Toward Electoral System Reform

My blog post last week, advocating a more participatory form of democracy, focused on the Green Party's key value: Decentralization. In response I got an email inquiring about the other key values (there are ten altogether), so here is the full annotated list:

ECOLOGICAL WISDOM
The Greens recognize that the Earth sustains all life forms. Whatever we do to the web of life, we do to ourselves.

SOCIAL JUSTICE
Greens find the worldwide growth of poverty and injustice unacceptable and are working for a world in which all can fulfill their potential regardless of gender, race, citizenship, or sexual orientation.

GRASSROOTS DEMOCRACY
The powerless suffer the most from resource exhaustion and toxic pollution. Greens believe in direct participation by all citizens in the environmental, political, and economic decisions that affect their lives.

NONVIOLENCE
Greens reject violence as a way of resolving disputes - it is shortsighted, morally wrong, and ultimately self-defeating. We advocate demilitarization and abhor state organized killing of any kind; therefore we are against the death penalty and we work to end war forever.

DECENTRALIZATION
Power and responsibility must be restored to local communities, within an overall framework of ecologically sound, socially just values and lifestyles. To counter the alienation of mass industrial society, we work toward the restoration of humanly-scaled communities, institutions, and technologies. We view political decentralization as a prerequisite for substantive participatory democracy.

COMMUNITY-BASED ECONOMICS
Greens seek the deconcentration of wealth and power; we assert that extreme disparities in personal wealth and concentrated control of productive assets are inherently undemocratic. Therefore we advocate a new economics which first and foremost assures that the basic needs of everyone on the planet are met (sufficiency) - while taking account of the natural limits of the Earth. We advocate decentralization in the economic sphere as well as the political sphere; this would mean regionalizing economic activity as much as practical - to foster local self-reliance and accountability.

FEMINISM
The ethics of cooperation and understanding must replace the values of domination and control. Gender should not be a basis for discrimination nor for role typecasting.

RESPECT FOR DIVERSITY
We honor the biological diversity of the Earth, and the cultural, sexual, and spiritual diversity of Earth's people. We aim to reclaim this country's finest ideals: popular democracy, the dignity of the individual, and liberty and justice for all.

PERSONAL AND GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY
Greens express commitment to global sustainability and international justice both through political solidarity and personal lifestyles based on sufficiency and living lightly upon the Earth.

FUTURE FOCUS/SUSTAINABILITY
Like the Iroquois Indians, Greens seek a society where the interests of the seventh future generation are considered equal to the interests of the present. Every generation should, minimally, seek to leave the planet no worse off than when it was bequeathed to them. We must act in the present in such a way as to reclaim the future for our children and their children.

In a nutshell, the Green message centers around ecology, democracy, peace, justice, and community. These are pretty mainstream values and I often hear comments like: "I love what the Green Party stands for and I hope the Green politics movement grows over time, but when it comes to casting my vote, well, it's a two-party system, you know, and I've just got to make sure the greater-evil doesn't get elected." This justifies a vote for the lesser-evil.

I've mentioned before that if we could change the system to incorporate Proportional Representation, where 10% of the vote gets a minor party 10% of the representation in the legislature, that would be the ideal solution. No vote would be wasted. Greens work for that solution, but we know it will take time to implement such a fundamental revamping of the electoral system.

In the meantime there is a more modest partial solution that could be implemented easily (and has already been implemented in cities like Minneapolis, Santa Fe, Memphis, San Francisco, Burlington, and Portland, ME). It's called "Instant Runoff Voting" or IRV for short.

During the Ralph Nader campaign of 2000, here's what the Trenton Times wrote about IRV:

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No more "spoilers"

Trenton Times editorial of 10/27/2000 (excerpts)

"This is America, where anyone who has the audacity and the message has a perfect right to run for president, and where voters have a right to ignore the two major-party candidates and vote, if they wish, for a Green Party candidate, a Libertarian, a Socialist or a Vegetarian, without feeling that their ballot has been wasted or that what they actually are doing is helping elect someone whose views and principles they despise. How to reconcile these conflicting democratic interests?

"It can be done; it is being done in Ireland, Australia, London and other foreign venues. The secret is 'instant runoff voting' -- IRV -- which the Green Party, among others, advocates. It's a system that ensures that the winner will have a majority of the votes cast, thus giving him or her a mandate. But it also ensures that the public will hear the voices of candidates who disagree with the positions of the two major parties and have different issues to raise and solutions to propose.

"Under IRV, voters cast ballots for their first-, second- and third-choice candidates. If no candidate receives a majority of first-place votes, the last-place finisher's second-choice votes are redistributed among the remaining candidates. The process continues until one candidate gets a majority. In Ireland in 1996, Mary McAleese, one of five candidates for the presidency, gained only 45 percent of first-choice votes. But she was the second choice of enough voters to win easily with 58 percent after the bottom three candidates were eliminated.

"IRV would be suitable for any election in which more than two candidates compete. The more candidates there are in the field -- recall the crowded fields in some Trenton City Council races, or New Jersey gubernatorial primaries -- the greater the chance, under the present system, of a candidate winning with less than a majority, and, therefore, the greater the benefit of switching to IRV.

"The change would greatly improve the democratic process. It ought to be made."