The Impact of Voting Systems on Green Party Success

[Gary Swing]

(Note: This is my first draft of a presentation on Green Party election results in the United States and other countries under different voting systems, arguing that proportional representation is a necessary precondition for creating a viable Green Party)I would like to talk with you today about how the Green Party is doing in the United States compared to the rest of the world, and how different types of voting systems impact the success of Green Party election campaigns. According to the current listings on the website of the Global Greens, there are now Green Parties in 96 different countries on six different continents. So far, there is no organized Green Party in Antarctica. However, there are rumors that some penguins -- who are deeply concerned about global warming -- may soon be organizing a Green Party chapter there.The Global Greens website reports that as of December of 2013, Green Party members held 314 seats in national Parliaments in 30 countries around the world, and 46 seats in the European Parliament. (A total of 360 members of Parliaments.)The Green Party of the United States has an outdated database of Green Party office holders. It lists 129 Green Party officeholders around the United States. These are people who happen to be Green Party members, and who were elected mostly to small, local, non-partisan offices such as special districts, school boards, town councils, and mayors. Very few of these people appeared on an election ballot with the label: “Green Party.”  So the best way for a Green Party candidate to get elected in the United States is to NOT be identified as a Green Party candidate. The Green Party has been running candidates for public offices in the United States since 1985 and in Colorado since 1994. But we still haven’t elected a single Green Party member to Congress. Currently, there is one Green Party state legislator in Arkansas. Only four Green Party candidates have ever been elected to state legislatures in the United States. In three of those cases, the Green Party candidate was in a two-way race in which the other candidate self-destructed in a major scandal. In 2012, Fred Smith, a former Harlem Globetrotter, took a funny bounce into the state legislature when his only opponent was convicted of election fraud and was disqualified from the ballot just a few hours before the election. In 2008, Richard Carroll was elected to the Arkansas state house of representatives with 100% of the vote after his Democratic Party opponent was removed from the ballot for inappropriate sexual conduct. In 1999, Audie Bock won a special election for a vacancy in California’s state assembly. Her opponent was embroiled in controversy when he offered coupons for free fried chicken to people in the mostly African-American district in exchange for their election ballot stub. He was accused of vote-buying and racism. In 2002, John Eder was elected to Maine’s state house of representatives in a two-way race in a tiny district, with public campaign financing.The website of the Green Party of the United States shows that Green Party candidates have been much more successful in other countries. As the website states: (Quote): “Why are US Greens not holding similar offices in similar proportions? The difference is not of ideology but of the electoral system. Greens are being elected on the state and national level in countries that utilize systems of proportional representation. In contrast to US-style winner-take-all, single seat districts, there are multi-seat districts in these countries where representation is determined according to the proportion of the vote cast for each party.If systems of proportional representation existed in the US, Greens would assume their rightful place at the political table as they do elsewhere in the world.” (End quote.)I have looked primarily at legislative elections because that is where the use of better voting systems makes the biggest difference. Out of the 360 Green Party members who currently hold seats in national parliaments or the European Parliament, almost all of them were elected through some form of proportional representation voting system. Only 14 Green Party members have ever been elected to a national parliament anywhere in the world under a winner-take-all voting system. And most of those 14 were elected under unusual circumstances, echoing back to our four Green Party state legislators in the United States. We are stuck with an archaic 18th century voting system. Voting systems have evolved, but the United States remains primitive and most Americans don’t know how the rest of the world votes.  Most democratic republics use more modern, more sophisticated, more representative voting systems.American elections are uniquely backwards in many respects. We have the longest, most expensive election campaigns in the world. This is the only major democratic republic that nominates candidates through primaries, which adds months and expense to elections. No nation takes so long to select its chief executive, with presidential primaries or caucuses in each state and a bizarre Electoral College system. Only in the United States do we elect so many secondary executive offices like attorney general, treasurer, auditor, secretary of state, and even county coroners. Most countries have unicameral legislatures with one body of representatives. Our Congress and 49 redundant state legislatures are bicameral, electing two bodies of representatives. The US Senate is probably the most unrepresentative legislative body of any country that claims to have a representative form of government. Most other democratic republics have a prime minister chosen by their parliament, not a direct presidential election. Our elections are centered on individual candidates, not political parties and platforms, but only candidates of the two establishment parties are covered by the media or included in debates. Public campaign financing is rare in our elections. The government allows unlimited corporate campaign spending. Voter turnout in the United States is among the lowest in the world. This is also the only western democracy that has never held a national initiative or referendum. Nowhere else have so few people voted so frequently in such utterly meaningless elections, with such poor representation.Our winner-take-all voting system tends to divide voters into two major parties, even if the voters wish they had more viable parties that they could elect.We have two types of problems with our voting systems. One problem is the possibility that a candidate could win with less than a majority of the vote in an election with three or more candidates. There is the so-called “spoiler” problem. Many voters are afraid to vote for their favorite candidate because doing so might lead to the election of their least favorite candidate. So these voters often cast “strategic votes” for candidates they see as the “lesser of two evils.”A much bigger problem is the lack of fair representation for a politically diverse population. We don’t all support one of the two major parties. We want to be able to elect candidates who represent our values. We have choices, but we lack a meaningful, effective vote.The basic premise behind proportional representation is that the right of decision belongs to the majority, but the right of representation belongs to all. The first two points in the election reform section of the Green Party’s national platform call for implementing better voting systems. The first point states (Quote): “Enact proportional representation voting systems for legislative seats on municipal, county, state and federal levels. Proportional representation systems provide that people are represented in the proportion their views are held in