In recent months and years, legislation meant to make it more difficult to vote, especially for Black and brown people, has proliferated in some state legislatures. But problems with the way we vote in the United States go deeper than these laws. In Part 1 of this two-part episode, Talk Policy To Me reporter Elena Neale-Sacks talks to GSPP researcher Charlotte Hill about what it would look like to fundamentally change how we vote in this country.
Look out for Part 2 next week.
To learn more about proportional representation and what it could look like in the U.S., go to fixourhouse.org.
Transcript
Noah: [00:00:00] Amy, how do you feel about shaking things up a bit in the next couple of weeks?
Amy: [00:00:03] Say more.
Noah: [00:00:03] Well, as you know, our colleague Elena Neale-Sacks has been reporting an episode on something pretty big.
Amy: [00:00:09] Right, voting?
Noah: [00:00:10] Well, yeah, but not your average story on voting rights or voter suppression, both of which are still super important, by the way. But no, she’s been tackling the systems at play here and asking questions like, should we get rid of our voting system altogether? And if we do that, what will take its place?
Amy: [00:00:27] It does sound like a lot.
Noah: [00:00:29] Which is why we’re going to do something a little different today instead of giving you guys one long and complicated episode on changing the way we vote in the U.S., we’re going to break it down into two parts. Today, we’ll bring you part one, an interview Elena did with our very own Charlotte Hill, a researcher and policy analyst at the Goldman School of Public Policy.
Amy: [00:00:48] Elena and Charlotte discuss what it would look like for the U.S. to adopt a proportional representation or PR voting system instead of the single winner plurality system we use in most elections today.
Noah: [00:00:58] If that sounds like a lot of jargon to you, don’t worry. Elena and Charlotte are going to break it down for us.
Amy: [00:01:04] So without further ado, this is Talk Policy To Me.
Noah: [00:01:07] And today we’re talking a new way to vote, part one.
Elena: [00:01:09] What is the story of how you came to be interested in democracy and electoral reform?
Charlotte: [00:01:25] Yeah. I think so much of my interest in democracy reform really does come back to being a kid who grew up in a lower income family in the U.S.. I mean, I always add the really big caveat that I am a white woman with highly educated, you know, formally educated parents, so came with a lot of privileges from the get go. But that being said, you know, I was from a family that really just didn’t have much income to speak of and four kids and four mouths to feed. So we were always just kind of living on the brink, right. Always of one crisis away from being in financial peril and then the financial crisis hit and in pretty short order, my family went through bankruptcy and we lost the home and my parents got divorced, and it was just one crisis after another. And I remember at the time feeling like this is also personal to my family. This is all kind of a result of choices that my parents have made or, you know, the industry that we’re in. And as I got a little bit older and reflected on that time, yes, there were personal choices that led that contributed to some of those awful things happening, but a lot of it was so systemic, right. It was like families like mine just weren’t well represented in our political system, and they weren’t being prioritized when decisions were made about who to help during that financial crisis, during the recession. And that is the story of so, so many people in this country. And so I think that recognition of how much our family’s lives were directly tied to the policy decisions being made at a federal level and a state level, that really supercharged my passion to get involved in this work.
Elena: [00:03:22] Charlotte started doing democracy reform work about a decade ago. Her research focuses on how policy changes affect how we vote, who votes, and how votes are translated into political power. So what is it about our current voting systems in the U.S. that, you know, kind of contributed to those systems that made it so that your family was like one crisis away? Like, what’s the connection between how we vote and those systems and those-
Charlotte: [00:03:56] Well, for instance, since we’re speaking in this conversation largely about proportional representation and voting policy. I live in California and families like mine and we were living in a rural community at the time are not the primary constituency that state policymakers overall are paying attention to in California. The bulk of California’s population is located in major cities, places like San Francisco and L.A., San Diego, Sacramento. And so when you have a political system that basically incentivizes paying attention to the majority over the minority, the voices of the people who make up that majority end up carrying more weight. And there are other types of political systems that would say, okay, the rural population in California isn’t that big, but it is. I’m going to make up a number here and say it is 25% of the population, 20% of the population. And so we’re going to make sure that they get about 20% of the representation in the state. And of course, when we’re talking about members of the state house, you get a little bit closer to that because people are elected in districts but for statewide positions right now like, you have one seat and whoever is in the majority is going to have more control over who gets elected to those seats.
Elena: [00:05:16] This is most commonly known as single winner plurality voting.
Charlotte: [00:05:20] So you can you can structure the system differently so that instead of having, you know, one elected official represent the entire state, you could have a few elected officials and maybe two of them represent the more populous areas and one of them is sort of representing your more rural areas.
