DEMOCRACY, IN THEORY, means rule by the “people,” the ancient Greek word demos. Democracy in practice, however, often means finding ways to manipulate, divert, and thwart what “the people” want. One such emergency brake put in place to stop Democracy, when needed, is the Electoral College. With polls showing that this year one Presidential candidate might win the popular vote while the other wins a majority in the Electoral College, it has been a prime topic on the lips of pundits.
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America’s founders, in a time when rule by mass voting was almost untried, made no bones about the Electoral College’s purpose. It was to prevent the corrupt and charismatic, those with “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity” as Alexander Hamilton described them in Federalist Paper #68, from becoming President.
“It will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practise with success the vicious arts, by which elections are too often carried,” wrote James Madison in The Federalist #10. The Electoral College and related Constitutional checks and balances, he continued, would protect against “the diseases most incident to Republican Government.” These would prevent popular election to the Presidency of “factious leaders” who might degenerate our politics into issues such as “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project….” Sound familiar?
Madison’s Vice President Elbridge Gerry lives on as namesake of a political gimmick he perfected as Massachusetts Governor. He recognized that power could turn on how the boundaries of congressional and state legislative districts were drawn. In an area with an equal number of, say, Republicans and Democrats, those controlling reapportionment could manipulate the boundaries to carve out three districts -- one 60 percent Republican and two 55 percent Democratic. The result: two Democrats elected to one Republican in a region with equal voter numbers from the two parties.
Gerry’s reapportionment of Massachusetts, wags noted, produced Jeffersonian districts that on a map resembled a salamander. “Gerrymander,” this democracy-thwarting technique was dubbed.
Gerrymandering remains a powerful force in distorting our politics today. In one by-election during President Ronald Reagan’s 1980s, for example, the entire nationwide difference between total Republican and total Democratic votes for congress was a mere 125,000 votes - an average of only 287 votes in each 500,000 resident district. But so powerfully had Democrat-controlled state legislatures gerrymandered the districts that this election produced 41 more Democratic congressmen than Republican ones - and gave Democrats an authoritarian ruling majority in the House of Representatives.
Today, as one Federal judge noted in the case of a Texas district gerrymandered to elect a black Congresswoman, district boundary lines are literally drawn not just block by block but house by house - in this instance to include Democratic voters and exclude Republicans. “Voters no longer choose their Member of Congress,” the judge said. “Now the Congressman chooses his voters,” at least if that lawmaker is of the ruling party that draws the district lines. As Congressman Robert Dornan learned the hard way, lawmakers of the non-ruling party can be “redistricted” to cause their defeat. And critics recognized in Clinton-Gore efforts to “adjust” the constitutional enumeration of the Census by “sampling” a way to allocate more congressional seats to places that traditionally vote Democratic.
Other kinds of gerrymandering have excluded groups from voting. In the early days of the Republic, the franchise was in most places limited to those who were male, white, 21, and property owners. From Reconstruction until recently, poll taxes and literacy tests were used to restrict black voting. Today, as this column has discussed, those who have been convicted of felonies or deemed mentally ill are in some states prohibited from voting; the Democratic Party, seeing these groups as likely to vote for its candidates, is working hard to enfranchise such people, although it has not taken the next logical step of working to restore the Second Amendment right of such people to own firearms - ballots yes, bullets no.
The Clinton-Gore Administration also pushed through “Motor Voter,” which registered to vote those who came seeking welfare and other benefits at government offices - again, prime potential Democratic voters. This law also made it very difficult to remove fraudulent names from voter rolls.
As journalist Joseph Farah reported this week, an unknown number of immigrants whose application to stay in the United States is before the Immigration and Naturalization Service have, just prior to the election, received a letter from the Democratic Party. These letters congratulate these people, not yet citizens, on having registered to vote; urge them to vote for Democrats; and include a personal Voter Identification Card and instructions to “Bring your card with you to your polling place on Election Day. It will help your voting go more smoothly.”
This “fraud,” notes Farah, used confidential information and private addresses known only to the INS in an unpublicized corrupt effort to tip local and national elections to the Democratic Party. “After the election, the party will be happy to pay a fine for any illegalities involved,” he writes, “and it will all be swept under the rug.”
But while Democrats in 2000 rushed to make sure felons, the mentally ill, and non-citizens voted, they also took steps to stop those likely to oppose them from voting at all. As this column has detailed, the Clinton-Gore Secretary of Defense issued a directive prohibiting any polling places at military bases and other facilities. This made it more difficult, and less likely, for those serving in uniform to vote.
Days before the election it also came to light that thousands of absentee ballots customarily sent to U.S. Navy and Army units overseas, including the support team for the bombed U.S.S. Cole, were somehow never delivered. As a result, thousands of soldiers and sailors were denied their vote, a vote that, as polling makes clear, would have been overwhelmingly for the Republican presidential candidate in key states and districts.
Many reforms have been proposed to “improve” our democratic republic. Failed Clinton nominee Lani Guinier has proposed methods of proportional representation, including local elections in which each citizen receives five votes instead of one. In theory, this scholar suggests, minority citizens could cast all five of their votes for a city council candidate of their own race or ethnicity, while whites would feel compelled to split their votes among several candidates. Others have argued for what amounts to racial gerrymandering to guarantee a minimum percentage of minority Members of Congress, so that the government will reflect the proportion of groups in the populace.