society and are based on dividing seats proportionally within multi-seat districts, compared to the standard U.S. single-seat, winner-take-all districts. Forms of proportional representation include choice voting (candidate-based), party list (party-based) and mixed-member voting (combines proportional representation with district representation).” (End Quote) What that the Green Party calls “choice” voting here is usually called the single transferable vote, or STV.The second point of the Green Party’s election reform platform states: (Quote): Enact Instant Run-off Voting (IRV) for chief executive offices like mayor, governor and president and other single-seat elections. Under IRV, voters can rank candidates in their order of preference (1,2,3, etc.) IRV ensures that the eventual winner has majority support and allows voters to express their preferences knowing that supporting their favorite candidate will not inadvertently help their least favored candidate. IRV thus frees voters from being forced to choose between the lesser of two evils, and saves money by eliminating unnecessary run-off elections.” (End Quote). I have a handout that describes the three basic forms of proportional representation: party list voting, mixed member proportional representation, and the single transferable vote (or STV). The last two pages of the handout describe instant runoff voting (or IRV), which is a winner-take-all voting system, not a form of proportional representation. In Colorado, the use of the term “ranked choice voting” may be confusing. Ranked choice voting includes both the single transferable vote and instant runoff voting. But usually when someone talks about ranked choice voting, they are only talking about instant runoff. IRV will help the two major parties by eliminating the potential threat posed by minor party candidates, but it won’t help the Green Party to win elections. If we want the Green Party to win fair representation in government and hold real political power, we need to push for proportional representation in legislative bodies as our number one election reform priority. We could use the citizen initiative process to implement proportional representation systems at the local and state levels. At the federal level, it would require an act of Congress or a Constitutional amendment. More than 80 percent of the proportional representation systems used worldwide use some form of party list voting. Each party nominates a list of candidates. Voters cast a ballot for their favorite party, and the parties win seats in proportion to their share of the vote. Ten percent of the vote would win ten percent of the seats.Party list systems can use either closed lists or open lists. With a closed list, the party chooses the order in which its candidates are listed and elected. The voter simply votes for their favorite party. Most European countries now use open party lists. Voters cast one or more votes for individual candidates, but the vote counts for their party as well as for the individuals. The most popular individuals are elected in proportion to each party’s share of the votes. Party list systems typically provide the best representation for women, ethnic minorities, and smaller political parties in government. These are generally the most simple proportional representation systems.After World War Two, Germany created a system of mixed-member proportional representation for its parliamentary elections. Half of the seats are elected from single member districts, as they are here. The other half of the seats are elected by a party list vote and added on to the district members so that each party’s share of the seats is equal to its percentage of the vote. Bolivia, Venezuela, New Zealand, Romania, Hungary, Scotland and Wales also adopted this system. In New Zealand, the Green Party currently holds 14 out of 120 seats in Parliament. All of these Greens were elected from the party list, not from the single member districts. In 1997, the Green Party of Colorado selected mixed member proportional representation as its preferred system for electing our state legislature.The single-transferable vote (or STV) is used in Malta and Ireland. This system looks like instant runoff voting because you rank individual candidates in your order of preference. The difference is that more than one candidate is elected from each district. In a district with nine seats to be elected, a candidate would need one tenth of the vote to be elected.  If your first choice candidate doesn’t have enough support to win, your ballot is transferred to your highest ranked candidate who can be helped by your ballot.  STV is the most complicated system of proportional representation and is generally less proportional than party list systems. Australia elect its Senate with a system that gives voters a choice between casting either a single transferable vote ranking individual candidates in their order of preference or a simple vote for the party list of their choice. It is interesting to note that when voters are given this choice, about 95% of them choose to cast their vote for a party instead of using a ranked choice voting system. I like this system with some modifications.  As I said before instant runoff voting is not a form of proportional representation. It can be useful for making sure that the most popular candidate is elected to a single winner office like president, governor, or mayor, but it won’t help the Green Party and it should not be used for legislative elections. The only countries that use instant runoff voting exclusively to elect their Parliaments are Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Australia uses IRV to elect its lower house. Parliamentary bodies elected by IRV have fewer women than parliaments elected by any other voting method. There is a growing movement to promote IRV among progressive activists in the United States. Some people in the Green Party believe that we can build up from the grassroots to become a major political party. That is a nearly impossible dream under our current election system. In the history of the United States, more than a thousand minor political parties have nominated candidates for public office. Only one of those parties was successful enough to become a major national political party. The members of that party call themselves Republicans.In 1994, I was the campaign treasurer for the first Green Party campaign in Colorado, Phil Hufford for governor. Ever since then, I have felt that if we want to create a successful Green Party here, we must first pass a citizen initiative to elect our state legislature by a party list system of proportional representation. This would require an enormous amount of effort, but without it, the Green Party will remain an ineffective protest vote. On the other hand, we could all move to New Zealand or Bolivia.Gary Swing was a Colorado Green Party candidate for state representative in 1996 and for US Representative in Colorado’s First Congressional District in 2010 and 2012. He is seeking the Green Party’s nomination for US Representative in Colorado’s Sixth Congressional District in 2014. Gary was the Vice Chairman of the Colorado Coalition for Fair and Open Elections in the mid-1990s. He is also a former National Advisory Board member of the Center for Voting and Democracy. Gary has created a Facebook page under the name Coloradans for Proportional Representation: http://www.facebook.com/ColoradansforProportionalRepresentationSupporting Materials:Explanation of Proportional Representation Voting Systems: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/BeginningReading/PRsystems.htmSingle Winner Voting Systems Explanations: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/BeginningReading/plurality.htm

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