[Dear DemocracySOS readers,if you like what you are reading, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work. Or, if you are already a subscriber, consider giving a $5 gift subscription to a friend, colleague or family member. Thanks.]

Remember the dark comedy Election, from 1999, when a high school teacher (Matthew Broderick) tries to throw out some ballots and steal the student government presidency away from an obnoxiously overambitious and manipulative student (Reese Witherspoon)? The film was an intelligent satire and effective indictment of the “win at all costs” mentality that had deeply infected US politics by the end of the Bill Clinton presidency. That was in the thick of when Monica Lewinsky, cigars as dildos, blowjobs in the Oval Office and the Newt Gingrich-led impeachment scandalized the national zeitgeist. The whole nation held its breath in disbelief, as did nations around the world. I remember thinking then that we had really reached a new national nadir. “This is what politics has sunk to? Really???”

But Donald Trump has lowered the bar to a whole new low level. Off-the-charts low level. Like, you’re so low you could play handball against the curb of the street. Trump is preparing to run his own version of Election, trying to steal this November’s election by any means necessary, as the US creeps another few steps toward a Banana Republic.

Already we have seen the following plots and ploys:

* unprecedented mid-decade redistricting, trying to hyper-rig as many congressional district lines as possible in favorable GOP states like Texas, Alabama, Louisiana and others to squeeze more Republican House seats out of the district map – all of that done with the collaboration of the right-wing US Supreme Court;

* use of presidential directives attempting to impose new federal guidelines for citizenship verification during voter registration;

* the White House has tried to legally force state election offices to turn over voter registration lists and personal data as part of its effort to compile federal databases of “citizenship lists” as a prelude to disqualifying certain voters;

* Trump and his Department of Homeland Security chief have threatened to use ICE and other federal agents at the voting polls, which would certainly create an atmosphere of intimidation and surveillance;

* Trump allies like the dangerously goofball Sheriff Chad Bianco, who last year illegally confiscated 650,000 ballots in Riverside County, California, may well have been running a dress rehearsal for 2026 as part of a national group of “constitutional sheriffs” that claims sheriffs are the supreme law in those counties in which they preside, and can ignore any law they deem unconstitutional, confiscate ballots they deem suspicious, and who knows what other outrage they might be cooking up.

In addition, Donald Trump and top aides have been using the bully pulpit for a near-constant disinformation campaign that has repeatedly claimed, with scant evidence, that voter fraud is widespread and that the 2020 presidential election – which Trump lost by a significant margin – was stolen. In the event that the Republicans have an electoral meltdown in November, Trump is clearly trying to shape public perception and establish a negative narrative that will allow him to delegitimize any unfavorable election results.

Share

The corruption of the US Postal Service and other federal agencies

Now comes Trump’s latest audacious Election-style gambit: corrupting the United States Postal Service and preparing the groundwork for tossing out voters’ mailed-in ballots in certain parts of the country. Last year, the White House took a very active role in the selection of the current postmaster general, David Steiner, a Trump ally, and more recently has been attempting to install his allies in other Post Office oversight roles. With Democrats historically using mail-in voting at higher rates than Republicans, Trump has publicly said that mail voting is “dangerous” and could “rig the election” for the Democrats (even as he himself has voted by mail in two elections this year).

Last March, the president signed an executive order seeking to deploy the Postal Service to verify that anyone who receives a mail-in ballot is a US citizen. The administration is creating state-by-state lists of citizens to help determine voting eligibility, and is seeking to require states to submit their voter data to the Postal Service as a condition for having their mail ballots delivered. Even more troubling, the Postal Service has been hastily trying to develop a complex computer-based screening portal for mail-in ballots in time for the November election. The new system, if the courts allow it to be used, would require states to tell the Postal Service which voters will be sent ballots so that those voters can be verified as eligible voters before the ballot is delivered.

And get this: already a court order has temporarily barred the Postal Service from implementing the president’s plan, yet the agency has acknowledged that it has disobeyed the court order and continued to develop the portal anyway.

So Trump’s Postal Service is illegally developing a computer screening system to implement an illegal plan. Putting 2 + 2 together, it appears that the White House is actually trying to control the delivery of mail ballots in order to interfere with the midterm elections.

But it gets worse. A whistleblower within the Postal Service just this week came forward and publicly revealed that the computer screening system is being developed in such a rushed and sloppy manner that it may well jeopardize voting by mail across the country. With the hastily devised ballot trap that the Postal Service is cobbling together, the whistleblower says that many voters may not even receive their ballots. In other cases, if a single mistake on a single ballot in a large batch of ballots is found, it may cause the entire batch of ballots to be rejected en masse. The amount of time that it would take to create a well-functioning system of this nature would normally take years to develop, test and then implement. As of today, that work is not anywhere close to being completed, even as twenty states will start mailing out their mail-in ballots within the next couple of weeks. Yet the Trump administration is filing lawsuits to enforce its use.

In the latest reports, hundreds of federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security are scouring voter rolls managed by the states, and are using identifiable information about individual voters, such as their dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers, to look them up on those rolls and figure out if they should be disqualified.

Don’t get me wrong, stopping noncitizens from voting is a reasonable goal -- except for the fact that there’s little evidence that it has occurred in the past other than in a few isolated incidents. A database managed by the conservative Heritage Foundation has identified roughly 100 instances of noncitizen voting over the last quarter-century. More recently, roughly 400 noncitizens — a tiny fraction of the electorate — voted in New Jersey after a software glitch led to their improper registration.

So the voter fraud that Donald Trump is hyperventilating over is a wholly manufactured myth. Closer examination of the details of the Trump plan reveals that the real goal seems to be to use the Post Office to prevent mail-in ballots from being mailed to certain anti-Trump voters, or delivered for counting; and beyond that, to sow so much chaos in the elections that it provides justification for legal maneuverings and lawsuits to prevent certain ballots from being counted. We’re talking the potential for multiple Florida’s in 2000 going on all across the country, especially in those strategic places where the elections are close and control of the US House and Senate are at stake.

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

For Trump, election meddling is “business as usual”

Trumps meddling in elections should not come as a surprise. The White House has slammed its giant thumb on the electoral scales in numerous countries. In Argentina, Trump promised $20 billion to prop up the struggling economy but only if voters supported fellow right-wing President Javier Milei in legislative elections. In Honduras, Trump issued a presidential pardon to a former Honduran president who was serving 45 years in a US prison for running a narco-state that imported cocaine to the United States…even as Trump was claiming to be jailing immigrants for drug-related offenses and escalating his military campaign against drug trafficking in Venezuela. Then Trump did everything he could to boost that pardoned president’s political party right before Hondurans cast their ballots.

In Brazil, the Trump administration has actively tried to help the family of former right wing President Jair Bolsonaro, who sits in prison for trying to overthrow the previous presidential election that he lost, and whose son is now running for president against President Lula da Silva on October 4. As part of his influence campaign, Trump imposed a 25% tariff on Brazilian imports. The Lula government has accused two senior US State Department officials of meeting with the Bolsonaro camp with the intention to sow public distrust in Brazil’s elections ahead of next month’s vote.

Trump also interfered in elections in Hungary, Colombia, Poland and elsewhere, with Trump himself making personal endorsements of candidates, vice president JD Vance appearing at those candidates’ campaign stops and other types of support. And who can forget that the Trump administration also kidnapped the sitting president of Venezuela and then made a back-to-colonialism deal with the US-installed puppet government there, seizing over a fifth of Venezuela’s enormous oil reserves.

The man will stop at nothing. To Trump, criminality is just another way of accomplishing your goal. If democracy must be trampled in the process, so be it.

What should Democrats do? Don’t trust the mail!

Voting rights and Democratic-affiliated groups have filed lawsuit after lawsuit, and multiple federal courts have temporarily blocked or struck down these executive orders, ruling that the US Constitution grants individual states the authority to run elections. But a final ruling from the US Supreme Court about the mail-in ballot restrictions is still pending, so all bets are off.

Beyond that, the US Postal Service is in the hands of Trump allies. Who knows what cards they have up their sleeves? Or how many of the postal delivery people are Trump allies, and know that Trump will pardon any of them if they get caught making certain ballots illegally disappear. Any mail carrier already knows if you are a Democratic household from your yard signs or the type of mail you regularly receive. Given the charged and polarized political climate, it seems prudent to assume that a fair number of mail-in ballots are going to be “lost,” either in the delivery of the ballot to households or in the return of the ballots to election admin central via the mail.

Given the high level of unprecedented uncertainty – and what’s at stake in this election -- I would strongly recommend that Democrats should launch an all-out educational campaign telling voters to not vote by mail this year. It’s just too risky. It would be better to vote in person at your local polling station. Even ballot dropoff sites might not be safe enough, because if too many people use that method, the dropoff boxes will quickly fill up and will no longer be able to accept your ballot.

In short, the only sure bet is to show up at your local precinct or at City Hall and vote. And try to do it in the middle of the day when the voting line won’t be so long, as it will be in the morning when polls first open and in the evening after people get out of work.

Don’t trust the mail, don’t trust the US Postal Service. Tell your friends, coworkers, family members and anyone else who needs to know. Donald Trump has launched a nakedly corrupt power grab to try and throw out votes and otherwise intimidate people to deter them from voting. And he has weaponized the US Postal Service, as well as Homeland Security and other federal agencies, as part of his vile and sleazy campaign.

In trying to explain away Trump’s criminality, White House spokeswoman Lauren “I drank the Kool Aid” Bis has said, “President Trump has been clear, and he is absolutely right. We fix this now, or we lose our country.”

In actual fact, it looks like we are breathtakingly close to losing our country – to Donald Trump and his authoritarian cronies trying to undermine our representative democracy. We are on the cusp of a historic moment. Let’s hope that historians look back at this time and tell the uplifting story of how Americans were ready for this test, and stepped up and did the right thing.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

Most Americans have been suffering under our antiquated 18th century democratic methods for so long that we don’t realize there are alternatives. There’s an old riddle, “We don’t know who discovered water, but we can be certain it wasn’t a fish.” That is to say, we naturally take for granted the nature of the sea in which we swim.

Consider the situation in the South, where about 59 percent of all African-Americans live today. States like Mississippi (36% black), Georgia (31% black) and Louisiana (31% black) lead the way in the evolution of multi-racial societies, with Alabama and North and South Carolina not far behind. Yet tragically, because we elect our legislatures using single-seat, “winner take all” districts, partisanship in the South has become racialized in a dangerous way.

Heading into the 2026 elections, the 38 US House seats from the five states of the Deep South (Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina) are held by 27 conservative white Republicans (23 of them men) and 10 liberal African American Democrats (three women, with one Democratic seat vacant). There were no elected black or non-white Republicans, and moderate representatives, which often act as the bridgebuilders in a legislature, have virtually disappeared from the South. FairVote’s “Dubious Democracy” report shows that only a handful of these elections have been even remotely competitive in recent years, as voters have bunkered down in solidly red and blue winner-take-all districts, exacerbating the partisan and racial divide.

Not only is partisanship racialized, but the handful of black Democrats represent urban-based seats, while Republicans dominate the rest, adding a sharp geographic schism to this polarization. That also has contributed to the extinction of elected white moderates. This mix of race, partisanship and geography constitutes an extremely toxic brew; it usually has been explosive whenever it has appeared in US history.

Share

Post-Callais: the promise of multi-seat districts with RCV

This racially partisan and polarized geographic checkerboard got a huge steroid shot following the Supreme Court decision in March, Louisiana v. Callais. The right-wing majority on the US Supreme Court strangled to death the Voting Rights Act, allowing conservative red states an even greater free hand to rejigger the legislative district lines in the middle of the decade to block racial representation. Some voting rights advocates are scrambling to pass voting rights legislation in targeted states to preserve some scraps of the legacy, but it’s kind of like watching water circle down the drain to the point where it won’t be long before it is bone dry.

But let’s play a game of What if…instead of using single-seat districts, even so modest a change as combining three adjoining districts into one three-seat district elected by proportional ranked choice voting would advance fair and less racialized and polarized representation to an encouraging degree. Indeed FairVote has modeled how a PRCV system would perform in all 50 states. Let’s look at its proposed plan for some of these southern states, starting with Louisiana.

In recent years, Louisiana’s black population, which comprises nearly a third of the state, elected two black Democrats and four white Republicans to its six single-district seats. But post- Louisiana v. Callais, the districts have been redrawn and Black communities are no longer linked together for electoral success, instead many of them have been absorbed into majority-white areas. Louisiana’s previous 6th district, which was 56.5 percent black, is now only 26 percent black. So the number of elected black House members is about to drop to one.

But what if, instead of using six single-seat districts in Louisiana, which are so vulnerable to manipulation by both partisan Supreme Court judges and legislatures, we used two multi-seat districts of three seats each, elected by proportional voting? Here’s how that could look:

In the Fair Representation Plan (purple map), districts A and B would both have three seats, and would each contain half of the state’s population. Using proportional ranked choice voting, any candidate that receives 25% of the vote in one of those three-seat districts would win a seat. Candidates could run district-wide, or more likely would try to win their votes in the region(s) of the district where she or he is most popular. So this configuration would create a flexible mix of some geographic-based representation combined with regional and city representation. Democrats and Republican voters throughout the state would be able to elect winners in proportion to their overall share of the popular vote.

Based on FairVote’s proposed plan, grounded in a preliminary analysis of the latest demographic data, in all likelihood Republicans would elect four of these six seats (instead of the soon-to-be five); and Democrats would elect two seats, both of them potentially black Democrats. African American voters in Louisiana would have the power to elect one of their preferred candidates in each district, even assuming extreme racially polarized voting, because they are over 25% of each district’s voting population. Moreover, instead of the unfair and racially biased plan that will be used in this November’s election, in which only those small number of black voters that live in the heavily Democratic and black district around New Orleans are able to elect a representative, with the Fair Representation Plan fully 100% of African-Americans, no matter where they live, would be able to cast a vote in a district that would elect a black representative. Currently “orphaned” black voters, whose votes don’t help elect anyone, would have an electoral home. The same could be said for white Republican voters, no matter where they live.

That in turn means that candidates would be visiting these voters’ townships and communities, making campaign promises and asking for their votes. Entire regions of the state that currently have no electoral hope whatsoever of casting a vote that impacts final outcomes suddenly would be valued and empowered.

A similar retrenchment in racial representation has occurred in next-door Alabama. Alabama’s 2023 redrawing, which was struck down by a lower federal court as intentionally discriminatory, has been restored by the US Supreme Court, post-Callais. Like Louisiana’s new map, it eliminates one of the state’s two majority-Black districts, in part by gerrymandering the line so that Mobile and Montgomery, two majority-Black cities that are reliable Democratic-leaning areas, are now in two separate districts, one of those districts being heavily Republican.

But what if…Alabama’s seven single-seat House members were elected from one three-seat district (25% victory threshold) and one four-seat district (20% victory threshold). This would result in four Republican seats (instead of the soon-to-be six), two Democratic seats (instead of currently one), and one swing seat that either party could win, introducing some real competition in Alabama for the first time in decades. Blacks would potentially fill the two Democratic seats. Perhaps even a black Republican would win a seat.

Proportional ranked choice voting does not favor any one political party, it is designed to ensure that all parties win their fair share of representation. In Massachusetts, Democrats currently win all nine of the U.S. House seats, as if there isn’t a single Republican in the entire state deserving of representation. If Massachusetts used PRCV, Republicans would likely win three of those nine seats.

Currently these five Deep South states with large black populations elect ten black House members out of the 38 seats up for grabs. But FairVote’s “full representation” plans would likely result in13 to 14 seats for black congressmembers. And black voters would be empowered no matter where they live, instead of only in the handful of districts that have been racially gerrymandered. Formerly orphaned black voters would have an effective vote that actually counts towards electing their preferred representative.

Indeed, the number of African Americans living in a district with high enough population numbers to reach the victory threshold would more than double, going from currently 40% to 98% of black voters. In FairVote’s plan for North Carolina, the percentage of black voters with an effective vote would increase from 19% to 100%. Latino voters also would be closer to the victory threshold in many states; and more white moderates would certainly get elected to Congress.

Using FairVote’s representation plans based on multi-seat districts and ranked choice voting, broad representation would be accomplished in competitive elections without gerrymandering a single district, or worrying about judicial courts sabotaging it all. House elections would result in elected representatives that more accurately reflect the actual demographics of the South today. And different communities of interest, even if they are polarized, would no longer be fighting over a limited commodity – political representation in winner-take-all districts. Each side would be able to win its fair share of representation, drawing from its base of supporters but also using the ranked ballots to build broader coalitions and attract more voters. That in turn would help lessen the degree of division and polarization.

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

Bi-partisan potential in the West and Northeast

If the racially-divided South can implement an electoral system that provides diverse and less polarizing representation, then anywhere can. Using multi-seat districts with RCV in other regions of the country would yield similar results. In New England, moderate Rockefeller Republicans, once a granitic mainstay of Yankee politics that have also become an extinct species, would be electorally viable again. In the Mountain and Prairie states—which in recent years have experienced a virtual avalanche of extreme polarization amidst right-wing gains that threaten post-democratic breakdown – it would be possible to once again elect moderate Republicans like former Montana governor Marc Racicot and the Solutions Caucus, and moderate Democrats like Rep. Pat Williams.

In the 2018 midterm elections, congressional Republicans’ biggest losses came among their most moderate members, further widening the partisan divide. Mavericks like Republican Congressmen Adam Kinzinger and John Katko, and Democrat Stephanie Murphy, who have recently declined to run for reelection because of pressure from extremists within their parties, would be able to cultivate support from both Republican and Democratic moderates in their multi-seat districts. With more moderates getting elected, the resulting cross-fertilization in Republican and Democratic party caucuses would lessen some of the polarization and harsh rancor that now infects the United States Congress.

Following the recent Supreme Court-licensed mid-decade redistricting, in which 10 states – Alabama, California, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah -- rejiggered their district lines to make even more seats uncompetitive, perhaps 20 House seats out of 435 are considered “competitive” for either major party to win. Even more districts have become lopsided one-party fiefdoms. Multi-seat districts elected through PRCV would stir up this racket of incumbent protection and lack of competition, and would give more moderate candidates a chance of winning.

There is much to gain from the use of proportional representation electoral systems in the South, West, Northeast and elsewhere -- from diverse representation and more minority voters actually helping to elect their favorite candidates without gerrymandered districts, to moderate voters having a chance to elect moderate representatives, to a reduction in geographic-based polarization, to independent voters and candidates having a chance to win a seat by reaching the lower (25%) victory threshold, to orphaned voters everywhere having an opportunity to cast a vote that helps elect their preferred representatives.

Any of the 50 state legislatures could adopt multi-seat districts right now, and elect those seats using proportional voting. And if Congress changed one federal law that mandates single-seat districts to simply allow an option of using multi-seat districts, then various states could try using proportional voting to elect their US House delegations. No changes to the US Constitution are necessary.

Americans just need to get outside the rusty iron box that we have entombed ourselves in, and try the magic of multi-seat districts elected by ranked choice voting. This and other proportional voting methods are already being used by most of the world’s established democracies.

Oh, the answer to the riddle… of who discovered water? It was a flying fish.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

Ranked ballots are one of the wonders of modern representative democracy because they solve real democratic dilemmas that other methods can’t solve. Even a Party List Proportional method offers a voter only a single-choice and thereby replicates one of the worst defects of the truly antiquated “plurality wins all” method. Here’s what I mean.

