Most elections in the U.S. select one person; elections with multiple candidates selected by proportional representation are relatively rare. Typical examples include the House of Representatives, whose members are elected by a plurality of votes in single-member districts. The number of representatives from each state is set in proportion to each state's population in the most recent decennial census. District boundaries are usually redrawn after each such census. This process often produces "gerrymandered" district boundaries designed to increase and secure the majority of the party in power, often by offering secure seats to members of the opposition party. This is one of a number of institutional features that increase the advantage of incumbents seeking reelection. The Senate and the president are also elected by plurality. However, these elections are not affected by gerrymandering (with the possible exception of presidential races in Maine and Nebraska, whose electoral votes are partially allocated by Congressional district).
Proposals for electoral reform have included overturning the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC, public and citizen funding of elections, limits and transparency in funding, ranked-choice voting (RCV), abolishing the Electoral College or nullifying its impact through the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and improving ballot access for third parties, among others. The U.S. Constitution gives states wide latitude to determine how elections are conducted, although some details, such as the ban on poll taxes, are mandated at the federal level.
Cost of the current system
The cost of getting elected, especially to any national office in the US, has been growing. The Federal Elections Commission estimated that "candidates, parties, PACs, super-PACs, and politically active nonprofits" spent a total of $7 billion in 2012. The magazine Mother Jones said that this money was used "to influence races up and down the ballot", noting further that the cost of elections has continued to escalate.[1] The 2010 congressional elections cost roughly $4 billion.[2]
Other studies have estimated between $6 and $220 return for each $1 invested by major corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals in lobbying and political campaigns.[7]
This rate of return helps escalate the cost of elections. To obtain the money needed for their next election campaign, incumbent politicians spend a substantial portion of their time soliciting money from large donors, who often donate to competing candidates, thereby buying access with the one that wins.[8][9]
Josh Silver's "Cure for political corruption" divides electoral reforms between campaign finance, lobbying and election administration.[10]
Most of the proposed reforms can be achieved at least in part by legislation, though some require amending the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC and related decisions would require a constitutional amendment to permanently change, and several have been proposed. Similarly, some proposed systems for campaign finance or restrictions on campaign contributions have been declared unconstitutional; implementation of those changes could require a constitutional amendment.
However, many other reforms can seemingly be achieved without a constitutional amendment. These include various forms of public financing of political campaigns, disclosure requirements and instant-runoff voting. The American Anti-Corruption Act (AACA) is one collection of reforms that appear to be consistent with existing US Supreme Court rulings, developed by Republican Trevor Potter, who had previously served as head of the US Federal Elections Commission under Democratic President Bill Clinton. Local versions of the AACA are being promoted by RepresentUs.[11]
Lawrence Lessig said, "On January 20, 2010, the day before Citizens United was decided, our democracy was already broken. Citizens United may have shot the body, but the body was already cold. And any response to Citizens United must also respond to that more fundamental corruption. We must find a way to restore a government 'dependent upon the People alone,' so that we give 'the People' a reason again to have confidence in their government."[12]
Lessig favors systems that share as broadly as possible the decisions about which candidates or initiatives get the funding needed to get their message to the voters. Following Bruce Ackerman, Lessig recommends giving each eligible voter a "democracy voucher" worth, e.g., $100 each election year that can only be spent on political candidates or issues. The amount would be fixed at roughly double the amount of private money spent in the previous election cycle. Unlike the current Presidential election campaign fund checkoff, the decisions regarding who gets that money would be made by individual citizens.
Lessig also supports systems to provide tax rebates for such contributions or to match small dollar contributions such as the system in New York City that provides a 5-to-1 match for contributions up to $250.[13] To be eligible for money from vouchers, rebates or matching funds, candidates must accept certain limits on the amounts of money raised from individual contributors.
Vouchers, tax rebates, and small dollar matching are called "citizen funding" as opposed to more traditional "public funding", which tasks a public agency with deciding how much money each candidate receives from the government. While the Supreme Court of the United States has already struck down many forms of public funding of political campaigns, there are forms of public and especially citizen financing that seem consistent with the constitution as so far interpreted by the courts and could therefore be secured by standard legislative processes not requiring amending the constitution.
