“The conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only one thing — one person, one vote,” the Supreme Court ruled almost a half-century ago. Yet the framers of the Constitution made this aspiration impossible, then and now.
Under the Constitution, electoral votes are apportioned to states according to the total number of senators and representatives from each state. So even the smallest states, regardless of their population, get at least three electoral votes.
But there is a second, less obvious distortion to the “one person, one vote” principle. Seats in the House of Representatives are apportioned according to the number of residents in a given state, not the number of eligible voters. And many residents — children, noncitizens and, in many states, prisoners and felons — do not have the right to vote.
In House races, 10 eligible voters in California, a state with many residents who cannot vote, represent 16 people in the voting booth. In New York and New Jersey, 10 enfranchised residents stand for themselves and five others. (And given that only 60 percent of eligible voters turn out at the polls, the actual figures are even starker.) Of all the states, Vermont comes the closest to the one person, one vote standard. Ten Vermont residents represent 12 people.
In the Electoral College, the combined effect of these two distortions is a mockery of the principle of “one person, one vote.” While each of Florida’s 27 electoral delegates represents almost 480,000 eligible voters, each of the three delegates from Wyoming represents only 135,000 eligible voters. That makes a voter casting a presidential ballot in Wyoming three and a half times more influential than a voter in Florida.
This system, along with the winner-take-all practice used to allocate most states’ electoral votes, creates the potential for an absurd outcome. In the unlikely event that all 213 million eligible voters cast ballots, either John McCain or Barack Obama could win enough states to capture the White House with only 47.8 million strategically located votes. The presidency could be won with just 22 percent of the electorate’s support, only 16 percent of the entire population’s.
The authors here (a sociology grad student and two graphic designers?) adopt the logic of reductio ad absurdum to argue their case, though one wonders if they are even aware of it. They assume modern definitions of political equality mean “one person, one vote,” and then argue this principle was thwarted by the framers of the Constitution. Then they cite the remotest mathematical possibility as proof of the absurdity. They seemed to have missed the point by a mile.
Our democracy has established the principle of “one person, one vote,” but the concept of political equality and justice are not violated by the Electoral College, the Senate, or the apportionment of House seats. The objective of a social choice mechanism, which is what voting is, is to arrive at a result acceptable to the majority of voters while adhering to accepted notions of equality and justice. A direct vote with a simple majority does not necessarily accomplish this as it would strongly favor the tyranny of absolute numbers, which may only affirm the narrow interests of that majority. In other words, high population states and regions would dominate our national politics. Is this fair or just? Not to those in small rural states.
Furthermore, when that majority is geographically based, as it is today and often has been in our past, the incentive for inhabitants of regions that are persistently dominated is to secede from such a tyranny. Such secession movements are fairly common, especially in today’s world. (Just ask a Québecois.)
The intent of the framers of the Constitution was not to insure some individual notion of fairness based on equal weighting on the outcome. Rather it was to develop voting rules that reinforce the cohesiveness of a disparate, voluntary union of states. This is critical in choosing a national leader who is meant to represent the entire nation and is insured by making the geographic distribution of votes across the states as important as the raw count of votes. (Besides, the EC only really comes into play when the popular vote is too close to make a clear determination.)
Our voting system has accomplished its objective more successfully than any other political experiment in world history. It has done this while also reinforcing the concept that every vote counts—and it does, just not in the way some people have wrongly assumed. It would be very wise for us to keep this in mind, because it is a strong union, not an individual sense of importance, that ultimately defends our rights and liberties.
No comments:
Post a Comment