In this previous DemocracySOS article, we reviewed the recent Democratic primaries for governor in Wisconsin and US Senate in Michigan, in which both winning candidates prevailed by an eyelash with less than a majority of the popular vote. In the Wisconsin governor’s race, the winner had only 39.8 percent of the popular vote, meaning three out of every five Democratic voters preferred another candidate. If the supporters of the other candidates in these two races had been allowed to cast a runoff vote to determine the majority winner, a different candidate might have won. In truth, in both races the Democrats can’t be sure that the correct candidates – the candidates preferred by the most voters – actually prevailed.

Moreover, a large chunk of the Democratic Party voters wasted their votes on minor spoiler Democratic candidates who had no chance of winning – including some “zombie” candidates who had dropped out and were no longer even running for the nomination! Yet those voters couldn’t change their votes to a continuing candidate. In the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, more than 3 million voters nationwide cast ballots for candidates who had withdrawn from the race; millions more wasted their vote on a candidate who didn’t reach the 15% threshold used in Democrat presidential primaries to qualify for being awarded delegates. Zombie votes, wasted votes, spoiler candidates, non-majority winners…this is what the Democrats served up in these primaries, which not only is frustrating for voters but also undermines the legitimacy of the non-majority winners and undercuts their ability to beat the Republican candidates in the November general election.

If, instead of the “pick-one” plurality system, the Democrats had used an “instant runoff,” otherwise known as “ranked choice voting for single winners” which gives voters the option of ranking their favorite candidates and elect the candidate with majority support, all of these completely unnecessary negative defects – frustrating to candidates, parties and voters alike – would have been avoided. With IRV/RCV, if a voter’s first choice can’t win their vote automatically migrates to the voter’s second choice, and then their third choice, and so on.

Or look at the mess of our presidential elections. Since 1992, five out of nine presidential elections saw a candidate win with less than a popular majority. In two of those, the winning candidate had fewer popular votes than the loser. In 2016, if you added up all the votes of center-left candidates, including Democrat Hillary Clinton (48.2%), Green Party candidate Jill Stein (1.1%), add a good chunk of the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson (3.3%) (since he said he wanted “nothing to do with the GOP”), and Evan McMullin (0.5%) who was a former Republican “Never Trumper,” Hillary easily would have crossed the 50% threshold and prevailed in enough states to win the electoral college vote. The same happened in 2000, with the Gore-Nader center-left split allowing George W. Bush to win with only 47.9% of the national popular vote. Using instant runoff voting within the 50 states would have changed the outcome of those two presidential elections and elected majority winners. Think of how history would have changed. No Trump, no Bush.

Or how about the 1992 victory for Democrat Bill Clinton with only 43% while independent Ross Perot had 18.9% and the GOP’s George HW Bush pulled 37.5%. If the Perot voters had been allowed to select an “instant runoff” choice, would Clinton have won? Bush and Clinton would have had to woo Perot supporters throughout the campaign; who knows which candidate would have done that most successfully.

We accept these bizarre election results as “normal,” as “just the way it is,” but it’s really a national travesty. We elect the most powerful political leader in the world, and in most presidential elections over the last 30 years our defective electoral method was not competent enough to ensure that the most popular candidate – the one preferred by a popular majority -- actually won. If we saw this happen in another country on a regular basis, we would call it a Banana Republic.

Share

“Majority winners” should be a sacred, inviolate democratic value

There is a simple operative principle at work here: if a candidate wins an election for a single-seat office and has garnered less than a popular majority, that means you can’t be absolutely 100% certain that the right candidate — the most popular candidate — won. Every time that occurs, it violates key democratic values.

Throughout US history, there have been 19 out of 47 (40%) presidential elections when the winning candidate won the office with less than a majority (50%) of the national popular vote. Out of these, five winners actually received fewer individual popular votes than their direct opponents, while the rest won with a plurality (the most votes but less than a majority). The lowest ever was Abraham Lincoln in 1860, pulling only 39.7% of the national vote in a very split field. But the regional divisions on the cusp of a civil war were so dramatic that Lincoln won 59% of the electoral college vote and the presidency. In 1876, Samuel Tilden won a 50.9% majority of the popular vote, yet lost a very controversial electoral college count – by a single vote -- to Ruther(fraud) B. Hayes.

It’s understandable why Americans in the 19^th century put up with bogus election methods that couldn’t guarantee that the most popular candidate would win. Methods like instant runoff voting/ranked choice voting hadn’t been invented yet, and the challenges of election administration and potential corruption required a degree of systemic simplicity that prevented improvement.

But what is our excuse today? Why do we still put up with using an electoral method that sometimes elects the wrong winner and makes voters feel like they can’t vote for their favorite candidates, lest it turns out that vote for a “spoiler” candidate actually contributed to their “greatest evil” candidate winning? A vote for Nader, Perot, etc. helped elect George W Bush and Bill Clinton. But the use of ranked ballots would have changed all that.

No question, ranked ballots are a miracle of modern democracy. Let us count the ways that ranked ballots unequivocally improve our elections and our representative government, adding a unique enhancement that no other electoral system can provide.

1) More voter choice liberated voters.

Voters have the option of ranking their ballots, 1, 2, 3, and if their favorite first choice candidate can’t win, their vote automatically moves to their second choice, then their third choice, etc. What a gift this is – voters no longer have to worry about spoiler candidates or feel forced to vote for the lesser of two evils. Voters no longer have to strategically try to figure out which candidates are more likely to win, and can enjoy unprecedented sincerity in their choosing of candidates. In the 2000 presidential election, Ralph Nader voters could have ranked Al Gore second or third, ensuring that when Nader was eliminated from the tabulation because of too little support, their votes would not have been thrown out because they would have had the option of giving their vote to Al Gore. Gary Johnson’s Libertarian voters would have had the option of casting their runoff vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump…Ross Perot voters for Bill Clinton or George HW Bush. No other major electoral system empowers voters like this. This aspect of ranked ballots offers an unqualified improvement for democracy and representative government.

2) Liberates candidates too.
More candidates are liberated to run without fear of playing spoiler, or without fear of splitting the vote with like-minded candidates. For example, multiple progressive candidates can all run in the same race and instead of competing against each other and splitting the votes of their own base of support, causing them all to lose, now that vote can coalesce around the strongest of their bloc’s candidates. The same is true of multiple moderate or conservative candidates. Like-minded candidates can even campaign together, much as Democrats Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander did in New York City’s mayoral election, and like women of color candidates have done in Minneapolis, St. Paul and New York City’s city council elections. Previously those candidates were told “wait your turn, if you run you will split our vote.” But with RCV’s ranked ballots, all those candidates could run at the same time and actually support each other. Do you have any idea what a sea level change this is, during a time when politics has become a bitter, hack attack zero-sum game? Research and opinion polls show that voters love this feature about RCV.

3) Incentivizes coalition-building.

The typical “plurality wins all” election encourages candidates to campaign with a strategy of “you against me.” But RCV changes the incentives for how you win. Suddenly you have to attract second and third rankings from the supporters of other candidates. That means you need to be mindful of what you say about those candidates. If you attack them, their supporters will not rank you. Instead, you have to find some degree of common ground. In a San Francisco mayoral election, the two leading progressive candidates co-endorsed each other and did TV ads together, trying to encourage a progressive wave of voters and organizations, instead of “don’t vote for her, vote for me.” In Maine, two Democratic candidates for governor endorsed each other and ran TV ads together (see their ad here). Building a coalition with other candidates in turn results in another crucial feature that voters’ love….

4) Less mudslinging campaigns.

If attacking your opponents may well be a losing strategy, and if finding common ground and building coalitions with other candidates is a winning strategy, then the campaigns themselves become less about slinging mud and personal attacks and more about the issues. In one mayoral election in Oakland using RCV, a leading candidate saw a house with another candidate’s yard sign. In a typical plurality election, this candidate would have skipped that house. Instead, she rang the doorbell and told the homeowner what she had in common with the other candidate, and asked this voter for her second ranking. In Alaska, some candidates told a similar story. Less mudslinging, more coalition building. No other electoral system incentivizes this kind of positive behavior among candidates and the organizations supporting those candidates. We have seen this dynamic play out in election after election.

Upgrade to $5 subscription

5) Your vote becomes an expression of your personhood.

Imagine you are a gay Republican. In the current “plurality-wins-all” system, you probably will have to pick whether you want to vote for a gay candidate or a Republican candidate, quite possibly a MAGA candidate. With RCV, you can express who you are – rank a gay independent candidate first, a moderate Republican candidate second, perhaps a gay moderate Democrat third. Or how about if you are a moderate Democrat who supports gun owner’s rights and tighter control at the border. You could rank as your first choice a moderate Democrat with a sensible position on border policy, and a pro-gun moderate Republican candidate second. How about a Green Party supporter who strongly supports the Green New Deal. You could rank first a Green candidate for Congress and rank a progressive Democrat second and a pro-environment Republican third. RCV gives the voter a more expressive vote that allows you to define yourself. You aren’t locked into a narrow choice of candidates who don’t represent your fullness.

Interestingly, there are some political scientists who are supporters of a Party List PR system, and who criticize this “maximum expression” of ranked ballots. Some political scientists call it “vote leakage” (or inter-coalition “vote leakage”) when a voter’s vote transfers from one political party to another. They see this as a dilution of a political party’s ability to hold onto its votes. Instead of this being a feature that liberates voters to pick their favorite candidates and parties rather than the “lesser evil,” to these academics the votes don’t belong to the voters they belong to the political party who has received the primary allegiance of the voter. The idea that many voters are actually complex mixtures of political sympathies, and that in a mature democracy should be able to express that personal blend, is not valued. While I am fully aware of the desirability of fair and proportional representation along party lines, nevertheless I find this view to have anti-voter consequences.

6) More candidates of color elected.

RCV makes it easier for women and candidates of color to run for office and win. With RCV, women and minority candidates aren’t pressured to wait their turn, nor can they be automatically labelled as “spoilers.” Research finds that candidates of color are more likely to win in RCV elections, in part because voters of color tend to rank more candidates than white voters. And we have seen some remarkable results: women of color and people of color majorities have been elected to city councils as distinctive as Minneapolis, St. Paul, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Oakland. Or look at the miracle of New York City: it’s ridiculous that it has not been more widely reported that, since New York City began using RCV in its 2021 elections, the number of women-of-color elected to the city council has increased from only a handful to 26 out of 51 seats. And the number of women overall has reached 31 out of 51 (61%). Yes, the city council for America’s largest and most dynamic city is majority women-of-color and one of the most racially and gender diverse in the country. New York City has had public financing of campaigns and fusion voting for many years, but not until New Yorkers started using RCV did they see such stunning results.

7) Less polarization.

Because of these features of ranked ballots, including more coalition-building and less mud-slinging, RCV meets the current moment more than other electoral systems. People can come together around the ranked ballots and its full range of choices, around being able to select more than one party or one candidate instead of the same old “you against me,” and not feel trapped into being taken for granted by a single party. PR proponents talk about the importance of “multiparty democracy,” which I agree with, but to the average person “more parties” might well sound like “more conflict.” Because even in a Party List PR system, a certain number of voters would still be stuck in the same old bind of potentially picking a single political party that does not reach the victory threshold and thereby wasting their vote. RCV will result in less polarization and the freedom to pick multiple choices instead of only a single political party or candidate. In states like Alaska, which used to be highly polarized between MAGA Republicans and Democrats, RCV has led to coalition-building within the legislature between moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats, who have formed a cross-partisan governing coalition (see “Alaska – of all places – shows what a bipartisan coalition could look like”). For reasons I truly do not understand, certain political scientists see this kind of bipartisan coalition-building as somehow undermining the cohesion and influence of political parties as vote-maximizing entities.

8) Ranked ballots can be used to elect both majority-winners and to elect proportional representation.

Ranked choice voting comes in two different varieties – for electing single-winner offices, in which it functions as an “instant runoff” to elect majority winners in a single election; or for electing legislatures from multi-seat districts, using the “single transferable vote” method (also known as proportional ranked choice voting, PRCV) to elect political parties or nonpartisan groupings of like-minded voters via a system of proportional representation. By using ranked ballots in all elections – from executive offices like president, governor, mayor (instant runoff) to city councils and legislatures (proportional representation) – that allows voters to learn a uniform method in all elections and to lessen the chances of voter confusion. In regards to which PR method is best for the United States, no other major electoral method empowers voters with all the features of proportional ranked choice voting and ranked ballots, not even Party List PR because…

9) Ranked ballots would significantly improve Party List PR methods

Party List PR (PLPR) democracies would be wise to include ranked ballots in their own elections. Proponents of PLPR apparently have not noticed that one-choice PLPR shares one of the worst defects of plurality elections – if a voter picks wrong with their single choice, her/his vote gets wasted. For example, in Germany during a recent election 34 political parties competed but only five parties crossed the 5% threshold and won seats. Votes for the other 29 parties were wasted, resulting in 16 percent of the List vote going to losing parties. In Germany’s more recent 2025 elections, there were 29 parties and only six of them won seats. Approximately 20 percent of the List vote went to parties that fell short of five percent. Germany could have allowed those voters to rank more than one political party, and if their first choice can’t get elected, their vote would transfer to their next-ranked party. That would reduce the number of wasted votes and increase the proportionality of the elections.

Other List PR democracies, including Italy, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia and New Zealand have been plagued by similar spoiler dynamics that could be fixed by using ranked ballots. Without ranked ballots in the previous Israeli election using Party List PR, nearly 300,000 anti-Netanyahu votes were wasted on small parties that did not win representation, allowing his rightwing, religious bloc to barely squeak out a majority of legislative seats despite winning less than a majority of the popular vote. So these kinds of “wasted vote” dynamics can have tragic outcomes. Party List-based democracies should improve their electoral systems by incorporating some version of the Spare Vote, which combines ranked ballots in a List PR system.

Ranked ballots, one of the wonders of modern democracy science

Ranked ballots are one of the wonders of modern democracy science and should be incorporated into nearly every election situation, at federal, state and local levels. Minnesota held a public election using ranked choice voting to choose its new state flag design. RCV should be used to elect names of stadiums or sports team, favorite restaurants, it should be used in opinion polls and in any situation in which you want to receive a true representation of majority voter sentiment without worrying about spoilers, wasted votes and too many voters feeling frustrated and disempowered by picking losers. Once I was with a group of colleagues following a political reform conference, and we selected our pitcher of beer by ranking our choices. Even Party List PR elections, whether “closed” or “open,” which together constitute the mostly widely used electoral system in the world, would be improved by allowing voters to rank their favorite choices.

Ranked ballots are an unequivocal improvement in representative democracy, and it’s puzzling to me why a handful of political scientists like to trash them. Some people believe ranked ballots are complicated, or make the voting process more complicated, but there is no research, based on actual, real-world elections, to support that view. In actual fact, there is a lot of bad anti-RCV research out there using questionable methodologies, as attorney Paul Haughey and I have exposed in our report, “Shaky Political Science.” The fact is, millions of voters in the US, as well as millions more in Australia, Ireland and other places, going back many decades, have been using ranked ballots and have handled the task of ranking candidates as easily as they handle the task of ranking their favorite flavors of ice cream or movies. In exit polls from New York City’s RCV elections in 2025, 96% of voters said their ballot was simple to complete, including at least 94% of each racial group; 76% said they want to keep or expand RCV to other elections in New York City.

Ranked choice voting has established an impressive track record across the country because it delivers better choices, better campaigns, and better governance. It has been used in a thousand elections by over 16 million voters in over 50 US cities, counties and states, at local, state and federal levels. Six Southern states – Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina – use ranked choice ballots for their military and overseas voters so they can participate in their states’ delayed two-round runoffs, by having them rank their runoff choices at the same time as their first choice. Another magical use of ranked ballots.

If we used RCV on the national level, I have no doubt that it would result in a dramatic improvement in American politics. The attractive features that are on display in RCV elections in dozens of US cities and states are all ones that our national politics desperately need.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

[Dear readers: DemocracySOS survives through reader support. Here is a link to our $5/month subscription page. Can you toss a few coins into the hat? Thank you.]

Dum-Dum Democrats. In the internecine tussles between the moderates and progressives, which has been playing out in a number of Democratic primaries in various states, virtually no one has noticed the elephant – pardon me, the donkey – standing in the living room.

The Democrats keep using the wrong voting method to pick their nominees for Senate and governor. And now its national executive body is poised to shoot the Democratic Party in the foot by banning the best method that ensures that their most popular presidential candidate actually gets nominated.

I have written before about how the Democrats are their own worst enemy, opposing political reforms that would both empower voters and help Democrats. We have seen the Democratic Party’s incompetence on display in some of its recent primaries in various states. Specifically, they keep using a method – known as “first past the post” or “plurality-wins-all” – that can’t guarantee that the candidate preferred by the most Democratic voters actually gets nominated. As a result, Democrats keep nominating candidates that did not win a popular majority, even among their own voters. That means they may be nominating the weakest candidate toward the goal of defeating the Republican nominated-candidate in November.

Look at the recent results in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor. The leading candidates – Francesca Hong and David Crowley – were separated by only 4,000 votes. The moderate Democrat Crowley won with a low plurality of only 39.8 percent. That means three out of every five Democratic voters preferred another candidate. The progressive Democrat, Hong, in second place, had 39.3 percent of the vote. Four other candidates together won over 20 percent of the vote, 165,000 votes in all; in fact, a FairVote analysis found that 68,000 voters cast their ballots by mail for candidates who later withdrew from the race. They threw their votes away by casting what is known as “zombie votes,” which amounted to 17 times the margin of victory in the Wisconsin race.

Who did the voters of those other candidates prefer between Hong and Crowley? Nobody knows. The plurality method doesn’t allow the true majority favorite to be determined. What happens if most of those voters preferred Hong? That means the wrong candidate won!

Or look at the Democratic primary for the Michigan Senate seat. Same thing happened, but in reverse. The progressive Democrat, Abdul El-Sayed, won in a squeaker over moderate Haley Stevens, 48.5 percent to 47.5 percent. Again, the winner did not have a popular majority. A third candidate in the race, Mallory McMorrow won over 61,000 votes (4 percent), four times the margin of victory. McMorrow also pulled out of the race after many of her voters had already voted and wasted their vote on a non-candidate. Who did McMorrow’s voters prefer, between El-Sayed and Stevens? Nobody knows. The defective method used was inconclusive on that crucial point. It’s possible the candidate preferred by a popular majority actually lost…in other words, the wrong candidate may have won.

Not to mention that a large chunk of the Democratic Party voters wasted their votes on minor spoiler candidates who had no chance of winning – including some who had dropped out and were no longer even running for the nomination. These so-called zombie votes are a nationwide problem that affects both parties. For instance, in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, more than 3 million voters nationwide cast ballots for candidates who had withdrawn from the race – including tens of thousands in Wisconsin.

Zombie votes, wasted votes, spoiler candidates, non-majority winners…this is what the Democrats are serving up in their primaries, which not only is frustrating for voters but also serves to undermine the legitimacy of the non-majority winners and undercut their ability to beat the Republican candidate in the November general election.

How crazy is that? Why would the Democrats use an electoral method that can’t guarantee that the most popular candidate wins? It’s not like this is the 1850s, before “instant runoff” methods were invented to ensure winning candidates had a popular majority. Electorally speaking, Democrats are still stuck in the mid-19^th century.

Democrats keep shooting themselves in the foot

Now a small sclerotic faction of the Democratic Party’s leadership body – known as the Democratic National Committee, DNC -- has proposed to further hamstring the Democratic Party’s procedures, this time for its presidential nomination process.

Since 2020, six state parties have used ranked choice voting in their Democratic presidential primaries: Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, Nevada, and Wyoming. An additional six state parties have used ranked choice voting to choose convention delegates: Delaware, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Democrats Abroad. The reasons to do so are clear: RCV reduces wasted votes, spoiler candidates, zombie votes and best ensures that the most popular candidates actually win the most delegates.

