Fixing Democracy, Continued

It's the morning after the election. The President-elect calls you up and says, "you know, after this grueling, absurd campaign, I now see that the state of our democracy is something we have to grapple with immediately. What should I do?"

The Brennan Center posed this questions to the following academics, writers and thinkers, just before the 2008 campaign. Here is what they had to say.

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Hendrik Hertzberg
Contributing writer, The New Yorker. Author, Politics: Observations & Arguments.

To:
From:
Subj: Fixing our democracy

Mr./Ms. President —

You need to fix the way you got elected, and you need to fix it right away. I'm sure winning was fun, but I'm equally sure about how painfully aware you are of what a nightmare the Presidential election process is. The only people more painfully aware are the poor saps you defeated.

The Electoral College is the easy part. You don't have to abolish it; you don't have to propose a Constitutional amendment, which would be a futile exercise anyway. All you have to do is push the National Popular Vote plan over the top. A bunch of states have already passed identical bills saying that as soon as enough of them do the same to account for a bare majority of the E.C. (i.e., 270 votes), then come the next election they'll all cast all their electoral votes for whoever wins the popular vote nationally, regardless of who happens to carry their particular state. In other words, the only number that would count would be who gets the most votes in all 50 states plus D.C.

This is easily doable by 2012. A nudge from you should do the trick. Besides guaranteeing that the people's choice (i.e., you, next time) wins, this will give us a truly national election and a campaign fought on truly national issues. That will be good for the country—and should be good for you. By the way, when you announce your support for the National Popular Vote, please make sure you've got a couple of prominent people from the other party standing up there with you.

The hard part is the primary system. Here's where you've got to be a little bit selfless. A brutal, endless, frontloaded primary schedule will be fine for you. If you do the kind of job in office I expect you to, you'll coast to renomination. You can sit in the White House while the other party tears itself apart. If somebody clinches the other party's nomination by the first week in February, the voters will have nine months to get thoroughly sick of him or her. While he or she wanders from hotel to hotel, complaining about your record, you'll be signing bills, meeting with world leaders, and saying you're too busy doing the public's business to get down in the political mud. Wonderful. But eventually—one or two election cycles down the road—the shoe will be on the other foot.

The primary system chaos won't be sorted out without Presidential leadership. There are a bunch of good solutions out there—the regional-primary plan, the so-called American plan, and others. You need to get together with leaders from both parties and put together a bipartisan blue-ribbon commission. I know—that sounds like pure goo-goo wankery. But there are times when wankery works. Your job will be to mount the bully pulpit and make the public and the elites understand that the primary system is in effect part of our unwritten Constitution and deserves to be considered, debated, and consciously planned just as if it were part of the written one. If you succeed, it may or may not benefit you in the short term. But the editorial boards will love it, and it will do wonders for your historical legacy.

Michael Dawson
John D. MacArthur Professor of Political Science and the College, University of Chicago.

What can you do to fix our democracy? Mr./Ms. President, you want to bring the country together. Use your "honeymoon" to do something you can only accomplish in the beginning of your first term (after that you'll be too mired in other controversies). Healing often involves bitter medicine.

Lead us on the path to healing by holding up a mirror and have us acknowledge what divides us. Conflict over race has divided us since the nation was founded on slavery and western expansion. Lead us in a national debate about race and how we can jointly overcome the racial divisions that still were so manifest in the primaries. That will help heal our democracy. To stay in office while dealing with racial divisions and not be run out of the White House on a rail, simultaneously have a discussion about how to secure the economic future for all Americans, starting with ensuring universal health care.

Victor Navasky
Publisher emeritus of The Nation. Director, Delacorte Center of Magazine Journalism at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. Author, Matter of Opinion.

I would authorize and encourage each member of the staff to cancel his/her subscription to one mainstream publication and in its place, subscribe to The Nation or a journal of opinion of his/her choice.

And I would seal off Karl Rove's old office and sweep it for bugs, fingerprints, and anthrax powder.

Marc Mauer
Executive Director of the Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C. Author, Race to Incarcerate.

In order to promote civic participation and to develop an effective crime strategy, we should promote a policy of justice reinvestment. This means that we should shift the allocation of resources in order to provide communities with the support they need to strengthen families and develop problem-solving strategies. By scaling back our world record prison population—a back end approach to crime—we could invest resources in preschool education, job training, and transitional programs for people returning home from prison. Initiatives such as these would work to prevent crime far more effectively than expanded incarceration, while also promoting locally-based responses to socioeconomic problems.

David Rakoff
Essayist, journalist, actor and This American Life contributor. Author, Don't Get Too Comfortable.

Roll back the imperial presidency and restore the coequal branches of government. Close Guantanamo, define torture, and make it illegal.

Mark Crispin Miller
NYU Professor of Media Ecology. Author, Fooled Again.

Here's a 12-step program to save US democracy. It's what I would tell the president-elect (assuming that he/she hadn't obviously just been fraudulently "voted" into power!), and so I will insert it here:

1. Repeal the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
2. Replace all electronic voting with hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB).
3. Get rid of computerized voter rolls.
4. Keep all private vendors out of the election process.
5. Make it illegal for the TV networks to declare who won before the vote-count is complete.
6. Set up an exit polling system, publicly supported, to keep the vote-counts honest.
7. Get rid of voter registration rules, by having every citizen be duly registered on his/her 18th birthday.
8. Ban all state requirements for state-issued ID's at the polls.
9. Put all polling places under video surveillance, to spot voter fraud, monitor election personnel, and track the turnout.
10. Have Election Day declared a federal holiday, requiring all employers to allow their workers time to vote.
11. Make it illegal for Secretaries of State to co-chair political campaigns (or otherwise assist or favor them).
12. Make election fraud a major felony, with life imprisonment—and disenfranchisement—for all repeat offenders.

