By

John Rapp

In the late 1970s I owned a Chevy Vega. That was GM’s answer to those who wanted a sub-compact car. It got 30 miles to the gallon, which wasn’t bad, but only 100 miles to the quart (of oil). It had an aluminum engine, which at first tended to burn out very quickly, so GM deliberately redesigned it burn oil. If you didn’t like that small car, your only other choice in the early 70s was the Ford Pinto. Now I’m sure more of you remember that car and its tendency to blow up when rear-ended. That’s what American car makers told customers their only choices in small cars were in the early 70s: exploding gas tanks or oil guzzling engines. When the Japanese and other car makers started exporting more cars to America in the late 70s, all of a sudden the Big 3 American car companies realized they could make a better small car after all.

Why do I mention these two cars in an essay about electoral systems? Because the two American political parties similarly tell us that their candidates and policies are the best they can give us. We either can have tax and spend or borrow and spend, tax cuts for the rich or big bureaucracy, millionaire candidates or those bought by big money interests. Sorry, they say, we can’t do any better and you’ll just have to chose between the lesser of two evils.

Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. We can have a better election system that will give us more choices and force the Big 2 to compete more honestly for your votes. In fact, the electoral system that we borrowed from the British is becoming rarer and rarer in the world every year. Even the elections in Iraq and Afghanistan, which the Bush administration presents as models of American-driven democratization, are being held under different voting systems that America’s. There are, in fact, many ways to hold elections that are fairer and give more choices than American national elections.

What if Wisconsin borrowed the current German electoral system for Congress, for example, a system that has been a model for new democracies since the fall of Communism? Wisconsin would then have four district seats and four at large seats, and voters would each have two votes. On the first ballot you could vote for a person, like now, with the one getting the most votes winning. On the second ballot you’d vote for a party, which would give third parties a much better shot at one or more of the seats.

Don’t like that system because you want to vote for a person and not leave the decision up to a party? Then how about a system in which you can order your votes by rank for individuals? You put a 1 by your first choice, a 2 by your second, and so on, and the top vote getters win in a multi-seat district. That way you could vote for an independent or “minor party” candidate first, and the lesser of two evils second, while still voting for individuals and not parties.

Under either of these systems, and others (which are used in different countries all over the world right now), candidates have to compete honestly for our votes and can’t take anyone for granted. Such systems also lead to less negative campaigns, by the way, since candidates won’t want to alienate any other candidate’s supporters from listing them 2^nd or 3^rd, and would also greatly encourage voter turn-out.

All of these changes could be accomplished by a simple majority vote in Congress – our antiquated British-style election system can be found nowhere in the U.S. Constitution, but is mandated only by a 1967 federal law. All we’d have to do is abolish that law, and states would be free to experiment with different election systems on their own.

Imagine: What if the two major parties had to contend with real competition and we actually got to choose them instead of them choosing us, as they do in our current elections, with their gerrymandered districts? Maybe they would suddenly find out they could give us better candidates and policies after all. Who would the new candidates be? I don’t know, but I’d bet anything they’d be as much improved from our current crop of representatives as modern small cars are from Vegas and Pintos.

John Rapp is a professor of comparative politics at Beloit College