This is particularly important in the Democratic presidential primaries in which there have been large fields of candidates. According to the DNC rules, only candidates who win 15 percent or above of the Democratic voters’ support are entitled to be awarded delegates in proportion to their percentage of the popular vote. So any candidate who wins 15.1 percent of the popular vote in a given state’s Democratic primary would win about 15 percent of the delegates; a candidate who wins 14.9 percent of the popular vote would receive zero delegates. The Democrats have been using this proportional allocation method for many years.

It’s worked out pretty well, all in all, since it allows a range of candidates from the different wings of the party to run, be competitive and win delegates. It has ensured a robust discussion of the crucial issues that are the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, instead of allowing a single anointed candidate with the most connections to big bucks donors to easily sweep the nomination.

The only problem with this method is that, in a large field of candidates, many candidates might finish beneath the 15 percent threshold and win no delegates. Just as importantly, the voters voting for those candidates waste their votes on losers. If this happens to a lot of sub-15% candidates, it can actually steal votes from viable candidates who win fewer delegates and could potentially distort the nomination outcome.

For example, in the New Hampshire Democratic primary in 2020, with 10 candidates in the race, Bernie Sanders finished first with 25.6 percent of the vote, followed by Pete Buttigieg with 24.3 percent and Amy Klobuchar with 19.7 percent. The other seven candidates – including Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang – all finished beneath the 15 percent threshold. If New Hampshire had used ranked choice voting aka instant runoff voting, and voters had been able to transfer their vote from their losing candidate to their second choice, many of the 9.2 percent of Warren voters likely would have picked Bernie Sanders. Many of the 8.4 percent of Biden voters probably would have picked Buttigieg or Klobuchar. Those voters would not have wasted their votes.

Or look at the Democratic presidential primary in Texas. Joe Biden finished first with 34.6 percent followed by Sanders with 29.9 percent. No other candidates in the race finished above 15 percent. But if voters had been able to give their vote to their second choice, many of the 14.3 percent of Michael Bloomberg voters might have given their vote to Biden; and undoubtedly many of the 11.4 percent of Elizabeth Warren voters would have picked Sanders as their second choice.

With RCV, voters are empowered to rank multiple candidates and automatically reassign their first choice support for a candidate with too few votes to a more viable candidate as their second choice, another for their third choice, etc. Voters are liberated to vote for the candidates they truly like, even if that candidate might not reach the 15% threshold; you don’t have to feel coerced by the “pick only one” method to vote for “lesser evil” candidates. No more wasted votes, what a miraculous feature of ranked ballots. Who could be against that?

Democrats stuck to the flypaper of old ideas

Without RCV, in state after state these kinds of representational distortions can start adding up. As previously mentioned, in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries more than 3 million people cast votes for zombie candidates who had withdrawn from the race; millions more cast votes for candidates who never reached the 15 percent threshold. If the race to nominate the Democratic candidate is close enough, these kinds of unforeseen dynamics turn the Democratic presidential primary process into a crapshoot over which candidates cross the 15 percent threshold and which candidates act as spoilers for each other.

So why would Democrats use such a defective method in which zombie candidates, wasted votes, spoiler candidates and ultimately frustrated Democratic voters become the victims of the donkey in the living room that is messing up the carpet?

In 2020, Democrats in six states decided to upgrade their nominating procedure and added ranked choice voting. Voters were allowed to rank as many favorite Democratic presidential candidates as they wanted to. The vote counting was conducted according to a “bottoms up” rule in which any sub-15% trailing candidates were eliminated and their supporters’ vote was transferred to that voter’s next-ranked candidate, until any remaining candidates were all above the 15% threshold for earning delegates. Using RCV this way led to nearly 100% of voters having their ballot count for a viable candidate earning delegates in the four states for which there is data. In these contests, more than 99.8% of voters cast a valid ballot, and nearly 90% of the backers of withdrawn candidates had their ballots counted in the final round for either Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. If RCV had been used nationwide, it would have led to more than 2.5 million votes for withdrawn candidates counting for an active candidate.

Who can be against that? In those six states, RCV worked like a charm to eliminate zombie votes and candidates, dramatically reduce wasted votes, and ensured that the leading candidates cruised forward with as much wind in their sails as the aggregated votes from the ranked ballots allowed.

Having seen the success of RCV in those six presidential primaries, the Democrats should be looking to spread the usage of it in all of their presidential primaries, as well as in their primaries for Senate, Governor and House races. It just makes sense.

Antiquated Democrats against modern voting methods

But no. Instead, a small cabal of antediluvian Democrats, who have been around since Noah and the Flood, have taken control of an important DNC sub-committee on rules and bylaws and proposed a ban on the use of RCV in the Democratic presidential primary process. Currently each state gets to decide for itself and its voters if it wants to use RCV within its proportional allocation process. But these national anti-reformers want to rob from the states their ability to decide this at the state level.

Ban proponents are led by a longtime anti-RCV Democratic Party operative, who is spreading the misinformation that because RCV can be used to elect majority winners, it is incompatible with the party’s longstanding proportional allocation requirement and its 15% threshold to be awarded delegates. But that claim is false, as proven by the six states that used RCV in 2020. In those states, the “bottoms up” way of counting eliminated the candidates with the least votes one by one until all remaining candidates had 15% or higher. RCV was not used to elect majority winners, and it perfectly complemented the proportional allocation to prevent thousands of voters from wasting their votes on candidates who couldn’t reach 15%.

Other Democrats are mobilizing to oppose this move. Congressman Jamie Raskin is leading the pro-RCV forces among Democratic leaders. Maine Democrats are speaking out against this proposal because by state law they are required to use RCV in their presidential primary, so if they follow state law that could prevent Maine’s delegation from being seated at the 2028 Democratic National Convention. DC Democrats are calling on the DNC to reject the ban.

The entire 450-person DNC body will vote on the proposed delegate selection rules in just two days on August 15. RCV supporters have been mobilizing to reach out to DNC members and correct some of the misinformation that the ban supporters are spreading. Hopefully the full DNC knocks this down and preserves the ability of states to decide the rules for their own presidential primary. During a time when the Democrats are trying to mobilize to take back Congress, instead they are engaged in this kind of infighting, and shooting themselves in the foot once again. RCV could actually help Democrats to nominate stronger candidates and to empower their voters. Isn’t that obvious?

For any DemocracySOS readers who want to weigh in, here is a link to a petition to stop the ban. You can also contact DNC members from your state on your state party’s website. The “ask” is simple: strike the ban language and return the rules to what they’ve always been, which allows every state to decide this for itself.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

[Dear DemocracySOS readers, this political newsletter only survives due to the support of people like yourself. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber for only $5 a month to support this work — the price of a cup of coffee. Or, if you’re already a paying subscriber, consider a $5 gift sub for a friend, colleague or family member. Thank you!]

Donald Trump does not give up easily. When the U.S. Supreme Court in February struck down his tariffs as being illegal because he invoked so-called “emergency powers”—even though there was no emergency—did the president throw up his hands and say, “Oh well, I guess that’s the end of that?” Not in the slightest. Now the White House is back with another attempt at tariffs, based on even more preposterous claims of slave labor and prescription drug price manipulation by, you know, those rogue, Simon Legree-ish states in the European Union, and Canada, Japan and Australia.

Trump fired up a trade commission back in late April/early May which held hearings to find justification for invoking a new clause, Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, as a vehicle for reinstating the previous tariffs. The US Trade Commission investigated whether “the acts, policies, or practices of a foreign country are unreasonable or discriminatory and burden or restrict U.S. commerce.”

Slavery…in the EU?

There’s nothing wrong with such investigations, but here’s where it got really peculiar in a kind of, well, Trump-ian way. The Trade Commission hearings probed dozens of countries, including our top trading partners like the European Union, Canada, Japan, Australia, Mexico, China, and India. More specifically, the hearings said they were shining a spotlight on specific trade infractions that could justify slapping tariffs on a nation. One of the potential violations was: “forced labor,” which is a nice term for: “slavery.”

Say what? The Trump administration investigated Germany, the UK, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Japan, and Switzerland—the land of chocolate, cheese, and watches—for slavery? As the rationale for imposing tariffs?

Stretching the logic further, even if slavery wasn’t occurring in the investigated country, maybe that country was trading with other countries that were…using slaves? The sketchy rationale had many a trade expert scratching their heads. As if the US doesn’t trade with those same countries. This is a president who said the Smithsonian museum focused too much on “how bad slavery was.”

Lo and behold, the White House recently announced new tariffs of anywhere from 10% to 12.5% on 60 nations who were judged to have failed to effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods made through modern slavery.

To be clear, some of the 60 nations reviewed for slave labor might make sense, including China, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, and Libya. The U.S. has long-standing sanctions against some Chinese exports because of forced labor of the Uyghur ethnic and religious minority. But for most of the other five dozen nations, it’s pretty ridiculous because those are some of the highest-ranked on ethics and corruption by Transparency International, way above Trump’s America, which is ranked a lowly 29th.

It’s also ridiculous because many of those countries, such as EU member states, as well as Canada, Norway, the UK, and more, have better labor practices than we have in the United States. In fact, the EU formally adopted the Forced Labour Regulation in December 2024, banning the sale, import, and export of all goods made using forced labor anywhere in the world, at any stage of the supply chain.

The Trump administration is clearly on a fishing expedition for whatever charges it can make stick—similar to when it accused Canada of exporting fentanyl to the U.S. as a reason for tariffs, when in reality Canada exports a minuscule amount, no more than the U.S. exports to Canada.

Meanwhile, Trump is repaying billions for the first tariffs that SCOTUS struck down. Apple has hoovered an estimated $2.2 billion tariff refund, Amazon $600 million, Nike $300 million, hundreds of thousands of importers will be refunded around $166 billion. Most of those same corporations had raised their prices to pay for the tariffs, and "We the Consumers" had to pay for it all as the tariff impacts filtered throughout the economy. What a crazy windfall for these businesses, getting both a refund and more revenue from their customers.

Share

Trump trying to force other countries to raise their pharma prices

But the fishing expedition doesn’t stop with slave labor and fentanyl. The White House is also trying to make the case that others countries’ pharmaceutical policies that “artificially lower drug prices, including price-fixing and discriminatory policies against U.S. technology and pharmaceutical products,” are also a barrier to trade and justify tariffs. Certainly numerous studies have found that the US allows drug companies to charge more for pharmaceuticals than just about every other developed nation. The same pill made by the same factory sells for five times the price in the US because pharmaceutical companies are price-gouging the American public.

Germany achieves much lower drug prices by allowing its large health insurance funds to negotiate volume discounts with pharma companies. Instead of the US copying such a successful policy, Trump’s fantastic leap of illogic says that lower drug prices in Europe force American patients to shoulder a disproportionate share of global pharmaceutical research and development costs. So the White House is demanding that international trade partners increase the price of their own domestic pharmaceuticals to US levels in order to avoid higher tariffs.

The Trump administration has targeted a rebate that the UK receives from pharmaceutical companies and that they pass on to consumers to lower prices; the White House is demanding an agreement that will increase the net price that the UK pays for new medicines by 25%. How the heck would this be a win for either UK or American consumers? According to Trump’s trade representative, this will ensure that higher prices for new medicines are not “materially eroded” by any rebate schemes. In other words, if countries like the UK, Germany and others don’t cooperate in increasing their pharmaceutical prices to U.S. levels, that will be the justification for slapping another tariff on that country.

Tariffs vs trade surplus

Another part of the Trump “investigation” is looking into what the White House is calling “manufacturing overcapacity.” Trump is targeting 16 major economies to determine if their production policies unfairly burden U.S. commerce. Again, some of these investigations might have a degree of legitimacy, depending on the country, such as China and India. But in reality, the United States runs a trade surplus in goods with 136 countries and a trade deficit with only 97 countries. Would it then be fair for those surplus counties to slap a reciprocal tariff on the United States?

For example, the U.S. has a goods trade surplus with the Netherlands ($61B), the UK ($32B), the UAE ($24B), Spain, Belgium, Australia, Hong Kong, Brazil, Belgium, UAE, Singapore, many Latin American countries, and more. Yet most of these countries have been newly hit with Trump’s “slave labor” tariffs. Not to mention that the US actually has a trade surplus in services (as opposed to goods), exporting far more services to many countries—especially in technology, financial services, and travel—than we import. While the U.S. has a massive trade deficit in goods, our consistent services surplus, which exceeded $278 billion in 2023, helps offset that imbalance.

The U.S. trade deficit imbalance on a volume/dollar level is really only with 10 countries, in this order: China, Mexico, Vietnam, Germany, Canada, Japan, Ireland, South Korea, India, and Italy. Nevertheless, Trump is casting his net far wider than those ten, and using the flimsiest of rationales to do it.

Trump wants tariffs as a political — not economic — weapon

None of this makes very much sense. Addressing such a broad range of alleged trade infractions to justify tariffs is like having the hometown referees officiating at the local high school basketball game. What’s clear is that what Trump really wants is the power to “negotiate” with each country individually, using tariffs—an economic tool—as a political cudgel to get any number of political or economic concessions. The White House wants to be able to say to countries, “Be nice to us or we will impose tariffs,” and following the Supreme Court ruling, it could no longer do that. So the Trump administration needed to find another rationale.

Before, Trump was able to do things like threaten a new tariff on Canada because he didn’t like a Canadian television ad criticizing his trade policies. Previously, the president had what has been described as “a little tariff switch” in the Oval Office that he could flip on and off anytime he wanted to. If he wakes up in the morning and he doesn’t like what a world leader has said, previously he could crank the tariff dial as high as the urge struck him. The goal is to maximize a trading partner’s pain level to force compliance with the political objective.

So Section 301 is the new legal fig leaf to cover Trump’s naked unilateralism. The White House is trying to find any reason or rationale, no matter how ridiculous, to return to a tariff policy that allows the president to have unilateral trade leverage over dozens of countries as a way to strong-arm political concessions that are not related to actual trade issues. Donald Trump and his White House team are determined to take back this lost power as part of his imperial presidency. But is it beneficial to have our trade relations – as well as our political connections -- with dozens of countries dependent on the whim of a single, unpredictable man with an ego-driven authoritarian streak?

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

[DemocracySOS welcomes as a guest contributor Grant Tudor, who is a policy advocate for Protect Democracy where he develops and advocates for a range of reforms to shore up our democratic institutions. A version of this article was originally published by The UnPopulist.]

Last week, the United Kingdom got a new prime minister who wants to change how Parliament gets elected. Andy Burnham, the new Labour Party leader, just became the most powerful person in UK politics calling for proportional representation (PR), an electoral system in which the number of seats won by each party reflects their respective vote totals. “There is nothing more unstoppable than an idea whose time has come,” said Burnham last year, “and PR’s time has come.”

On this idea, the UK, like the United States, is playing catch-up. Most democracies today use some form of proportional representation to elect their lawmakers. But not since New Zealand and South Africa in the early 1990s has a major democracy made the switch. The U.K.’s current system, winner-take-all, uses single-seat districts; winning the most votes secures the single seat, colloquially known as “first past the post.” Proportional systems use multi-seat districts, allocating seats to parties in proportion to their share of the popular vote. In a six-seat district, for example, a party winning just over a 50% majority wins three seats instead of all them, and a party winning one-third of the popular vote wins two out of six seats, instead of nothing. This is in contrast to the status quo, where a party might win many more seats, or far fewer, than its share of the vote.

Electoral reform in the U.K. could reverberate. The U.S. also uses the British system—and as the movement for proportional representation gains steam here, the U.K. could offer something American reformers have long lacked: a contemporary blueprint for how a centuries-old system can be changed.

That change appears to have a leader in Burnham, who is reflecting a growing recognition in British politics: that the country has outgrown its electoral infrastructure, one designed for a two-party democracy that no longer exists—the same fracturing that, as The UnPopulist explained, forced Keir Starmer’s own exit from Downing Street. In 2024, roughly 42% of all votes went to parties other than Labour or the Conservatives. In recent local elections, that number jumped to roughly three-fifths. Today, both major parties compete alongside Reform UK, the Liberal Democrats, Greens, and powerful regional parties in Scotland and Wales. The UK’s electoral system was built for a two-lane road—winner-take-all elections tend to sustain two-party competition—but its politics now resembles a six-lane highway.

Using outdated infrastructure has consequences. Under winner-take-all, multiple parties competing in single-seat races can produce comical distortions. Labour won 63% of seats in 2024 with just over 33% of the vote. Its vote share barely changed from 2019, yet it more than doubled its number of seats. Meanwhile, the center-left Liberal Democrats won fewer votes than Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, but more than 14 times as many seats. As in New Zealand, where bizarre distortions prompted public calls for a fairer system, the British public has warmed to reform. In a survey conducted after the 2024 election, 60% favored changing to a more proportional system—the highest level recorded since the question began in 1983. Only 36% preferred retaining winner-take-all.

Share

Labour’s Changing Calculation

Labour’s support is probably motivated less by calls for fairness and more by a sober assessment of its future. Political scientists have long observed that parties become more open to proportional representation when they grow less certain they’ll keep dominating under winner-take-all rules.

Until recently, Labour expected to govern alone, reliably swapping power with the Conservatives. But the emergence of other parties has made winning outright majorities increasingly unlikely. The UK’s left now appears dependably multiparty, with significant chunks of the electorate peeling on both its centrist flank (to the Liberal Dems) and its left (to a surging Green Party), as well as to the left-leaning Scottish and Welsh regional parties. Under these new conditions, proportional representation begins to look more attractive to the Labour Party, because it converts new competitors into potential coalition partners instead of electoral liabilities. Consider how under winner-take-all—where only a single seat is up for grabs in each district—every vote for other parties on the left like the Liberal Democrats or Greens risks costing Labour a seat. But under proportional representation, multiple parties can win seats in the same district. There’s space for both Labour and Liberal Democrats to win and, when needed, to coordinate.

An ascendant far-right led by Reform UK has added fresh urgency to forging a broad coalition on the left. The distortions produced by winner-take-all elections now appear likely to benefit Reform UK, at least in the near future. According to new modeling, the far-right party could win roughly 46% of parliamentary seats with only 28% of the vote—the kind of winner-take-all “seat bonus” familiar to political scientists. (The effect, if not the term, is also familiar to Americans: Democrats in Massachusetts regularly win all nine of the state’s U.S. House seats with roughly two-thirds of the vote, a one-third “bonus.”) Under various forms of proportional representation, the same modeling suggests that Reform UK would receive roughly 27 to 33% of seats instead, aligning its representation to its actual popular support.

The strategic implications for Labour are profound. Under winner-take-all, Reform UK could come within striking distance of a parliamentary majority despite commanding well under a third of the electorate. But under proportional representation, Reform UK’s seat bonus largely disappears, while most other parties would secure more seats commensurate with their popular support. Proportional representation acts as a safeguard against extremist parties winning disproportionally large shares of seats or coming to power through massive vote-to-seats distortions.

That makes two other scenarios plausible: either Reform UK becomes meaningfully more dependent upon the Conservatives to form a majority on the right, or Labour and the parties to its left command a coalitional majority of their own. The logic for Labour, then, is uncomplicated: a less distorted distribution of seats creates a clearer path to governing.

When Burnham argues that proportional representation would produce a more “collaborative”—that is, a more coalitional—politics, this is probably in part what he means. In doing so, he also argues that proportional representation would dial down the temperature and decrease polarization, encouraging a politics “less about point-scoring and more about problem-solving.” That might sound platitudinous, but decades of political science backs up Burnham’s claim.