Elena: [00:05:42] And this would be an example of proportional representation or PR voting.
Charlotte: [00:05:47] So that’s just one example, but there are so many ways in which representation gets distorted in this country. We can dig into it here.
Elena: [00:05:56] And we will. But before we get too in the weeds, it’s worth mentioning that the U.S. has actually used PR before.
Charlotte: [00:06:03] To go back in American history for a little bit. Between 1915 and 1948, there were actually 24 cities that adopted proportional representation in the United States. We had women getting elected to citywide office for the first time in several cities after they adopted PR. In Cincinnati and Toledo, African Americans were getting elected to citywide office for the very first time. And, you know, again, this is the early 1900s. And so these changes scared a lot of white people who are used to, you know, white people and men who were used to being the ones in power. And it led to backlash against proportional representation and contributed to this law at the federal level saying, no, you’re not allowed to do this.
Elena: [00:06:54] Can you help me visualize it? Like, could we say there’s kind of one umbrella that says like plurality voting and another that says proportional representation. And then there are all these like subcategories under each umbrella, or is that not really the right way to be thinking about it?
Charlotte: [00:07:13] So here’s where I would start. I have a lot of assumptions that I didn’t even realize that I had when I began going into political science as a discipline. And one of the biggest assumptions that I held was that the way that I was used to voting as an American was the way that everyone votes. And I’ll describe it, and I’m guessing for most people listening, it will sound like, yeah, obviously this is how you vote. Everyone cast a ballot and whoever gets the most votes wins, right? That is textbook plurality voting. If you have two candidates, then the candidate who gets the most votes is by definition going to be getting more than 50% of the votes. So that’s where we think of like, okay, pretty clear sign, like you got 55%, the other person got 45%. You get to win because you got 55%, and if there are three candidates running, those votes could split approximately like 33, 33, 34%. The candidate who got 34% would win. Right. So basic math, and that’s plurality voting. And that is the assumption I had about how voting works. Turns out that in most advanced democracies, this is not the way that people vote. The second assumption I made was, and I’ve kind of hinted at it here, was around how my vote translated into who ended up holding power. Right. So again, I’ve already kind of spoken to this a bit, but I thought you vote for one person and if they get the most votes, they get to be your elected official. This is what we call single winner districts. And it is something that we do all across the U.S. in most jurisdictions. It feels very, very familiar. Turns out in most other places, that’s not actually how elections are run. Instead of having a single person who represents a district, a geographic region, we will instead elect multiple people to represent that geographic region, which then allows for what I just described, this proportional approach to to voting in elections where people can kind of express their preferences in different ways and you can allocate the seats for that district according to how much support there is for those people in the population. So when I understood that there was a totally different way to be doing elections and not just like a, this weird, crazy idea, but actually the way that 80% of the world’s democracies run elections. Proportional representation with multiple political parties. It really opened my eyes to how things could be done differently and set me on a journey to exploring those ideas further. So to go back to your original question, yes, we can talk about plurality voting and we can talk about proportional representation. There are a lot of different shades of gray within those two buckets, but those are generally considered by political scientists to be the main two categories for how we can do elections.
Elena: [00:10:25] So last week I spoke with another kind of voting systems researcher who was kind of saying that like a country’s voting method essentially determines whether it’s a two party system or a multi-party system. Would you agree with that? And kind of you know, why or why not?
Charlotte: [00:10:44] Sure. Yeah, that’s a, that’s pretty close to a law of political science that the voting if you have a plurality voting system, you are probably going to end up with a two party political system and that if you have a proportional representation system, you’ll end up with more parties. And it makes sense when you think about it. If you have a plurality voting system, then you’re always going to have an incentive to kind of demonize opponents, to raise the temperature in the room and to say like, I am better than anyone else, or, you know, my party is better than any other party. And when you have that sort of polarizing dynamic, it’s really hard for there to be middle ground parties. People generally tend to have to take a strong stand or or side, and there’s no incentive to compromise, form coalitions. And so you end up with these kind of bipolar political systems. And you’ll also I mean, there will always be two, say you have a three party system to start, and that third party that the party with the fewest number of votes is going to be seen as a spoiler. Right? They’re always going to be kind of sucking votes away from one of the other two parties. And so those two major or larger parties are always going to have an incentive to kind of squish down the third party. Right. And try to suck their voters away. And, you know, there are more reasons for why we end up with only two parties. But what you see is for- because of those factors and other factors, almost inevitably you end up with a two party system and that becomes really dangerous. As we’re seeing right now, it’s very hard to hold together a cohesive country with a two party system.
