Political Reform and Compulsory Voting

Once upon a time in an Introduction to U.S. Politics class, my Professor was making an argument that may or may not be familiar to many people: he was arguing that voting should be compulsory. He argued that democracy only works when everyone is involved, and therefore everyone should have to vote on penalty of a fine. At the time, I was very much opposed to this idea for a variety of reasons, and truth be told I'm still very leery of the idea of making voting compulsory.

Let's face it, the current Democrat incumbent's drone policy has set new lows for dehumanizing brown people, Republicans are the gun-toting "patriotic" types who love the military beyond all reason (as Bill Maher once said "They're the religious party, worship is in their DNA"), and voting third party is about as useful as voting for Mickey Mouse. If you're seriously anti-war - or even just think that maybe wholesale slaughtering people should be a last resort and not the immediate "go to" plan every time the U.S. has a problem - you really don't have a good option when it comes time for an election. I personally refuse to cast a vote for president because I know that I have no option that does not result in the election of a war-monger, and I refuse to take any action that could be seen as an endorsement of a war-monger rising to a position of power. That said, I think that - with a couple of modifications - this whole "compulsory voting" idea could be a pretty good idea. First let's look at what's wrong, and then we'll look at how to fix it.

1. Voting For Third-Party Candidates: An Exercise in Futility

If I've heard it once, I've heard it one thousand times, "You don't have to vote Democrat or Republican! You can vote third-party! Just get out and vote!" Usually this is spoken by someone who knows that votes effect who is elected, but really don't know how the whole election process works.

Let me begin with the Presidency. It's probably pretty well known that when you cast a vote for President, you're actually voting for an Elector, who will then cast an Electorate Vote for President. This was useful back when the Constitution was first written, since there were no computers or mass media, and illiteracy rates were fairly high, meaning that getting information about candidates to "common people" would've been ridiculously difficult. As a result the founding fathers thought it would be best to allow the people to elect an educated person from their region to go cast an electorate vote on their behalf (that and the founding fathers were kind of some elitist pricks). So the Electoral College had its purpose in ages past, but today it is a relic of a bygone age whose only purpose is to ensure that Democrats and Republicans remain the only serious political parties.

Per the Twelfth Amendment (which governs the current procedures for the Electoral College) for any candidate to be elected to the presidency, the candidate needs to receive a majority (meaning, "50% plus 1") of the Electoral votes. There are currently 538 Electors, meaning that a candidate must receive 270 electoral votes to win the election (538/2=269, 269+1=270). If no candidate receives the necessary 270 votes, the names of the three candidates who got the greatest number of electoral votes go to the House of Representatives. From there, the Representatives form groups based on what state they're from, and each group casts one vote for president. As such, even if you could get a strong third party candidate, unless this person carries the election with the full 270 electoral votes, the Constitution is set up in such a way that the election will be decided by the House of Representatives (which is 100% dominated by Democrats and Republicans, neither of whom are going to vote for a third party candidate over the candidate from their own party). A third-party candidate winning the presidency is a statistical impossibility. For all intents and purposes, it cannot happen. Even if a third-party could rise up and seize a sizable number of the electoral votes, all it would mean is that the House of Representatives would get to choose the president.

Similarly voting for third party members of Congress is an effort in futility. The U.S. has based its elections around an ideology of "first past the post", meaning that the person who gets the most votes wins it all, and the person who came in second or third (no matter how close in the total number of votes) gets nothing. To elect a third party candidate, you need to compete against two big parties who have a lot of funding (the 2012 Democratic and Republican Presidential campaigns by themselves spent nearly $2 Billion. On top of that, on average, it takes $10.5 million to win each of the 33 Senate seats, and $1.7 million for each of the 435 House seats that are up for grabs each year. If each seat has 2 people running for it, that's another $2.2 Billion), who are already very well-known and are identified with by a large number of Americans, and get more votes than each of them. Sure right now there are two independent senators (one from Vermont and one from Maine) but they both run under the Democratic caucus. Similarly, there is not a single independent congressman in the entire 435-person House of Representatives.