With multiple winners in each district, politics becomes, in a literal sense, less zero-sum: less “if you win, I lose.” A vote for one party is not automatically a loss for another. By creating more winners and more opportunities for coalition-building among them, scholars have long observed that the system tends to generate a “kinder, gentler” politics. Research in recent years has found that democracies with proportional representation exhibit less severe affective polarization than those with winner-take-all, or the kind of polarization that doesn’t just divide opponents but demonizes them. Partisans become less inclined to vilify rivals they may later need as partners.

Labour formally endorsed proportional representation in 2022 through a vote of members at its party conference. It was the product of years of bottom-up work. Hundreds of local party organizations had embraced the idea and major trade unions had reversed decades-old positions. Burnham’s support followed. This spring, a cross-party reform coalition of more than 160 MPs, including 88 from Labour as well as Liberal Democrats, Greens, and Scottish and Welsh MPs, signed an amendment to a bill calling for a National Commission on Electoral Reform. By the numbers, this is the most popular proposed legislation since the 2024 election. Of course, Burnham and Labour could later soften their support. New Zealand’s Labour government stood up a similar political body—a Royal Commission on the Electoral System, in 1985—only to shelve its recommendations once they arrived. It was the National Party, Labour’s rival, that ultimately committed to the referendums that brought proportional representation into effect.

Bringing the Lesson Home

However uncertain the remaining road to reform, the UK’s experience points to at least one straightforward lesson for American reformers. Yes, proportional representation seems to dampen the worst kinds of polarization—as well as better protect minority representation, support more stable governance, push up voter turnout, bring in younger political leaders, and even inhibit gerrymandering. But electoral systems are rarely, if ever, remade because advocates win the argument. Electoral systems change because political parties and their leaders decide the old rules no longer serve them.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans are confronting the kind of new and forceful parties remaking British politics. But America is not really a two-party democracy, either. Beneath the two-party surface lies a variegated political landscape of distinct and powerful factions. Consider the recent nationwide wins by the Democratic Socialists of America: the kind of electoral threat to a major party that proportional representation is designed to channel into something more productive. Instead of engaging in exhausting intra-party feuds, imagine establishment Democrats and democratic socialists winning seats side by side in the same districts, and then forming coalitions to compete against the far-right. Proportional representation accommodates that kind of pluralism instead of forcing it into a zero-sum contest.

America’s system was inherited from the very country now reconsidering it. The Framers didn’t endorse winner-take-all; it was simply “the only game in town,” observed the political theorist Robert Dahl. Thankfully, the Framers left the entire business of electoral rules to Congress and the states: a gift of foresight that our system, over time, might require some improvements. The current system of single-seat districts is not a constitutional mandate; it is set by a federal statute that can be amended through regular lawmaking. If the U.K. decides that the system it bequeathed to us is in need of an upgrade for itself, it’ll be past time for us to consider the same.

Grant Tudor @g_tudor

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

[DemocracySOS welcomes back Canadian political scientist Henry Milner as a guest contributor. Professor Milner has been on the faculty of Vanier College in Montreal and at Umeå University in Sweden, and has been a visiting professor or researcher at universities in Finland, Norway, France, Australia and New Zealand. He is the author of eleven books, including his recent political memoir Participant Observer: An Unconventional Life In Politics and Academia.]

Only a handful of elections are slated in democratic countries in coming months. Most of the attention will be on the American congressional elections in early November. With oil yo-yo-ing around $100 a barrel, a solid majority of voters can be expected to reject Trump and the GOP. It is possible that the Republicans will be beaten badly enough — including a Democratic majority in the Senate — to open the door to badly needed institutional changes, including electoral reform. Though there is still the question of what Trump might try to do administratively, before or after the election, to prevent a Democratic triumph.

The October 27th election in Israel, with its system of pure proportional representation, is also attracting international attention, and there too the incumbent — Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud supported by the religious right — is expected to lose. Real change, however, would require the incorporation of Israeli Arab representatives into the new centrist coalition government, which so far is an unlikely prospect.

In mid-September, Sweden also will host an election, and it will have wider European implications. I hope to observe it in-person, as I have been observing Swedish elections for over 40 years. There, the left-center coalition appears poised to replace that of the center-right. I would remind readers about the workings of the Swedish electoral system, one that I have argued to be the best available, combining an effective PR system that incorporates various other desirable outcomes. Also noteworthy are the French elections with their 2-round system, which will take place in the spring 2027, quite possibly resulting in Madame Le Pen entering the Elysee Palace as president.

The ravages of winner-take-all in Québec

In this article, I will focus on an election in another French-speaking society, this one closer to my home, taking place in Québec on October 5th. I suggest that it is of special interest to electoral system reformers since it could bring consideration of adopting a new electoral system of proportional representation back to the agenda of its National (provincial) Assembly (for a detailed analysis of voting intentions of an electorate still in flux as of June, see www.Leger360.com).

In Québec’s last general election, held on October 3, 2022, voters experienced the all-too-typical representational distortions of the province’s winner take all/first past the post (FPTP) electoral system. Incumbent premier François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) won a second term with a lopsided majority, the first time in 66 years that a party other than the Liberals and Parti Québecois (PQ) had been re-elected. The majority owed much to Quebec’s FPTP electoral system, since with a mere 41 percent of the popular vote, the CAQ captured 72 percent of the 125 parliamentary seats.

The opposition Québec Liberal Party dropped to its lowest share of the popular vote in its history (14.4%), but since its votes are concentrated in the linguistically mixed Island of Montreal, the party was able to win 21 seats, more than the rest of the opposition parties combined. It remains the official opposition despite finishing fourth in the popular vote.

In contrast, the Conservatives increased their share of the vote to 13%, but since their support was more spread throughout Québec, they won zero seats. The Parti Québécois actually won slightly more votes than the Liberals (14.6%), yet only managed to win three seats. The left-wing Québec Solidaire won 15.4% of the votes but only 9 percent — 11 — of the seats.

Meanwhile, 18 political parties — including the Green Party, Climat Québec, and Libertarians — won no legislative seats at all, even though those parties together garnered over 550,000 votes out of 4.1 million votes cast. Over half a million Québécois — 13 percent of all voters — wasted their votes on a party that was unelectable.

Once in power, Mr. Legault faced pressure from his party’s deputies, many of whom stood to lose their seats if a fair electoral system were put into place. COVID served as a convenient excuse for renouncing his promise to do just that. If the version of PR that had won the support of a majority of legislators had not been repudiated by the CAQ, Québec’s coming election might very well have been fought under a made-in-Québec version of proportional representation.

Share

PR coming to Québec?

But the issue is far from dead, and could emerge as a key factor in the fall election campaign and its outcome. In the autumn of 2025, Bill 199 was put forth by the Parti Québécois, supported by the Conservative Party of Québec, under which Québec would adopt a new electoral system known as “mixed member proportional” (MMP), with regional compensation similar to that proposed in 2023.

Based on years of discussion and planning led by one of the leading pro-electoral reform coalitions, the Movement Democratie Nouvelle, it spells out in detail a hybrid system which combines using a first-past-the-post voting method to elect parliamentarians (MNAs) in single-seat districts with a second proportional representation vote. Some MNAs would continue to be elected by their local district (called a “riding”), while compensatory seats would be allocated in each region via lists of candidates in order to ensure that the political weight of each party more accurately reflects the popular vote, both at the regional level and at the provincial level covering the entire territory of Québec.

The territory of Québec would be divided into 80 local ridings of the same winner-take-all type as those that currently exist, and the seats of MNAs to represent each of them would be allocated in the same way as under the current electoral system. The Québec territory would also be divided into 17 regions corresponding to the current administrative regions. In each region, compensatory seats would be allocated to candidates appearing on the lists produced by political parties that obtained at least 4% of the vote at the national level. The total number of such “regional” seats would be 49. The total number of seats in the National Assembly would therefore increase from 125 to 129 deputies.

Each voter would cast two ballots: a first ballot to choose the MP for his or her local riding, as is currently the case. A second ballot would be used by the voter to designate the political party of his or her choice. This second ballot would be counted at the regional level in order to choose the regional deputies. The allocation of regional seats in an administrative region would serve to compensate for the result of the local riding elections in that region, to bring each political party’s representation in parliament closer to proportional with the provincewide share of the popular vote won by each party.

Indeed, under the current winner-take-all system, it is not uncommon to see a political party win all legislative seats in a given region, even if other political parties obtained a significant number of votes. Regional seats would therefore be allocated in each region in order to promote an overall representation of seats from the region that would better reflect the political diversity of the total votes cast in the region as a whole. This proposal is similar to that promised — and then repudiated — by Premier Legault.

Will PR succeed in Québec? It’s hard to say at this moment. It could be implemented if the October election results in a minority-controlled government, an outcome the polls today suggest is a strong possibility. But Québec is volatile, and with a new CAQ leader and the francophile PQ promising another referendum on independence from Canada — something a majority of voters have rejected twice before — almost anything could happen. Stay tuned.

Henry Milner

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

[Transforming America’s toxic, antiquated “winner take all” electoral system to some type of a proportional representation (PR) method has long been discussed, and in recent years has gained some momentum among a relatively small (but growing) group of experts and thought leaders. Recently I was one of 500 scholars and political leaders who signed a joint letter to Congress, "End the Redistricting Wars by Adopting Proportional Representation: Gerrymandering persists because single-member districts allow it." But that fairly recent show of intellectual unity masks a growing divide among the experts about WHICH type of PR method would be best for the US. In the discussion below providing an overview, DemocracySOS welcomes back Alan Durning, founder and executive director of Sightline Institute. This piece was first published by The Fulcrum]

In the wake of recent redistricting battles, proportional representation is having a moment. Ezra Klein devoted an entire episode to touting it as a solution to gerrymandering. A flock of Substackers and influencers chimed in. Even Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg came out as PR curious. [Editor’s note: also see NYU law professor Rick Pildes’s proposal and academic Jack Santucci’s proposal for a “topping off” version of a Mixed Member Proportional method, Paul Starr from the American Prospect also calling for MMP, while a counterpoint weighs in with “The Trouble with MMP”]

From the hubbub, you might assume that most students of US elections believe that multi-winner districts with proportional representation are the only full solution to the redistricting wars, and you’d be right. But beyond that point of consensus, agreement breaks down. Proponents split into camps over which type of proportional representation to pursue.

Proportional representation, after all, is not one thing. Every country that uses it—and most do—has its own version: closed list, open list, mixed member, proportional ranked choice voting, and countless hybrids.

Ranked choice or open list?

These myriad alternatives have elicited passionate debate among specialists for decades. Two factions currently dominate the movement in the United States.

1.FairVote and allies have spent more than three decades building momentum for ranked choice voting (RCV), including its proportional version. They contend that RCV is the best fit for America’s traditions and political structure, partly because it combines single-winner executive and proportional legislative forms and can work in both nonpartisan local elections and partisan races.

2.Protect Democracy and allies have built a newer effort to promote party-based proportional representation through methods such as open-list elections. They maintain that party-based voting methods yield stronger multi-party democracies than do ranked choice voting and cite the voluminous literature from political scientists underlining the centrality of strong parties to a healthy democracy.

In principle, these differences seem stark; in practice, they may collapse into insignificance. The US Constitution makes moving wholesale to proportional methods difficult: a single-winner elected president, Senators elected one at a time, and states with small delegations all bake in advantages for the two major parties. The upshot is that RCV might yield as many parties in Congress as would a party-based method. In this light, the arguments between these factions may turn out to be the proverbial two bald men fighting over a comb.

Share

Constitutional constraints on multi-party democracy

A canon of political science is Duverger’s Law. It holds that any system of democracy that relies on single-winner races with pick-one voting and plurality victors favors two-party dominance. Conversely, proportional voting methods eventually nurture more parties.

Presidency. The preeminent role of the president in American government and culture, and the method used to select him or her, puts a classic Duverger situation on the main stage of American politics. The internal logic of a separately elected president, chosen through state-by-state winner-take-all electoral college competitions, discourages voters from marking their ballots for anyone but the major party nominees. The presidency itself does not rule out multiparty democracy but constrains it.

US Senate. Each state elects its Senators one at a time, in different years, by plurality, pick-one elections, which makes Senate elections classic Duverger terrain: as in presidential races, two parties naturally predominate.

Because the Senate is the more powerful chamber of Congress, the highest-stakes US elections, for president and Senate, both entrench two-party dominance. These commanding heights give the major parties the vast authorities of these offices. They also confer other political advantages: their candidates are automatically on almost every ballot they contest and are taken seriously by every voter.

The presidency and Senate let the two major parties build their war chests, institutions, and reputations; control media attention and public narratives; recruit promising candidates and operatives; and win entrée to virtually any audience they want to address.

50 States. The US House adds to this two-party entrenchment by virtue of its composition: half of states lack enough representatives to support a fully robust multi-party composition. That’s a matter of arithmetic.

A panel of experts assembled by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences notes:

. . . something close to a law in political science. Knowing the average number of seats per district, along with the total number of seats in a legislature, will generate a remarkably accurate prediction of the number of nationally competitive political parties in any given country.

More seats per district equal more parties. To produce an American politics with more than two parties, the panel recommends multimember districts with a minimum of three, and preferably as many as eight, House seats in each.

If every House district has three representatives, three major parties become mathematically possible, but two major parties remain the most likely outcome. If the aim is a true multiparty democracy with five or six parties, districts of seven or eight seats would be best.

Unfortunately, 26 states do not have seven or more seats; indeed, six states have only one each. Some 18 percent of House members come from states that are too small to reliably send five or six parties to Congress. That’s another built-in advantage for the major parties.

Voters and other political actors will think hard about supporting parties that have no shot at the White House, the Senate, or the House seats from more than half the states.

Upgrade subscription

International experience offers hope for both paths

For the United States, therefore, a multiparty democracy with five or six main parties seems far-fetched, regardless of the model used. American proportional representation might get to three or four parties, but two would probably still predominate.

That result would still be a gratifying upgrade; indeed, it’d be much like the admirable proportional systems of New Zealand and Australia, which have two main parties and a few minor ones. The former employs a party-based voting method called mixed-member proportional; the latter, a version of proportional RCV.

Indeed, proportional RCV can yield as many parties as party-based voting methods.

Consider the island nations of New Zealand and Ireland, two former British colonies with about 5 million citizens each. Ireland has used proportional RCV since its independence in 1922, and New Zealand has used mixed-member proportional voting since 1996. Since 1996, Ireland has averaged 10 parties in its legislature, along with several independent legislators, while New Zealand has averaged around 7. In this comparison, RCV yielded more parties than did mixed-member proportional voting.

Thus, the argument that open-list or mixed-member proportional elections will give the United States a more robust multi-party democracy than ranked-choice voting is strained. The Constitution and international experience suggest otherwise.

So while proportional representation is having a moment—its US prospects have brightened, and its potential is exciting—many obstacles litter its path. Ultimate success likely depends on unity among proponents, on advancing whichever method is politically attainable in the circumstances of each locality and state, and on no longer fighting futile battles over a comb.

Alan Durning, executive director, Sightline Institute, @Sightline

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

[This article is the latest in our “Shaky Political Science” series. In our 38 page report, “Shaky political ‘science’ misses mark on ranked choice voting,” released in December 2025, we examined over 40 studies focused on ranked choice voting (RCV). Many of these studies suffered from puzzling research methodologies, poorly constructed surveys, unrealistic simulated elections, cherry picked data and faulty analyses that often were contradicted by results from real-world elections (a link to our full paper is here).

Here are links to the first four articles in our series: the first one summarizing the overall results of our report; the second one analyzed a study co-authored by University of Minnesota academic Larry Jacobs, which was one of the most error-prone of all the research we reviewed in our report; a third article showing an admirable example of two political scientists holding two other political scientists accountable for their flawed, sloppy research; and a fourth article that analyzed seven studies sponsored by New America’s political reform program that deployed flawed methodology based on “simulated” elections instead of real-world elections, which when combined with some basic misunderstandings of RCV, produced odd and misleading results].

In this fifth article in our “Shaky Political Science” series, we examine two flawed studies on the impact of RCV on voter turnout authored by San Francisco State University professor Jason McDaniel. McDaniel’s research in these two papers stands out for its puzzling methodology, inadequate and cherry-picked data, and faulty analyses that not only misunderstands ranked choice voting but reflects a basic misunderstanding of politics in general.

The first of the McDaniel studies actually passed through a peer review process and then was subsequently published by the Journal of Urban Affairs, despite its obvious errors. It is perplexing that a jury of peer political scientists did not catch the errors and send it back to McDaniel for a rewrite or outright rejection. This calls into question the credibility of the peer review process itself. The peer review process is supposed to represent the intellectual pinnacle of the profession – a way for academics to certify the quality of each other’s work, and to act as a check against sloppy research. In the case of the McDaniel study, the peer review process failed. Yet his flawed study has been cited dozens of times by other political scientists in their own flawed works — an unvirtuous circle of academic research.

Here is the first Jason McDaniel study that we analyzed:

“Writing the Rules to Rank the Candidates: Examining the Impact of Instant-Runoff Voting on Racial Group Turnout in San Francisco Mayoral Elections,” by Jason McDaniel, 2016, Journal of Urban Affairs.

This study covered San Francisco’s use of ranked choice voting (RCV) in mayoral elections, purporting to show that RCV reduces voter turnout overall, increases voter errors, and has a negative impact on “marginal populations,” i.e. racial minorities, mainly as the result of the alleged complexity of RCV asking voters to rank candidates and having to be familiar with multiple candidates and related dynamics. McDaniel reached these conclusions by examining five San Francisco mayoral elections taking place in odd years (i.e. where there are no federal or state races on the ballot) from 1995 to 2011, comparing three earlier non-RCV races (in 1995, 1999 and 2003) with the later two RCV races (in 2007 and 2011).

Only two RCV races were studied, and as McDaniel acknowledged, only the contest in 2011 was “competitive” (that contest in 2007 was the first mayoral election using RCV, and incumbent mayor Gavin Newsom won easily in the first round of counting, earning 74% of first choices and far ahead of the second place candidate who had just 6.3% of first choices). Yet even the allegedly competitive contest in 2011was won by an incumbent with a landslide margin of nearly 20 points. No other elections were studied by McDaniel, even though San Francisco elects 17 other offices besides mayor with RCV, including the 11 seats on the Board of Supervisors (the name for the city council) in even years, and six other citywide offices in odd years. Previous academic research has found that competitive elections can stimulate greater voter involvement and higher turnout. For unexplained reasons, this study ignored at least 34 other RCV races between the years 2004 to 2011, many of which were very competitive and had high voter turnout. Instead, McDaniel’s analysis based its conclusions on data from only a single, marginally-competitive mayor’s race using RCV.

These 2007 and 2011 mayoral elections were the only two RCV elections that McDaniel used as the sole basis for his small data set to determine the impact of RCV on voter turnout. Despite having no meaningful data to inform his study, McDaniel nonetheless concluded that RCV lowered turnout when compared to the previous three mayoral non-RCV elections using two-round runoffs.

Then, using the same inadequate database of San Francisco elections, McDaniel also found that “Instant-runoff voting is associated with a significant decline in Black voter turnout and White voter turnout…On average, Black voter turnout decreases by 18 points and White voter turnout decreases by 16 points …” But how could he credibly arrive at that conclusion when his study was based on voter turnout in two RCV contests that were not even remotely competitive?

Beyond that, McDaniel tacitly admits that the key determining factor driving Black voter turnout was not RCV vs non-RCV elections, but the presence of a viable Black candidate. McDaniel wrote, “Black voter turnout was about 17 percentage points higher for the two elections that featured an African American candidate compared to the three elections that did not” — but one of those three elections did not use RCV. The same dynamic was present for White voter turnout, in which higher turnout was not correlated with RCV vs non-RCV elections, but the presence of a viable White candidate.

