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THE REAL MISSING VOTES
By Douglas Amy
In their intense coverage
of the election debacle in Florida, the media managed to miss
one of the most disturbing political stories there. They focused
almost entirely on the controversy over how and whether to count
all the votes. As a result, they overlooked the fact that most
of the votes cast for president there did not really count at
all. Most of the votes by Floridians didn't count because they
were cast for candidates who eventually lost. They are what political
scientists called "wasted votes" votes that don't contribute to
the election of an official. Large numbers of wasted votes are
an inherent result of the winner-take-all approach used by most
states to allocate their electoral votes. In the case of Florida,
a majority of the voters (51%) actually cast votes for either
Gore or Nader, but all of those votes were wasted. The majority
won no representation in the Electoral College. Their votes were
no more effective than if they hadn't voted at all. As a result,
George Bush, who won less than a majority of the vote, won all
the states Electoral College votes hardly what you could call
a fair outcome.
The media largely ignored this unrepresentative result because
wasted votes are so common in our election system that we hardly
ever think about them. But the fact is that this denial of representation
is neither inevitable nor necessary. For example, the constitution
allows states to divide their electoral votes proportionally;
allocating those votes according to the percentage of the popular
vote won by each candidate. Florida could have given 12 of its
25 electoral votes to Bush, 12 to Gore, and 1 to Nader. In this
way, virtually all the votes cast by Floridians would have counted
and the electoral votes would have been distributed much more
fairly.
This problem of wasted votes and unrepresentative election results
goes far beyond the Electoral College. We use the same problematic
winner-take-all system to elect virtually all of our local, state,
and federal legislatures. In all of these elections, wasted votes
not only deny representation to large numbers of voters, they
also discourage turnout. If you are a Democrat in a predominantly
Republican district or a Republican in a Democratic district,
or a third party supporter in any district, then you know your
vote will be wasted and you have little incentive to go to the
polls.
Wasted votes also ultimately undermine the right of our political
leaders to rule. Consider, for example, the congressional elections
of 1998. Voter turnout was only about 40%. But given the many
wasted votes, only about 25% of the eligible voters cast votes
that actually counted toward the election of a winning candidate.
And the Republicans who ended up in control of the House of Representatives
won only a little over half of those votes. So legislation passed
by the House was fashioned by officials directly elected by only
about 15% of the eligible voters not exactly an overwhelming mandate
to govern.
Most other Western democracies use proportional representation
(PR) for their legislative elections, and so they don't suffer
nearly as much from this problem of wasted votes. PR ensures that
only about 10%-15% of the votes are wasted, significantly lower
than in the U.S. These elections use large, multimember districts
where, say, 5 or 10 legislators are elected at a time. In a ten-member
district, if the Democrats win 50% of the vote, they get 5 of
the 10 seats. If Republicans win 40% of the vote, they receive
4 seats; and if the Greens win 10% of the vote, they get one seat.
This approach not only dramatically increases the number of votes
that count, it also produces much more accurate representation
of all parties in the legislature. For that reason, many election
systems experts consider proportional representation elections
much more democratic and representative than our winner-take-all
approach.
So the lesson from Florida is not only that we need to get rid
of our antiquated and malfunctioning punch-card machines, but
also that we need to consider getting rid of our antiquated and
malfunctioning winner-take-all election system. We should take
a serious look at alternative electoral systems that have to potential
to make virtually all of our votes count and that produce the
most democratic election results.
Douglas J. Amy is a professor
of Politics at Mount Holyoke College. His latest book is "Behind
the Ballot Box: A Citizens Guide to Voting Systems" from Praeger
Publishing.
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