Focus 580; Fixing Elections: The Failure of Americas Winner-Take-All Politics

Good morning this is Focus 580 our morning telephone talk show. My name is Jack Brighton Jason Croft master of the controls. Glad you're listening today. The confusion from the contested vote count in the 2000 presidential election reminded us that our electoral system is far from perfect. Most of the major news coverage has focused on problems with the mechanics of voting butterfly ballots hanging chads polling irregularities in absentee voter returns. But it has occurred to a number of people that maybe we have deeper problems with our electoral system. The media highlighted that more individual voters cast ballots for Al Gore but George W. Bush won the Electoral College. But for a long time in a great many electoral contests the winning candidate has received a minority of votes in elections with more than two candidates it's possible perhaps even likely that the winner will be chosen by a minority of voters in our winner take all system of elections. The majority does not always rule in fact it may be disenfranchised during this hour focused 580 will talk with Stephen Hill a writer and political activist and co-founder of the Center for Voting and Democracy. He has written articles and commentary for dozens of

publications including the nation the Wall Street Journal the Los Angeles Times salon and the Washington Post. He was the campaign manager for Proposition 8 in San Francisco which resulted in the adopt. Of instant runoff voting to elect that city's government I'm sure we'll talk more about that during this hour. Steven Hill is also the co-author of the book whose vote counts with Robert Ritchie and he is the author of a new book will be drawn from during this hour. It isn't titled fixing elections the Failure of America's winner take all politics recently published by the Rutledge press. As we talk with Steven Hill you are invited into the conversation that's what the show is all about public dialogue on important issues the number around Champaign-Urbana for you to call 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We also have a toll free line. Anywhere you hear us around Illinois Indiana you know the states our signal reaches and via the Internet anywhere else 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. We also have an e-mail address if you'd like to send us a question by e-mail on the topic that would be welcome.

You can send that to talk at W I L L U R U C dot edu. Any time during this hour Stephen Hill joins us this morning by telephone. Good morning. Good morning. Thanks very much for being here. My pleasure. Let me ask you there's a whole bunch of things that I'm sure we're going to talk about but let's start by asking the question can you tell us about the Center for Voting and Democracy. Sure the center is a nonprofit educational organization. We're 10 years old and we are a primarily a research in education organization and when we look at voting systems which is something that people have not had a lot of experience in looking at you know a lot of times we think about how to reform the system we talk about campaign finance reform or ballot access laws and now of course punch cards in voting equipment and all important things. But does the voting system is actually the engine of any democracy it would. It's what drives all the rest and you know we have a nice little

educational presentation with a slide show where we can show you take the same exact vote and put them through different voting systems and you can come up with completely different results in terms of who gets elected. And so for a lot of people that's an eye opener that it could seem so arbitrary is that you know whatever voting system you have dramatically. Affect representation. Participation. It effects the type of policy that gets passed it affect the way campaigns are conducted and it effects to some degree our sense of national cohesion or national unity. And so all these things those are the five areas that I go into in my book Fixing Elections and looking at how the winner take all system at this point in our history in the here at the outset of the 21st century is negatively impacting our nation in numerous ways. In those five areas representation participation campaigns and discourse of ideas policy and national unity.

Let's talk about this phrase winner take all politics and what that means. Well the winner take all politics is a function of the winner take all voting system in the winner take all voting system is simply. You know we elect all the single districts all around the country both for the U.S. Congress and then for the for our state legislatures and then also for governors and presidents and also for many times for city council and any anything goofy district as it's called the highest vote getter wins in everyone and everyone who voted for that person gains a representative and everyone who votes for any of the other candidates essentially loses and has no representation and we've had to wallpaper over this winner take all aspect of our system by by coming up with this truly odd notion that the person represents you just because they sit in the chair even if you didn't vote for that representative and even if they are somehow diametrically opposed to your point of view and you can hear this all the time like well that person is still my representative. And you know and so I've been asking people how is

that person you represent of they don't you didn't vote for them. You you they they don't represent anything that you believe. Why is it that we would call that person our representative I mean it raises some odd notions like you know perhaps. Newt Gingrich represented all the Democrats in his district or perhaps Jesse Jackson Jr. represents all of the conservative Republicans in his district and you know perhaps the the the British Crown really did represent the colonists. So why do they toss the tea into the harbor to begin with. You know and so I think we really have to start looking at some of these basic notions that we have in our in our country which are result of using a winner take all system. OK let's talk about some of the lessons of what you call an election 2000. What did that tell us about the problems with our electoral system and I think that you start with this map that shows the voting patterns and in maybe draw some lessons from that. Right well. Well what we saw in the election 2000 and.

