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Submission RICHIE-1383 (Online)

Submission By Robert Richie, Executive Director, The Center for Voting and Democracy
AddressTakoma Park, MD,
OrganizationThe Center for Voting and Democracy
Date20040824
CategoryDemocratic elections, Electoral system change
Abstract
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 and most state legislative elections. [2 pages]

Submission Content
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.

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