Our Questionable Democracy

Our biennial elections bring the usual lamentations about the inequities in our jury-rigged democratic system. But we chuckle over Churchill's soothing words about democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others and move on,with no action begun to fix the serious faults that threaten this democracy.

Move on straight to the next election, that is. Even before the midterms, there seemed as much media preoccupation with 2016 as with the midterms. The country is in the grip of a perpetual campaign that has displaced governing.

Largely to blame is the Supreme Court's string of decisions that equate money and free speech as justification for their legislating virtually unlimited contributions to political campaigns and candidates by corporations, unions and individuals. With so much money flooding the process — an estimated $4 billion poured into the midterms — candidates must raise oceans of money or risk being drowned by their opponents' tsunamis.

Daughter of a longtime respected senator, Michelle Nunn, had a known name but was nevertheless advised at the beginning of the year to spend 80% of her time raising money; by September she could relax and back off to 70%. She lost anyway. That percentage is the standard recommendation. Incoming freshmen in 2012 were told in a presentation by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee they should spend four hours each day making fundraising calls. House members raised on average $2.6 million for November's election. That's almost $3,600 a day — weekends included and no vacations — across their two-year terms.

If the amount of money allowed to be raised and spent on a campaign were sharply curtailed, legislators would find themselves with time to spend learning about and acting on the issues that face the nation. It is unsurprising that they rely on lobbyists' one-sided pitches to fill them in on the particulars of a bill and who suggest how they should vote.

A simple remedy is to change the term of House members from two to four years — half of the 435 each midterm. It would halve the money-grubbing drain for each, partially free them from catering to their donor base, attract better candidates now too sensible to run, result in more thought out legislation, and avoid Nancy Pelosi again saying “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it" by creating the time to actually read bills before voting on them.

But that's not possible because we are wedded to a Constitution of which we are justifiably proud for its endurance but treat its every word as written by the hand of God. The authors viewed the House as more directly representing the people and thought that short terms would keep them more accountable to their voters, so Article I, Section 2, says the House "shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year". But now that money buys free speech and 70% of their time is taken up with dialing for dollars, an election every two years is not working.

So why not amend the Constitution to double the term length? That's become another problem with our democracy: we can't vote for change. The rules of Article V make it difficult to amend for good reason but we have nevertheless managed to change the Constitution many times — 27 times. The first 10 — the Bill of Rights — were voted in all at once at the end of 1791, and you might argue that two no longer count — probation erased by its repeal — but the remaining 15 were adopted with some frequency — 5 amendments in just the 20 years of 1951 to 1971. Except for a minor tweak about congressional pay in 1992, nothing since.

With the Great Partisan Divide, it is hard to imagine our politicians agreeing to anything, much less two-thirds of both houses of Congress or two-thirds of the states voting to propose a new amendment and three quarters of the states then ratifying, as Article V requires. We're stuck.

The founders failed to imagine by how much states would become larger than other states, so they thought it equitable that each state have equal say in one of the legislative bodies by having an equal number of senators. But because of runaway population differences, that each state has two, no matter its size, has become a gross distortion of the "one man, one vote" premise. On the one hand we do not want raw majority rule whereby small states effectively have no say. But what has resulted is that California, with a population of over 38 million, has two votes in the Senate, but so does Wyoming with less than 600,000. Or compare Texas with Rhode Island, or New York with the Dakotas. The 25 least-populated states have half the Senate's votes but only 17% of the nation's population. We're stuck with that too.

As children of monarchies, perhaps some portion of America's early citizens weren't entirely persuaded of the democratic ideal. Right off they corrupting it by engineering voting districts so as to rig elections. No less than Patrick Henry gave himself the liberty of drawing a Virginia district's boundaries in such way as to keep James Madison out of the House. The practice, which tries to corral a maximum of voters inclined to one party into a district and rid them from the surrounding districts to give supremacy to the opposing party, acquired the named "gerrymandering" when Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry twisted a district into a shape that reminded people of a salamander (did salamanders look like dragons then?).

The 1812 cartoon in the Boston
Gazette mocking the shape of one of
Gov. Gerry's contrivances.

The word and the practice have been in use ever since. The Supreme Court just heard a case brought against Alabama for packing a district with black voters to bleach surrounding districts white.

Every ten years after the census, the 435 House seats are reapportioned among the states according to their changing populations. Those who gain or lose a seat must redraw their districts (and nothing prevents the unaffected from redrawing theirs as well). Save for seven states which to varying degrees have given the assignment to nonpartisan commissions, the party that has won control of the state typically redraws so as to gerrymander the opposing party's voters into as few districts as possible, so as to minimize the opposing party's House representatives and maximize its own.

