[Newspoetry] The Runoff: A Simple Electoral Reform

[Rob Wittig]

[from Philip Wohlstetter,
Godfather of Invisible Seattle
patron saint of electronic literature]





Every crank has an idea.  Every American is a crank.  I am an American,
therefore--well, you get the idea.   Pass this along into the great ocean of
community dialogue.

Best to all of you,

Philip




THE RUNOFF: A SIMPLE ELECTORAL REFORM


Contrary to what pundits and party apparatchiks would have us believe,
neither God nor George Washington proclaimed, "Let there be two parties,
Republican and Democrat, thou shalt worship none other but these."  Not
until after the political founding of our country,  a decade after the
drafting of the Constitution, did our first party system  come into being.
Its ostensible purpose was to mobilize political energies, not (as now) to
exclude them.  In the beginning, it did so.  Federalists vs. Jefferson
Republicans,  Democrats vs. Whigs,  Lincoln Republicans vs. Democrats: the
system kept evolving, spawning new rough-and-tumble rivalries, new
alliances, new ideas, new ways to participate.  Then it ground to a halt.
What we have now, what we have had for a long time,  is a duopoly-or, if you
prefer, what Gore Vidal has called "a hydra-headed single party" that
controls all access to politics.  It is the perfect embodiment of
Tocqueville's "tyranny of the majority," keeping conflict and discussion
within a sanitized and Disneyfied center which it defines without
significant input from the American people.  Are there differences between
the two heads of the hydra?  Absolutely.  They are not minor differences.  A
Bush presidency plus a Republican Congress would, as many know, make life
harder for a lot of people.  That is why I, personally, felt compelled to
vote Gore.
But this sense of compulsion is precisely the flaw at the heart of a system
which ought to inspire a sense of free choice, but never does.  What flaw?
The perennial need to vote tactically, rather than passionately. Vote Nader
and you elect Bush.  Vote Gore and you ratify a party system you detest.
This is not a moral dilemma that builds character.  It is a political flaw
that corrodes citizenship.  Does anybody believe that cynicism and apathy
are not the inevitable results of a closed system, however relatively
benign?  Does anybody seriously believe that a third party can be built as
long as voters know that they are tossing away their vote whenever they vote
for a candidate who has no chance of winning?   Not only will there never be
a viable third party under the current rules.  There will arise no new party
whatsoever.  We are condemned to the Democrats and Republicans from now
until eternity, in saecula saeculorum.  To turn this state of
arteriosclerosis into a virtue, to keep identifying such a senile party
system as the linchpin of a healthy and vital democracy is a  perversity
beyond Orwell.
I'd like to suggest a simple electoral reform that would, at one stroke,
remedy this flaw and re-open the system.  In France,  there is a second
round of voting in the Presidential election.  The top two vote-getters face
a runoff.   Imagine such a system were in place in America.  You or I could
have voted Nader in the first round (garnering him enough of a tally to
qualify for federal funding and gradually build a viable third party) and
then have voted against Bush in the Gore-Bush runoff.   Gone would be all
those incestuous, finger-pointing arguments among Left-Progressives who
share the same broad goals but waste their energies fighting each other
instead of the Right.   Suppose (in the absence of the Fear-of-Bush factor)
Nader and the Greens had gotten, say, 12% of the vote.  Suppose (and who can
suppose otherwise?) the major parties continue to falter in the next four
years.  The Greens could get 22% next time, and then, eight years down the
road, win 40%.  The same goes, of course, for every variety of Right Wing
party from Buchananites to Christian Theocrats.   There would be more teams
on the field.
 Would such a reform tamper with the essence of our American Democratic
identity?  Not at all.  It would merely replace an outdated technology
(which no longer achieves the end for which it was designed) with a newer
one better suited to bringing  energy into a political system that will
eventually mummify without it.  It is not the only such technology that
could do the job.  Similar results could be achieved without a runoff--for
example, by allowing minority party candidates to transfer their vote totals
to a top contender,  providing they have announced their intentions before
the election.   The point is not to make a fetish of whatever technology we
adopt, but to focus on the goal: to re-open the system, to boost
participation, to aid new party formation.
Let's not be naïve.  The Republican and Democratic party machines are not
going to say, "Hey, good idea, let's go for it."  They will fight to
preserve their monopoly.  Wise men from the parties, aided and abetted by
media pundits, will ridicule the proposal.  It would, they will say, invite
the extremes into politics, sharpen conflicts.  Better to have only a 50%
turnout.  Apathy, they will argue, operates as an additional buffer against
instability and faction, showing once again how little they trust the
safeguards that the Founders built into the system by separating
Legislative, Executive and Judiciary, and how much they prefer to introduce
unspoken (and unconstitutional) checks and balances.   They will cite
ostensible constitutional obstacles, decry the expense, warn that it is the
first step on the slippery slope to (gasp!) a parliamentary system-and, if
none of that works, they'll play dirty..
But right now, in this extraordinary parenthesis, when the wounds of the
election are still fresh, when Florida's own version of Imelda Marcos is
about to choose the American President over the will of the people in her
state, when voters and excluded candidates are more alive than ever to the
perversities of the electoral system, will there ever be a better moment to
take arms against it?  Let the Greens make this their primary message and
the Buchananites too.  Let Ralph Nader, Pat Buchanan, Jesse Ventura raise
their voices together and speak out in favor of opening up the process-and
why wouldn't they?-let them take some kind of dog-and-pony show from
state-to-state and they will generate a tremendous groundswell of popular
support and put the duopoly on the defensive, both domestically and
internationally.
There is no task more important.  Not abolishing the electoral college.  Not
reforming campaign finances.  Not any of the urgent issues that could last
begin to be heard consistently were the system to finally open up.  To those
who say, "this cannot be changed," I can only answer "this must be changed."
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Philip Wohlstetter