Voter Apathy?

While most of you reading this column voted this month, most of the people you see walking down the street did not.

Blaming voter apathy, however, may not be the answer. It’s like blaming the bumps for the measles – it’s a symptom not the cause.

Instead, consider this: The United Sates has one of the lowest rates of voter turnout in the free world. Is it just coincidence, that they are also one of the last advanced democracies to use a winner take all system of voting?

In a winner take all system, everyone votes, and whoever gets the most votes wins. While it sounds perfectly fair, it is not.

Too often, under winner take all, the winning candidate is an outlier that most of the voters did not want – the perfect example – the primary nomination of Donald Trump.

Let’s say there are eight people running for the school board’s one open position. There has been rampant juvenile crime on the busses lately, so Tommy Terrible, the candidate who wants to ban school busses, has convinced about 15 percent of the voters (mostly those who already take their kids to school) to support him. The other 85 percent, however, hate this idea. So he has no chance of winning – right?

Wrong.

If the seven remaining candidates divide the opposition votes, with no individual getting more than 15 percent, Terrible wins the election. He is now on the school board even though 85 percent voted against him.

After a few elections like this, voters will start voting strategically. This means they vote only for the candidate closest to their view that also has the best chance of winning. It is called the spoiler effect. They don’t vote their first choice, or even their second – they only vote to keep Tommy Terrible out of office.

If this sounds familiar, it should. How often do we hear complaints of how there are no good candidates with a chance of winning. Yet we vote anyway – it’s our duty. Many just give up.

As people continue to vote strategically, the smaller parties drop out rather than spend money in futile efforts, leading eventually to a two party system. That is where we are today. The two parties will change control periodically, but third parties have no chance, and most voters feel they have no real say in government.

We call it voter apathy and blame it on lazy voters.

Negative campaigning grows when the purpose of campaigns is as much about scaring the public off the competition as it is satisfying your base. Major parties like the spoiler effect. It makes them less answerable to small interests as long as they can scare those interests away from the opposition.

A simple change in our voting system could go far to fix these problems.

Instant runoff voting (IRV) is one method several states are trying.

IRV, allows voters to number each candidate on the ballot by preference. In an election for a single office, only the number one preference on each ballot is counted in the first round. If, in that first round, a candidate gets more than 50 percent of the votes, he or she wins the election.

However, if no one gets 50 percent, the two bottom candidates are dropped, and the ballots recounted. The ballots that had originally numbered a dropped candidate as their first choice, are now re-allocated to count as a vote for whomever they selected as their second choice. The process continues until one candidate reaches the 50 percent mark and wins the election. No one has to visit the polls more than once, and the winner is always the one that the most voters actually chose.

Voters, seeing that their vote really matters, vote again.

Parties must stop alienating small groups so that they will choose them as their second or third choice. Because they can no longer depend on demonizing large swaths of the population, negative campaigning decreases.

Major parties must work harder to lock in voters – so changes in voting systems are difficult to get past the party dominated legislatures – kind of like re-districting reform.

Regardless, fourteen major cities in the U.S. already use Instant Runoff Voting. And Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), another alternative system that claims it can beat Gerrymandering, is used at some level in more than 30 states – including some party elections in Virginia.

As is so often the case, grass roots efforts started the ball rolling.

Perhaps the two major parties might consider IRV or RCV for their next presidential primary.

A new voting system is not the only fix needed to help solve voter apathy. Fixing Gerrymandering would also help, as would finding more innovative and convenient ways to vote.

But that’s a discussion for another time.

Punchbowl Shelter

 

Read Full Post »

Burning Books

“Where books are burned, people in the end are burned too,” Heinrich Heine, German poet and political commentator, from his play Almansor, 1821.

Seventy-nine years ago, almost to the day, the Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Association decided to take nationwide action against the un-German spirit. They would burn the books of those who opposed the rise of the Nazi Party. Later, confirming the prophetic nature of Heine’s quote, they would go on to burn people.
Today we look back smugly on those poor, misguided people confident that it could never happen here. Perhaps we would be wise to examine how these folks were drawn down such a dark and gruesome path.
The power of German propaganda during and just before WWII is legendary, as was its primary designer Dr Joseph Goebbels, who patterned much of his craft after American style public relations – taken to the extreme. The media, used ruthlessly, is powerful tool, especially, as used by Goebbels, to excite the people to violence and tell them only what they wanted to hear.
The Nazis are gone, but this pattern of media manipulation is alive and well.
The latest example is the up-roar over the tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. The media has, from the beginning, promoted this event like an ancient Roman coliseum exhibition, feeding the public every new “fact” as soon as it surfaces from any source, regardless of its basis in truth, speculation or fear.
Even the pictures of Martin and Zimmerman were biased toward controversy with pictures of Martin from several years earlier looking very young and innocent placed side by side with the mug shot of an unshaven and overweight Zimmerman also from several years prior.
Cries for help recorded on the 911 tapes were at first were reported as Martin’s, then later Zimmerman’s, now, as of this writing, they may have been spectators or who knows who.
Thanks to this over the top media circus, and spurred on by the likes of Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson (two has-beens looking to shore up their crumbling positions as black leaders) radical groups like the New Black Panthers have issued threats and bounties on Zimmerman. Spike Lee even tweeted what he believed was the home address of the uncharged shooter to thousands of his followers knowing it was likely to lead to violence.
Even locally we had folks gathering in front of the courthouse demanding justice for the “murdered” Martin with almost no real evidence that anything close to a murder had occurred.
In the end they may turn out to be right. Who knows? But that is the power of media when it manipulates the natural tendency of folks to believe any speculation that supports their personal agenda or prejudices.
It seems we have forgotten some of the basic rules about judging too quickly:
Don’t believe everything you read or see on the news.
Don’t jump to conclusions before the facts are all in.
Don’t assume you can know what others are thinking.
And don’t get so invested in your position that you can’t consider competing views.
I have to wonder, if tomorrow the police found a certified recording of Martin saying he planned to burglarize the neighborhood and kill anyone who tried to stop him, how many of the “Trayvon protestors” would stay on the streets and call the evidence manufactured.
I’m betting it would be the same number of “Zimmerman supporters” who would remain supporters if the tape was instead Zimmerman admitting to hating blacks and planning to shoot anyone wearing a hoodie that night.
And it’s not much different in politics. While burning books today is not an ineffective way to limit competing information, our tendency to only watch programming that supports our point of view is nothing less than self censorship. So, when our favorite media takes statements out of context to make political leaders look evil, heartless, or stupid, we are more than willing to accept it as long as it supports what we want to believe is true.
With hundreds of media choices available to us today, we have taken away one form of censorship only to replace it with another, perhaps more powerful because it is self imposed.
Consider the recent Supreme Court hearings on Obamacare. Liberals were shocked by the questions the justices posed to the solicitor-general. Why? These were not new arguments. They were the same arguments those opposed to the new law had been making for years. Either liberals never listened to the counter arguments, or, they were caught off guard when people they considered the intellectual elite (Supreme Court Justices) made the same arguments as those that the uneducated, hayseed conservatives were making. In either case one has to wonder how deeply buried their head was in the sand.
In a free society we cannot, nor do we want to, compel anyone to pay attention. However, freedom requires constant diligence from those who would remain free. Self censorship may not be Nazi book burning, but it’s effects are just as corrosive to liberty. Leave media manipulation unchallenged, and freedom’s days are numbered.

Read Full Post »