Beyond that, McDaniel’s voter turnout results, whether correlated with the race of the candidates or RCV vs non-RCV elections, showed no clear patterns. In his Figure 1, he shows low Asian voter turnout in the non-RCV elections in 1999 and 2003 when there was no viable Asian candidate running, but in the 2007 mayoral election using RCV, there is still no viable Asian candidate, yet Asian turnout increases dramatically. For Latinos, voter turnout is virtually the same in 1999 (no viable Latino candidate, non-RCV elections), 2003 (leading Latino candidate, non-RCV elections), 2007 (no viable Latino candidate, RCV elections) and 2011 (leading Latino candidate, RCV elections). Meanwhile White voter turnout increased dramatically from a low in the 2007 mayoral election, in which the leading candidate was a white incumbent, to the 2011 election in which there were no leading white candidates that finished any higher than sixth place with 5.6% of the vote.

Clearly other factors were determining voter turnout than either the race of the candidates or RCV vs non-RCV elections. Despite these inconsistent findings, McDaniel boldly marches forth to render conclusions about the impact of RCV on different groups of racial voters, even though his conclusions are not remotely supported by his data. This looks like the worst kind of “data cherry picking” to cover up a puzzling conclusion based on a poor data set involving only two RCV elections, neither of which were remotely competitive.

McDaniel’s cherry picking didn’t stop there. In calculating voter turnout for the three non-RCV mayoral elections in 1995, 1999 and 2003, he failed to mention that in each of these years there was a two-round runoff election, with a first round election in November in which no candidate garnered a winning majority of the vote, followed by the decisive runoff in December. So there were two non-RCV elections in each election year.

But McDaniel only decided to include one of the two elections in his data set, apparently the December runoff in each year (which had higher turnout in two out of the three mayor’s races, and lower turnout in the third). So he ignored the November 1995 election, the November 1999 election when turnout was only 45 percent, and the November 2003 election when turnout was only 45.7 percent. This is flawed methodology based on blatant cherry picking, since McDaniel simply omitted three elections worth of data that did not fit within his frame. His study should never have made it through a peer review process, and it is an embarrassment to political science that not only was it approved for publication, but it has been uncritically cited by dozens of other political scientists.

Share

A “study” without wider context or credible data

Lacking a data set that included even a single competitive RCV mayoral race, McDaniel declared that RCV lowered voter turnout in 2011, when turnout was 42.5 percent. But he also ignored -- or did not realize -- that voter turnout in mayoral elections during 2011 had sharply declined in all big cities, including far more steeply in nearby Los Angeles and other cities. In fact, San Francisco’s election in 2011 had the second highest turnout of any mayoral election in the nation’s 22 largest cities from 2008-2011. Was 2011 just a particularly low turnout year all across the country, perhaps because the country was still reeling from the aftermath of the housing market collapse in 2008-2010? McDaniel ignored this factor and did not search for alternative explanations beyond his flawed thesis.

Furthermore, while McDaniel suggested that RCV leads to more “overvotes” – which is an invalidated ballot in which a voter, in either a non-RCV or RCV race, makes a mistake and selects two candidates for a single choice – he failed to address that in the June 2012 US Senate primary contest, which used the typical “one-choice” plurality method and did not use RCV, there was more than five times as many overvotes in San Francisco and Oakland than in the RCV mayoral elections in those cities. Additionally, turnout had been significantly higher and more representative in RCV elections for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors races -- that McDaniel didn’t even bother to study -- as compared to previous “delayed two-round runoffs” for those offices, often higher by as much as 40% in the RCV races.

Perhaps the most surprising irony was that an earlier study co-authored by McDaniel (Overvoting and the Equality of Voice under Instant-Runoff Voting in San Francisco by Francis Neely and Jason McDaniel, 2015, California Journal of Politics and Policy) found that overvotes are often more common in lower-income precincts, but that the pattern of overvoting is similar in both RCV and non-RCV contests. Wrote Neely and McDaniel: “[Overvote] errors appear to be a function of complexity in general and not IRV per se…. the pattern of overvoting is similar in both IRV and non-IRV contests…Even among votes cast in a top-of-the-ticket race like U.S. Senate, overvoting occurs in an uneven fashion” (IRV, or ‘instant runoff voting,’ is another name for ranked choice voting in single-winner contests).

So McDaniel not only contradicted his own conclusion in his earlier study with Neely, but the earlier study had been an important corrective for one of the most frequently made mistakes made by anti-RCV political scientists – a continual failure to provide crucial context by pairing a comparative analysis of real world RCV elections with an analysis of real world plurality or other electoral methods. Unfortunately McDaniel’s earlier study does not get cited much by other researchers, and McDaniel did not even cite it in his own flawed study analyzed above. Incredibly, McDaniel cherrypicked McDaniel, even as his flawed study has been cited dozens of times.

Despite being a textbook example of poor political “science,” featuring both inadequate as well as cherrypicked data, the shelf life of McDaniel’s study has been extended endlessly by other political scientists and media outlets who have cited it uncritically. Equally troubling, the Journal of Urban Affairs put this paper through its peer review process and published it despite its numerous flaws.

McDaniel gets it wrong, Part II

Not content with producing one shoddy, confused paper, McDaniel produced another one a few years later, here is the link:

Electoral Rules and Voter Turnout in Mayoral Elections: An Analysis of Ranked-Choice Voting by Jason McDaniel. San Francisco State Univ. (McDaniel, 2019).

In this paper, McDaniel extended his previous flawed research focused on San Francisco, about voter turnout and voter impact, to multiple RCV cities through the 2018 elections. In his data set he included San Francisco, Minneapolis, St Paul, Oakland, Berkeley, San Leandro and Santa Fe. He then compared their turnout in mayoral elections to non-RCV cities, and to mayoral elections in those cities held before first RCV usage, and concluded “a significant decrease in voter turnout of approximately 3–5 percentage points in RCV cities after the implementation of RCV.” But he replicated many of the same mistakes as his first study presented above. While in this study McDaniel attempted to distinguish between various factors, such as odd year vs. even year elections, competitive races vs. noncompetitive, contests with open seats and other factors, the analysis is superficial and inadequate. He attempts to incorporate so many often-conflicting variables that his conclusions are once again unsupported by the actual data, and ultimately unconvincing (this second study never underwent a peer review process).

For example, McDaniel declared that for RCV cities “in elections that are more competitive than average (margin of victory less than 20%), there is no significant RCV effect on voter turnout.” Yet McDaniel is a professor in a city, San Francisco, in which the 2018 special election using RCV to fill a mayoral vacancy was exceedingly close, decided by a margin of only one percentage point, and resulted in the second highest turnout in San Francisco history for a mayoral election. Illustrating the complexity involved in assessing the critical factors in turnout, that special election was held on the same election day as federal and state offices, which tends to boost turnout. Yet more voters participated in that RCV mayoral election than voted on the same day in the non-RCV primary for governor in which former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom was running.

Even more puzzling, in this study McDaniel inaccurately cited his own previous study from 2015 with Neely. McDaniel wrote, “Neely and McDaniel (2015) examine individual ballot image files within a natural experiment, and find higher rates of ballot errors in RCV elections compared to non-RCV elections” (emphasis added). However, we quoted from that 2015 study several paragraphs above, and in actual fact Neely and McDaniel actually concluded the opposite -- that the pattern of overvoting – which is the most common form of ballot error – is similar in both RCV and non-RCV contests. McDaniel also ignored the fact that in Bay Area RCV elections held in even years – at the same time as federal and state elections, when turnout is highest -- the “undervote” (that is, the dropoff in ballots cast for governor or mayor) has declined, which contradicts his thesis that the act of ranking ballots in RCV elections is too complex and presents a barrier for certain demographics of voters.

To his credit, McDaniel actually acknowledged another contradiction in his own paper, which found a negative RCV turnout effect in some odd-year elections but not others, admitting that “may present a challenge to the theory that increased complexity [from RCV] will have a marginal negative effect on voter turnout.” But he tried to wallpaper over that contradiction by blaming it on an unlikely source -- bad election administration. McDaniels wrote, “This would suggest that the negative impact of RCV on voter participation may be alleviated by high quality election administration,” without presenting any data or even anecdotes to support such an unfounded theory. While competent election administration of any election, whether RCV or non-RCV, is crucially important, there is no credible research that supports the far-fetched notion that the quality of election administration has much of an impact on voter turnout in US elections, whether using RCV or otherwise.

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

The unvirtuous circle of academic research

It is puzzling how McDaniel’s first study could have survived the peer review process for the Journal of Urban Affairs. The mistakes in McDaniel’s first study above should have been obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of ranked choice voting as well as elections in general, and elections in San Francisco specifically. It undermines faith in the credibility of the peer review process to think that a jury of peer political scientists did not catch the egregious errors and reject McDaniel’s sloppy research and paper. And it remains a black mark on political science that this thoroughly discredited study has been cited dozens of times by other researchers. Indeed, in our research paper it became apparent that many political scientists cite each other’s flawed research to pad their list of citations and to legitimize their own flawed research, creating an unvirtuous circle of political science.

More broadly, McDaniel’s voter turnout studies, like other studies evaluating RCV’s impact on turnout, lacked a recognition that no credible opinion or research can claim that RCV increases voter turnout merely because so many voters are excited to vote for their favorite candidates instead of “lesser evil” candidates without worrying about spoilers. Instead, with respect to turnout, the advantage of RCV has always been that, in most places where it has been used, it has eliminated a pre-November primary or post-November runoff, which usually saw about half the turnout of the November general election. This is especially true during even years when there are state and federal elections on the ballot which substantially drive turnout more than local contests. Any study that does not adequately account for this non-November primary/runoff vs November general election dynamic, or odd year vs even year election factors, is simply not credible. Both of McDaniel’s studies largely failed on those grounds.

Steven Hill and Paul Haughey

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

[Dear DemocracySOS readers, this political newsletter only survives due to the support of people like yourself. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber for only $5 to support this work — the price of a cup of coffee. Or, if you’re already a paying subscriber, consider giving a $5 gift sub to a friend, colleague or family member. Thank you!]

Remember “Survivor,” the reality TV show in which contestants stranded on a desert island used dirty tricks and backstabbing deals to be the last one standing, and win the million dollar prize? Something similar may be about to unfold in Maine.

Maine Democrats have drawn a terrible hand in their poker game to finally defeat Republican Senator incumbent Susan Collins. In only two weeks, they have to create a process to nominate a successor to their withdrawn nominee, Graham Platner. Seven candidates have thrown their hats into the ring, preparing for a 14 day sprint to the finish line.

Unfortunately, in their haste, Maine Democrats have designed a “sequential runoff” method that could unintentionally result in a throwback to a nasty old-time form of politics: decisions made in smoke-filled rooms and using logrolling schemes. Which is a shame, because if Maine Democratic leaders had used instant runoff voting/ranked choice voting as the method to fill their Senate nomination, it would have prevented “Survivor” dynamics among their seven candidates and helped their party to come together around a unifying candidate, and finally defeat the wily and battle-tested Senator Collins.

Maine already uses ranked choice voting in its party primaries to nominate each parties’ Senate nominee, and then in the November general to decide the winner. Voters are used to it, and it’s received high reviews. But for some odd reason, the Maine Democratic Party is deciding to not use RCV in its nominating convention to replace Platner. It makes no sense, and I can’t help but wonder if the designed “sequential runoff” method wasn’t selected to ensure a certain outcome among the seven candidates. It opens the door to electoral mischief among the large field of candidates and their supporters, as well as by national Democrats, i.e. Chuck Schumer, who have watched Maine screw this up once and are not likely to stand by neutral.

Share

Poor design, poor outcome

Here’s how the nominee replacement process will work:

For delegate selection, instead of having only the 101 members of the state party committee pick the nominee, to their credit Democratic leaders have broadened it to allow 500 delegates from all 16 counties to also participate in the vote. But here’s where the first potential mischief is likely to occur.

Those delegates will be selected through a vote at county meetings this coming weekend. Any registered Maine Democrat can participate in the delegate meetings. So there is going to be a stampede by the candidates to try and pack their own supporters into those county meetings, elect their own delegates and then pack the nominating convention on July 25. The candidate with the most money, more staff and better organization will have a leg up.

Some are hailing this method as a return to some glory days of party caucuses, where real organizing can make a difference and can inspire grassroots politics. While old-style party caucuses had their pluses and minuses -- I participated in two of them during presidential election years when I lived in Washington state – current boosters of this method are displaying short memories. This method was replaced all across the nation in state after state by statewide primaries because of how it was abused by party insiders. Used by both the GOP and Democrats, many caucuses were nothing more than elite-driven, Boss Tweed type affairs where nominees were picked by party bosses in – yes – smoke-filled rooms.

Once the delegates are seated at the convention, that’s where the Democratic Party should have used RCV to ensure the winning nominee wins broad majority support in a single vote. Instead, party leaders are going to have a series of votes – sequential runoffs – in which the last-place candidate will be eliminated, and then a second vote will happen in which the delegates will pick among remaining candidates. The 601 convention delegates will cast ballots round after round until a candidate gets to a majority.

The glorified description of this method in Maine suggests that its champions have never participated in such a proceeding. One booster writes, “It will almost be a time warp to the days before the modern presidential primary process, where nominating speeches mattered and coalitions had to form….the tools are in place for the grassroots to be the kingmakers.”

Theory gets tackled by reality

Really? I’ve actually seen this process play out in a high-stakes selection process, and it does not always go well. Unless there is obvious consensus in support of a particular candidate, it can get real ugly, real fast. Round after round, the remaining candidates start trying to cut deals. Factions emerge in the back rooms, and sometimes strange coalitions emerge that can cause deep division.

For example, San Francisco uses this method to select the president of its city council, known as the Board of Supervisors. I remember one year, in the perennial battle between moderate Democrats and progressive Democrats, the progressive Democrats on the Board had a 6-5 majority. Since the supervisors elect their own president, all the progressives had to figure out is which one of their supervisors was their consensus pick and all vote in unison. The president of the Board is powerful, making committee assignments, setting the meeting agendas and overseeing the budget process. But among the six progressives, two of them wanted to be president, both were stubborn, and neither would relent.

The 11 supervisors voted in round after round, with no candidate reaching a majority. Rumors started swirling around City Hall about deals being struck. The local TV and newspaper media started reporting stories based on the rumors. Cracks started to appear in collegiality, decorum and solidarity. Behind the scenes, Machiavellian maneuvering left various constituencies baffled and resentful.

Finally, after seven rounds of voting and fierce political scheming, the deal was done – for unexplained reasons, several of the progressive supervisors broke ranks and agreed to vote in another supervisor for president. The public could not understand how or why. The president-elect was considered somewhat of a progressive but soon showed himself to be more of a moderate. The two leading progressive candidates for Board president, now scorned by their colleagues, ended up hating each other and the progressive coalition lost much of its steam. This was a battle among Democrats, and each round of voting only made the bitterness deeper.

And note: the participants in these sequential runoffs were in 99% agreement on most issues and the progressive Democrat agenda. The division didn’t result over issues or partisanship, it was driven by the incentives of the method used — “you against me,” round after round of calculation. That’s what drove the process off the rails.

Now it’s Maine’s turn

I fear that something similar is about to unfold in Maine over its Senate nomination. The fantasy that a brokered convention, with sequential, in-person voting rounds allowing candidates to deliver speeches and win over delegates between ballots, will somehow usher in some lost little ‘d’ democracy, or build real party consensus, seems far-fetched. In actuality, the RCV ballots used in Maine’s gubernatorial primary shows why that will be the case.

The three frontrunners at the convention are likely to be public health official Nirav Shah, former state senator and fifth-generation logger Troy Jackson, and Secretary of State Shenna Bellow, who finished second, third and fourth in the Democratic primary for governor, all with 20% or more of first rankings. But no candidate appears likely to have anywhere near majority support. FairVote has used the ranking data from the gubernatorial contest to simulate head-to-head matchups -- Shenna Bellows would defeat both Shah and Jackson, while Shah would defeat Jackson. Notably, Platner himself supported Jackson, Bellows and Hannah Pingree (the latter being the winner in the gubernatorial primary), with Jackson as his first choice.

Those three candidates also cross-endorsed, encouraging voters to rank all three of them on their ballots. Shah recorded a video, asking to be the second choice of voters ranking another candidate first. Trying to woo each others’ voters, several candidates complimented one another during the televised debate.

If the nominee was being selected by RCV at the state convention, then the wonder of ranked ballots would kick in. The candidates would be looking to curry favor with each others’ supporters and ask for their second or third rankings. Perhaps two or three of these candidates would once again cross-endorse each other, unifying the party around the strongest candidate.

But with the current “sequential runoff” method, the incentives are different – and more toxic. It’s “you against me,” and my best strategy for winning is to attack the candidate who is most like me. That’s because once the similar candidate loses, you hope her supporters will now vote for you as the “lesser evil,” even though you just attacked her. Round after round, backroom deals and horse-trading will be taking place between rounds. Instead of trying hard to find common ground and making coalitions, candidates will benefit by using “Survivor” tactics to see which of them will be the last one standing.

In addition, depending on how long the round by round voting occurs, some delegates may have to go home. The convention will be held in Bangor, which is over two hours from Portland, the largest city, with other rural towns and cities four hours away. The longer it takes, the more the war of attrition kicks in, round by round. I have participated in a number of party conventions at the county and state levels, and keeping your supporters for 8, 10, 12 hours becomes increasingly challenging. I’ve seen tailored strategies, such as one candidate purposefully trying to stretch out the number of rounds and convention hours, knowing that his supporters lived closer and could stay longer. Better-funded candidates will be able to pay their delegates’ expenses, including possibly hotel rooms, especially important for those delegates who have to travel long distances.

Upgrade subscription

Instant runoff/RCV is a better method

Is this really the best and most democratic way to nominate the party’s Senate candidate? I think not.

With RCV, it’s “one and done.” One vote, let the delegates rank their top choices, allow all candidates to address the delegates before the vote, with candidates making coalitions with the ranked ballots and possibly cross-endorsing each other. The winner will end up with a popular majority, some voters will have gotten their first-choice candidate nominated, others their second or third choice. The Democratic Party leaders and members will blast out of that convention unified and enthusiastically backing their candidate. This is how the Labour Party in the UK selects its party leader and presumptive candidate for prime minister at its party convention. Democratic Parties in Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, North Carolina, Nevada, Oregon and Wyoming have used RCV in recent presidential primaries. So has Maine. It works.

Maine Democrats could have used IRV/RCV to unify the party around a large field of candidates, and to ensure their best chance at unseating Senator Collins. Now, it will be a crapshoot to see how divided – rather than united – they are, coming out of the convention. It didn’t have to be that way. Poor leadership has its costs.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

A financial tsunami of giant proportions is heading our way. It is due to arrive in about six years, and if it strikes with full force it will amount to another blow to America’s representative democracy. Policymakers have known about this tsunami for some time, but in June, we found out the Big Wave is taller than anyone knew.

That’s when the Social Security Trustees released their latest report on the financial health of the popular Social Security retirement program. According to the trustees’ report, the outlook is alarming – Social Security’s solvency is in danger. By 2032, the Social Security fund will fall short by about $2.5 trillion of the money needed to pay the 52 million American retirees their full retirement benefits. Previously, it was thought that the tsunami would make landfall in 2034, but the finances are deteriorating faster than expected. If no presidential and congressional intervention is mounted, retirees will take about a 22 percent haircut, meaning any senior beneficiary who was receiving $3000 per month will see that chopped to about $2300 per month, a loss of about $8000 per year.