Elena: [00:12:39] Yeah, And I’m curious, do you think that the increased polarization that stems, at least in part from this two party system that we have basically leads to the politicization of things that in many other countries are just not seen as political, like climate change, for instance, you know, or universal health care, like things that in the United States have become deeply political, but in, I don’t know, Denmark, it’s like, yeah, that’s just kind of, climate change is real, we need to do things about it and everyone should be able to go to the hospital. Like do, I don’t know, do you see any, any correlation there?
Charlotte: [00:13:23] I will say there are so many factors that contribute to this. But where I do see the connection is that in the U.S. context, the folks who are climate change deniers, who oppose health care as a human right, I mean, right now this is the far right. The extremist right has definitely taken over the Republican Party. This is not news to anybody. We’ve seen the populist extremist right rise in power around the world. This is not a distinctly American phenomenon. But what’s distinct in the U.S. is that this faction has gained outsized political power. Right. So it’s really interesting to look back at the numbers in 2016 and see that Donald Trump’s voters made up less than a fifth of the eligible electorate. And, you know, only 43% of registered voters are Republicans. Back then, in 2016, less than half of registered Republicans voted in the primaries. You know, Donald Trump really was not the preferred candidate for a long time. And yet these folks are able to run the country for some period of time and really be a cog in the wheel of progress on some of these really urgent issues. So that is distinct to America and directly tied to the way that we elect our leaders. You know, Donald Trump is not the only member of the Republican Party who holds these beliefs. And again, you know, if we had a system in which 20% of the electorate got 20% of the political power, even if they could somehow, you know, through other rules, manage to elect their president, you know, their preferred candidate was president. In our political system, they would not be able to enact a backwards agenda because they would not be able to take control of the House of Representatives.
Elena: [00:15:30] I was curious to know how other countries avoid these problems and what role proportional representation plays.
Charlotte: [00:15:38] There are two main types of proportional representation in the world two systems. One is called multi winner ranked choice voting. You’ll also hear it described as single transferable vote. So two good examples of this are Ireland and Australia. Australia uses it for its Senate. You can kind of structure the system a little differently in terms of like how you list candidates on your ballot. Ireland lists them in alphabetical order, Australia lists them by party. But the result is the same in both countries, which is that, you know, they’re thriving democracies. They’re both ranked in the top ten democracies globally. I mentioned earlier that the U.S. is distinct in having these far right forces going to take over our political system. But Ireland and Australia have kind of similarly sized far right elements in their population, but those elements have not taken over, and experts largely attribute that to them using proportional representation. And both countries developed pretty strong multiparty systems. Ireland has between three and five parties or so in many different coalition governments, where those parties are joining together to pass policies that work for a majority of citizens. So the other system is called mixed member proportional. Don’t need to remember all these names. But the examples here are New Zealand and Germany, and this is a you know, this isn’t using ranked choice voting. This is a system where voters get two votes. They get to one vote goes for their local representative who’s going to represent them in their small geographic area and one goes for a political party. And the powers that count up all the local representative votes first, and then they then the parties get compensatory seats to bring their total share in the legislature up to their overall party vote share. So basically, if you know, if those party votes show that, let’s say the far left party has about 30% support. But when you look at how things played out with all of those individual local representative votes, only about 25% of the people who got elected were from that party. There are another few seats that get thrown in for that party to make sure that the legislature is like fully representative. So, again, totally different way of electing candidates, but it is also proportional. And we again see that voters are happier and that governance seems to work better. So lots of different ways you can structure this, but generally speaking, if you go proportional, it works better.
Elena: [00:18:27] So a lot of the how we’ve been talking about PR has mostly been in the context of like multi winner elections, but within the scope of a single winner election like the presidency, how can we make voting more Democratic.