Sure electing a third party candidate is possible, but it's just not practical.

To recap: As it currently stands, if you're going to vote third-party for any federal office - whether it's president or congress - you may as well vote Mickey Mouse, because your vote will have no effect either way. If you're going to vote third-party, you may just as well stay home.

2. Voter Fatigue

Imagine it's May 2016. The election is still a solid six months away, but you're already starting to see adds about how Candidate X is a heartless bastard who wants to strap grandma to the electric chair, and you should vote for Candidate Y because that's totally the better option! And maybe that wouldn't be so bad, except it's not just presidential candidates putting up commercials, it's congressmen, and governors, and state assembly members, and state senators and maybe even commercials for mayoral candidates in bigger cities! And after six months of this filth spewing forth from nonstop TV, radio, and Youtube ads, you finally reach election day. You go to the polling center and stand in line for forever, before you finally cast your vote, and you're ecstatic because maybe, finally, the damned commercials will stop! But then you have another month of hearing about whatever B.S. election fraud issues Florida is having this year, then a month or so later the inauguration happens, and you finally relax and tell yourself "Ah, I don't have to deal with that again for nearly 3 1/2 more years!" and you are finally happy.

Alas, it is not to be! Because only 1 year and 4 months later later all of the election commercials are back on again! Oh foolish voter, you've forgotten about the midterm elections! That's another six months of political propaganda ads that you'd forgotten about! In disgust you throw up your hands and yell "SCREW IT! What do I care about elections? Politicians are all scum anyway! What difference does it make which scumbag gets elected? All I want is some peace and quiet!"

This pretty much sums up voter fatigue. Americans are asked to vote so often, for so many offices, and subjected to so many propaganda commercials that after a while they just don't care anymore. Couple that with the fact that - in a country where 219 million people are eligible to vote - your vote is statistically insignificant, and the fact that many states require you to register to vote several weeks - if not months - in advance, and you have a great reason to just stay home and try to isolate yourself from the political arena as much as possible. That is a big underlying reason why - in 2012 - only about 57.5% of eligible voters actually went out to the polls.

[As a brief aside: that's one of the things that makes me laugh about Scott Walker's big "Voter ID" law to prevent voter fraud. I just want to go up to him someday and say "You've forgotten something: this is America. Nobody wants to vote, much less are they actually going to put in the time and effort to do so fraudulently!"]

3. What Should Be Done?

The first, most obvious thing to do is just cut out the Electoral College. This isn't really the big deal that a lot of people make it out to be, but in U.S. history, there have been 57 presidential elections, and the Electoral College has disagreed with the popular vote in 4 of those elections. Granted 4/57 is only about 7% of the time, but really, we have electronic voting machines, we have mass media, we have 95%+ literacy rates, there is no justification for the Electoral College's existence, so I'd say choosing a 7% risk over a 0% risk is just foolish and a waste of everyone's time.

The second thing to do is to standardize election terms. No more of this whole "Senators get six years, Representatives get two years" nonsense. Everyone is elected for four years, the election for every office is held on the same day, you go through the six months of political ads exactly once every four years and that's it. Voters vote once every four years, and that's it. That cuts out all sorts of voter fatigue. Sure there will be six months of nonstop propaganda ads, but at least it's only once every four years. On top of that, Election day should be a national holiday. Everyone gets off from work, which gives everyone ample time to vote.