That’s not chump change for retirees living on a fixed monthly income. Three-quarters of American seniors depend heavily on their monthly benefits, and nearly half would be living in poverty without it. Social Security income has been especially crucial to retired women and racial minorities, who have suffered from historical wage discrimination and therefore have less retirement savings. During economic downturns, it has acted as an “automatic stabilizer,” keeping money in people’s pockets, maintaining consumer spending levels, providing customers for businesses, and preventing deeper recessions. Social Security has been the most stable component of our nation’s retirement system, especially compared with Americans’ other chief sources of savings — their homeownership and their 401(k)s and IRAs — which are struggling amid the current affordability crunch driven by rising costs for housing, healthcare, and groceries.

In short, Social Security not only has been the greatest anti-poverty program ever, keeping tens of millions of older Americans afloat in their elderly years, it has kept the American economy afloat during numerous economic downturns. It has been a vital part of the financial fabric of the American Dream for almost a hundred years, when it was launched by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935. And right now the threat against it is growing by the day while the Do-Nothing Congress dawdles. 2032 is not that far away. A Social Security crisis in six years means it will loom over the next president’s term.

This is not the first time that the popular Social Security program has hit a financial roadblock. In 1983, a bipartisan commission came together and successfully solved the then-looming crisis. But today the spirit of bipartisanship is so broken that it is scarily possible that any attempt at solving today’s crisis will collapse in a bitter mess of partisan finger-pointing and blaming. And then, we will be standing at the edge of a financial cliff, looking past our collective toes down into the abyss, as we fall off without a parachute.

Share

Why is Social Security so…insecure?

Given the foundational importance of Social Security to the nation’s retirement system and overall economic vitality, why has it reached the current “red threat” level? Most experts agree that there have been a few causes for the growing crisis. First, it’s good news that Americans are living longer, but it also means they are collecting more in Social Security retirement benefits. In the 1950s, the average retiree received a monthly Social Security check of $554 (inflation-adjusted), was retired for 10 to 15 years, and received a total lifetime payout of $65,000 to $110,000. An average retiree today receives a bit more than $2000 per month for 15 to 25 years and will receive a total lifetime payout of $380,000 to $640,000. Sure, American workers receive much higher wages today and pay more into the Social Security fund, but it’s not been enough to keep up with the increased benefits being paid out (note that this is different than what is called the “dependency ratio.” While the ratio of workers to non-working dependents (children, disabled and retirees) has declined, past labor productivity increases and job creation have allowed the Social Security trust fund to receive adequate revenues to maintain benefit levels, despite the declining ratio).

Second, there has been an upward redistribution of income due to greater inequality among wage-earners. Consequently, revenue collected from the Social Security payroll tax has been declining as a share of national income. The funding mechanism for Social Security is peculiar. Unlike income taxes, in which the more income a person earns, the higher the tax on every dollar earned, or unlike Medicare, in which every American pays the same tax rate on every dollar earned, Social Security has a cutoff called a payroll cap. Any income earned by an individual above $184,500 is exempt from the 6.2 percent Social Security payroll tax. Their employers also stop paying their payroll match, so a total of 12.4 percent in tax revenue is lost on income above the payroll cap. About 11 million of the wealthiest Americans exceed the taxable maximum wage and stop paying into the Social Security fund.

Consequently, less total income is being taxed by the Social Security administration. In 1982, just 10 percent of national wage income went to high-wage earners whose income escaped further taxation by exceeding the payroll tax cap. But over the last quarter century, close to 17 percent of wage income has gone over the cap and therefore has not been subject to the Social Security tax. This upward redistribution of wage income has substantially reduced the revenue flowing into the Social Security trust fund.

A third cause undermining Social Security’s finances is relatively new but will have an increasing impact. That’s the passage from last July of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), which gave a special tax break to seniors over 65, reducing the amount of tax they pay into the Social Security trust fund. This was a sweetener that Trump threw into his bill to blunt opposition to the massive tax giveaways to the wealthiest of the wealthiest Americans contained in that law. But it meant less tax revenue for the Social Security trust fund.

This temporary tax break for seniors will last only through 2028, but the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that the loss of tax revenue from OBBB will accelerate the projected depletion date of the Social Security fund by a full year. At that point, many of those same seniors who received the tax break will get a 22% haircut on their Social Security monthly payout. Anti-Social Security Republicans cleverly used smoke-and-mirrors legislative tactics to undermine this “entitlement” program, as they like to call it, since politically they don’t dare call for the abolishment of one of the most popular federal programs ever. Clever, MAGA Trump, clever.

A fourth cause, according to the Trustees’ report, is Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies. Although those policies have been in effect for only a short time, they are already making this problem worse. It turns out most of those immigrants are working-age adults who pay into the system for many years before they collect benefits. The Trustees’ report concluded that lower immigration will result in a loss of tax revenue and greatly deepen Social Security’s financial hole. Trump’s immigration policies are further endangering Social Security’s already deteriorating financial condition.

Another uncertain factor is the impact of AI. If, as many fear, AI accelerates rising income inequality and stagnant or reduced wages, it will further reduce the payroll tax receipts that currently pay for Social Security.

Share

Can Social Security—and retirees’ benefits—be saved?

So, is it possible to save retirees’ Social Security benefits? The short answer is: absolutely. I actually wrote a whole book about this a few years ago, Expand Social Security Now: How to Ensure Americans Get the Retirement They Deserve. This is not an economic or financial problem; it is a classic “guns versus butter” dilemma for modern governments. In other words, it’s a political will problem rather than a budget crash up. There are numerous adjustments that could be made to shore up Social Security benefits, and even to increase the amount of the benefit for Americans. Here are just a few of them:

* Eliminate the unfair Social Security payroll cap, currently set at $184,500, beyond which an individual and their employer pay no more Social Security tax. The practical effect of the cap is that billionaire bankers and CEOs contribute a far lower percentage of their income to Social Security than their secretaries and chauffeurs do. Requiring every American and their employers to pay 6.2% on every dollar of income would not only be fairer and more equal, but also raise hundreds of billions of dollars to close the financing gap. That’s how the Medicare tax works; why not Social Security?

* Apply the Social Security tax to investment income. Many affluent Americans derive much of their wealth from investment income rather than wages. Yet they make zero Social Security contributions based on that investment income. By applying Social Security rules to this income — which is how Medicare is partly funded — we would raise billions of dollars to help stabilize Social Security.

* Eliminate tax shelters and loopholes for one-percenter households and businesses, including for capital gains, “carried interest” and the truly outrageous “step-up in basis,” which exclusively benefits inherited wealth. These function as direct federal subsidies to the most affluent Americans, and they cost the national treasury some $350 billion per year.

The “step-up in basis” exemption is particularly repugnant. When a yacht or mansion or any other type of expensive asset is sold, the seller’s profit is subject to the capital gains taxation rate of 15–20 percent — about half the 37 percent tax rate that the wealthiest pay on their wage income. Normally, the amount subject to taxation is the appreciated value, which is the difference between the amount the seller originally paid for that particular asset, which might have been many years ago, and the usually much higher sale price. But for inherited property, the difference is calculated using the date that the previous owner died and left it to the heirs. As a result, the appreciation in value is much less, and so are the capital gains taxes. This effectively erases decades of capital gains taxes for the heirs.

Rather than a “step-up in basis,” this dodge might more accurately be termed a “step-up in privilege.” Of the more than 200 federal tax expenditures in the individual and corporate income-tax systems, this is one of the 10 largest. And of course none of the income received from the sale of these inherited assets is taxed for Social Security purposes. If it were, at the usual 6.2-percent Social Security tax rate that all workers pay, it would generate billions more for the Trust Fund.

Other tax deductions result in tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidies for the wealthiest Americans. These include federal subsidies of individual retirement savings accounts, like 401(k)s and IRAs – nearly 80 percent of the federal subsidy goes to the top 20 percent of income earners – and the home mortgage interest deduction – a massive 86 percent of this federal subsidy goes to Americans in the top 10-percent income bracket. These tax-code favoritisms are nothing more than “entitlements for wealthier Americans.”

In short, just a few revenue streams would raise more than enough money not only to save Social Security but also to increase the monthly Social Security payout. In fact, in my book Expand Social Security Now, I proposed doubling the monthly payout, bringing it to levels that other nations already provide, and showed how we could raise the revenue to do that. If other countries can do it, why can’t we Americans?

Yet not even Democrats are calling for that, even though doing so not only would provide a more stable, secure retirement for every American, it would make the economy itself more secure by levelling out the ups and downs of the economic cycle.

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

Will our political leaders save Social Security?

According to the Social Security trustees’ June report, the amount of additional funds needed to keep paying full benefits for the next 25 years is 1.06 percent of the nation’s GDP. To put that in perspective, the Trump administration has proposed increasing military spending by $420 billion next year, equivalent to about 1.4 percent of GDP. So “We the People” have financial and budgetary options, but are “We the Leaders” listening? It’s all a matter of what we, as a society, decide to prioritize.

If the Democrats want a popular issue to run on, championing the rescue of America’s most popular federal program, and going further to expand it, seems like a smart campaign slogan. If no party decides to prioritize this, America in 2035 is going to look much different compared to America today, and not for the better. Not only will our economy suffer, but representative democracy itself will further decay as inequality grows and its tentacles creep into every household, city and town. We are coming to a fork in the road. I hope we take the right turn.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

[Editor’s note: here’s something fun and short for the Fourth of July holiday. Have a Happy 4th, everyone. Thanks for reading Democracy SOS!]

I was catching the L train uptown to the A to get to work for the 116th time this year.  As usual, bleary-eyed and half asleep, I stumbled to my favorite seat, which is most always vacant at this hour.  Another 10 minutes and the car will be jammed full, but at 6:27 am all the early regulars get our own subway thrones.  Usually by the time the train hits Halsey, its rhythm has rocked me back to a snooze. I look forward to those few precious moments, before the doors snap open and the daily rat race begins.

Except this morning, wouldn’t you know it, I’m being disturbed by a couple of loud mouths. They’re rattling on about something, I can't help but overhear. Arguing, arguing, all they do is argue, annoying everyone around them. Both are opinionated sorts of guys who think the world's entitled to their opinion. 

“Listen here, Madison,” says one.  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...”

“Nonsense, Jefferson,” bawls the other. “Each individual is blessed or cursed, depending on their unequal abilities of acquiring property.”

“See here Madison, it says right here,” cavils the one called Jefferson.  He’s madly waving aloft his iPhone with a limey green screen all aglow -- at 6:35 in the morning, mind you – reading aloud and pointing to a line about locks or by Locke or something like that. I can’t quite make out what.

“Men being by nature all free, equal, and independent...” Jefferson points to the passage with his finger, like it’s Scripture. “You see? It says right here, under your very nose -- free and equal!”

Hoo boy, I think to myself, here we go.  They won’t settle this one for centuries.

Madison shakes his head.  He’s a short fellow with ruddy cheeks, and a first class know-it-all.  Probably debates endlessly whether the '61 Yanks were better than the '55 Brooklyn Dodgers or the ’73 or 2026 Knicks. You know the type.

“There, there, Jefferson, it’s as plain as the powder on the King’s wig, isn’t it?  As a result of our unequal abilities of acquiring property, some people end up with more and others end up with less. Inequality is the natural order of things, that’s how the Creator made us…isn’t it obvious?”

Is that it, I thought? Madison said it with such lofty conviction, like this was some sort of major revelation.  Heaven spare us, it’s 6:39 in the morning!

Jefferson was similarly unimpressed, and scoffed at the notion. He was quite a bit taller than Madison, with red hair all aflame. He puffed up his chest, as if stature alone might win the argument.

“Equal!” he barked.

“Not!” countered Madison.

Back and forth, back and forth.  Alright already!  Which is it, boys, which of you are we to believe?  Either we are created equal or we’re not, you can’t have it both ways!  I covered my face with my newspaper and tried to ignore them, praying they would settle it later. Instead, they growled louder, rising above the scrape of the train wheels.

About 1st Ave, Madison decides to up the ante. He shouts out to anyone within earshot:  “How many here think that all men are created equal?”

It’s 6:45 in the morning, mind you. Glazed eyes snap awake long enough to glare menacingly at this lilliputian madman.

“What about women?” yawns a woman near the back of the car.  Madison ignores her.

“You see there?” he taunts Jefferson.  “No one agrees with you. Unequal in abilities, and unequal in acquiring property -- forming an insurmountable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. And the protection of that property is the first object of government.”

Ah, I get it now.  This Madison’s one of those anti-tax, anti-big government fanatics. Maybe a John Bircher or Ayn Rand militant.  Now that he's got his, he wants to pull up the drawbridge and hell with with everyone else. Oh, the nerve of some people!

Jefferson just stands there, kind of hanging his head.  Come on man, defend yourself, thinks the idealist in me.  But Jefferson sees that his ‘All men are created equal’ line isn’t going to sell, not at this ungodly hour, not with this crowd.  If his maxim were true, how come we’re all stuck here bouncing in this subway car like sardines in a can? While our bosses are chauffeured to work late, or worse yet, call the shots from their posh homes in Greenwich or Mt. Kisco? 

All men are created equal -- yeah, right. Good one.

Jefferson scratches his head, trying to think of a good comeback.  Mercifully for the rest of us, he couldn’t.  But did that satisfy Madison?  Not a whit.

“The causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man,” smirked Madison.  “The unequal nature of man.” 

His pompous air made my teeth grind. I felt like shouting at him, ‘Not very distant, are we Mr. Madison, from the Law of the Jungle?  Not as removed or evolved as we like to think about ourselves? Welcome to western civilization, and its over-rated casino capitalism. Welcome to life in the food chain!’

I was getting worked up and now muttering loud enough to get a double-take from my seat mate.

“The authorities should be more careful about who they allow on the subway,” I tried to explain, gesturing over my shoulder toward the unrelenting pair.

She nodded and barely smiled back. It was a strategic response, most New Yorkers know better than to disagree with a stranger, especially one who is muttering to himself. No telling who's packing what these days.

6:58, it was my stop, and that Madison really had me rattled. A question was now nagging in my brain that was to disturb me for the rest of the day. “Are we equals or are we not?” The question begged an answer. You can’t have it both ways.

One other disembarking passenger, noticing my agitation, leaned over and whispered consolingly in my ear.

“It’s true,” he said, “we are all equal—but some are more equal than others.”  And then he vanished into the rush hour crush of bodies. I found out later his name was Orwell.  

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

With Donald Trump, the effluent just keeps coming. The corruption, the utter lack of virtue, the power drive for the unitary presidency (what we used to call the imperial presidency), constantly pushing boundaries of what’s legal. It’s like a gushing waterfall of putrid muck and dead fish that the Trump gang keeps spewing into the Reflecting Pool at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.

And now with no end in sight, because this US Supreme Court – or at least the 6-3 MAGA majority – keeps finding legal reasons to stretch the law into giant loopholes, overturning previous precedents in the process, and signaling to Donald Trump that there are few limits on his presidential power. And few possibilities that he will ever get caught or prosecuted for any of the stanky stuff we know about, not to mention the stuff we don’t (yet) know about.

Here are the two latest episodes that have really caused me to shake my head over the fate of this American experiment in democratic self-governance.

The Trumps go to Kazakhstan

First, the New York Times just reported that Donald Trump finagled a huge, multiple billions-dollar mining deal with Kazakhstan, which is run by Trump’s kind of dictator, for one of the world’s largest deposits of the precious metal tungsten. And who do you think is right in the middle of this deal but a small no-experience company that Trump’s sons, Don Jr and Eric, are leaders of.

And second, enter the US Supreme Court. This is not the first documented instance that Trump, his sons and their wider gang of cronies have used their position to feather their own nest, so what should the courts do with a man like that? How about remove the rules and regulations around him designed to keep a president honest and to hold him accountable? That’s what the MAGA Majority just did in yesterday’s Trump v. Slaughter decision (what an apt name for that decision).

Following in Hunter Biden’s footsteps

Remember how Hunter Biden was accused of trading on his family name and profiting from his famous father’s position as Barack Obama’s vice president? It was a legitimate criticism. Leaving aside Hunter Biden’s drug addiction, illegal possession of a firearm and tax evasion, there was something unsavory about how he used his insider connections to land a five year stint on the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, a prominent Ukrainian natural gas company, which paid him millions of dollars despite Hunter’s lack of expertise in the energy industry. That was twinned with another multi-millions dollar plum position on the board of BHR Partners, a Chinese private equity firm.

None howled louder about this unseemly arrangement than Donald Trump and his sons, who claimed Hunter Biden engaged in influence-peddling and sold access to his father’s office. Nothing was ever proved, but the mud stuck because it had a ring of truth.

Now here comes Trump and Sons, who make Hunter Biden look like a slo-mo piker. Already we had seen how, once Daddy Trump returned to the White House for his second term, Don Jr immediately took board seats at two companies, including a Florida-based manufacturer of drone components. How much does Don Jr know about drones? About as much as Hunter Biden about energy.

But this latest “deal,” an immense mining transaction in Kazakhstan, is a real zinger. The New York Times reported on June 28 about the secret negotiations, which have been months in the making, and involved the direct hand of Daddy President. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met last September with Kazakhstan’s president-til-death Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to seal the deal, and President Trump, with the power and prestige of his office, jumped into the meeting by phone. Who knows what was said, or who was offering what. According to the Times, “During the call, Mr. Trump and his team won an agreement from the Kazakh leader to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten,” a metal that the United States needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods.

But that’s not all. Within weeks of that call, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump joined with other partners to take a 20 percent stake in a corporate entity involved in the Kazakhstan project. Commerce Secretary Lutnick’s two sons, Brandon and Kyle, also stuck their noses into the business. Their investment company, called Cantor Fitzgerald, helped one of the lead investors working with the Trumps to raise $210 million for the Kazakh deal, which the Times reports likely netted the Lutnick boys millions of dollars in fees.

All in the family, indeed.

Unlike Hunter Biden’s board appointments and consulting arrangements, the Trump family has wrangled a sprawling international real estate, licensing, and investment empire, with active projects and licensing agreements in multiple countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. The Trump family has launched cryptocurrency ventures, one of which netted the Trumps $500 million even as other investors saw steep losses. Just after Daddy won his second term, Don Jr joined 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in various companies that subsequently secured major loans and contracts from the federal government. Earlier in 2026, the Trump brothers struck a deal giving them stakes worth millions in an armed drone maker seeking contracts with the Pentagon and with Gulf states under attack by Iran and dependent on their father’s military. An Eric Trump-backed robot company landed a $24 million deal with the Pentagon.

Recently Daddy Trump’s release of a mandatory financial disclosure for 2025 showed that he raked in at least $2.2 billion just in his first year back in the White House. That compares to about $622 million that Trump’s his enterprises pulled in for all of 2024, before he returned to the presidency. The New York Times reports that one of his biggest hauls in 2025 came when an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, “a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise.”

Like father like sons. And of course there’s Jared. Do you know about son-in-law Jared? I’ll have to save that for another time.

Hey, some say, the enterprising sons are just looking to earn a dime during the father’s goldrush time. Didn’t you watch the Godfather movies? And we actually do need a stable and affordable source of precious tungsten, it’s in the national interest. That is of course Trump’s best defense. Call it a “convergence of interests,” so what could be wrong with that?

Share

Unprecedented president

Here’s what’s wrong. Most presidents during our nation’s history avoided even the appearance of profiting from their office. Harry Truman refused to lend his name to any business, even in retirement. Richard Nixon feared a brother might profit off his ties, so he had his phone tapped. And George W. Bush dumped his individual stock holdings before taking office. Insider trading and self-dealing have always been considered bright lines best not to cross, for the good of the republic.

