Voting Systems and Representation—Illinois’s Experience

In his New York Times column David Brooks is in despair about the current Congress:

Now the two-party system has rigidified and ossified. The two parties no longer bend to the center. They push to the extremes, where the donor bases and their media propaganda arms are. More and more people feel politically homeless, alienated from both parties and without any say in how the country is run.

Moreover, the whole way of practicing politics has been transformed. Each party imagines that it is one wave election from destroying the other side and gaining total power. Therefore, as Drutman notes, there’s no interest in compromise, just winning and losing, gloating and seething.

Partisans’ chief interest is in proving that the other party is despicable — in ramping up fear, hatred and the negative polarization that is the central feature of contemporary American politics.

The result is that people, especially the young, lose faith in democratic norms altogether. There are over 6,000 breweries in America, but when it comes to our politics, we get to choose between Soviet Refrigerator Factory A and Soviet Refrigerator Factory B.

and proposes an alternative system of voting to “save” America:

The way to do that is through multimember districts and ranked-choice voting. In populous states, the congressional districts would be bigger, with around three to five members per district. Voters would rank the candidates on the ballot. If no candidate had a majority of first-place votes, then the candidate with the fewest first-place votes would be eliminated. Voters who preferred that candidate would have their second-choice vote counted instead. The process would be repeated until you get your winners.

As it turns out for 110 years Illinois had a voting system for its House and Senate that approximated such a system so, consequently, Illinois’s experience is relevant. The system was called “cumulative voting” and, like the system proposed by Mr. Brooks, it was an ordinal voting system.

Under cumulative voting each voter had three votes and could cast the three votes for a candidate once, twice, or three times. The candidate who got the most votes won. Without getting too much into the weeds, the intention of the system was to approximate proportional representation with geographic districts and the multiple studies of the system have tended to find that it was successful. Over time it had a defect: it tended to provide an edge to incumbents.

Mr. Brooks’s system is likely to have the same problem, especially in the presence of party primary elections. Since our present problem is not that it’s just too darned hard for incumbents to get re-elected, giving an edge to incumbents is hardly what we need. BTW, the system that Mr. Brooks is advocating has a name: single transferable vote.

The arguments against Illinois’s system of cumulative voting apply equally to Mr. Brooks’s system. In particular that it’s complicated, too complicated for the voters to understand.

If I had to pick just one reform to “save” our political system at the national level, it would be to cap the number of persons who could be represented by a representative in a single geographical district at something like 150,000 and let the number of House districts grow over time accordingly.

There’s actually a simpler way to accomplish what Mr. Brooks wants to do: ban political parties altogether.

I should add that voting systems don’t have just one objective they have several. People tend to focus on whether the outcome is proportional that is to say does it have legitimacy when they should also be considering the quality of the representatives being elected. IMO that’s our greater problem. We have lousy representation. That won’t be improved just by a system that is more proportional.