representative slate of representatives. And it would make it harder for crooked politicians to gerrymander maps that did not.
If Americans want to try to “unrig” our elections, we have ways.
Drop primaries and employ ranked choice voting to select winners. That would reduce the cost and length of elections, perhaps allowing more less-wealthy candidate to run.
Increase the size of Congress and other elected bodies to reflect population growth.
And turn over district mapping to non-partisan demographic experts, with courts acting as a backstop against maps that are designed to produce legislators who do not match the community at large.
Unfortunately, we have people in charge right now – at many levels – who never could win under such a system. They will use the power they now have to keep these changes from happening. So how do people get the power to change elections when those who now have that power won’t allow fairer elections to happen?
That is the tough question that Americans need to start considering.