Tag Archives: voting

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Spoiled Rotten: Who Owns Your Vote?

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RGBStock.com Vote Pencil

There’s a word that sets my teeth on edge, bubbling up among the commentariat every other year as election campaigns heat up. In this cycle I’m starting to hear it earlier than usual, mainly because prominent candidates — first Donald Trump, now Jim Webb — are rumored to be considering independent bids for the presidency.

Since the word is out there early, signifying a bad idea, I’m coming out early to combat that bad idea.

The word I’m referring to is “spoiler.”

You’ve heard the arguments, I’m sure: If everyone in Florida who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 had voted for Al Gore instead, we wouldn’t have ended up with George W. Bush (as a side note, if everyone who had voted for Harry Browne in 2000 in New Mexico had voted for Dubya instead, Florida wouldn’t have mattered).

“A vote for the Libertarian is a vote for the Democrat.” “A vote for the Green is a vote for the Republican.” “A vote for anyone but the candidate I support is a vote for the candidate I fear.”

Horseapples.

First of all, let’s get one thing straight: Your vote is yours and yours alone. It doesn’t belong to a candidate until you cast it for that candidate, and you don’t owe it to any candidate until he or she has — in your opinion and your opinion only — EARNED it. You have no obligation whatsoever to vote for someone else’s hypothetical “lesser evil” instead of for your own carefully considered greater good.

Secondly, the “spoiler” phenomenon is largely a myth. As a partisan Libertarian, I often hear the claim that people who vote Libertarian would instead vote Republican if they didn’t have a Libertarian option. That’s sometimes true, but decades of exit polling says that Libertarians “take votes from” Democrats in about the same ratio as “from” Republicans on average, and sometimes more so (for example, in the 2013 election for governor of Virginia, Libertarian Robert Sarvis’s voters said, by a two to one margin, that their second choice was Democrat Terry McAuliffe, not Republican Ken Cuccinelli).

Finally, even if “spoiling” is a real phenomenon, so what? If the candidate who wanted your vote didn’t get it, maybe that candidate should have worked harder to deserve it. If there’s any chance to bring one or both of the major parties around to the views of third party voters, that chance is represented by the “spoiler” factor: “What do we have to do to get back that 3%  we lost by last time?”

As you watch the 2016 campaigns unfold, keep these three things in mind. Vote your own priorities and let the chips fall where they may.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Redistricting for Dummies: How to End the Gerrymander

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English: Gerrymander diagram for four sample d...
English: Gerrymander diagram for four sample districts. Created in Adobe Illustrator by Jeremy Kemp. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Every ten years, based on the latest census data, the states receive new apportionments of seats in the US House of Representatives. The state legislatures begin mapping out revised districts to accommodate changes in population, population distribution, and increases or decreases in the number of seats.

And five years later, some state legislatures (at the moment, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia top the list) are still fighting over how to divide the spoils. Districts are re-drawn to protect powerful incumbents, give each major party at least token representation, and preserve the political power of labor lobbies, racial and ethnic communities, and other special interests. Each redistricting scheme ends up in court with multiple trips back to the drawing board.

This process is called “gerrymandering,” after Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, who in 1812 signed a state senate redistricting map in which one district resembled a salamander.

It’s an ugly process. Everybody claims to hate it. But nobody seems interested in ending it, though it would be simple to do so.

Judge Robert Bork, later a failed nominee to the US Supreme Court, was once tasked with submitting a redistricting plan. He suggested starting in one corner of the state and drawing roughly square districts by population, without regard to special interest factors. His suggestion wasn’t accepted. But it would be easy to implement. Just plug the map and census data into a computer program and voila — uniform districts, fairly drawn.

Even better, why not transition to “at-large” elections for all US Representatives?

The district concept was implemented before the invention of the telegraph, at a time when most Americans got their news from a local paper and never strayed more than 50 miles from their birthplaces. Local elections made sense then. Today we cross the continent in hours and read worldwide news seconds after it happens (or watch it AS it happens).

Why not just have a statewide election for (for example) five seats, in which the five top vote-getters are elected? This would not eliminate sectional interests, pork barrel earmarks and other maladies of supposedly representative government entirely, but it would make members of Congress more accountable to large, mixed constituencies and less beholden to the insular coalitions controlling gerrymandered districts.

Switching to “at-large” elections might also mitigate the power of the two-party “duopoly” in favor of more proportional representation, especially if  better voting systems — approval voting, single transferable vote and instant run-off are three interesting ideas — were implemented as well.

Which is why it will ever happen. The American political system is brittle. Our politicians would rather break it than bend their will to ours. So maybe we should instead start thinking about what comes next.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Mandatory Voting vs. Consent of the Governed

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Diagram of US Federal Government and American ...
Diagram of US Federal Government and American Union. Published: 1862, July 15. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At a Cleveland town hall event in mid-March, president Barack Obama mulled the possibility of legally requiring Americans to vote, noting the existence of such laws in other countries like Australia. “It would be transformative if everybody voted,” he said. “That would counteract money more than anything. If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map of this country.”

It’s easy to understand Obama’s sensitivity on the subject of non-voting. He won re-election in 2012 with a popular vote of just barely one in five Americans — a hair over 50% of votes cast by a little more than 40% of the population. Not much of a mandate, is it? Nearly six in ten Americans either chose not to vote or weren’t allowed to vote (children, convicted felons in some states, etc.).

Obama’s estimate of Americans’ intelligence is noteworthy as well. When he says that mandatory voting would “counteract money,” what he presumably means is that Democrats would win more elections if they could force people who don’t pay attention to the debate — the campaign commercials, campaign brochures and campaign events that money buys — to vote. To re-write the Statue of Liberty’s famous line, “give me your ignorant, your uninformed, your apathetic …” I don’t know if he’s right about that, but doesn’t it seem a bit unflattering to Democrats and to their prospective new constituents?

Mandatory voting sticks in libertarian craws for obvious reasons, one of which Sheldon Richman notes in a March 25 column on the subject: A “right” to vote implies a right to NOT vote. Voting might be a “right,” or it might be a “duty,” but it can’t be both.

Mandatory voting also flies in the face of the alleged basis of American government’s legitimacy, per the Declaration of Independence:  “Consent of the governed.” Compelled voting smacks of “you must consent whether you want to or not.” Which, of course, is not really “consent” at all.

Over the last half-century, voting in American elections has become easier and easier. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited racial discrimination in registration and voting.  The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (“Motor Voter”) made registration easy and convenient, available at any government office. Many states have loosened their absentee voting rules and some are moving to “vote by mail” systems eliminating the need to schlep down to a physical polling place and wait in line.

Yet only 37% of eligible voters cast ballots in the 2014 mid-terms.

Maybe the majority of Americans who don’t vote are trying to tell Obama and his fellow politicians something. Polling by Rasmussen says that fewer than 20% of Americans believe the federal government enjoys that “consent of the governed” I mentioned earlier.

Maybe it’s time to proceed to the next step the Declaration mentions and “alter or abolish” the federal government for lack of consent to its existence and actions.

Maybe it’s time to do things differently.

Maybe that’s what “mandatory voting” advocates are so afraid of.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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