This often results in absurdly contorted shapes that make obvious the anti-democratic intent. It goes far to explain why candidates in 69 of the House's 435 districts faced no opponent in the midterms and why only 5% of the districts could be called truly competitive. With the winning political party already decided for a district through gerrymandering or other manipulation, it is in the primaries — in which fewer than 20% vote — that the controlling party decides who goes to the House. The rest of the voters stay home, there being no point.

Gerrymandering is a reprehensible practice that the Supreme Court has never acted against. In 1986 they held it violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment but they could not arrive at a standard against which to test claims of partisan gerrymandering.

Why not? We can. The law requires each district to have approximately the same population. Population densities vary across a map, rivers and lakes intrude, highways bisect, so dividing a state into the number of districts that matches the number of congressional representatives that its population allows, with each district having the same number of people, is more than a doodle on a napkin.

But software companies have obligingly taken redistricting to extremes by creating the tools to assist states in gerrymandering opposing parties virtually out of existence.

But those same software algorithms can be redirected to agnostic apportionment. Handed census data, software code would begin by dividing a state into the nearest to equal size shapes that irregular borders and waterways permit, then iteratively adjust the shape and size of each — with no regard whatever to political parties and ethnic groups — until optimally equal populations occupy each district. Were that method to become law, it would rid us for good of a practice that so corrupts our democracy

It was Congress that set Tuesday as the date for presidential and congressional elections, not the Constitution. It is often suggested that the day be moved to the weekend rather than Tuesday, so that people need not leave work. But there is never any movement to make that change because those who have problems leaving work are more likely to be in the lower economic echelons that typically favor Democrats.

In the last few years, states mostly controlled by Republican governors and legislatures have joined a party strategy to limit voting by groups that mostly vote Democratic, particularly blacks, Latinos and students. ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, funded by major corporations, has taught them how and even written model laws for states to pass. Early voting is shortened, Sunday and same-day registration is eliminated, etc., but the first priority has been the requirement of a photo-ID, which can be difficult and even costly to acquire. The professed reason is to combat voter fraud, a meme that was skillfully implanted on a public that never reflected on how minuscule, risky and impractical voting fraud is.

But the propaganda kept coming. The Wall Street Journal gave space to an op-ed just days before November 4th that cited an election for a Pennsylvania town council, a Hattiesburg Mississippi mayoral race, a woman buying votes in Polk County Tennessee — all to prove that that voter fraud does indeed exist. But to pretend that the Republican Party's motive for mounting a national campaign to reconstruct voting laws in state after state was only to safeguard elections for local zoning or school boards — in a year when takeover of the Senate was the motivating prize — well that's risible. It was an education to see how successfully propaganda can work even in a country where information flows freely. (We covered this in depth in The Republican Campaign that Kept Democrats from the Polls).

Voter turnout for the midterms was the lowest since 1942, a year which had the excuse that so many were elsewhere fighting a world war. An anemic democracy indeed. It raises the question of whether we should follow the lead of Australia and some other nations that have made voting mandatory, but good luck talking libertarians into that. By how much the new laws caused only 36.3% of eligible voters to show up at the polls this November is now being analyzed. It is too soon to say but not too soon to express contempt for a campaign by any party that seeks the effective disenfranchisement of legitimate voters in what we like to think of as a democracy.

Comes the presidential election and new obstacles to a true democracy arise, most notable among them the layer of the Electoral College, a bizarre artifice worth a treatise on its own. It is the "Electors" vote, not ours, that decides who shall be president and vice president — and the 12th Amendment, itself an 1804 replacement of a section of the original Constitution — did not even require the Electors to mirror the popular vote.

While few stray from the pledge to do so, the worst defect in America's so-called democracy kicks in when they do vote. Only two states apportion their electoral votes according to how many in the state voted for each candidate. All of the remaining 48 cast all of their ballots for the candidate who wins the popular vote in that state. What this means is that, if you voted for the losing candidate, your vote and those of hundreds of thousands of like voters in your state (millions in the largest states) are completely ignored. They don't count for anything. They show up in the national popular vote tally, but that tally is just an interesting fact for newscasters to tell us. And so, we saw in this pretend democracy, that Al Gore won more votes than his opponent but George W. Bush was made president — and by the Supreme Court when it stepped in to halt the ballot recount in Florida and decide, exercising its 5-4 partisan split, who should be our president.

It would seem that before we proselytize democracy to other countries and even go to war to force it upon them, we should first repair our own.