Columnist George Will has suggested a way to reduce ballot box stuffing and rigged elections in our emerging age of computer voting and Oregon’s elections entrusted to the honesty of Postal Unionized letter carriers.
We should, argues Will, do away with the secret ballot. People should cast their votes openly, with results posted in the newspaper or a public place. If vote fraud is detected near a graveyard in Chicago (where four out of every two people vote Democrat), these ghost votes can be erased retroactively. No more would we have districts like former Congressman Dornan’s, where lots of people voted illegally, but nobody can prove that their votes defeated him. With open voting, we could delete precisely those votes that were illegal - and in the process deter future votescams.
One recent phenomenon in our elections has been declining voter turnout. In 1996 only about 43 percent of eligible voters cast ballots for either the Democrat or Republican candidate, with almost 57 percent of these potential voters voting with their feet against both ruling parties. No wonder in 2000 these two parties conspired to exclude any third-party candidate from the Presidential debates.
Even after being excluded, third-party candidates polled enough support to risk tipping the balance between the Republican and Democratic nominees. To counter this, Gore supporters proposed something akin to vote-selling - the swapping of Gore votes by voters in states like New York and Texas (overwhelmingly going for one candidate) with Nader votes by voters in closely contested states (that could decide the election). The object of this swap: to let Gore win, while securing for Nader the 5-percent nationwide vote needed to qualify for Federal matching campaign funding in the 2004 election.
This was to be an unspoken confirmation of the mathematics of Democratic Theory - that voters ultimately reject their preferred First Choice in favor of the Second Choice that different groups can agree upon. Such was the compromise that in 1968 made Richard Nixon the only choice both Goldwater and Rockefeller Republicans could accept as their Presidential nominee, even though he was the first choice of neither faction.
The dirty little secret of our politics is that not only do we rarely get to vote for our first choice, but also that most of us seldom vote for a candidate at all. Most of us vote not for the lesser of two evils (or the evil of two lessers) but against the candidate we perceive as more evil. We vote not to affirm but to reject, not to approve but to defend.
This is partly the result of negative campaigning, but also partly the reason why this tactic works. Another reason it works, especially for Democrats, is that more moralistic Republicans have often responded to mud-throwing by walking away - by deciding that no candidate in a race is worth voting for. This works to the advantage of the more liberal candidate, the largest share of whose voters are merely voting to keep government goodies, or a welfare check or paycheck, coming and growing. As George Bernard Shaw famously said, he who robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on Paul’s vote.
It is not necessary in what we call our democracy to win a majority of eligible voters, nor to have run-offs until a true majority emerges. All that victory requires in Presidential races is a plurality of those who actually vote in states with enough electoral votes to win. If this can be achieved by negative campaigning that so disgusts 95 percent of eligible voters that they stay home and cast no ballot, that is fine with politicians, so long as more than half of the voting 5 percent votes for them. (This election could have turned on the Democrat-leaning District of Columbia, which is not a state and has no Senators or Congressman of its own but was in 1961 granted by the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution 3 Electoral College voters, appointed “in such manner as the Congress [which controls D.C.] may direct….”) Polls, too, can persuade potential voters to stay home if their candidate appears to be losing. (And if the people become uppity by voting for anti-government initiatives or referendums, a judge can always be found to declare unconstitutional what 60 or 70 percent of voters want.)
A long-standing Lowell Ponte reform would be to require in elections what parliamentary rules require in legislatures - a Quorum. If Congress cannot take a binding vote without 50 percent plus one of its members present, why should a vote of the people be binding if less than 50 percent of eligible (not just registered…who comprise about 2/3rds of those eligible) voters participate? If more than half the voters reject an election with their feet, this is no reason to declare the vote of a minority binding on everybody, any more than it would be if more than half the members of Congress refused to be present for a vote. The government should be shut down, and all collection of taxes should cease, until it attracts a majority of eligible citizens to take part in voting for it. Another good reform would be to move election day to April 16th, the day after taxpayers have been reminded what government is really all about, instead of as now with voting as far away from April 15th in the calendar as possible.
The event that crystallized this election happened Saturday, as a television news crew in Milwaukee recorded homeless people who had been brought to vote at city hall. As the crew discovered, the shepherds herding these homeless were Democratic Party apparatchiks who were, in effect, trading packs of cigarettes for votes. These absentee ballots were being cast for Al Gore, who at the 1996 Democratic National Convention dramatically told of watching his smoker sister die of lung cancer and vowed that “until my last breath” he would fight against tobacco and smoking. (Two years after her death Gore would be recorded telling North Carolina tobacco farmers to vote for him because he, too, was a tobacco farmer.) But with only hours left until election day, Gore operatives would be using bribes of tobacco, risking the lives of nicotine addicts, to buy votes. This is where American democracy had evolved to by Year 2000, as Vice President Gore acted as if any means could be justified by the power he was determined to win in the end.
Mr. Ponte hosts a national radio talk show Saturdays 9 PM-Midnight EDT that can be heard live via TalkRadioNetwork.com or KAOK.com. His live show’s call-in number is 1-800-876-4123. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader’s Digest. Click here to send him a message. |
