Constituents lose when winner takes all

Thursday, February 19, 1998

Constituents lose when winner takes all

VOTING: Race panel must call into question, replace

outdated electoral system

By Steven Hill

"This land is your land, this land is my land, from California
to the New York islands."

President Clinton’s panel on race relations has swept across the
country and finally arrived in California. California is a most
appropriate state for such a discussion, being home to a
smorgasbord of 30 million Latinos, Asians, African Americans,
whites, immigrants, Native Americans and everything in between.
California has given us Propositions 187 and 209, two bitterly
contested rollbacks of immigration rights and affirmative action –
as well as the Rodney King riots and the O.J. trials.

How will so much diversity ever get along?

An important corollary to this question is this: how will all
that diversity ever win fair representation in the legislatures?
The two questions are related, because if voters don’t feel
represented, it’s not likely they’ll feel welcome either.

The irony of the type of democracy used in California and the
rest of the United States is that the single representative elected
to each district seat is supposed to represent everyone residing
within that district. There persists this odd notion that an
elected official "represents" you just because they occupy the
district seat, even if you didn’t vote for them and they are
diametrically opposed to your point of view. Yet there are
districts where a white Christian Republican lives next door to a
Latino single mom Democrat who lives next door to a Korean
small-businessman who lives next door to a duplex where a gay
Reform Party computer programmer is rooming with a black Green
environmentalist, etc., etc., ad infinitum.

Asking a single representative to straddle the ideological
divide between so many perspectives is becoming increasingly
impossible. The result is that millions of voters from different
races and partisan perspectives have to compete against each other
in a zero-sum game for representation – if I win representation,
that means you don’t win.

This dynamic exacerbates racial tensions in several ways. In
most districts, minorities don’t win representation because they
need an unattainable plurality or majority to win. The U.S. Senate,
which competes with Britain’s House of Lords as the most
un-representative body among Western democracies, has exactly one
black and no Latino Senators.

Historically, we’ve tried to remedy such inequality by
gerrymandering a certain number of districts so that a particular
minority group is made into the majority. But this can have the
effect of excluding other racial minorities within that district.
What’s more, districts drawn for racial representation are becoming
increasingly risky, as they have come under judicial fire with some
racial districts being tossed out by the courts.

Also, the inability of single-seat districts to fairly represent
diversity within the districts exacerbates tensions between urban
and suburban areas.

Republicans have given up trying to win in most cities, which
are racially-mixed and usually Democratic strongholds. Republicans
tend to concentrate instead on the white suburbs. This polarization
has far-reaching ramifications for cities since Republican
legislatures have little to gain politically by supporting urban
policy. Not surprisingly, a number of states are being sued over
spending discrepancies in school funding between urban and suburban
areas.

The national dialogue on race must move beyond conversation,
identifying real-world institutional barriers that perpetuate and
exacerbate the racial divide. Certainly the continued use of
single-seat "winner take all" districts is one such barrier.
Fortunately, other options exist.

From 1870 to 1980, Illinois used cumulative voting in three-seat
districts to elect its lower house. If 25 percent of voters
supported only one candidate, that candidate was sure to win,
giving minority voters a chance to win representation. This
relatively minor modification of winner-take-all rules had a
profound impact on Illinois politics. Nearly every district, even
the Chicago districts, had two-party representation of both
Republicans and Democrats, fostering bipartisan support for urban
policy and giving voters more choice, better representation and
creating more competition. In 1995 the Chicago Tribune
editorialized, in support of cumulative voting’s return, "Many
partisans and political independents have looked back wistfully at
the era of cumulative voting. They acknowledge that it produced
some of the best and brightest in Illinois politics."

Even more effective would be to convert the U.S.-style "winner
take all" voting system to a multi-seat proportional representation
system.

South Africa is following this example in its post-apartheid
era. In their first multiracial election, white and black ethnic
minorities and the black majority won their fair share of seats
without a single gerrymandered district. Moreover, the main parties
reached out to voters of both races by running multiracial slates
of candidates. Rather than polarize the nation along racial lines,
the proportional election helped unify a fragile democracy.

President Clinton’s panel on race relations ought to question
seriously this reliance on "winner take all" single-seat districts.
It’s an antiquated 18th-century method that just isn’t capable of
serving the needs of a multi-racial, multi-partisan democracy,
hurtling toward the 21st century.

Leaders as diverse as Clarence Thomas, Kevin Phillips, Eleanor
Smeal and Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney have expressed an interest
in exploring new approaches. It’s long overdue, and now is the
time.