In the not too distant past, I’ve described elections as a person in a pit fill with vomit about to have a bucket of feces dumped on his head. Should he duck? We have a two-party system, no matter what the libertarians say, and for a great many Americans, perhaps even the majority, the choice is no longer acceptable as neither party represents their will.
In early 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive Democrat from New York, was asked to speculate about her role under a Joe Biden presidency. She groaned. “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party,” she said, “but in America, we are.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s frustration with the two-party system reflects the frustration American voters feel every time they step into the voting booth, when they find themselves stuck with the same two choices — and, in most places, only one with any shot at winning.
By definition, there can be only one president under our Constitution. There are alternative systems, such as parliamentary system where the chief executive isn’t chosen by the people or the states, but by the elected representatives who are constrained to form coalitions in order to achieve a majority. But Jesse Wegman and Lee Drutman propose a less radical change in proportional representation. And before the knee-jerk resistance arises, the outcome is highly likely to favor a more moderate, more cooperative, middle than either side’s most radical extremes.
The heart of the problem is the system of single-winner districts, which give 100 percent of representation to the candidate who earns the most votes and zero percent to everyone else.
Winner-take-all is the electoral software that generates two dominant parties and relegates third parties to playing the role of spoiler and wasting their supporters’ votes. This leads to the same high-stakes contest every two years between the same two parties, resulting either in domination by one or in divided and paralyzed government by both.
What’s proportional representation and how would it work? Consider a modest expansion of the House of Representatives where a congressional district would send not one winner-take-all representative, but a number of representatives based on the population of the district reflecting the vote of majority and minority. To get a fuller understanding of how this would work, it will be necessary for you to read the op-ed (gift link to NYT) and see the graphics as they can’t be easily copied here. Based upon a survey, with the assumption of a six party division, this is how it would flesh out at present.
| Progressive | 74 |
| New Liberal | 120 |
| New Populist | 132 |
| Growth and Opportunity | 122 |
| Patriot | 52 |
| Christian Conservative | 93 |
Notably, such a change wouldn’t require a constitutional amendment, but merely a change in federal law enacted in 1967.
Many Americans believe the two-party system is inherent to the American constitutional design. But the nation’s framers didn’t intend it, nor is it found anywhere in the Constitution. Rather, the shape of the House of Representatives is mandated by a mere eight words of federal law, which requires “no district to elect more than one representative” — 435 districts, 435 members.
The law as it exists today was passed in 1967, to address concerns that white-dominated Southern states would exploit multimember districts to marginalize their Black voters, but versions of it have been in effect since 1842. Before then, states regularly used multimember districts to elect their congressional representatives. None of those multimember districts, however, have ever been proportional. All used a form of bloc voting — a majoritarian system in which voters can support as many candidates as there are seats, making it impossible for minority-supported candidates to win. But under proportional representation, bloc voting is impossible because each voter gets a single vote.
Is this the way out of the divisiveness that plagues Congress? Once proportional voting was enacted, would our two legacy political parties split apart into their component divisions, giving voters a choice of a representative that far better reflects their values? Would we be better off with this change or would this produce even greater divisiveness and chaos, giving rise to coalitions that no better reflect the majority will than do the two primary parties now?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