But with Trump, the family business interests are undergoing the fastest overseas expansion of any previous president, each deal potentially shaping everything from tariffs to crypto to data centers to semi-conductors, AI and military aid. The Trump administration has taken direct equity stakes in dozens of private and publicly traded companies, including Intel, IBM, US Steel, Westinghouse and more. The Trump family business has brought in billions of dollars even as questions are raised about whether some companies and investors are receiving favorable treatment in return, and whether certain countries who favor the Trump investments also receive favorable treatment. Mixing foreign policy with family business seems particularly disturbing because of how it could undermine the national interest. It’s all happening with furious frequency and on a truly epic scale.

You can say “But what about Hunter?” and “Both sides do it” if you want. There is some truth to that, we are truly living in a time of kakistocracy, it seems. But that just evades recognition that one side does it a lot more than the other side.

Subscribe now

Supreme Court’s MAGA Majority blesses it all

You hope that in these troubled national times, our institutions hold strong and the separation of powers will contain the damage of a White House run amok. But the GOP-majority Congress is supine, so we are left with the federal courts. Unfortunately, the US Supreme Court just handed to Donald Trump in yesterday’s Trump v. Slaughter decision a close-to-carte-blanche for committing more excesses. Remember, this is the same Chief Justice John Roberts’ Black Robes who ruled in July 2024 (Trump v. United States) that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts taken while in office.

So this latest decision continues this “let ‘em move fast and break things” judicial mentality. Paul Krugman says “the Supreme Court declared war on US democracy. It also declared war, basically, on modern society, on everything it takes to function in the 21st century.”

What was the Slaughter ruling? From the New York Times:

“In a major expansion of presidential authority, the Supreme Court cleared the way on Monday for President Trump to fire independent government regulators despite federal laws meant to protect their jobs…The court’s 6-to-3 ruling to broadly allow the firings…represented a significant shift in power from Congress to the president, and could drastically change the federal government’s structure by giving the president more control over independent agencies.”

The previous legal understanding of these matters, based on the SCOTUS 1935 precedent, Humphrey’s Executor v. US, was established so that independent government regulators would, as much as possible, act in a less partisan and more professional manner. Some of these independent government agencies were required to have both Republican and Democratic appointees, creating a degree of bipartisanship. It’s been this way for 90 years, and suddenly the MAGA Majority has decided that what a previous Supreme Court read into the law actually has been incorrect all along. It’s like two Christian preachers reading the same Bible, and one of them concluding the things that Rev Jesse Jackson used to say, and the other concluding the things that Rev Pat Robertson used to say. Go figure. How can the same book or document lead to such completely opposite interpretations? Aren’t Supreme Court opinions supposed to be based on a higher and deeper understanding of the law?

Don’t count on it. This ruling, as it plays out over the next few years, could result in a shocking level of corruption that the US has not seen in over a century. Think “suitcases of money trading hands” kind of corruption.

Corruption Inc.

That’s because rulings by independent agencies such as the Federal Drug Administration, Department of Labor, Federal Trade Commission, Environmental Protection Agency and more were supposed to be based on fairness, objectivity, the public interest and a sense of legal legitimacy. When the FDA tested a new pharmaceutical drug, or the EPA monitored the cleanliness of our air and water, they were supposed to do that based on science, evidence and empirical data. Certainly the process was not always perfect, but there was a reasonable expectation of high standards and fair results. The agencies oversaw ground rules that companies could fashion their business plan around, and that allowed investors to invest with reasonable assurances and expectations.

What happens if instead these agencies are run based on the whims of a megalomaniac Oval Office occupant? Or if they are overseen by the personal apparatchiks of a White House authoritarian? What happens if the new rules for success are not based on data, science, merit, fairness, competitive performance or the law, but instead are based on who is better at bribing the president, his family and his crony network? Economist Paul Krugman asks, who would want to invest in a new business when you don’t know what the ground rules are, and when the White House “regulators” could decide that your product isn’t “safe” but a competitor’s product is— based on who gave the more generous bribe?

This may not be just a future concern -- it seems likely that it is already happening. Who would be surprised to find out that the president of Kazakhstan took a wee little envelope of money to let Trump and his sons win that tungsten mining concession? Who can forget that in 2019, President Trump pressured newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to work with his attorney general William Barr and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and stop Biden’s run for president against Trump?

In short, this could well be the start of the Viktor Orbán-ization of America. The illiberal Orbán ran Hungary like his own personal kleptocratic fiefdom -- is there any doubt that these are the footsteps that Trump would like to follow?

These are strange days for the American republic, no longer so glittering and with an uncertain future. One can only hope that this is a blip in the nation’s 250 year old history. Will this kind of historically deviant presidential behavior eventually pass out of the American system when Donald Trump and his brood finally exit the stage? Or will the Democrats take the new playbook written by Trump, and use the new potent powers and precedents that Trump has conjured? It would be noble to say that the Democrats should resist the temptation of Trump’s One Ring of Power.

But in reality, the Democrats may have no choice but to use those authoritarian powers to return the US government and its agencies, and society at-large, to some version of its former self, before it was chainsaw mutilated by Trump and his gang of kleptos (including Elon Musk). That’s what is going on in Hungary right now, as Prime Minister Péter Magyar dismantles the tentacles of the previous Orbán machine that had ensnared itself inside every crack and crevice of the deep state.

The Democrats will have to do something similar to rid the US of the lasting stains of this authoritarian regime. Otherwise we will still be dealing with its twisted and corrupt vestiges a generation from now.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

[Editor’s note: DemocracySOS welcomes back as a guest author Dr. Eveline Dowling, senior fellow and research analyst at Expand Democracy. This article was published originally by Independent Voter News].

The June 2 California governor’s primary ended without the Republican lockout that Democratic strategists had feared, but only narrowly. With 99 percent of results in, Democrat Xavier Becerra leads with 28 percent of the vote and Republican Steve Hilton advanced in second place with nearly 25 percent.

Democrat Tom Steyer, who had been polling competitively for months, finished third with 23 percent and is out of the race entirely. More than 2.1 million Steyer votes played no role in determining who advances to November. In a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two-to-one, the top-two system converted a fragmented Democratic majority into a close race decided by a few percentage points.

This is not a failure of individual candidates nor of all-candidate primaries, but the result of a plurality voting system in the primary that is not designed to handle competitive, multi-candidate fields. The good news is that the fix does not require a constitutional amendment but instead can be accomplished by a simple statute.

For future Top Two primaries, legislators could pass laws to enact ranked choice voting (RCV) in the primary, along with more reasonable ballot access and a write-in option in November elections with RCV.

Under the top-two rules, two Republican candidates with a combined total below 40% could advance to November over a fractured Democratic field. This happened in Washington State’s Top Two election for state treasurer in 2016, and nearly happened again in another key statewide race in 2024.

The Seattle Model of Top Two Elections

Seattle voters have adopted all of these changes, with RCV in the primary now moving toward implementation. Voters will rank candidates in order of preference, with the candidate with the fewest votes being successively eliminated and those votes counting for the next ranked choice until two candidates remain.

Those two advance to the November general election, as Proposition 14 requires, and ensure the majority of voters are never locked out.

Consider how this would have changed June 2. Rather than Steyer’s nearly 20 percent of the vote going to waste and Becerra barely surviving on a plurality, RCV would have redistributed lower-ranked candidates’ votes until two candidates had majority support.

The outcome might have been the same, or it might not, but it would have better reflected California voters’ true preferences rather than how well campaigns managed the coordination problem of a crowded field.

The evidence base for this approach is now substantial. Research synthesized in a 2025 American Bar Association report on RCV finds that RCV elections consistently produce winners with broader support, reduce spoiler dynamics in multi-candidate fields, and reward unifying candidates. These findings translate directly to the coordination problem California faces.

Voters consistently tell pollsters they like RCV after voting with it, and numerous states and cities have seen voter turnout surge after adopting RCV. With sufficient time for planning, California will be able to tally RCV results quickly, efficiently and transparently, certainly as well as its non-RCV elections. The statewide experience in Maine and Alaska is instructive on legislative reception as well.

The Maine model of RCV

In Maine, where RCV has been used for federal elections since 2018, the legislature has repeatedly acted to expand and clarify its use and added it for presidential elections in 2019, and is seeking to extend it to the governor this year.

In Alaska, research published in Political Research Quarterly found the state’s top-four/RCV system is associated with more unifying candidates winning elections, and a 2024 poll found that 82% of Maine voters described RCV as easy to use and more popular than ever in the state.

These findings represent a growing scholarly consensus that RCV, when properly implemented, delivers the representative outcomes that plurality systems in crowded fields cannot.

Why This Moment Matters

This reform has a germane behavioral component. If you watched any California governor’s debate, the incentive problem of the current system was clear. One student observer at the April Pomona College debate left “more confused than ever“ after candidates descended into what one participant called something “worse than my teenagers at dinner.”

Debate moderators warned against a “food fight” at the outset of a subsequent debate. The candidates ignored the warning, trading personal insults alongside policy attacks despite sharing broadly similar positions on most major issues.

In a crowded field governed by plurality rules, candidates often face structural pressure to distinguish themselves through negative attacks instead of persuasive appeals. This occurs because the difference between moving forward or being knocked out often hinges on securing only a tiny fraction of votes.

RCV changes that calculus with great examples from recent gubernatorial debates among Maine Democrats and Republicans. Because candidates aim to be ranked favorably by a wider audience, there is a reduced incentive to engage in personal attacks that could alienate potential supporters.

The political science literature shows that, across RCV and plurality jurisdictions, voters in RCV jurisdictions were significantly more likely to report campaigns as less negative. My research, co-authored with fellow scholars, finds that RCV is associated with increased voter mobilization, driven in part by the more civil and candidate-accessible campaign environment the system creates.

The 2026 governor’s race in California attracted attention from a political class that typically does not engage with electoral system design. Candidates, party officials, and journalists are now asking, “Why does California’s system produce this kind of strategic pressure?”

That attention creates a window for legislators to introduce a concrete, technically sound proposal for future elections that speaks directly to an observed failure rather than asking the public to accept an abstract argument for electoral innovation.

The Seattle model is well-suited to that moment. It’s incrementally understandable, keeps the voter-approved top-two system, adds a clear ranking mechanism to the primary, and expands voter choice in the general election.

It does not require a ballot measure campaign nor ask California to take a leap of faith on an untested system. And most pressingly, it directly addresses the coordination problem that consumed Democratic Party attention in the governor’s race, not by restricting competition, but by making it safer.

Dr. Eveline Dowling, Ph.D., @EvelineDowling8, is a senior fellow and research analyst at Expand Democracy.

[Editor’s note: for another perspective on how to reform California’s defective Top Two primary, see this article by CalRCV’s Paul Haughey, calling for an upgrade of the Top Two primary to a Top Five primary decided in the November election by Ranked Choice Voting.]

Share

Upgrade to $5 subscription

[DemocracySOS took a brief early summer hiatus, but now we are back in the saddle providing commentary, analysis, context and history on the important political and economic issues of our time. DSOS only works with the support of readers like you. Here’s the support link, you know what to do.]

Thus spoke President Donald Trump on January 2, 2021 in a leaked telephone conversation to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican. As the transcript and audio of the phone call make all too clear, Trump was trying to pressure the state’s top election official to overturn the presidential election results in his state.

As Raffensperger resisted Trump’s increasingly desperate entreaties, Trump got more threatening:

“You know what they did, and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you…Under law, you’re not allowed to give faulty election results. OK? You’re not allowed to do that, and that’s what you’ve done. This is a faulty election result…There’s nothing wrong with saying that you have recalculated.”

When you listen to Trump’s bullying and pleading in the audio highlights from the phone call, you realize this is a true con artist at work. He is carefully, seditiously, selecting his words to skate a thin line of legality, while trying to put as much lipstick on the pig of a stolen election as necessary.

To his credit, Secretary Raffensperger, showing a rare measure of integrity that seems to have largely vanished from the Republican Party, pushes back calmly but firmly:

“Well Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong… We have to stand by our numbers. We believe our numbers are right.” (audio highlights from the phone call here; transcript highlights here).

Numerous legal analysts concluded that Trump had essentially solicited election fraud. But instead of Raffensperger nailing the president, Trump got his revenge against Raffensperger when he endorsed Raffensperger’s opponent in the 2026 GOP primary for governor of Georgia, which Raffensperger lost by a wide margin. Having personal integrity and patriotic virtue makes you very unpopular within GOP circles these days.

The past as prelude to the future

This is important context for the upcoming November election, as the Trump forces increasingly are flexing the power of the Oval Office and the federal government apparatus to allegedly “prevent election fraud” in the upcoming congressional elections. The balance of power in both the US House and Senate are up for grabs.

It’s one of the ongoing mysteries of US politics and culture that a president who was caught red-handed during a leaked phone conversation soliciting electoral fraud, by blatantly strong-arming Georgia’s top election official to “find 11,780 votes,” has any credibility with any single American when it comes to preventing electoral fraud. Nevertheless, that is where we are. Too many Americans simply don’t care. A third of the soul of America is rotten, possibly more. And the current occupant of the Oval Office and all of his fellow cronies will go down in history as the most corrupt carnival barkers to ever soil the institutions and political traditions of America.

Make no mistake, Trump and his top cronies are not finished, not by a long shot. Here’s what they are up to at this very moment — rust never sleeps — what they are subterraneanly planning in preparation for this November’s election. It involves mobilizing an alarming number of federal agencies, including the White House, the FBI, the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, even the US Post Office, to operationalize their nefarious election schemes.

Numerous Trump allies and election denialists have been installed in leadership positions in these key agencies to pursue claims of fraud. These agencies also are being used to investigate and intimidate political opponents, and to press their thumbs on the scales in an effort to tilt future election outcomes. The US has not seen this level of political thuggery since the bad old days of Boss Tweed and his Tammany Hall graft and patronage machine, or the intimidation of Black officeholders and voters and the stealing of elections during Jim Crow and Reconstruction. Here is a breakdown of the plot that is unfolding:

* Department of Justice

Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche, head of the Justice Department, told Fox News recently that there is “a ton of evidence that the election was rigged” in 2020. His predecessor Pam Bondi held a similar view and that has set the tone for the Trump DOJ. Even as the US Supreme Court has gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act in its Callais decision, the DOJ’s voting section in the civil rights division was overhauled to pursue Trump’s election denialist views, starting with cutting its 30 lawyers in half. Then, to pursue Trump’s agenda, a number of new lawyers have been recruited who were part of the 2020 effort to mount election challenges to overturn Joe Biden’s victory over Trump.

The DOJ once prided itself in staying out of the partisan fray, but it is now pressing forward with unproven claims of fraud. These pro-Trump attorneys have been instrumental in this effort. The DOJ has filed dozens of lawsuits seeking sensitive voter data of tens of millions of Americans from 30 states and numerous counties. The data contains private information like driver’s licenses and social security numbers from every state in the nation. Accumulated in a master database, the data then can be manipulated to knock targeted individuals by the millions off the voter rolls and to discredit future election results. By law, the 50 states control their own elections, not the federal government, but this is yet another legal limit and tradition that Trump is determined to shatter in pursuit of his conspiracy fantasies.

The Department of Justice has also backed the legality of Texas and other states’ mid-decade redistricting plans targeted to help Republicans pick up House seats in the November midterms, even as the DOJ challenged a California voter-approved redistricting plan that could help Democrats win five seats. The DOJ used to play a referee role in elections, trying to ensure fairness and accuracy, but it is now playing on the Trump Team trying to fix election outcomes.

Share

* The FBI

The FBI, which since the dark days of the discredited J. Edgar Hoover regime has tried to walk a nonpartisan line, is now using its long and well-funded law enforcement and investigation arms to aid Trump’s electoral agenda. The FBI has active inquiries into voting fraud from the 2020 election in several states: it raided an election hub in Fulton county, Georgia, has seized election data and images of ballots in Arizona, demanded ballots in Michigan, and in May expanded its inquiries to include the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area. According to the Washington Post, FBI agents visited homes of former and current Wisconsin election officials as part of an investigation into discredited election conspiracy theories pushed by Trump.

This is clearly part of an intimidation campaign, with the FBI trying to obtain access to poll workers’ personal information and talking to election officials in swing states. A search warrant was executed at the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, an organization focused on voting rights and registration, with federal agents seizing computers and phones. Using tactics more on display in authoritarian regimes, federal agents have showed up at the homes of people who have worked with the organization, seeking interviews and gathering information. The plan seems to be focused on intimidating election workers and voters in a number of states, including swing states that Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020.

* US Post Office

Bizarrely, in late March President Trump issued an executive order sharply tightening mail-in voting rules, which Trump has long claimed, without any evidence, contribute to voter fraud. The order gives the United States Postal Service unprecedented powers to issue new rules making voting by mail harder. If Trump gets his way, the USPS —which has long suffered from a reputation of inefficiency and failing to deliver the mail on time — will decide who is allowed to vote by mail. The USPS would be authorized to not deliver ballots sent to individuals who are not included on specified federal mail voter lists. The order also threatens criminal penalties for election workers, mail carriers and others who deliver or send ballots to people the administration claims are ineligible.

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

* Department of Homeland Security

The order also instructs the Department of Homeland Security to develop lists of citizens in every state using unreliable and incomplete federal data materials, as a basis for checking for voter ineligibility. If this policy ever gets implemented, it will create enough chaos to shut out some eligible US citizens from voting. With Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin being a Trump ally and stolen election conspiracist with a history of making false election fraud claims, it raises fears among voting officials that DHS will no longer be a partner helping to secure elections, but rather a threat seeking to undermine any results that Trump dislikes.

Trump also has raised the prospect of deploying federal immigration agents at polling sites, even though federal law explicitly bans federal officers from interfering in elections and prohibits armed federal agents from being deployed in any places where an election is being held. In Trump’s “move fast and break things” style, he is daring the courts to stop him because he knows a sycophantic, supine GOP-controlled Congress never will.

Will Trump succeed in his audacious gambit?

“We the People” have not choice but to fight back to protect and preserve US democracy. But the ultimate outcome will depend on the federal courts, and potentially the heavily MAGA US Supreme Court. Remember, “Five votes beats a reason any day.”

To counter the threat of the White House’s demands for voter roll data, 23 Democratic states have filed a lawsuit to block Trump’s executive order, arguing that the order is an unconstitutional overreach to interfere with states’ right to administer their own elections. Voting rights groups such as the Brennan Center also have challenged the executive order to stop this election interference. At least eight federal district judges have ruled against the administration, with half of those judges appointed by Trump. According to David Becker, a former voting rights attorney at the Justice Department who is now the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, the Trump administration is “throwing everything against the wall that they can find, and nothing is sticking. I don’t know that the Department of Justice has ever had a zero-for-eight streak.”

But the Trump administration is appealing the decisions so this strategy hangs in the balance. Nothing is certain. Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission, has warned that “Trump’s executive order requiring the Department of Homeland Security to compile a list of verified US citizens eligible to vote, and the Postal Service to limit mail-in voting, could very well disenfranchise millions of voters.”

In his relentless hunt for votes, whether illegal or legal, Donald Trump is using lies, conspiracies and scaremongering to justify an unprecedented takeover by the federal government of the administration of elections. For the first time since the Confederate sympathizer President Andrew Johnson tried to undermine Black representation in the South, the power of the federal bureaucracy is being deployed against our representative democracy. At this point, no amount of “both sides do it” dissembling can hide what is in plain sight: we have met the American republic’s enemy, and it is Donald Trump and his corrupt cronies.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

[Dear DemocracySOS readers, this political newsletter only survives due to the support of people like you. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber for only $5 to support this work. Or, if you are already a paying subscriber, consider giving a $5 gift subscription to a friend, colleague or family member. Thank you!]