In particular say in the presidential election we saw that the president the person who won did not have a majority the popular vote. But we also saw some other uncomfortable facts. For instance if Al Gore had won he would be able to fly from Washington D.C. to California without passing over a single state that he won. What we saw was a and alarming Balkanization that happening in our country a regional breakdown that we've seen in other winner take all nations in the past like India for instance and even Canada where one part of the country goes to one party in another part of the country goes for the other political party in the United States we saw that the Western states outside of the coastal states are becoming have become solidly Republican in the past there was no is it true that places like Montana would elect Democrats like Mike Mansfield kind of populist Democrats in Idaho would elect a Frank Church. But we're not seeing that anymore. The mountain states and down through the Southwest are becoming pretty solidly

conservative. The South of course when it comes to presidential elections is pretty solidly conservative Republican. And then you have the Democrats who are winning mostly the urban areas. And so even in places like California which is a Democratic state most of the Democratic votes come from just the coastal area in the inner parts of California are becoming solidly conservative. And so you having to be situations where. You can see state legislatures like in Idaho and other places where the Republicans will win say 60 percent of the vote but they'll win 70 80 90 percent of the seats are getting these huge distortions between the popular vote and the number of seats won because of the distortions of the single seat districts and how those are created during the redistricting process. And so you're getting these huge distortions where one side is winning way more power than they should and the other side is winning way less power. It effects what legislative policy is produced with how ideas are

debated discussed in all these different states and so it's kind of a regional breakdown is quite new. In our in our history usually you saw more of a mix of Democrats Republicans being elected all over the country. But now that we're getting into these kind of regional Balkanization Steven you put your finger on something that I'd like you to talk a little bit more about. And that's the redistricting process that sort of you know maybe fuels this Balkanization that you're talking about. Yes it certainly is in the redistricting process what happens is basically the incumbents and party leaders and their technocrats sit at a computer and they draw the district lines they draw themselves safe seats and not only do they draw themselves say things but say you're the party in your state that controls redistricting. You can manipulate the districts and how many of your types of voters you pack into each district in such a way as to win more than your fair share of seats so you can you know there's been new tourist examples where one party in a particular state

will have you know maybe 55 percent of the popular vote statewide for their congressional seat and they'll win 65 70 80 percent of the congressional seats. And it's because what they've used techniques like some recall packing in cracking if you control the redistricting process. What you do is you take as many of your opponent's voters and you pack them into as few districts as possible you sacrifice a couple of districts let them win those districts. Well that's not it. Good sound. I think we're going to have to recontact our guests since we're having a little problem with the phone line and while Jason Croft takes care of that let me reintroduce during this hour focus five a day. We're talking with Steven Hill. He is the founder and co-director of the Center for Voting and Democracy and author of the book we are drawing from during this hour it isn't titled fixing elections the Failure of America's winner take all politics. Excuse me. Recently published

by the Rutledge press in the book he looks at the what he describes as the breakdown of America's electoral system and some of the problems with the ways that we are conducting elections and suggests a number of ways to remedy the situation among them instant runoff voting which hopefully will get to talk about with Stephen Hill as we reconnect and hopefully have a better phone line here. Stephen are you there. Yeah I'm very sorry about that I don't know what but if I was your mentor my aunt marie maybe somewhere in the middle Well that's all right. Weird things happen with phone lines sometimes you know. Anyway here we are again. This is what I do. I was saying that you use techniques like packing and cracking you pack your opponents into a few districts. And as a result you've made all the other districts around those districts more to your liking more favorable to your party. And then they use. The techniques like cracking where if you have a concentration of the opponent's voters you put the District line right down the middle and cut their their their numbers in half in each

district and you separate them into two separate districts or three separate districts and so by using these techniques today the computers are extremely sophisticated. They have very good databases and they keep the profits has really become extremely extremely precise. That's you know where you see all these fingers sticking out of districts and long necks in these sorts of things and you get districts that are big compared to the shape of splattered spaghetti sauce and squash mosquitoes and all these sorts of things. And it's because you know the party leaders in the incumbents are using they're manipulating the political process the redistricting process in order to draw the districts. No one will guarantee them a safe seat in other words their own re-election and to who will guarantee the preeminence of their political party that's what the goal is. The goal is not in any way shape or form to somehow maximize the power of your vote as a voter. They're not concerned with that at all and so they don't look to see you know how many. How many can we make as many competitive districts as possible so that each voter has a sense that their vote counts because