Larry David
Actor, writer, and producer.

There's nothing I could say that could improve upon Mark Miller's 12 points...

Heather Gerken
Professor, Yale Law School, specializing in election law.

If the president asked me to identify a reform proposal for fixing what ails our democracy, I would tell him that he is asking the wrong question. We already spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about what's wrong with our election system and how to fix it. The problem is that we are fighting reform battles on hostile terrain, and almost no one is thinking about how to change the terrain itself. Our focus should not be on end goals but on how to get from "here to there"—how to create an environment in which reform can actually take root.

Reform is an uphill slog in this country. Even a crisis as profound as the one that occurred during the 2000 presidential race prompted only modest reform. Just think about that for a moment. In the wake of the Florida fiasco, there was a strong national consensus that we had a problem, lots of potential solutions, a reform community ready to act, and a cause that was at least superficially appealing to voters. Yet relatively little got done. If that is not a sign of a tenaciously difficult reform environment, I don't know what is. Even a newly minted president is likely to find it hard to get change passed.

Rather than urge the president to fight the same fight in the vague hope that his proposal, unlike so many others, will take root, I would urge him to step back and think about how to create an environment that is more receptive to change generally. It is time to think less about end results and more about the institutional correctives and intermediary strategies that will help us get from "here to there." We have already spent a lot of time identifying the journey's end. Now is the time to figure out how to smooth the road that leads there.

My "here to there" proposal might seem modest when compared to the goals typically articulated by reformers—rewriting campaign finance laws, a nonpartisan system for administering elections, redistricting reform. But proposals like these have been met with a deafening silence from voters and politicians. We know the basic outlines of the reform we need; we don't need a president to help us with that. What we need is an environment in which change can happen. That is where presidential vision and leadership can make a difference.

What would a package of "here to there" strategies look like? Space constraints prevent a full discussion here, but let me offer one set of suggestions about the kinds of strategies that should help us get from here to there. If you ask any expert to identify the root causes of the problems in our election system, partisanship and localism are usually the two main targets for blame. Both make it more difficult to create a professional, unbiased, properly funded system for running our elections.

Unfortunately, phrases like "the perils of partisanship" or the "problem of localism" are usually the punch line to the story, not a starting point for the analysis. The stated goal of many reform proposals is the elimination of partisanship in election administration or the replacement of our localist system, as if one could just wish them away. But partisanship and localism aren't just the problem; they are also the reason that the problem is hard to fix. Partisan and local officials, needless to say, are reluctant to give up the power they wield over the election system.

It would be a mistake to tell the president to focus on proposals that require partisan foxes to stop guarding the henhouse or to imagine that our centuries' old tradition of localism will vanish overnight. Even a president cannot get rid of such entrenched interests so easily. The president should instead focus on how to domesticate the foxes and harness the power of local competition. We may not have an ideal system in place. But we might as well take advantage of the best features of the current system—the powerful engine of partisanship and the intriguing possibilities associated with local competition.

I have spent the last few months writing a book about one promising "here to there" strategy: a Democracy Index, which would rank states and localities based on their performance in administering elections. The Democracy Index would function as the rough equivalent of the U.S. News and World Report rankings for colleges. It would focus on the basic issues that matter to voters: how long were the lines? how many ballots were discarded? how often did the machines break down? It should work for a simple reason: no one wants to be at the bottom of the list.

The Democracy Index should harness localism and partisanship, the usual obstacles to change, in the service of reform. At present, problems with how we run elections are all but invisible to voters. Voters see the symptoms of the problems here and there, but they lack the data that would tell them how well their state is doing compared to other states. Little wonder, then, that states would prefer to fund projects voters can see—new schools, more cops on the beat—rather than put resources into improving our voting system. A ranking not only makes election problems visible to voters, but plays up rivalries between the states.

The Democracy Index should also realign the interests of partisans with those of voters. Right now, it is quite hard for voters to hold election officials accountable for their missteps because we lack the most basic information about how well state election systems are run. If voters cannot assess how well the election system functions, politics—not professionalism—is what matters most for the many secretaries of states or lower-level election officials who want to run for reelection or seek higher office. That means that the fate of an election official depends heavily on her standing within the party, which will provide the resources and support for her next campaign. The current state of affairs creates the wrong kinds of incentives for election officials. It is not just that some are tempted to administer the process in a partisan fashion. They also have less incentive to rock the boat by lobbying other members of their party hard for needed resources. Legislators, after all, would rather fund cops and teachers than machines and poll workers.

The Democracy Index realigns the interests of election officials with the interests of voters. When voters have information about an election official's professional performance, not just her political skills, she should care deeply about how her state ranks. Imagine, for example, you were running against a former Secretary of State like Ohio's Kenneth Blackwell or Florida's Katherine Harris. What better campaign weapon could you imagine than a ranking system showing that your state is one of the worst-run systems in the country? In this fashion, the Democracy Index should help domesticate the foxes. Instead of asking a secretary of state to stop thinking about her political interests in administering the election process, the Democracy Index links her political fate to her professional performance.

I have identified a variety of other "here to there" strategies in a series of posts on Balkinization, here, here, here, here, and here. Many of these proposals similarly harness partisan and local competition in the service of reform. In my view, these modest proposals represent the best shot we have for creating an environment in which bigger, better reform can take place. Thus, if I were advising the president, I'd tell him to start there . . . or, rather, to start with the "here to there."

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Fixing Democracy, Continued

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