Can We All Admit the System is Broken Now?
Here’s how we can fix it
Government isn’t a sport where a singular winner must be determined. It’s a system to make rules that everyone follows — and so we need a system where everyone can agree that the process is fair.
— CGP Grey
All you really need to know about the election that just happened is that protests are currently breaking out around the country in response to the results, and many of these protests have already turned violent.
It remains to be seen how long they’ll last or whether they’ll escalate; that they are occurring is enough. You don’t have to sympathize with the protestors (though I do) to agree that violence is a serious problem for everybody.
Most of the reactions to the protests I’ve encountered from Trump supporters have been along the lines of They lost fair-and-square! and I guess they’re protesting DEMOCRACY! (It’s difficult to imagine them being so dismissive if people were protesting, say, a Hillary victory.) Such dismissals are not only unhelpful, however; they fundamentally misunderstand both the purpose of the democratic system and the reason people would protest a result from such a system in the first place. If you want to end violence, you need to understand the motivations behind it, so let’s look at the current state of our system.
On the one hand, claiming victory in a democratic system, as if you were a finally-vindicated Cubs fan emerging bloody and victorious from game seven of the World Series, fundamentally misunderstands what democracy is for and how it’s supposed to work. Democracy is not a sport or a war to be won; it’s a system for building and maintaining a government that represents the will of the people. By any reasonable definition of those terms, our system has failed grossly in that respect.
I’m sure you’ve seen them by now, but allow me to walk you through the election results. Barring heroic intervention by the Electoral College (please, guys?), Donald Trump will be elected president not only without a majority of the popular vote, but without even a plurality. He received less than 60 million votes (many of which were cast reluctantly!), which is less than 25% of the 241 million eligible voters in the U.S. Together with both houses of Congress on his side and a vacant Supreme Court seat to fill, this gives him essentially 100% control of the federal government on the votes of 25% of the people.
(If you want, you can be even less generous than that. Only about 12% of the American population voted in the Republican primary, and a majority of them voted against Trump — so really, 100% of the country is having less than six percent of the country’s will imposed on it. This is not, by any reasonable definition of the term, representative government.)
With all that in mind, is there any doubt as to why people are protesting? Tyranny and anarchy are typically characterized by violent struggle; democracy exists, in theory, to substitute debate and elections for that struggle. However, if the democratic process fails to create a government that people genuinely believe has their interests in mind, they’ll fight back however they can.
This isn’t even a new development, nor is it a partisan issue; under the Obama administration, we saw what may have been the earliest rumblings of this from disenfranchised groups typically associated with both the “right” (see: Bundy standoff) and the “left” (see: Ferguson, Missouri). You don’t have to agree with either of these groups — but if you want to quell the violence, you do have to understand them.
If you want people to accept election results, you have to assure them they have a seat at the table. Our present voting system — a relic from the Enlightenment era — clearly does not do this. As things stand, every voter gets one vote, and whichever candidate gets the most votes wins (for presidential elections, the electoral college adds a layer of complexity, but only above the state level).
It’s stupid-simple, and it’s also simply stupid, because the incentives for candidates and voters aren’t even remotely aligned. It punishes voters for voting for anyone other than an already-popular candidate, and it rewards candidates for running smear campaigns, demoralizing voters into staying away from the polls, gerrymandering districts, and staight-up preventing eligible citizens from voting.
But it’s not the only way to run an election.
In fact, as luck would have it, the state of Maine just voted on Tuesday to implement a new system that corrects for many of these problems and that should also be a simple, easy change.
It’s called “ranked-choice” voting, and many countries, such as Ireland and Australia, already use it. Instead of voting for a single candidate, each voter instead ranks each candidate in the order of their preference; then a simple, transparent algorithm is used to determine which candidate would make the most voters the happiest. (The video below explains the algorithm in detail.)
Areas that have tried ranked-choice voting have found pretty unambiguously positive results. They see wider and deeper fields of candidates, because the ranked-choice system doesn’t penalize constituents for voting third-party. They see less negative campaigning because candidates don’t benefit from turning off voters (because appealing to even the voters who don’t love you means you might end up as their second choice). They see increased voter turnout becuase no one has to worry about throwing their vote away. Finally, instead of giving all the power to the candidate with the largest minority on his side, it gives it to the one best suited to represent the most people in consituency.
There are obviously many, many reforms that need to be made to our voting system (see: the terrible, terrible Electoral College) if we’re going to hold this country together, but implementing ranked-choice nationwide would be a great step in a positive direction.
Until then: buckle up, I guess, because the next four years are likely to be brutal.
Luke T. Harrington’s debut novel, OPHELIA, ALIVE (A GHOST STORY) is available now from Post Mortem Press. Elsewhere, his work has appeared at Cracked and BuzzFeed, and he writes the biweekly column “Dumb Moments in Church History” for Christianity Today. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook, if you want.
