Last Tuesday, the CATO Institute hosted a book forum discussing the forthcoming “Not Invited to the Party: How the Demopublicans Have Rigged the System and Left Independents Out in the Cold” (Springer, 2009).
Author James T. Bennett
, a George Mason University economics professor, keynoted, sketching out the ambitious plan for electoral reform that he advances in his book. As the publisher has yet to release the title, a full review isn’t in order, but a few of Bennett’s major points merit addressing more immediately, briefly.
First, Bennett challenges the sanctity of the Australian ballot, enshrined in American political lore as the “secret ballot.” Up until the late 1800’s ballots were printed by private entities, most notably political parties, listing only their candidates. Color coded and often dropped into clear glass jars, polling place observers, who were by no means disinterested, could note how each voter cast his vote, illustrated in vivid detail in George Caleb Bingham’s famous painting, “The County Election.”
Bennett’s real beef with the Australian ballot is not its secrecy, but the fact that when a board of elections decides the criteria for which candidates or parties may be listed on the ballot, it invites government to limit choices, regardless of who sits in office.
Bennett approvingly cites South Carolina, where, he notes, private ballots were in use as recently as the 1950’s. But South Carolina is a curious case to cite with admiration. The most obdurately Solid of the Solid South of yore, the Palmetto State was returning Democratic votes for president and congress in the astoundingly stratospheric range of 85% to 98% from the end of Reconstruction to Favorite Son Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat Segregationist splinter from national Democrats in 1948.
Until then, under the peering, leering glare of a local Democratic Party boss – the likes of Jefferson Davis Hogg – voters who wanted to vote Republican at the county courthouse on Election Day could be not-so-subtly dissuaded from doing so.
So, it’s unlikely a mere coincidence that Thurmond’s bolt to the Republican Party, forcing South Carolina’s lurch into two-party competition, occurred in the 1950s, at the demise of the private ballot. Far from fostering electoral competition, in practice, the private ballot’s last redoubt perpetuated a one-party state past its prime.
Even back in the viscerally politically contested 19th Century, if a voter wished cast his vote for an alternative slate, but the third party had no local organizers disseminating ballots, he could be out of luck. Parties used their privately-raised funds in those cases to ward off competition by omitting the names of other parties’ candidates, just as effectively as government can throw up obstacles today to ballot access.
Bennett also laments demise of at-large congressional elections, and bemoans America’s traditional “first past the post” constituency-based method of choosing elected officials. Contrary to Bennett’s repeated assertion, most jurisdictions that employ this election method do not require the victor to accrue an outright majority, but merely muster a plurality of votes cast. When multiple parties compete, it’s easier for minority parties to reach first place.
In other countries, political culture – a willingness to regard more than two choices as viable – trumps any structural hindrance that “first past the post” may pose for small parties.
Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper wouldn’t even be tenuously clinging to power, as he is today, with a minority government if the Great White North were subject to proportional representation. Canada’s parliamentary elections can be vigorously contested, with up to five parties seriously contesting a riding. Under “first past the post,” Harper’s Tories garnered just shy of a majority of seats, on a mere 38% of the vote. Some Conservative MPs scraped into office with barely a third of the vote. Under PR, his benches would be even more sparsely seated, and a coalition of Québécois nationalists and left-leaning parties would have toppled his government.
In the UK, local council elections are often decided by modest pluralities. “First past the post” has vaulted parties with marginal electoral appeal into office, including the Greens, the Cornish nationalists and the xenophobic and neo-Fascist British National Party. The BNP once snared a council seat in a six-way by-election with a mere 28% of a weak turnout.
An economist by training, Bennett advocates competition and choice in the electoral sphere as he does for the realm of economics. Convinced that the two party system is a cynical pact among Democrats and Republicans designed to preserve their mutual spoils of big government, he yearns for more political competition to amplify the voices of the millions of Americans whose libertarian leanings aren’t welcome in either major party.
So, Bennett’s electoral reform schema is ultimately a means for achieving the end of drastically limiting the scope of goverment. But private ballots in South Carolina extended the life of a one party state whose bosses split the state’s spoils amongst themselves. And, if current polls hold up, and the UK’s Conservatives are on their way to No. 10 Downing Street, it will be thanks to a parliamentary majority achieved with a flurry of MPs who got to Westminster by winning constituencies with only a minority plurality. In the UK and Canada, “first past the post” boosts the parties that are less likely to expand government.
Advocating a diminished state along with expanded electoral competition is preaching to the choir for this libertarian election junky. But Bennett’s comments at CATO suggest that many of the tenets of his reform package may be merely cosmetic, neither encouraging political competition, nor offering hope for reining in government. His proposals merit a more thorough assessment when its full argument is presented upon the tome’s publication.
