Tag Archives: ranked-choice voting

Renewing Democracy

Actually, the United States does not have a democracy. We do not elect our national leaders by popular vote. We elect them by people called electors, sent to Washington in early January every four years by the states after the presidential election.

Until January 6, 2021, few Americans paid attention to the electoral college, meeting after each presidential election to certify the vote. For most of our history, it functioned as a kind of rubber stamp after the November election.

Where did this “electoral college” come from? Some of our nation’s founding leaders, back in the late eighteenth century, didn’t trust the idea of ordinary citizens electing their leaders. They wanted a group of supposedly enlightened state leaders to actually decide on the outcome of the presidential election. Ordinary citizens would elect these “electors” who would then make the choice for them of the next president.

We all know how that turned out.

Nothing humans devise is perfect. We must constantly fine tune even well-thought out designs. After the January 6, 2021 calamity, perhaps we should examine the idea of political parties, whose development the founding citizens didn’t foresee.

One suggestion for overcoming the power of political parties is ranked choice voting. Voters rank political candidates on their ballots instead of voting only for one.

Another is overcoming gerrymandering. Gerrymandering allows winners of an election to create voting districts that don’t reflect the population density but instead create weird districts that tie the favored party into divisions that favor them.

Regardless of the methods chosen, we need voting laws which decrease the power of parties and increase the power of individual voters.

Turning the U.S. Into a Democracy

The United States, at this time, is not a democracy, that is a country ruled solely by its citizens. The founding of the country certainly was at the forefront of the movement to give power to citizens, compared with most other countries in the world at the time. As the years passed, however, we did not build on this beginning as we should have.

We have certainly progressed from those white mostly upper class men who hammered out a constitution for the new nation in the late 1780’s. The progress, however, has been slow and incomplete.

It took us almost a century to rid the country of slavery, and the racism that lingers from that time still impedes us. The election of senators by citizens and not state legislatures was granted in 1913. Women weren’t give the right to vote until 1920.

We also are burdened, as we discovered on January 6, 2021, by a relic from the past, the electoral college. This gives power to individual states to elect the president rather than to the popular vote. It also allowed for the growth of political parties, not foreseen by many of the country’s founders at the time.

One suggestion for giving more power to citizens over political parties is the institution of ranked-choice voting. Voters rank candidates by choice. The two candidates with the most votes win. They could be from different political parties, the same party, or have no party affiliation. It would tend to give more power to voters and less to political parties.

Who knows? In time, perhaps we might eventually tackle the problem of gerrymandering, in which outsize power is given to party leaders to set voting boundaries.