As executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy, an
American non-profit focused on fair elections in the United States,
I have followed the general course of your deliberations with great
interest. I hope that Americans in states and cities here have
opportunities to do some version off what you have done in the
not-so-distant future.
I don't know how much you have considered our political dynamics
in your deliberations, but I wanted to address our reform situation
in broad terms. We do have some important differences: a
presidential system instead of parliamentary system, strong
bicameralism (e.g., two strong legislative houses) instead of
unicameralism (one strong legislative house), more diffuse
political parties, countless elected offices and so on.
But I wanted to assure you that whatever strengths that American
democracy has, precious little can be traced to our winner-take-all
electoral system in single-member districts, which are used for
U.S. Congressional elections and most state legislative races. We
have severe problems, with rates of voter turnout (not just
overall, but in large income and education background disparities);
with lack of meaningful electoral choice (fewer than one in ten
U.S. House races was won by less than a 55%-45% victory margin for
the third election in a row in 2002); with severe
under-representation of women and racial minorities; with our
notoriously partisan divisions grounded in our "winner-take-all"
electoral map between the major parties:" and much more.
I thought one way to present potentially useful information to
you would be to:
1) urge you to peruse our pages on proportional representation
on our website (
www.fairvote.org), including the
intriguing history of the use of the single transferable vote and
cumulative voting in American city and state elections. Note that
we have some terminology differences: we generally use "full
representation" to mean "proportional representation" and "choice
voting" to mean "single transferable vote."
2) attach two mid-length articles I pubished recently that both
confront the severe problems we have with gerrymandering. Both
pieces make the point from different approaches that while new ways
of drawing our legislative disticts would have an incremental
improvement in promoting electoral competition, that improvement
would be relatively minor and potentially at the cost of fair
representation. We thus believe that some non-winner-take-all
system is an essential reform.
The first piece (
A
Better Way to Vote) is from Legal Times, co-authored
with my organization's chairman John B. Anderson, the 1980
presidential candidate for president. The second piece (
Full
Representation: Uniting backers of gerrymandering reform and
minority voting rights) is from the National Civic
Review.
We will follow your progress with great interest and wish you
well.