One bill that proposes such a system for U.S. congressional elections is "The Grassroots Democracy Act". It was introduced September 14, 2012, by U.S. Representative John Sarbanes as H.R. 6426[14] and reintroduced on January 15, 2013, as H. R. 268.[15]
Overturning Citizens United
The Citizens United v. FEC decision, January 21, 2010, of the U.S. Supreme Court has received substantial notoriety, pushing many people to work for a constitutional amendment to overturn it. Key provisions of that decision assert in essence that money is speech and subject to first amendment protections. Move to Amend began organizing to oppose that decision in September 2009. By June 2013, they had at least 164 local affiliates in 36 states plus the District of Columbia. They had obtained roughly 300,000 individual signatures for their Motion to Amend and had secured the passage of 367 local resolutions and ordinances.[16]United for the People is consortium of some 144 organizations supporting a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.[17] The web site of United for the People lists 17 constitutional amendments introduced in the 112th United States Congress and 12 introduced by March 13, 2013, in the 113th proposing to overturn Citizens United in different ways.[18]
The libertarian think-tank the Cato Institute is concerned that most proposed responses to Citizens United will give "Congress unchecked new power over spending on political speech, power that will be certainly abused."[19]
Clean elections, clean money, and disclosure
Terms like "clean elections" and "clean money" are sometimes used inconsistently. Clean elections typically refers to systems where candidates receive a fixed sum of money from the government to run their campaigns after qualifying by collecting small dollar contributions (e.g., $5) from a large enough group of citizens. Systems of this nature have been tried in Maine, Arizona, North Carolina, New Mexico, Vermont, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Connecticut and elsewhere; some of these have been disqualified at least in part by the courts.
"Clean money" is sometimes used as a synonym for clean elections; at other times, it refers to a DISCLOSE Act, requiring disclosure of the sources of campaign funds. The DISCLOSE Act bill in the U.S. Congress seeks "to prohibit foreign influence in Federal elections, to prohibit government contractors from making expenditures with respect to such elections, and to establish additional disclosure requirements with respect to spending in such elections, and for other purposes."
The California Clean Money Campaign[20] is pushing the California DISCLOSE act, which differs substantially from the federal DISCLOSE Act. The California bill would strengthen disclosure requirements for political advertisements. Among other provisions, it requires the top three contributors for any political ad to be identified by name on the ad.[21]
Ackerman and Ayres propose a "secret donation booth", the exact opposite of full disclosure. This system would require that all campaign contributions be anonymously given through a government agency. Their system would give donors a few days to change their minds and withdraw or change the recipient of a donation; it would also add a random time delay to ensure that the recipients of donations could never know for sure the source of the funds they receive.[22]
Proposed improvements or replacements to the current voting system
Approval voting
With approval voting, voters select candidates that they approve of.
Approval voting is system in which voters may select all candidates that meet the voter's approval. The candidate with the highest approval score (i.e. approved by the most voters) wins the election. In elections with three or more candidates, voters may indicate approval of more than one candidate. Approval voting is the voting method which received the highest approval in a 2021 poll of electoral systems experts.[29]
In 2017, the Colorado legislature considered approval voting. If the bill had passed, Colorado would have been the first state to approve approval voting legislation,[31] but the bill was postponed indefinitely.[32]
In 2018, Fargo, North Dakota, passed a local ballot initiative adopting approval voting for the city's local elections, and it was used to elect officials in June 2020, becoming the first United States city and jurisdiction to adopt approval voting.[33][34][35] In 2023, the North Dakota Legislative Assembly introduced Bill HB 1273, which would ban approval voting statewide. The bill passed both the house and senate before being vetoed by Governor Doug Burgum.[36] The veto was overridden by two-thirds majority in the house[37] but upheld in the senate,[38] leaving approval voting as Fargo's voting method.
In November 2020, St. Louis passed Proposition D to authorize a variant of approval voting (as unified primary) for municipal offices.[39]
The State of Maine's ranked-choice voting presidential ballot
Ranked voting, also called ranked choice voting in the United States, is a ballot design where voters can rank their choices. Popular methods used in some jurisdictions around the world include a system called instant-runoff voting (IRV) to elect one candidate, or a system called the single transferable vote (STV) to elect multiple candidates. Each voter ranks all (or at least some) of the available options. If one option is ranked first by a majority of voters, it wins. Otherwise, the option(s) obtaining the fewest votes is (are) eliminated, and the options ranked second by those voters get those votes.
The Institute for Political Innovation, along with organizations such as Unite America and Nevada Voters, supports "final five voting" which consists of a combination of general primaries to elect the top five candidates, with instant-runoff voting to decide the winner.[41] A similar system was approved in Alaska via a 2020 ballot measure.[42]
Fair Representation Act proposes to introduce STV, along with the multi-member districts, for elections to the House of Representatives.
