Unrigging Our Elections

Our antidemocratic federal election system is a NYC issue. It subjugates us, sickens us, and imperils our future, and NYC’s leadership is needed to fix it.

The way we count votes in electing presidents and members of both Houses of Congress systematically undercounts the votes of city people. As a result, it undercounts the votes of African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, Jews, Muslims, and immigrants. It also undercounts the votes of every other group that mostly votes for Democrats, including women, LGBTQ+ people, supporters of the arts, supporters of gun control, people who believe in science, and people who hope to prevent climate catastrophe. In short, the system is rigged against everything UWSers believe in.

The mechanism of the bias is our method of counting places instead of people: the Electoral College makes presidential elections a vote of states, while Senators and Representatives are chosen exclusively by individual states and districts. This method boosts the power of the political party that dominates in more places, that is, Republicans, at the expense of the party supported by more people, that is, Democrats.

The consequences of this structural defect can hardly be overstated. It has subjected us to the two most disastrous presidencies in modern history, as well as to Republican control of the House when most people voted Democratic in 2012 and the Senate since 2014, and to right-wing domination of the federal courts.

It has caused the deaths of many thousands of NYers from Covid-19. The precise number we will never know, but the best evidence is that with even minimally competent national leadership, more than ten thousand of the lives lost in NYC would have been saved.

It also caused the ruinous war of choice in Iraq, bolsters white supremacy, blocks universal health care, restricts womens’ choice, promotes discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender diversity, jails immigrant children, facilitates teenage suicides and classroom massacres, and accelerates the rising of the seas and the raging of the storms that already threaten our coastal city.

The 2020 election demonstrated the continuing peril of our system. Biden won a decisive victory in the popular vote but barely squeaked by in the Electoral College. Only the Trump administration’s grotesque response to the pandemic pushed Biden over the top. Had the virus materialized eight months later than it did, the 2020 election would likely have been a repeat of 2016. As for the Senate, control was determined by two Georgia runoffs in January 2021, even though it was entirely clear that, regardless of the outcome in Georgia, Democratic candidates received millions more votes than their Republican opponents in the senatorial elections that produced the new Senate. And despite the slender victory in the runoffs, the systemic bias remains, and the reprieve will surely be brief. ()

Recall November 4, 2008. It had been 66 months since “Mission Accomplished” and 12 since “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job;” the cynical incompetence of our previous Republican president had been fully exposed. Eleven weeks later our first Black president took office with the support of full Democratic control in Congress.

Two years later we had already lost the House. The Democrats’ major accomplishment during those two years—the most significant accomplishment of Obama’s entire presidency—was the Affordable Care Act, a compromise health insurance plan based on ideas that originated in a conservative think tank and were first tested at the state level by a Republican governor.

By Election Day 2020, the ACA was barely breathing, and by almost any measure of progressive politics, we had fallen far behind not only where we were when Obama’s term ended, but behind even where we were when Obama took office. The bias in our election system is the cause, and if we don’t remove it, there is every reason to expect that our downward spiral will continue.

That’s the lesson, from the Contract with America, to Bush v. Gore, to the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, to Merrick Garland’s nonexistent nomination hearings, to the Muslim ban, to quitting the Paris Climate Accord, to “Gallup just gave us the highest rating ever for the way we are handling the CoronaVirus situation.“ As bad as it seems, it can always get worse. Much worse. As much worse as George W. Bush was than his father, as much worse as Trump has been than W—that’s how much worse the next one may be, and probably will be, unless we stop giving extra voting power to the most ignorant and intolerant Americans.

The federal government cannot fix itself. The Constitution prevents that, both expressly and through the election rules themselves, which produce elected officials who benefit from those rules.

Change can come only from the people. The organization I run, democratism, has a plan for how to give the American people the chance to make that change, and it begins with a movement of American cities. NYC should take the lead, by formally proposing what we call the Democracy Decree. When enough cities and other jurisdictions have proposed the Democracy Decree, it would be put to a vote of the people. If adopted, it would end the electoral college and institute proportional representation in Congress.

As our representative to the City Council, I will introduce legislation proposing the Democracy Decree, and I’ll fight to put the power of NYC behind a national movement to adopt it, thereby removing the right wing bias from our election system and ensuring that in the future the people will choose our leaders.

Like democratic resource allocation, this is something newer and bigger than what you’re accustomed to hear proposed by a candidate for City Council. But our recent history has shown all NYers the terrible price of failing to assert our essential right to government that operates by our consent. Now is the time for change.