what happens at the end of this process is that the voter most voters basically have been drawn into safe seats where it doesn't matter if you show up to the polls because everyone knows ahead of time who's going to win. Most districts we have the Center for Voting and Democracy one of the things we do is we make predictions. Over a year ahead of time about who's going to win each district without knowing anything about inequities in campaign finance or even oftentimes who the candidates are just by looking at the demographics of the districts and how they were drawn in the last redistricting process and oh you know. Really what's happening to the redistricting process is voters are being sliced and diced right out of the political process in essentially the redistricting is controlled by the party in power so the can the concentrate you know the concentration of you know is sort of sort of snowballs in other words. Right and this last time we just had a redistricting in 2001 and it was more craft than even usual because they have even more powerful computers. And California for

instance one of the congressional incumbents blurted out something that everyone always sort of suspected went on behind the scenes but no one ever really admitted. She said each of the incumbents in California paid the political consultant who was drawing the district lines $20000 apiece to draw them a safe seat. Twenty thousand dollars in this is you know this is protection money there's no other word for it. And so you know in which she was questioned about that she she said I mean the reporter was somewhat incredulous realizing the ramifications of this sort of practice. And she said no way that's it for me that's a bargain I usually spend three million dollars on reelection and now I have to do is spend 20000 and I don't have to worry about re-election anymore I'll be automatically re-elected. So you know. This is what's going on just over the past year and a half and the results usually after redistricting you expect in the U.S. House for instance will be about 100 competitive seats because after redistricting is when things are most competitive you get you get people who don't run for reelection you get some open seats and what have you. But this time

around most people are speculating maybe 30 35 perhaps 40 U.S. House seats are competitive out of 435 in other words. Those are the only seats in which we don't know who's going to win all the other ones are done deal safe seats. Voters don't even need to bother showing up to the polls. Now this is the calculus on the part of the people who are running for office and those who support them the consultants in the parties and so forth. And obviously that gives them a way to allocate their resources and perhaps focus their attention including their their campaign ads and their appearances in public places and so. North in you know affects the dialogue of the campaign by concentrating in those particular areas. You say. Certainly. Because what it means is that if the control of the U.S. House which is only six seats separating between Democrats Republicans control its six seats wing one way to the Democrats Hillary can trip regained control of the house and it's all we you know thirty five seats say up for grabs.

That means that's where all the campaigns are going to focus in all of the millions of dollars that are raised they're not going to go to the safe seat where everything is a done deal. They're going to go to the handful of seats that are up for grabs. And not only that. They don't have to win every voter in those those contested races because they know a certain number of voters most voters are going to vote either for a Democrat or Republican is going to be just a handful of voters what we call the swing voters. 15 percent of voters who are undecided. And that is elections that are going to be up for grabs so even within those you know a handful three dozen or so congressional races they're going to. Targeting a small group of swing voters who are going to decide the winners in each one of those elections. A similar dynamic goes on in our presidential election. You know I mean we saw how close of a national election was but in fact everybody knew that all of the states except for about eight states were already facing States for one presidential candidate or another they were done deals it was only a handful

of states in the 2000 presidential election that was up for grabs now. But they also knew that within those handful of states there were you know most voters knew whether they are going to vote for a Democrat or Republican it was just a handful of swing voters 10 maybe 15 percent of voters who were up for grabs in those handful of of swing states. And so what should be a national election really boil down to the most provincial of concerns where the parties and the candidates have their polls and their focus groups that tell them OK here's the handful of states we have to win. If the handful of voters with the in each of those states that we have to win. And so all of the appeals go to those handful of swing voters now in November 2008 both parties have determined that the swing voters in those states were seniors who were predominately white higher than average income and so on. That's why you saw all of the campaign ideas that were being talked about were things like Medicare Social Security lockboxes prescription drugs those

dominated our presidential election debates as if there are other issues out there and that's why you know as one 20 something said I feel like if you're not 65 and older and have arthritis these candidates have nothing to say to you. And it's exactly right because the way they run campaigns today with their polls and their focus groups they are targeting an up and up just to show a way that just slices and dices everyone else out of the political process so I would say that they care about the other voters care about besides prescription drugs Social Security Medicare are basically left on the political sidelines and all the voters that care for them about those issues are also the political sidelines. We have a call to talk with listen to them in a conversation I'll mention the phone numbers again if other people like to join us. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 around Champaign-Urbana elsewhere 800 2 2 2 9 4 5 5 and by e-mail talk Adobe oil dot UIUC dot edu. We have caller from Champaign County on line number one. Good morning you're on focus.

