The Presidential System: A Crisis in Democracy
Every 4 years we revisit a broken system that necessitates political extremism, disenfranchises many, and concentrates power in one
With the primaries over, voters have a choice between Trump and Biden even as 67% of voters are "tired of seeing the same candidates in presidential elections and want someone new". But even this is a false choice for a majority of the population, since the electoral college effectively makes voting only matter in a few swing states and conversely the entire national election is determined by ± 10,000 votes in these couple of states. To top it of, a significant amount of powers are vested into this one seat of the presidency such as to pardon [including him/her self], declare national emergencies and launch nuclear weapons, making the election both a zero-sum game and intensely polarized.
A government can only be legitimate as long as citizens feel it is fair, and the above issues left unaddressed can only lead to further instability.
Electoral College Reform
The Electoral College is designed such that each state gets a number of electors equal to the sum of its representatives in the House of Representatives and the Senate, the states can determine what ever way these electors are chosen and then these electors cast ballots for the President.
This system solved a couple of tricky issues at the time of writing the constitution. Each state limited who gets to vote differently [like slaves, people without property or women couldn’t vote], thus this precluded a direct and equal vote for president.
The electoral college solved this problem by turning the national election into 50 state elections with states giving all their electors to the candidate who wins the most votes.
Although small states do get a slight boost in representation in the electoral college, the main problem is that the whole election comes down to swing states and thus these states dominate the minds and policies of candidates.
Even if electoral votes were given solely based on population, the outcome for the 2016 election for example would not be different and wouldn’t reflect the popular vote:
This is because of the winner take all nature of the electoral college and vast disenfranchised democratic minorities in red states. This is yet another legacy of slavery, as white Southerners continue to leverage the electoral college to disenfranchise black minorities and cast electoral votes in their names.
Broad proposals for reform of the Electoral College are:
1.) Congressional District Method: Giving an electoral vote to whoever wins a congressional district and 2 electoral votes for winning a state. This mimics the actual distribution of electoral votes to the states and is actually how Nebraska and Maine divvy up electoral votes.
This method though exposes the presidential election to gerrymandering and packing, and candidates would just focus on a few swing districts instead of swing states. So, as seen above this proposal would actually lead to huge inbuilt advantages for Republicans and lead to an even more unfair system.
2.) Proportional Electoral College: Electors per state can be proportionately divided based on votes cast per candidate. Below would be a sample result for 2016 election sourced from Washinton Post:
The results would have been even more different as more people in states such as Texas and California would come out to vote since their vote would actually matter to the final outcome. Additionally, candidates won’t have to tailor their policies with special focus to swing states in mind and would instead focus on driving their statewide proportions.
As a compromise solution, this method won’t even need a constitutional amendment and could be achieved as a bipartisan compact amongst a majority of state legislatures.
A version of this solution where the electoral votes are floating point numbers with third decimal precision was tried before as The Lodge-Gossett Amendment, which actually passed the Senate by 2/3 vote. This change would have removed actual electors and associated issues such as faithless electors, but keep the math of the electoral college. Southern states were proposing this change because they were already suppressing black voting and this would fracture the northern voting power.
Perhaps this change could be paired with increasing the House of Representatives to 500, which would mitigate the extra power of smaller states by reducing the contribution of the Senate in the electoral college math.
3.) National Popular Vote: To be consistent with the idea "that all people are created equal” and the standard of “one person, one vote”, the only fair option for electing the President would be a National Popular Vote, where the candidates who wins the most votes across the country becomes the President.
Instead of catering policies to the median swing state, candidates would instead cater policies to the median American. Every American’s vote would count regardless of wether they lived in a swing state or not. States would no longer be incentivized to disenfranchise sections of their population, or suppress voters with onerous requirements.
Indeed, a constitutional amendment would be required but it would be akin to prior changes such as the direct election of Senators.
S.T.A.R. Voting
The current plurality voting system of determining who wins an election is deceivingly simple: whoever gets the most votes wins. But the second order implications of these rules is the direct cause of the polarization in American politics.
Since there can only be one winner, factions end up consolidating to two parties and fight for the median voter. Thus, parties end up building a core base of supporters and then try to give only so much on policy issues to win the median voter. To determine their candidates, parties then hold primaries. Due to the much reduced voter turnouts of primaries and a significant chunk of the population being independents, a small, active minority of the population at 10-15% can choose the policies for the whole country. Thus essentially becoming a two round voting system but with minority factions wielding tremendous influence on policy proposals of a party.
It is better to think of elections as imperfect systems that translate the preferences of a population across a range of policy issues into a single representative. There is only so much signal that this system receives by a person voting for a candidate. Even more information is received when voters rank candidates. But best yet, the most information is given when voters can cast scores to candidates. Indeed such cardinal voting systems are the only way out of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem on having imperfect voting systems. A simple but effective such cardinal voting system is S.T.A.R.:
These voting system reforms can be passed by state legislatures, even for federal offices. Recently Alaska made such a reform to ranked choice voting for House of Representatives and Senate leading to Sarah Palin losing her reelection “Because a majority of Alaskans hate what Palin has become”.
FedSTAR
Although one can easily see S.T.A.R. implemented with a national popular vote, I propose a novel FedSTAR implementation so that the S.T.A.R. electoral system can be made compatible with the above mentioned proportional electoral college.
Voters give stars to their preferred candidates
The scores are aggregated at the national level while weighting for the Electoral College by multiplying the score given by a voter to a candidate by:
The two highest scoring candidates across the country are selected as finalists
At each state, the proportional electoral votes for the two national finalists are calculated by the score wise comparison of the two finalists by each voter.
By taking the two highest scoring national candidates, this avoids wasting state electoral college votes on candidates that aren’t finalists at the national level. Alternatively, the top two scorers at each state might just be accorded the proportional electoral votes for that state. But say a candidate only wins in one state, then those voters preference basically don’t have an impact on the final election.
Federal Executive Council
For a group of people who were paranoid in centralization of power and monarchial tendencies, the constitutional framers created an office where one person has unilateral powers to do as they please. Indeed it was a series of last minute compromises that led to a single President with significant powers.
A better solution could be a Directorial System, akin to Switzerland, and a council of 5 people form the executive branch. The members can have equal votes and the council collective can have the same powers as the current presidency. So instead of voting for a pair of President and Vice-President, each party can propose a slate of five individuals that people can then vote for to compose the council.
A slate of 5 candidates would also lead to better representation of the factions composing a party. The simple need to elucidate your opinion and convince just two other people, who are already from your party, would block crazy, erratic and self dealing behavior.
Comparisons
Comparing to a parliamentary system, the independent elected office of the executive has lead to significant second order impacts on the body politic as well as American society. The mere fact of the whole population rallying behind two candidates has created a national consciousness that a parliamentary system just can’t replicate. Additionally, the veto power of this independent executive representing the collective will of the nation as opposed to individual districts has limited the amount of corrupt bargains, politicking, and party defections that are an even bigger problem in parliamentary systems.
The elected office of the presidency was revolutionary for its time, but over the course of 200 years there is still room for improvements. Considering the difficulties of passing constitutional amendments and the need to get the support of 75% of states, I think a meaningful yet possible set of reforms would be a Fractional Proportional Electoral College paired with FedSTAR voting protocol and increasing the House seats to 500, and replacing the President/V.P. with a Federal Executive Council.
Really though, this trio of solutions would be a general solution to increase the welfare and representation of citizens and applicable to all Federal democracies such as Canada, Russia, and India.