In Federalist 51, James Madison argues that the two branches of the legislature shall be disconnected from one another, and shall be elected by different means in order to counteract the inordinate influence that the legislature would have. Until 1913, this held true, and members of the Senate were elected by their state legislatures, not by popular vote. After the passage of the 17th Amendment, however, this was no longer the case, and both houses of the legislature have been elected by the same mechanism of election ever since. The House of Representatives is elected in single-member districts, and the Senate is elected in multi-member districts, but both are elected by popular vote in their districts. In order to re-establish the system of checks and balances as it was envisioned by the founders, the process by which Senators are elected must be reformed. Building on the vision of the founders of two different electoral mechanisms for the two houses of the legislature, while also modernizing and democratizing electoral politics in America, I will advocate for a reform to the Senate in which the members are elected not by popular vote in a district, but at large based on party affiliation in a proportional representation system.
Proportional representation is an electoral system in which the makeup of the legislative body is proportionally representative of the party makeup of the population. Rather than voting for individual candidates, voters choose a party to vote for, and based on the percentage of votes a party gets, they are apportioned a number of seats in the legislative body. For example, in a pure proportional representation system, if a party gets 25% of the vote, then they would get 25% of the seats. An example of a country that uses a proportional representation system for its legislative body is Iceland. Iceland has a unicameral parliament, meaning it has one legislative body instead of two. This legislative body, the Alþingi (pronounced Althingi) has 63 members, who are apportioned through the D’Hondt method of proportional representation, which I will explain later. Other countries that use this system in their legislative elections include Switzerland, Belgium, Israel, and Japan. Elections in Iceland are held after the parties publish lists of candidates that they will send to the Alþingi should they get the votes to do so. This system where voters cast their ballots for a party and the list of candidates is called party-list proportional representation, and it would be an ideal method for a new system of Senate elections.
Upon hearing of proportional representation, it could be reasonably assumed that it is obvious how seats will be apportioned; it will just be directly proportional to the percentage of votes each party receives. However, with many small parties splitting a portion of the vote, along with the fact that the percent of the vote each party receives is not perfectly rounded into whole numbers, it becomes apparent that there must be some sort of algorithm to calculate the number of seats each party will be allotted. The D’Hondt method for proportional representation uses an algorithm that divides the vote and accomplishes an approximation of the popular vote. Mathematician and Professor Christina Pagel of University College London explains the D’Hondt method in the context of the English elections to the EU parliament:
“In the first round when no party has any seats, the party with the most votes just gets the first seat — in this case, the Brexit Party. The Brexit Party’s vote then gets cut in half and Labour gets the 2nd seat as it now has the most votes. Its vote too gets halved for the third round, giving the Liberal Democrats the third seat — but they only just beat the halved Brexit Party vote. While the top two parties are pretty much guaranteed the first two seats, the third seat is up for grabs — the Brexit Party would only need a few more votes to beat the Lib Dems to that third seat. The Brexit Party does then in fact get its second seat after Round 4 and is then handicapped further — its original vote is now divided by 3 (2 seats + 1) for the next round.”
More information on this method is available in both of the links above. Essentially this method is used in many electoral systems that have adopted proportional representation, and it is equally favorable to both large and small parties.
In the current United States Senate, there are three classes of Senator: class 1, class 2, and class 3. Functionally, the only difference between these classes is the year of their elections. Class 1 Senators were last elected in 2018, class 2 Senators are being elected in 2020, and class 3 Senators will be elected next in 2022. In my proposal to reform and democratize the Senate, these classes of Senator would be kept, and the term of a Senator would still be 6 years. Ideally, there would be 300 Senators, 100 of whom are up for election every election cycle. This way, if a mass movement of support for one party sweeps the country, the movement would have to be maintained for three election cycles in order to have a significant effect on the makeup of the Senate. This would give voters time to learn how a party operates in practice before the party would ever be able to control a majority of the Senate. This would help weed out parties that don’t act in voters’ best interests, as well as helping weed out extremists since they will advocate for policy beyond the pale of American civil society.
One major drawback of America’s first-past-the-post elections is the tendency toward a two-party system. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party control just about every aspect of American politics, and in the grand scheme of things, there aren’t many differences between the two. Building a multi-party American political landscape would greatly increase the voice that people have in their government. One question that may arise from switching the manner in which the Senate is elected is that of the fate of the electoral college. If the electoral college is to remain in existence, then technically, the number of electors from each state would become equal to the seats that each state has in the House of Representatives, because Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution states that the number of electors in each state should be “equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress,” and if there are no Senators that States are entitled to, then it would just be dependant on the number of Representatives. As another goal, I would argue for the abolition of the electoral college, since a multi-party system would often result in no candidate for president getting an outright majority of the electoral vote. I would instead argue for runoff elections at every level of government, meaning that if no candidate reached 50% of the vote, the top two candidates run against one another in a subsequent election, and the winner of that election takes office. This model has worked in France for over a century, with much success.
Despite the many gains that implementing this system would have, there are potential drawbacks. One major drawback to a proportional representation system is that party establishments would have an increasing amount of control. Since party leaders would be determining who their Senators would be, party establishments would have near-complete control of who would be representing the voters. A counteracting force to the party establishments, however, is the constant threat of a breakaway movement. For example, if the Democratic Party chose Senators that aligned entirely with the neoliberal wing of the party, the democratic socialist wing of the party may break off and form their own party. This may be a counteracting force, but if it is ignored, it can lead to factionalization, which is another downside. The presence of more political factions inevitably leads to increased division in society, and Madison primarily argued against factions in Federalist 10. However, his arguments may be flawed, as parties will form coalitions with one another, resulting in amicable relationships and less division between each other’s party members. In addition, this factionalization may speed up progress in America, as more ideas are on the table for debate, and voters may latch onto ideas they would never have heard in a two-party system.
Regarding this reform to the Senate, people may wonder why the Senate should be the legislative body to adopt proportional representation and not the House of Representatives. In short, the function of representation that the House serves is important. 435 districts of roughly equal population all send a representative to Congress. The key difference between this and the Senate’s districts is that the Senate doesn’t apportion districts to have an equal population. States with less than 1 million people send 2 senators to Congress, as does California with its nearly 40 million people. This system of apportionment is fundamentally contrary to the principles of democracy, as well as a completely inaccurate picture of America. The House of Representatives provides each state with representation, and if a state has more people, it has more representatives. Combining a regional representation in the House with an ideological representation in the Senate would be an effective way to ensure that the interests of every American are represented in Congress, not just the Americans who vote for the candidate who happens to win in their district or state.
Obviously, the prospect of completely changing the way that the Senate works would be extremely difficult to implement. Therefore, I will conclude with a path forward to getting this reform passed. The ideal way to prove the effectiveness of this plan is to create a movement for proportional representation in the United States and get individual states to implement this system in their state legislatures. States with more progressive-minded electorates like Vermont, Washington, and Colorado would be the first to target with a push for a proportional state senate. Then, as more states implement this system, calls will be made for the national government to make the switch as well. It would require a Constitutional amendment, which is difficult to achieve, but not impossible, as the 17th Amendment has proved. The Democratic Party would be much more likely to sign on to this amendment than the Republican Party, because the Republican Party is more committed to maintaining the United States as a representative republic, and has no interest in further democratization, whereas there have been calls from the Democratic Party for other electoral reforms, such as the abolition of the electoral college. If public pressure puts an increasing demand on Congress to implement proportional representation in the Senate, then some members of the Republican Party, fearing losing reelection, would end up signing onto the amendment. Ultimately, the fight for democracy is an uphill battle, but eventually, the system will either change or collapse.
