Voters Don't Vote! What Are Elections For?

Second Quarter 2000

David S. Broder, one of most assiduous critics of our American electoral system, wrote a column last October (The Washington Post, 10/10/99) on a book by Jack Doppelt and Ellen Shearer, Nonvoters: America's No Shows (Sage Publications). In the 1996 presidential election, there were more No Shows than voters. "The gloomy message of this book," says Broder, "is that longer voting hours, easier access to absentee ballots or even Election Day registration might not do much to increase participation rates." A majority of Americans, say Doppelt and Shearer, has come to believe that the "vote has not only lost its actual value in terms of influencing the result of an election . . . but also its symbolic value as a democratic virtue." The No Shows "opted out long ago and are beyond the reach of conventional measures to bring them back."

What are elections for? First, they are the means by which citizens are supposed to gain a voice in government through those who represent them. Second, elections are one means of holding officials accountable. And third, they are one of the most important ways for citizens and officials alike to articulate and debate the concerns, goals, and ambitions they have for their locality, state, and the American republic as a whole. However, too few citizens feel much of a connection to their representatives. Most voters think that interest groups and campaign contributors exert more control over their representatives than they do. And election campaigns have pretty much been reduced to media blitzes and sound bytes; not much extended debate takes place.

Apathy or Active Dissent?

Why has this happened in the United States? Why have so many Americans become alienated and opted out? In his book, The Dissent of the Governed (Harvard University Press), Yale law professor, Stephen L. Carter, emphasizes the value of dissent in American law and politics. The Declaration of Independence was itself an act of protest, of dissent, against the British government. The king was not responding to the petitions of the colonists. They felt unrepresented and unable to hold the faraway government accountable. From this, says Carter, we should learn that "if the sovereign repeatedly ignores and rebuffs the complaints of its subjects—or, nowadays, its citizens—the sovereign will lose their allegiance." If we look around the country today, we "see a nation in which large numbers of citizens do indeed feel that their petitions to their government go unanswered, and, as a result, have lost a degree of faith in that government."

The main purpose of Carter's book is to justify dissent, especially religious dissent. What he does not do is to ask whether dissent is sufficient to satisfy those who are inadequately represented. After all, the colonists who rebelled against King George eventually became the majority that took control of a new nation and established an independent government. They moved from dissent to constructive assent and control. Many citizens who don't vote today--and even many who do--realize that after John McCain or Bill Bradley is eliminated from the race, his voice is silenced. To have a voice, activists turn to interest groups or to protest from the outside. Dissent leads to elimination more often than to representation. Could it be that many unrepresented and alienated citizens would prefer to be voting and making a positive contribution to civic life if they had a means of doing so inside Congress and their state legislature?

From Dissent to Political Voice

Carter points out that most self-constituted communities of meaning in the United States today are not defined by geography. Thus, our electoral system, with its relatively small, geographical, single-member districts, cannot adequately represent the diverse political views which are spread across the land rather than concentrated in small geographical pockets. "No more than a handful of democracies elect their legislatures through single-member districts according to the principle of winner-take all," Carter explains, "and no serious student of voting believes the practice an efficient means for aggregating preferences."

If Americans want to reestablish and fulfill the purpose of elections, then we need a better system through which the full diversity of voices can be represented, by which representatives can be held accountable more by their electors than by unelected interest groups, and in which serious public debate takes precedence over paid advertising. All the empirical evidence points to the need for a form of proportional representation to achieve these ends.

It is difficult in the United States to make the case for proportional representation (PR) because few Americans know much about it. That is a pity, because most democracies in the world, as Carter points out, have such systems. In democracies with PR, voter turnout is much higher; minority as well as majority viewpoints are represented; campaign finance is managed more responsibly; and publicly accountable political parties hold greater sway than interest groups. PR allows almost everyone to become a contributing "consenter" or part of an opposition voice inside rather than outside the national legislature. Political parties are stronger in PR systems and provide an additional means of holding their representatives accountable before and after elections. And the fact that in PR systems one winner does not "take all" means that public debate is fostered, because the competing parties will be represented in proportion to the number of votes they win rather than being cut off altogether if they do not win a majority of the votes.

The time has indeed come for electoral reform, but we need something much more serious than campaign finance reform, term limits, and easier voter registration within the present system. Now is the time to begin.

—The Editors

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Objections to Proportional Representation (PR)

1. Political Instability

Israel and Italy both use forms of PR and have faced problems of governmental instability. [However,] most mature democracies with PR are not plagued by falling coalitions or right-wing religious parties. If we don't condemn winner-take-all elections by citing Algeria, Pakistan, and India, then why condemn PR by citing Italy and Israel?

2. Excessive Gridlock

Some argue that we have enough gridlock with two parties and that adding more to the mix will simply make things worse. One answer to this concern again is empirical: nearly every major democracy has more than two-party representation, and most are not paralyzed by gridlock. In fact, many PR democracies—including Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, and Switzerland--have developed far more comprehensive policy than the United States on such major issues as health care and immigration. A two-party democracy rewards constant mudslinging and obstructionist posturing because if one party can drive up the negatives of the other, voters have only one place to go. "Zero sum politics" translates into "zero sum governance."

3. Loss of District Representation

The advantage of district representation, it is said, is that all areas have someone to hold accountable for district issues. The problem is that most residents don't vote for their representatives and can't even identify them.

Furthermore, voters can take little comfort from being represented by someone who is sharply opposed to their own political philosophy. PR takes a different approach. All voters deserve an opportunity to choose a representative who thinks like them. With PR, voters find an ideological "home" rather than a geographic one. Their choice of representation may be influenced by local considerations, and systems can be designed to ensure some geographic representation, but geographic interests are not assumed to be paramount.

—from Robert Richie and Steven Hill, Reflecting All of Us: The Case for Proportional Representation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999)

Additional reading:

Patterns of Democracy, by Arend Lijphart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)

Political Parties and Constitutional Government, by Sidney M. Milkis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)

"Public Discourse and Electoral Representation," by James W. Skillen, in his Recharging the American Experiment (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1994)

Real Choices/New Voices: The Case for Proportional Representation Elections in the United States, by Douglas J. Amy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)