Charlotte: [00:18:45] For the presidency I think I would push for ranked choice voting. I know there are also other models out there for how we can shift our voting system, and I think they definitely deserve attention and research. We have pretty good data on ranked choice voting, working to better represent voters than what they’re getting now, better represent voters preferences. So, you know, I like to go where the data is. So with ranked choice voting, you get to rank your preferred candidates, let’s say one, two, three, four or five. If you imagine instead dropping political primaries and instead just having a big election. This is another way you can do it. A big election for president. There are Republicans on the ballot. There are Democrats. There are some Independent candidates. Say there’s somebody who doesn’t identify as a Democrat or a Republican, say Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez runs for president. And she’s like, we’re in this new system with ranked choice voting. And she goes, you know, I really don’t identify as a Democrat after the last few years in Congress and how things have gone. I am a progressive freedom person, but for party, the progressive freedom group. And in a normal election or normal, you know, in the way that we run things right now, most Democrats are not going to vote for AOC. They might like AOC, but someone running on that third party ticket, we all know they just really don’t stand a chance because we assume that no one else is going to vote for a third party person, even if we would. Right. There are going to be a few people who vote for her because they don’t kind of understand the rules of the game and whatnot. But she would generally be considered a spoiler if she ran outside of the Democratic Party. In this new system, suddenly every voter has the opportunity, if they want to put AOC is the number one choice because they know if she does not pull in enough support and she has no chance of winning their votes, just going to go to their number two choice so they can say, okay, I like AOC first, but you know, Biden’s running for reelection. I’m going to put him as my number two. You know, I really don’t want to witness Donald Trump who’s running for reelection here, so I’m going to put him last on my list. So you can immediately see how with ranked choice voting, it creates an opportunity for a broader range of people to run for office, to have their ideas infused into the campaign conversation. Right. They end up on the debate stage. They’re influencing what issues we’re talking about, but it also shapes it reshapes the kind of the incentives of voters to speak their truth on the ballot to to really list as their number one choice, their true number one choice, and not try to vote strategically. And so this is a reason that I love ranked choice voting for four presidential elections. I do think in the long run, we should probably play around. We should explore the idea of getting rid of the presidency. But you know what? That’s a big reform that we could probably save for another podcast. Let’s get rid of the Senate, too, while we’re at it.
Elena: [00:21:46] Quick plug. We produced an episode in December 2020 about what it would look like to do exactly this to get rid of the Senate. If you haven’t listened already. Go check it out on our website. It all seems like a bit of a catch 22 in the sense that the political institutions we have in place make it pretty difficult to change our electoral process. And yet, as you mentioned, threats to actual democracy or even any semblance of democracy in the US have piled up so much that it’s, you know, feel like we need to change these things now more than ever in a sense.
Charlotte: [00:22:33] Between the two of us and everyone listening to this podcast. I am not bullish on any democracy reform right now. You know, we just had a big push for very common sense voting and election reforms in Congress. The things that have been proposed and trialed for decades, many of which don’t even have any sort of immediate partisan impact. And we couldn’t get it through because of extremist members, you know, the extremist Republican Party and then a couple of very conservative Democrats. I do think that there is much more hope at the state and local level. And let me be clear, I don’t think that it is sufficient to reform our political system at the state and local levels, because that is just going to lead to an exacerbation of what we see right now, which is some states with pretty excellent voting systems and some with really awful voting systems. You know, some cities that make it quite easy to participate, some that make it incredibly difficult, especially if you’re a person of color. So that’s not satisfactory. But I think that probably the best we can do is try to implement policies that we want to see implemented at the federal level and try to implement them at the state and local level to build even more of a track record of success and bring more voters along, you know, especially if we can implement them in populous areas, help people understand, you know, it’s not just that, you know, ranked choice voting looks this way on paper and like a wonky, you know, blog post or political science article. You’ve actually used it in your most recent elections. You might not even have noticed that you used it because it was that straightforward. I would venture that a lot of people in the Bay Area who vote using ranked choice voting have never thought twice about the fact that they’ve elected their mayor using this system or in Albany, California, that they are actually using proportional representation to elect their city council. And there are places in the in the country that are already doing this. So if we can help more voters have that experience and then tell them you’re having this experience and it seems to be working well for you, I think that’s how we can start building more support for federal reform so that when the if slash when the next opportunity arises to pass a a bill through Congress, the public is is more on board and their representatives can feel a little more at ease knowing that they’re not doing something crazy ambitious that their voters have never heard of before. That can feel a little scary, but that they’re just expanding access to policies that their voters already use.
Noah: [00:25:20] That was our producer, Elena Neale-Sacks, talking with GSSP researcher Charlotte Hill. Next week on the pod, we’ll bring you part two.
Amy: [00:25:27] You’ll hear from Charlotte again, as well as two other voting systems researchers who have a slightly different idea about the nuts and bolts of a more proportional voting method.
Noah: [00:25:35] It’ll get us to a point now where there will be a menu of options and cities can kind of pick the one that makes the most sense for them. Do they want to be really bold and try something really out there and novel or just something really simple like approval voting?
Charlotte: [00:25:47] Most people will vote their conscience with ranked choice voting. But that might backfire on them.
Amy: [00:25:54] All of this and more next week.
Noah: [00:26:01] Talk Policy To Me is a co-production of UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans.
Amy: [00:26:08] Our executive producers are Bora Lee Reed and Sarah Swanbeck.
Noah: [00:26:12] Elena Neale-Sacks produced and engineered this episode.
Amy: [00:26:15] The music you heard today is by Blue Dot Sessions and Pat Messiti Miller.
Noah: [00:26:18] I’m Noah Cole.
Amy: [00:26:19] And I’m Amy Benziger.
Noah: [00:26:20] Catch you next time.
