Corrupting elections eats the heart out of democracy. If you can rig the election, controlling what happens in government afterwards obviously becomes much easier.
We all know about the usual kind of box stuffing electoral fraud (“hanging chads,” etc.), and since the effects of the Citizen United case[i] are now beginning to be felt, it is no big secret that money can have enormous influence over elections.
The influence of money, however, is growing and titling the playing field toward the wealthy. The Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit, nonpartisan organization, published a report on this effect on December 13, 2011. The report said that in the 2010 elections, 26,783 individuals (1 percent of the top 1 percent of Americans) spent $774 million dollars on campaign contributions--24.3% of the total spent. According to the report, these contributors are “overwhelmingly…corporate executives, lobbyists, and lawyers.” Each of these spent an average of about $29,000 on the election, which is more than the median income of all Americans ($26,364).
That spending was all before Citizens United unleashed the real power of money in politics and made “super PACS” the instrument of choice for dumping huge sums into political campaigns.
Pouring buckets of money into elections is not where the gaming of elections starts, however. It starts long before the election is held. It starts with drawing voting maps to rig the districts in which the elections take place. This trick is known as gerrymandering.
Again, nothing new, just old tricks brought to perfection. Both parties have been gerrymandering for decades. They used to do it only every 10 years to update the districts after a new census. Now states redraw the voting district lines as often as they can to gain political advantage, depending on which party is in control of the state legislature. Before computers could mine big voting databanks, gerrymandering was difficult to do with absolute accuracy. Now, with the availability of fine grain detailed political intelligence regarding which voters live where, these lines can be drawn with infallible accuracy, assuring the election goes to one party or another.
Gerrymandering combines two techniques: “packing” and “cracking.” Packing is drawing the boundaries to concentrate one type of voters into a single district, reducing their influence in other districts. Cracking spreads out one type of voter among many districts, denying them a majority in any district. They are used in tandem.
This can result in some crazy-looking districts. A famous example is North Carolina’s 12th District, which follows Interstate 85 from north to south.
Source: This map is from an edition of the National Atlas of the United States. Works from the National Atlas are in the public domain.
When the campaign starts, other games begin, such as using spoilers. In any campaign where there are more than two candidates, our plurality voting system is open to the “spoiler effect.” This is the same as the “Nader effect” in the Bush v. Gore election in 2000.
The spoiler effect is seldom merely an accident or coincidence. If two candidates are roughly equal in support, one can enlist a spoiler to drain votes from the other candidate, or, if a potential spoiler for one side is already in the race, he can be secretly funded by the other side.
In the race for mayor of the District of Columbia in 2010, current Mayor Vincent Gray ousted the incumbent, Adrian Fenty, by paying a spoiler candidate in the race who had no chance of winning. The spoiler, Sulaimon Brown, agreed to harass Fenty in debates and other public appearances. Brown was also offered a job in the new administration. Gray denies that he personally gave Brown any cash or offered him a job, but Brown fingered the operatives on Gray’s staff who made the payoffs and promises. (Full disclosure: I worked for the losing Fenty campaign in that race, and I still have the T-shirt to prove it.)
Funding an opposition spoiler candidate does not always work, however. Former Senator Rick Santorum used this trick in the 2006 Pennsylvania election. He openly funded a Green Party candidate, Carl Romanelli, to siphon off votes from his Democratic opponent, Bob Casey. Casey was so far ahead though that he won anyway.[ii]
Our plurality voting system is uniquely vulnerable to the spoiler effect.
One way to eliminate spoilers would be to have a double elimination vote, with the final vote being only between the two leading candidates. This system has obvious timing problems, however. Whenever you have more than two candidates, you need two stages of voting.
Another option is approval voting, where voters can vote for more than one candidate. The candidate who gets the most votes wins.
Another is range voting. This is in use on internet popularity-rating sites. Voters rate candidates on a scale of 0 to 10. The one with the highest average wins.
These alternatives to the plurality one-man-one vote system we now use all avoid the spoiler effect and have been demonstrated to lead to outcomes less susceptible to manipulation, but the tricksters who make a living by fixing elections would surely resist changing the current system.
Recommendation for further reading:
The best and most comprehensive analysis of vote gaming and the benefits of other systems of voting can be found in William Poundstone’s book, Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren’t Fair and What We Can do About it (2008).
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