I had a specific question then a more general like sort of what do you suggest in move the second one. It's interesting to note that this isn't just you know looking at European systems we Illinois actually had bullet voting where we had the option of voting three votes in favor of one candidate. So it's sort of cumulative voting thing. And I reformer who is well-meaning and who has done some good work Citizens Utility Board said that that was something you could campaign on and got rid of it. And I think it's been bad actually overall it was the idea was we could lower the number of legislators. But but the more specific question. I guess it's more specific. What about Florida. I'd like for you to here review the situation and what do you think about the NAACP. Settlement. My

understanding is that there's no they didn't get a firm commitment to you know get immediate redress to the to the people who were called felons feloniously as it were that only like 5 or 6 percent of the people that were on that someone's list were actually were actually felons and it's a huge scandal that hasn't been commented on enough so I'm calling for you to do it again here. And I guess you might want to say something about the current fiasco down there too. Thanks I'll hang up and listen. Thanks for the call. Well the I think that the situation for I mean my perspective on it is that sure all the issues of of felons not being able to vote in the way they purge the rolls and then also you know we've heard stories of police barricades set up that prevented some people from voting in. And there were a million things that went wrong in Florida it sounds like from the recent primer they

just had They're still working out some of the bugs on their new voting equipment so they're still having problems there. The thing that that draws me to look at Florida is the fact that you had millions of voters going out there to vote and it was pretty clear who Floridians preferred in terms of the major presidential candidates they preferred Al Gore and yet the voting system completely broke down. They have a they use the plurality voting system with the highest vote getter wins regardless of whether they have a majority or not. And as a result of that process they had someone win without a majority of the popular vote in Florida and also nationally. And so if they had used something like say instant runoff voting in Florida where voters were would be allowed to rank their candidates. So if you have your first choice you know sort of like Ralph Nader voters could have put Nader as their first choice and then you also have your run off choice you get to rank second choice and a third choice if you want and so Ralph Nader voters would have had an opportunity to rank

Al Gore as their second choice or even one of the other minor candidates as their second choice and Al Gore as their third choice if they had used some sort of runoff system like this in Florida. Al Gore would have won despite all the discrepancies of felons and police barricades and all these sorts of things. Despite all of that went on Al Gore still would have won Florida and hands would have won the presidency. I mean Ed to me is it in some ways is the bigger problem here because you know it's a lot more insidious of a way to thwart the popular will by using something like a voting system. Or even the voting equipment and setting up things like police barricades you know because the barricade stuff is so crass in the denying felons the right to vote is so crap that people see it right away and it's much more surreptitious and sneaky in a sense to use these other ways that people don't focus on. And so I think that after a bit of that for me the lesson of the lesson of Florida 2000 is that at the very least the

winners of each state should have to have a majority of the popular vote and of course I think even beyond that we should abolish the Electoral College so it's a holdover from the the 18th century a when it was put into place because the Founders and Framers did not trust the popular will. And it began to backfire right from the very beginning because the way it was constructed was was an odd way to to start with but they didn't have a lot of examples to draw from in the 18th century. We know a lot more about voting systems now and better ways to do it. And it's time to upgrade our voting system in the way we elect our president. But. You know without more of an outcry and now with what's going on in the Middle East pretty much pushing everything off of the front pages. I mean I think that also is is too convenient for words the way that all has has been pushed off the front page by other events as well as other things like Enron and all the things that have been going on in this country for the last couple years have been pushed off the front page by the events in the Middle East and so unfortunately I'm not sure we're going to see a lot of change in their even having trouble right now passing that federal bill that would

allocate 3 billion dollars for voting in new voting equipment all across the country so I think the citizens are going to have to get more outraged about what happened in Florida in November 2000 and start making more noise about it instead of what's going on in the Middle East. Well there's many things I want to ask you to follow up on. There was. Speaking of things being pushed off the front page. The people some people may be aware that there has been an election in Florida or a primary in which the vote is very close between Janet Reno and the other Democratic candidate and again voting problems are sort of putting a big question mark on the who actually is the winner and I haven't seen the news this morning about that but you know when would you want to comment on that. Well from what I understand and the news reports I've read have been fairly sketchy about what exactly the problem is in Florida this time around but it sounds like you know they do have new voting equipment