Modern polling has allowed presidential campaigns to determine which states are "swing states" (also called "battleground states") and which will provide near-certain victories for either the Republican or Democratic candidates. The campaigns then increase their chances of winning by focusing primarily on the swing states. This effectively disenfranchises voters in other states to the extent that their concerns differ from those of voters in swing states.
Officially abolishing the Electoral College would require amending the U.S. Constitution. However, the same effect could be achieved if the Electoral College representatives from states with a majority of the electoral votes were all committed to voting for the presidential slate that achieves a national plurality (or the majority after instant-runoff voting): Presidential candidates would then have to compete for votes in all 50 states, not just the typically less than a dozen swing states.
This is the idea behind the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. As of October 2023, sixteen states and DC with combined electoral votes totaling 205 had approved the compact. To take effect it must be approved by states with electoral votes totaling 270, just over half of the 538 current total electoral votes.[43]
Voting is not required of citizens in any state, so elections are decided by those who show up. Politicians target their message at getting their own supporters out to the polls, rather than winning over undecided voters or apathetic citizens. One solution to this problem is compulsory voting.
Compulsory voting has been criticized as "vaguely un-American" but potentially beneficial to democracy.[48]
Compulsory voting has been proposed as a solution to make the pool of voters better represent the American population, particularly to make it more representative racially and socioeconomically.
[49]
Other proposals
Other proposals intended to make elections and political leaders more effective include:
Move Election Day to a weekend to make it easier for workers to attend,[50] or allow early voting on weekend days
Provide voters better information on the consequences of ballot questions[50]
Higher salaries to reduce the influence of money in politics[50]
Longer terms in office to better match economic cycles, but with term limits[50]
Require candidates to have qualification in terms of education, profession, or life experience[50]
Weigh voters differently according to qualifications, such as passing a civics test or being in a profession that implies expertise on a topic related to a ballot question[50]
Amend the Constitution to guarantee the right to vote in general, rather than only prohibiting certain forms of discrimination.[51][52] Voting in state and Congressional elections can be severely restricted by state laws, and Electoral College votes can be made by state legislatures alone if they so choose. Congress often does not use its power to enforce the existing Constitutional protections; an amendment could require courts to do so more directly.
^In any nation, the primary constituency for foreign policy are those with financial interests outside the country. The former Speaker of the U.S. House Tip O'Neill said that, all politics is local. Foreign policy is in essence "local" to people with financial interests outside the country but is not local to many others. Part of this is the Military–industrial complex, mentioned by then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The "Blowback" series by Chalmers Johnson documents some of this. Much higher dollar figures for the cost of crony capitalism can be obtained by looking at the increase in income inequality in recent decades. The average annual income (Gross Domestic Product per person or family) doubled between 1970 and 2010 (adjusted for inflation), but the typical (median) family income increased only 23 percent. The difference, 87 percent amounts to roughly $39,000 per year or $100 per day. This is discussed in more detail in Documenting crony capitalism and Cost of crony capitalism in the United States, based especially on data from the US Census Bureau Table F-1. Income Limits for Each Fifth and Top 5 Percent of Families (All Races): 1947 to 2010, Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplements, United States Census Bureau, retrieved January 24, 2012 and Piketty, Thomas; Saez, Emmanuel. "Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-2002". In Atkinson, A. B.; Piketty, Thomas (eds.). Top incomes over the twentieth century : a contrast between continental European and English-speaking countries. Retrieved February 8, 2012. These data are combined in the "incomeInequality" data in the Ecdat package available from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN; see r-project.org). For this $100 per day to be meaningful, we must assume that the rate of economic growth during that period would have been the same as it was if the U.S. political economy had been managed to benefit all equally, as it had been from the end of World War II to 1970, during which period the rate of economic growth was slightly higher than it has been more recently.
^Herrnson and Facheaux (2000) surveyed almost 2,000 candidates for office in the late 1990s. They found that the time devoted to fundraising tended to increase with the amount of funds raised and the level of the office. They estimated that 23.3 percent of candidates for statewide office spend over half their time fundraising and 55 percent spend over a quarter of their time. Local and judicial candidates need less money, and less than 6 percent of them spend over half their time asking for campaign contributions. Facheaux, Ronald A.; Herrnson, Paul S. (July 7, 2000), Candidates devote substantial time and effort to fundraising, archived from the original on January 19, 2014, retrieved February 25, 2015
^ abcdefMoyo, Dambisa (2018). "Chapter 7, Blueprint for a New Democracy". Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth-and How to Fix It. Basic Books. ISBN978-0465097463.
^ abcRichard L. Hasen (2024). A Real Right to Vote: How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American Democracy. Princeton University Press. ISBN978-0691257716.
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