Change our system of legislatures & districts to bring in more political parties
Every election we hear the same complaint(s)- that smaller (third) parties don’t have a chance at garnering seats in ____(fill in blank: state house, state senate, US House, etc). The current supposed cure, in the minds of some progressives is Ranked Choice Voting. I won’t get into the pros and cons of RCV, though from what I have seen, RCV ultimately has only resulted in the election of a candidate likely to have won anyway under the normal vote system.
But what if we did the elections differently. I will focus on Michigan as an example because I live here and doing this system at the state level is the easiest to illustrate and implement.
“Section. 4.
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government”
The US Constitution guarantees all states a Republican form of government, but that only means we elect representatives. And Article 1, Sec 2 does not specify we must have districts at the federal level.[1] The Michigan Constitution does specify “single member districts” in Article 3, Sec 3[2]. But changing a state constitution is easier than changing the national constitution.
Our current legislature is bi-cameral with 110 House representatives and 38 senators. As an aside, in my view, state senators are really nothing more than representatives with larger districts. It’s not like the state mirrored the federal government and has senators elected by counties in the same manner US Senators are elected by states.
I would also say my proposal eschews the mantra “I vote for the person, not the party.” In fact, I think voting for “the party” actually accomplishes more than voting for the person as my idea will illustrate. So let’s assume we change the state constitution and eliminate the need for districts. Eliminating districts also eliminates the possibility of gerrymandering.
I envision a more parliamentary style of legislature.
Reduce Michigan’s legislature to a unicameral body (a single chamber, eliminating the senate) and have only 100 elected officials.
All political parties would determine a slate of candidates for the legislature, up to 100. Voters, when entering the voting booth, would vote for the party of their choice, rather than the candidate. Once the election results determine the percent of the vote won by each party, the party would caucus and assign candidates to the legislature with stipulation on geographic spread across the state.
To illustrate, let’s say we had five parties on the ballot:
Democrats
Republicans
Green
Libertarian
Constitution
The rule would be that to have a legislator from one’s party in the legislature, the party must garner at least 1% . If we use the presidential results in Michigan from 2020 we find the following:
Democrat 50.6%
Republican 47.8%
Libertarian 1.1%
Green 0.2%
Constitution 0.1%
We can decide whether to round up or down, but if we do the rounding per normal math rules, the Greens and Constitution parties are effectively zero. The other three would work as follows:
Democrat 50.6% = 51% rounding up because 6 is higher than 5
Republican 47.8% = 48% rounding up because 8 is higher than 5
Libertarian 1.1% = 1% rounding down because 1 is less than 6
In a 100 seat unicameral legislature, the Libertarian Party would have a seat at the table, at least this one seat.
Using 2016 as an example, we find:
Democrats 47.0% = 47
Republican 47.3% = 47
Libertarian 3.6% = 4
Green 1.1% = 1
Independent 0.7% = 1
U.S. Taxpayers 0.3% = 0
The Libertarians actually get FOUR seats and both a Green and Independent land in the legislature.
This system would do far more to bring diversity of political views to governance than Ranked Choice Voting [3] in my opinion.
Thoughts?
[1] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