there. And it sounds like they didn't adequately train their poll workers about how to use it and perhaps didn't adequately educate voters about how to fill out the new ballots and you know and so here again is a good example for it. You know the country of Brazil. OK. They have completely computerized their voting process. The voter goes in and votes on it which is essentially the computer and they they push a button for their candidate and a picture comes up on the computer screen so they can verify who they voted for and make sure it's the right person. OK. And many other countries around the world already have this problem completely solved for the most part they don't have the problems that we have in this country yet here we are the you know that everyone has said you know the litany of the lone remaining superpower the most powerful country the world has ever known. And yet we can't count the votes we can't come up with the voting equipment proper training for a poll workers other nations pay their poll workers. And you know so it we rely pretty much on a volunteer force all across the country. There's over 3000 counties in this country and they do things in a

different way. And so. So what I'm saying is that we don't pay enough attention and we don't put enough money and we don't invest enough of our resources into our alleged electoral infrastructure from voting systems to voting equipment to poll workers. And I can tell you numerous examples all across the country of just complete flub ups that happen that are inexcusable for a country with our resources. But it's because somehow our our politicians and our elected leaders don't value it enough to put the money and the resources into it. And you know people in this country just aren't paying enough attention to what's going on. And you know it just happens in state after state and county after county and until we start realizing that we need to put more attention to what I call Democracy Technology. The way our our democracy functions and the infrastructure that helps us decide our representative government. We're going to continue to have problems like this. I'm look at the news now from Florida it looks like the electoral difference between Bill McBride and Janet Reno is less than a thousand votes in a number of irregularities in

terms of you know poll voting polling places not being open and a variety of other problems with the system in place. You sort of put it in question. How that how accurate the vote count was and I guess that will we'll hear more news about that I'm sure in the coming days. Right absolutely and you know I can tell you from experience that a lot of elected officials all across the country you wonder how they got their jobs it certainly wasn't because of their competency at running elections and you know I mean look at Kathleen Harris in Florida. I mean she was clearly a political hack and she was overseeing elections in Florida. But this goes on in county after county across the country where the people who got their jobs it was not because they took some sort of civil service cast or could show that they know the latest the latest information about the voting system technology and know how it works. That's not why they got their jobs at all it was politics that gave them their jobs and we in this country we really need to look at this process from from top to bottom and look at it in a way in a systematic

way and look at what other nations do. And you know most nations for instance have an electoral commission that oversees their elections. Not just one individual in a county that does whatever the heck they are. Sure he wants they have an electoral commission that oversees it. They have national electoral commissions oversee their electoral process for their country. We don't have anything of that nature we have the FEC perhaps which is you know it's barely a regulatory body. So it's really time to look at these as I said to look at our entire electoral process from top to bottom from voting systems to voting equipment and get serious about democracy if that's really what we believe in what we export to the world. Our lungs are almost all full I want to make sure we talk about instant runoff voting in proportional representation and some of the other the issues you raise in your book. But I also want to defer to callers since that's what the show is all about as well. So let's talk next with another listener on line number. One in Urbana. Good morning in focus 580.

Hi I don't usually work as an election judge on Election Day here in Champaign County and we do get paid off by one and then the day is very long and it's hard to get people to be election judges because you have to have the free time to be able to do that. And so election judges tend to be older and sometimes they're getting older and frailer. So if anybody's out there who would like to try to help make our system work they're going to have election judge training that's required in order to get the maximum out of. And I'm going to have it on the 17th on the 23rd the 17th is that the champagne County Farm Bureau and the 23rd is the anesthetic center and they'll be other places around the county. This three different times each time somebody could call their local county clerk and ask when the training is for election judges. One of the things that I've tried to tell people that you know what assume they're going to get tired of saying the same thing over and

over again is to check your ballot when you come out of the voting booth. And even so at the end of the day when we make sure we have the right number of ballots for the right number of people who came in and the right type of ballot we always find some that aren't marked or some that aren't punched fully and we always have people who come out and say I can't make this work. That's because they're trying to use the pencil for a write in vote instead of a stylus. People need to check their ballots when they come out and they you know people are distracted. People make mistakes. It isn't just Florida that's having problems. We all need to take responsibility for asking how we can check our ballot to make sure we've actually recorded what we think we've recorded. It isn't that difficult to do. But we're dealing with voters some of whom can't see very well or have physical sometimes have physical disabilities of all kinds of problems that when there are some things we can try to do to make the system