The third thing is to cut out the "first past the post" system, and replace it with a proportional voting system. For example, let's just look at Wisconsin. Wisconsin has two Senators, and eight Representatives in Congress. As it currently stands Wisconsin is divided into eight districts, and each district independently elects one candidate to be their representative. Under my proposed system (which I'll admit is not at all original) everyone in the state casts a ballot for the party that they thing best represents them (note that they're voting for the party, not the candidate), and the party wins seats based on the percentage of votes they get (Since Wisconsin has eight seats, we'd round to the nearest 12.5%). To illustrate, let's say that Party X gets 49% of the vote. We round that up to 50%, 50/12.5=4, so Party X wins four of Wisconsin's eight seats in the House of Representatives. Party Y gets 30% of the vote. We round down to 25%, which gives Party Y two seats in the house. Finally Party Z gets 21% which gets rounded up to 25% and Party Z gets the last two seats. (The parties could also work it out in their primaries so that their constituents rank the candidates from their party from 1-8 based on who they would prefer be elected. From that they could determine that if their party wins one seat, then the highest ranked candidate gets elected, if they win two seats, the two highest ranked candidates get elected, and so on, and so forth.)
The Senate would probably remain pretty much the same since there's only two Senators per state. The two parties that get the largest number of votes get one Senate seat each. Or if one party gets more than 75% of the vote, they win both Senate seats.

Running things in this way opens the door for third parties that may not share the ideas of either the Democrats or Republicans to have a chance at having a real say in the political arena.

Fourth, it should be mandatory that every State have Election Day Voter Registration. Time after time it has been shown that, the earlier voters are required to register and/or the more difficult it is to register, the fewer people turn out to vote. That should be a no-brainer. If people are already fed up with the political ads, what could be worse than making voting a hassle? The short answer: nothing. Nothing could be worse. Allowing people to register at the polls may be a hassle in bigger cities, but if you want people to actually vote, it's a must.

The fifth, and final reform is the one that most Americans are the most leery of: Making voting compulsory. I'm going to lead off by saying that democracy only works when everyone participates and this would definitely solve the problem of over 40% of eligible voters just opting not to participate, so I can appreciate what people are trying to accomplish by wanting voting to be compulsory. That said, as a non-voter, I can understand that many people don't vote as a sign of disillusionment with the current state of U.S. democracy. I think that if we were to wake up tomorrow and learn that voting had been made compulsory, it would be the final nail in the coffin and we all may as well just admit that the U.S. is a managed democracy. Sure the elections would be free, they'd be fair, but your options would be the red status quo or the blue status quo. Forcing people to vote, who disagree with both parties but have virtually no hope of electing a third party candidate would do nothing but prove the illegitimacy of U.S. democracy.

Bearing all of this in mind, I would support making voting mandatory on one condition: There must be a "no confidence" clause. That is, every ballot needs to include a box at least at the federal and state levels, where a voter can cast a vote of no confidence in their federal or state governments. If more than 50% of the people vote "no confidence" the federal government dissolves and the states work together to set up a new one if they see fit. If more than 50% of the people of one state vote "no confidence" in their state, the state government dissolves and the people can work on setting up a new one. Sure that may seem a bit dramatic, but honestly, if more than 50% of the people that a government is representing, think that that government has no legitimacy and it is no longer fit to hold that position, maybe the people are right. Who knows, maybe congress wouldn't have an approval rating in the low teens if they knew that not only their jobs, but their entire government (not to mention their pensions) were at risk if people were to choose to vote "no confidence".

4. In Closing

To sum up, I'm a non-voter, and I always have been. I don't see that changing in the near future. Unless something fairly drastic happens, I'm going to remain a firm believe in George Carlin's doctrine of "If you vote, you have no right to complain".

That said, if we wanted to fix this country's flawed election system, it would be pretty simple, we just need to: 1) cut out the Electoral College, 2) standardize all elections to be held on the same day, once every four years, and make that day a national holiday, 3) replace the "First Past The Post" election system with a proportional election system that opens the doors for third party candidates to have a reasonable chance at being elected, 4) make Election Day Voter Registration mandatory everywhere, and 5) make voting mandatory on paint of fine, but include the option to vote "no confidence".

Unfortunately, Democrats and Republicans will never allow this to happen. Neither one of them can kill the other, and so neither one of them are willing to allow any changes that might allow a third party to erode their influence. They may make a good show of hating each other, but the truth is, they need each other to maintain the status quo. So as I said before, something pretty drastic would have to happen to make me think that voting is a worthwhile endeavor.