better here. Just with that thinking to be changed but there are some small things we can do. Thanks. OK thanks. So much for that perspective. You know one quick comment I mean my fear is that we don't even understand the scope of of how bad the problem is. You know if there are states like Alaska where there are more registered voters than there are people who live in the state that they have problems purging the rolls you know and it has to do with our system of how we make people register to vote. You know other countries you don't have to register to vote you vote because you breathe. And anybody who's of age gets to vote and you just use your your driver's license whatever to go in say who you are and you vote. But because with how we make people register to vote here and we have to keep track of who's registered to vote and and all these other technicalities that we end barriers we erect to voters about how about what they have to do to vote. It creates more problems than it solves. You know for instance. I appreciate

what the previous caller said about it being election judges hard to get people it certainly is. But if we didn't have elections on the for first Tuesday on a war in the middle of a workday if we had been at a weekend or made a holiday you would suddenly have all sorts of people who were available to help out with our elections if you had them on a weekend or a holiday. Students For instance could help because it is true that a lot of the people who help out now tend to be older and you know bless their hearts for donating their time. But you know some of the older people there they're not exactly spry and you know they easily get confused and if they're confused then voters get confused. So if we did other things like changing the day of our elections we suddenly would solve the problem of getting people to help out with the polls so you know again we have to look at this problem and we have to start from the beginning we have to say to suggest we have to pretty much carrot all up and start over again from scratch because what we're doing right now is is backfiring and failing in numerous ways that we aren't even keeping track of right now.

We're talking this morning with Steven Hill he's the author of the book Fixing Elections. Failure of America's winner take all politics recently published by Rutledge press. We have a couple of callers waiting and we'll get right to them. Though Stephen I do want to just you sort of interject here make sure we get to some of the most important points you make in the book and give you a chance to talk about instant runoff voting in particular and describe what that is. Well it's throughout the morning as I was talking about earlier if we do use it in Florida voters would have gotten to rank their candidates instead of just picking one candidate. And so voters could have put their first choice first and they get to indicate their second choice which is a runoff choice and their third choice and you do that by ranking your ballot you know different ballots have different designs but basically whichever way you do it in your own in your county there would be a way to where you would get to indicate your first second and third choice is an interesting enough in Florida all those voters that you know Iranians sleep pick Pat Buchanan with the infamous butterfly ballot. They would have been able to indicate their second choice somehow too and somewhere in there they may have gotten

it right by putting Al Gore which is who they were really trying to to vote for and so. You know with the instant run off voting if your first choice does it when your vote goes to your second choice to your runoff choice and by doing it that way you make sure that the eventual winner has a majority of the vote and you do it in one election so you don't encounter the problems of caucus and having to set up at the polls for a second election that you have with the traditional two round runoff so the interop voting proposal is I think is gaining a lot of interest in this country. For instance all throughout the South you have a runoff being used both for the primary elections if no one gets a majority and then in the general election sometimes it takes four elections in many states in the south to elect a single office and it just it burns voters out you can see each election that the voter turnout drops until finally by the end hardly anyone is voting at all. And so I think instant runoff voting is becoming attractive and now that we have the voting Quitman technology to be able to quickly and efficiently handle these kind of

rank ballots we're seeing a lot of interest this is the system that we passed in San Francisco this past March and it is starting in November 2003 San Francisco using instant runoff voting to elect all local offices. It's also being used by the Utah Republican Party to nominate their congressional candidates in primaries because oftentimes in primaries we see a multi-candidate field. And as a result someone will win the primary with a 20 percent of the vote or 25 percent of a vote and so it's not even clear that candidate is really supported by their party. They just had a narrow base of support that allowed them to to beat everyone else and so using It's a write off in party primaries is a great way to make sure that all of the candidates the nominated candidates have the support of their mood of the majority their party behind them. And there's other places they using instead of voting as well. No the other system that I talk about in my book is called proportional representation which is what you used to elect legislatures and the way that works is if a political party gets 60 percent of the

popular vote they get 60 percent of the seats of the legislative seats. The party gets 30 percent of the popular vote. They get 30 percent the seats if they get 10 percent of the popular vote they get 10 percent of the seats it's a proportional representation you get the allocation of seats that match you or your percentage of the popular vote. And by doing it that way you give voters more choice you open up the political process to other candidates and to other parties being able to to run and actually win seats in the legislature and that has the salutary effects on not only on representation but now I'm participating because suddenly voters have more choice we're not stuck with these lockdowns safe seats where incumbents have redrawn the district lines to give them safe seats and nobody has any choice. And. It also has a salutary effect on how campaigns are to are conducted because once you introduce multi-candidate field suddenly the polls in the focus groups in the way the two parties run their elections today viz a viz each other is not so such a cosy game and you introduce a third perspective unlike when Jesse Ventura ran

in Montana suddenly a whole new perspective was able to be introduced. New ideas came into the debates and the candidates had to take positions on them so that's what happens when you have proportional representation it also has positive impacts on the policy that gets passed in an our sense of national cohesion so those of the other the other things I talk about in my book. Yeah. So in the case of proportional representation I mean there are there are many European nations that actually use that for example. Leave Germany. Who are the Green Party has become a very powerful force. Exactly in fact most established democracies in the world use proportional representation the trend in the world is away from our winner take all system because the winner take all system of the eighteenth century system we eventually. We essentially invented it in the 18th century and then about 100 years after that people started looking at the the problems with the winner take all system and they invented what's known as proportional representation in fact it was invented in the United States by an MIT professor who you know was looking at the problems and

said hey that was a better way to do it. And in fact in Illinois as one of your earlier callers the callers alluded to you have a history of using what's called a semi proportional system cuman of voting where you had three sea districts and every voter in the in the in these three seat districts had three votes and you could put all three votes on one candidate if you wanted to and it allowed you to express a strong preference for a particular candidate. And interestingly enough in Illinois when you use that system every three seat district elected a Democrat or Republicans it wasn't just one party dominating the district. And you saw independents and Mavericks being able to win against the party bosses. Chicago for instance which is now it's pretty much exclusively elected Democrats elected a few Republicans down state Page County which now ex Republicans. Elected some Democrats and what that meant is that in the party caucuses you had say a Republican in the Republican Caucus saying hey we've got to do something for education in the city. We've got to do something for transportation other

issues that we care about in in our cities. And same with Democrats in the downstate areas whereas now with your single seat district system things have completely polarized along these regional lines and so the Republicans don't have any incentive to do something for the cities because they know when votes there and the Democrats don't have an incentive to do things the places that they don't win votes. And so people like Abner Mikva and Jim Edgar and others have called for a return to Cuba voting because they say it unified your state more and didn't create such a balkanized and polarized politics where the politics are now dominated by the Four Tops the top the four top legislative leaders. You had more input percolating up from the grassroots and from voters and so it you know a lot of it both the Chicago dailies have have opined in favor of returning to Cuba to voting with a couple calls to talk with let's include them in a conversation will go next to another listener in Urbana on line number two. Good morning. Don't focus 580. Yeah it's good to hear someone talking about the technology of voting and how

important it is and I think here you basically are zeroing in on a really important problem but couple things kind of bother me one is that you seem to think that computer voting would be all that great. I want to quote a few lines from Victoria Collyer about that topic last year she says and I agree with her. The punch card is being replaced by the computer voting machine the most on verifiable Ribble voting system ever created. There is no longer a paper trail no way to go back and recount fraud if the system suspected all the workings of the machinery hidden from the public eye in the eyes of election officials. She goes on the say that these corporations won't allow access to the source code in that. And she points out how election officials are willingly abdicating the responsibility

oversee the safety of the vote count. So I would caution about putting much faith in being able to see a photograph of who you're voting for because. Between that image of who you're voting for and the Count it could be a million flip flops. But my question I have a question and this question is. You've talked a little bit about proportional representation which I think is really the only hope I would ever have of having somebody represent my point of view because. And which makes me ask why is it that it seems that you your institute seems to favor instant runoff in some areas and proportional representation in others.

An instant runoff it seems. Like for example in a three way race like happened in Florida at the presidential level with Bush Gore and Nader you know it would just seem to funnel mater's votes to Gore and which you know may get a make makes some people happy. But it's still just the two parties and there's no end in. And you yourself have said that that would not encourage third party wins. So why is it that in some places you favor proportional representation in some places or for favor and then run off and on. I don't hang up and listen thank you. Thanks the question. Great you have raised some some really good points to try to address them here as briefly as I can. In general my center for voting in democracy we think that that proportion representation is the way to elect legislatures and instead of

voting is the way to elect single executives like mayor or governor or president in order to elected to do something by proportional representation. You have to use what's known as multi-city districts more than once he produced it whereas the winner take all system for the most part relies on single seat districts and by most I see just what I mean is let's say you have a district with 10 seats in it with proportional representation. Every seat is weighted equally to the exact same number of votes and so if you win it can see district 30 percent of the popular vote. You get three out of 10 of those seats. If you win 60. Cent of the popular vote you get six out of the 10 of those seats if you win 10 percent of the popular vote you get one at a 10 of those seats. So in order to do proportion representation you have to use multi districts it doesn't have to be a Tennessee district it can be a three seat district four seat just of whatever size makes sense. The key is the more seats you elect at one time in that mold place the district the lower the threshold would like what I was saying you need 10 percent of a vote to win one seat in a Tennessee district in a feisty district. You would need 20 percent

of the vote to win one seat you just take the number of seats that are being elected at once you have divided into one hundred percent that gives you the approximate number of votes 20 percent in a five seat district. You can have more than one President Reagan that way but when it comes to single executive races you can't have more than one governor more than one president more than one mayor So for those we believe that the best way to do it is instant runoff voting because you get the candidate that's preferred by the most voters in those races. And you do it all in a one election because you know you if you use a two round runoff you run into problems there where it costs a lot of money for that second election. Candidates have to raise money for a second election which undermines campaign finance reform. And you know voters get tired of having to trudge out to the polls all the time you see voter turnout declines in those in the second runoff elections. So we think the it's a runoff voting is a better way to do that and so that's why we talk about both of the systems. And you know I also think that something else really in terms of proportional representation. You actually

can combine proportional representation with our single seat district system and some some people think this might be the best transitional system for the United States because Germany for instance uses are that combination is called a Mixed Member system where voters when they go into the voter's booth they have to vote. One is for their district representative just like what we have now and the other is for a what's called a list you vote for the party in their list of candidates that have been determined ahead of time and during a party caucus and you get the record the legislature has a mix of both times the types of legislators in there some that represent a geographic area some that represent the political party. And as a result you see the winner take all system basically gives you representation based on where you live proportional representation gives you representation based on what you think. And so you know there are merits to both of them. The problem with doing exclusively by where you live which is well how we do in the U.S. is that many many people end up being shut out of the political process because some voters gain a representative they win and everyone else loses.

And so that's where the winner take all after it comes in so using some combination. Actually I think could be a nice transition for the United States. I'm sort of excited that we have literally about a minute left and another caller must apologize to I took too long and hopefully will continue this topic at some later point. Well Stephen I want to ask just real quick. If you could tell us how would these changes be brought about one of the mechanisms to put these things in place the mechanisms are first block education because we've got to educate people about how these different options are out there that we aren't stuck with just our winner take all ways that we've used the last two centuries there are options and so first thing we need to do is educate ourselves. We can go to the website of my organization the Center for Voting and Democracy which is b w dot fair vote dot org and has lots of information there that you could use to educate yourself and then you know start handing out to your friends your family members your coworkers educate them. Once we do that and then starting to

lobby and starting to use voter initiatives of the U.S. Constitution and most state constitutions are silent on these issues and so just by passing a clickable state laws that local state and even federal levels we could implement proportional representation for our city councils for our state legislatures and for the U.S. House of the Senate we would have to make. We would probably have to do some of the things that involve changing the Constitution. But it also for instant thought of voting same thing. You know here in San Francisco we pass instead of voting by changing our city charter. We put it on the ballot and then voters decided they voted 55 percent in favor of changing it to instant runoff voting so we can do that in all the myriad ways that we have been have pushed other reforms like campaign finance reform and others and then also getting legislators involved because we have found legislators who are very open to these ideas that realize that you know we have problems in this country that ought to be solved in the current system. And so they're open to these ideas so I urge people to start contacting the legislators and talk about we need to basically start a national conversation. And we do that by starting locally and regionally

and in your state. OK. We have to stop there. Steven Hill's been our guest the book Fixing Elections The Failure of America's winner take all politics published by the religious press. Stephen thank you so much for talking with us. One quick thing if people want to check out of excerpt you can go to the Web site for the book which is w w w dot fixing elections dot com. OK. Thank you so much appreciate your time. Pleasure.