Here’s my (simplified) theory of (presidential) change. Holding elected office is a tough job. The elected leader has to make a lot of controversial decisions, and every time a decision is made there is somebody somewhere who is unhappy. Usually a lot of somebodies, who get upset over one decision or another. That’s the nature of representative democracy.

After being in office for a few years, enough voters are ticked off about something you’ve done, and the public has slowly grown sick of seeing you on their TV and smart phone screens. “Face fatigue” sets in. Once the elected leader reaches that critical point, every time the candidate’s face pops up in their feed it only reminds the voter about something negative. At that point, after two terms and eight years, more than anything the public just wants to turn the page and move on to the next new and shiny face.

Every four years, a lot of money is spent, and polling and research conducted, trying to predict who’s going to win the next presidential election. Methodologies based on economic trends, right track/wrong track perceptions, the so-called “misery index” which adds the inflation rate and the unemployment rate together, all get their turn in the spotlight. Historian Allan Lichtman uses his 13 true/false questions that he calls The Keys to the White House to predict presidential winners (which he got wrong in 2024).

But to me, it’s a lot simpler than that. Since FDR, the dominant pattern has been that every eight years and two terms, Face Fatigue sets in and the American public votes out the incumbent president’s party. The honeymoon is over, you’ve worn out your welcome. Most voters don’t think deeply about “the issues,” they vote based on vague impressions and some often hard-to-define sense of self-interest. The public got sick of Obama. Before that they were sick of George W Bush. Before that they were sick of Bill (and Hillary) Clinton, on and on. One-term Biden was an anomaly because he looked so old in his debate with Trump that it spooked a lot of swing voters, denying him a second term. Jimmy Carter was a one-term anomaly because he told people in the middle of an oil crisis to put on their sweaters, lower their thermostats, and then couldn’t rescue the US hostages from Iran. He looked weak, and Americans don’t like weak leaders.

George H.W. Bush was a continuation of Reagan, so they actually got an anomalous three terms out of it. And Trump? He’s wearing out his welcome, bigly time. He will tar the next GOP nominee, whether J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio, the way George W. Bush tarred John McCain. Assuming the Democrats nominate the right candidate – and it’s an honest, fair election – the presidency should be theirs.

Who will be the Democratic standard bearer?

So which Democratic candidate will be the right one? A recent poll by Lake Research Partners of 2028 Democratic primary voters found that the two Democratic front runners are Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom. The poll used ranked choice voting, and Harris had 26 percent of first rankings, followed by Newsom with 17 percent, Pete Buttigieg with 16 percent, followed by Senator Mark Kelly, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Josh Shapiro and other Democratic hopefuls. After the RCV tally, Harris bested Newsom, 52 percent to 48 percent.

To me, this is bad news for Democrats. As a Californian, I really don’t see how either Harris or Newsom can be elected president. It’s partly a matter of trying to win the votes of very different electorates in different elections. To get elected as governor or US Senator from California, you have to say and do things to appeal to blue state Californians, as well as state-based organized interest groups, that are going to backfire against you when you try to win votes nationwide.

It’s a simple matter of optics. In 2024, the Trump campaign ran billions of versions of an ad attacking Harris for being supportive of trans rights. The ad slogan “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for YOU” resonated bigly in 2024, and will still be effective in 2028. Newsom has tried to walk back some of his own positions on various liberal issues in preparation for his presidential run, but that won’t matter because those interviews, Twitter posts and video clips still exist. You can’t wave a magic wand and disappear them. His opponent will feature his original statements in ad after ad. The leopard can’t change its spots very easily.

Beyond that, Newsom actually has a governing record to run on, and it’s not a good one. He was elected in 2018, and whether the issue is housing, homelessness, prices and affordability and more, Democrats – like Republicans – have fumbled the ball when it comes to solving real problems in real people’s lives. That’s why, even as Trump’s polling numbers plummet, Democrats aren’t necessarily the beneficiary of the roller coaster in opinion, especially not among key demographics. As reckless, divisive and corrupt Donald Trump is, remarkably many voters do not see Democrats as a great alternative when it comes to actually helping them in their individual lives.

Share

Newsom’s many policy failures will haunt his campaign

I’ll give you one example of Newsom’s failure to solve a real problem in real people’s lives – the spiraling cost of home energy. More specifically, his failure to rein in a California company found guilty of numerous crimes, including manslaughter and destroying people’s property, even as Governor Newsom has allowed this company to continually increase prices to consumers and award higher pay to incompetent executives. In short, Newsom had a chance to get this one right, and he blew it.

Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) provides natural gas and electricity to 16 million people in northern and central California, from Bakersfield in the south to the Oregon and Nevada state lines. I’m sure it’s a tough job, that’s a lot of people over a giant service area that need energy for their homes and businesses.

And unfortunately, if I don’t like PG&E’s prices or service, I can’t shop for another company. PG&E, as an investor-owned utility, has been granted a monopoly over its 70,000 square mile area by the California government. In return, the company is required to get permission from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to increase its rates. Even before Trump’s ill-advised and illegal war in Iran and its impact on oil prices, PG&E’s rates were up 41% over the past three years and 101% over the last decade, many times higher than the rate of inflation.

But apparently that wasn’t enough for PG&E. So their lobbyists went to Governor Newsom and asked if it could implement – wait for it – a “new billing structure.” Uh oh.

Shifting the blame, Democrat-style

Previously, all billing was based strictly on usage – the number of kilowatt-hours used multiplied by the rate per kilowatt-hour, which in California has been around 38 to 40 cents per kilowatt hour -- the highest rate in the country after Hawaii, which is hindered by being an island with limited energy supply. For the new billing format, PG&E instead asked that all customers pay a mandatory Basic Services Charge of about $24 per month, regardless of how many kilowatt hours used, which – I was told by a PG&E representative – is “designed to cover infrastructure costs.”

And in return PG&E lowered the price per kilowatt hour to about 32.6 cents per kilowatt hour. PG&E swore that this would mean that customers would actually pay either the same on their monthly bill, or some customers would pay a little bit less.

But that’s not how it worked out. I have had two monthly bills now with the new billing method. In the first month, I paid 43% more for electricity than I would have paid if the old billing system was used. In the second month, I paid about 16% higher with the new billing system. WTH!

When PG&E and other utilities proposed this, utility watchdog groups were skeptical, saying this was going to turn into a “back door” rate increase. Nevertheless, Governor Newsom and Democratic leaders sneakily pushed through the authorizing legislation for this billing change using a legislative trick -- they attached the bill as a “trailer” to an existing bill, which is usually reserved for inconsequential additions. There were no committee hearings, no public testimony, no debates or standalone floor votes in the Assembly or Senate. Even many of the legislators later complained that they didn’t know that the PG&E trailer was in the bill.

But it gets worse. This backdoor increase came on top of six PG&E rate increases in 2024 and two more in 2025, granted by Newsom’s CPUC. Even as PG&E enjoyed record profits in 2024, and profits rose in 2025 by $118 million to $2.59 billion. Even as its CEO receives $19.8 million in compensation, a 25% increase. PG&E is ranked 175^th on the Fortune 500 list, it’s not exactly broke, like so many Californians are.

When I spoke to a PG&E representative on the phone, at first he sounded syrupy and nice in that scripted “customer service voice” as he explained that company costs have increased dramatically, “just like everyone else’s costs.” And singing the hit tune for liberal-minded people, he said the company “needs more money to invest in renewable energy production” and to build out the power grid for electric cars. It was a well-rehearsed script.

But he got snippy and sarcastic when he finally admitted that, with the new monthly fee and billing structure, it’s those households that use less electricity and power who are seeing their monthly bills increase, while energy hog households that use greater amounts of electricity and power are seeing their monthly bills decrease. So, if you’re a frugal or conscientious consumer who bought energy efficient appliances, invested in solar panels, avoid using the dishwasher during peak hours, and turn off lights to keep your usage low, your PG&E bill has gone up. Yet energy vampires who live in McMansions and use lots of power are seeing their bills decrease.

How wacky is that? The Utility Tax (as some are calling the monthly fee) is increasing electricity bills on four million California households that use less energy. The average household will see a bump in what they pay annually of roughly $400. This goes against all previous conservation efforts which tried to incentivize reducing use of electricity and heat.

We went round and round. Company PR flacks are steeped in their own reality distortion field. But no wonder so many Californians are now fuming over their utility bills. And Governor Newsom and the Democrats seem cluelessly oblivious.

Updgrade subscription

PG&E: Democrats’ favorite dangerous and disaster-prone company

But it gets worse for Newsom. The high prices and soaring profits might be acceptable if PG&E provided good service, and was ambitious in implementing renewable energy (which it’s not). But the company has long had a deeply disturbing safety record. Its service has resulted in a number of deadly disasters and many deaths in recent years under Democrats’ watch, both Governor Newsom and Governor Jerry Brown.

In 2019, PG&E was forced to declare bankruptcy to shelter the company against over $30 billion in liability lawsuits – nearly six times its market capitalization -- from catastrophic California wildfires caused by its negligence and equipment failures. That includes the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 87 people and wiped off the map the town of – ready for this? – Paradise, which was reduced to black burned rubble and standalone chimneys. More like Paradise Lost!

I still remember another incident, a deadly pipeline explosion in the Crestmoor neighborhood of San Bruno, just south of where I lived in San Francisco in September 2010. Eight people were killed and their homes blown up due to PG&E’s failure to inspect gas lines over many years. The initial blast shot a fireball more than 1,000 feet in the air, and the USGS registered the explosion and resulting shock wave as a magnitude 1.1 earthquake. In 2023, a smaller version happened again in nearby Daly City.

Just last year, multiple blackouts before Christmas and New Year’s Day left tens of thousands of San Francisco residents without electricity for several days. PG&E has pled guilty to numerous felonies related to safety violations, manslaughter and injuries to firefighters stemming from numerous California wildfires. In 2022, PG&E ended five years of federal probation after being convicted in the San Bruno explosions, with the judge noting that, even during its probation the PG&E equipment sparked 31 wildfires which the judge referred to as a “crime spree,” as he called the company a “continuing menace.”

How many companies tied to fatal disasters can still secure rate hikes from government regulators and boost executive pay? PG&E’s reputation is about as popular as a wildfire, and yet Governor Newsom and his CPUC are perceived as being in the pocket of this corrupt and dangerous company. This major policy failure, along with a number of others, has resulted in Face Fatigue setting in for Newsom in California. Team Newsom will counter that it cracked down on PG&E, and certainly he got in front of the cameras and tried to grandstand his way to restitution. But no one was fooled by that. A coalition of political leaders, including 22 mayors and some county supervisors, called for Newsom to turn PG&E into a customer-owned utility.

And why not? Compared to an investor-owned utility, a customer-owned utility would not be required to pay dividends to shareholders, and is exempt from federal taxation. Those savings could have been passed on to consumers, or invested in a modern and safe energy policy, as well as greater renewables. That’s a big part of the reason why, for decades, public utility rates have been about 15% lower than investor-owned utilities. According to Matt Stoller, anti-monopoly expert from the American Economic Liberties Project, over the last four to five years, publicly-owned utility rates have lagged inflation by about 40%, whereas investor-owned utility rates have exceeded inflation by greater than 40%. There are nearly 2000 community-owned public power utilities operating across the US, and Nebraska is 100% served by publicly-owned electric utilities, there are no for-profit, investor-owned power corporations in that state.

So it’s not like this is some fringe idea. Moving forward with such a proposal seems to make a lot money sense and common sense. But that was too bold of a step for Newsom, and instead consumers are suffering one rate increase after another to pay for this company’s catastrophic blunders and misdeeds, as well as its greed.

There is an obvious parallel here, to when President Obama responded so limply to the 2008 housing market collapse and failed to hold banks or corporate leaders accountable, bailing out Wall Street more than Main Street. Obama’s failure to demonstrate boldness and responsiveness festered throughout his two terms and fed the “resentment machine” that Trump then stoked in 2016 to succeed Obama as president.

The anger and frustration of Californians toward PG&E is matched only by a rising sense that their political leaders are nonresponsive and incapable of reining in such flagrantly egregious corporate behavior. Governor Newsom has been the protector-in-chief of this renegade company, shielding it from liability for its destructive behavior and shifting the financial burden of its lawbreaking away from its shareholders and onto everyday ratepayers.

And now Gavin Newsom wants to be president? I can just imagine the 30 second ads: “Have you heard about PG&E, Gavin Newsom’s favorite company?” Kind of like this:

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

[Dear DemocracySOS readers, this political newsletter only survives due to the support of people like you. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work. Or, if you are already a paying subscriber, consider giving a $5 gift subscription to a friend, colleague or family member. Thank you!]

The hot political gossip in California recently has been watching a potential train wreck in our Top Two primary for governor. Too many Democratic candidates could split the majority Democratic vote and result in two Republican candidates and no Democrats facing off in November. The chances of this happening have receded in recent weeks, but elections can be surprising, and there are a lot of undecided voters.

This episode has given Californians a chance to reflect on whether the Top Two primary is really the best way to elect the Golden State’s political leaders. A recent study by CalRCV shows a better way – Top 5 with an “instant runoff” in November using Ranked Choice Voting.

California, meet the Top Two

California has used a Top Two primary since 2012, after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger led the effort to put it on the ballot in 2009. At that time, California needed a 2/3 vote in the legislature to pass a budget and the Democrats were one vote short in the middle of the housing and financial crises. In order to win a single Republican vote needed to pass the budget, Democrats were coerced into agreeing to put the top-two primary system on the ballot in 2010. So the Top Two primary was born amidst partisan controversy.

In the Top Two, all candidates from all parties – Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, independents and more – all compete in a single nonpartisan primary. It’s also called a “jungle primary” because dozens of candidates sometimes appear on the ballot and it can result in a chaotic wild ride. The top two candidates, regardless of party, then advance to a runoff during the general election in November.

The rationale was that the formerly used “closed primary,” in which each party’s primary nominated its own standard bearer who then ran in the November election, was contributing to a polarized legislature. Since most districts were lopsided partisan strongholds due to partisan residential patterns, whoever won the low turnout primary -- with usually about half the turnout of the November election, and the most hyper-partisan voters -- would automatically win in November.

Despite most elections being decided in the primaries, independent voters had no voice in the closed partisan primaries. In California, 30% of voters are registered either “no party preference” (22.65%) or with a ballot-qualified third party (7.25%), combined more than registered Republicans (25.14%). Those independents were only allowed to vote in the November election, after the party primary had already decided who will represent that district.

Nationwide, closed primaries have resulted in representatives more extreme left and right than the American people. With the mafia, it’s a threat that “you’ll sleep with the fishes.” In politics, it’s the threat of “being primaried” – political murder. For example, many progressives have called for primary challenges to Democrats in Congress who have the audacity to vote for bipartisan solutions rather than spout leftist talking points in protest. Recently Trump has wielded this tool to unprecedented levels to cower the Republican party. In recent weeks, Trump-supported candidates won GOP primaries against incumbents who had opposed Trump in Indiana, Kentucky and Louisiana, including an incumbent US senator.

Share

Top Two’s defects

California has now used the Top Two primary for seven election cycles over 14 years. Eliminating the closed partisan primaries has been effective in stopping candidates from being “primaried,” but the larger promise of benefits has been at best mixed. Indeed, by limiting this “open” primary to advancing only two candidates, the Top Two has produced some anti-democratic tendencies of its own.

A study by my organization, CalRCV, examined all the races under the Top-Two system since the first elections in 2012, and identified a number of defects described below. The study also looked beyond the top two finishers to the next 3 highest candidates eliminated in each race. This allowed a comparison to what would have happened if the top five candidates advanced to the general election. Here’s a summary of the findings:

In 16 percent of races, two candidates from the same party finished in the top two. That meant in the November election, all other party’s voters in those races had to hold their noses and decide which of that single party’s candidates is either acceptable or less despised.

In many races, political operatives regularly try to manipulate which candidates make it into the top two. In a number of races, the leading Democrat has promoted a Republican opponent in campaign ads, thinking the Republican would be a weaker opponent than another Democrat. This tactic was allegedly used by Governor Gavin Newsom, Representative Ro Khanna and most recently Senator Adam Schiff (whose ads mentioned GOP senate candidate Steve Garvey).

This actually defeats the electorate having a choice between a moderate and a liberal Democrat, which was how the Top Two was supposed to offer more “choice” to voters in a lopsided Democratic district, or in a statewide race in heavily blue California. This tactic remains prevalent in many Top Two races today.

Another anti-democratic pattern is that, when too many candidates from the same political party run, that has resulted in voters splitting their party’s votes, as multiple candidates spoil each other. The result is that the other major political party’s candidates finish in the top two slots – just like has been threatening to happen in California’s gubernatorial race. When this happens, the most popular candidate might not end up as one of the top two finishers.

For example, in one California race for a heavily GOP state senate seat, six Republicans split 59% of the vote, sending two Democrats to the general election. A FairVote study of the first Top Two primary in 2012 found that far more than half of the Top Two races had outcomes that split the vote and may have resulted in the wrong candidates advancing to the November runoff.

The Top Two also has the undemocratic tendency of using a low turnout June or March primary to decide which candidates are eliminated and which two are advanced to the November election. The June election usually has a voter turnout of about half of the November election, and it’s disproportionately lower among voters of color, younger voters and poor people. Given that the low-turnout primary election often decides who will win in November, that means the election is being decided when the participating electorate is overwhelmingly whiter, older and wealthier than California overall.

Another undemocratic result of the Top Two is that it has wiped out what was once a vibrant third party culture in California. Third party candidates used to regularly appear in the November general elections for governor, attorney general and the state legislature, but not any more. Per the CalRCV study, third party candidates finished in the top two and appeared the November election in only 19 races (1.7%). Thirteen of those were because there was only one major party candidate (e.g., a Democrat frontrunner with no Republican candidate). One of the only two ways a third party can retain ballot status as a registered party is to receive 2% of the vote for a statewide office in the June or March primary. But since the Top Two went into effect, third parties hardly ever survive the primary gauntlet and appear on the November ballot, when most voters are at the polls.

Top-Two has been effective in stopping candidates from being “primaried.” But the larger promise of benefits has at best been mixed, with the flaw being the bottleneck of only two candidates advancing. We have to find a better way.

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

What if…we replace the Top Two with a Top Five primary, combined with RCV?

The defects of Top Two can be fixed by two changes: 1) expanding the number of candidates that advance from the primary to the November general election from two to five; and 2) using an “instant runoff” (ranked choice voting) in the general election to ensure the winner has a majority of the vote, and to prevent spoiler candidates and split votes. Below are some other advantages of moving to Top Five, as noted in the CalRCV study:

More women candidates in the November election. In 152 of 1111 total races (14%), there was at least one woman candidate in the top 3^rd-5th primary vote getters, but only two men advanced to the November election in those races. Top Five thus would have given the voters in the higher turnout November election more women candidate options in those 152 races.

More minority candidates in November elections. In 141 races out of 1111 total races (13%), there was at least one minority candidate in the top five in races in which no minority candidate advanced in the top two. The biggest negative impact was on Latinos. One of the reasons for minorities being locked out of the Top Two is that minorities have disproportionately lower turnout in the June or March primary elections, as reported by FairVote in studies of Sacramento, San Bernardino, Oakland and San Jose.

More third party candidates. In 219 races (20%) a third party or independent (NPP = No Party Preference) candidate was left out of the top two but would have finished in the top five (slightly over half were NPP candidates). That number is surely depressed because third parties often have not fielded a candidate out of frustration over the overwhelming hurdle of making it to the November election in a Top Two primary.

Top Four works in Alaska

Alaska sends the four highest finishers in its open primary on to the November general election. Oftentimes the general election includes both Democratic and Republican candidates and third-party or independent candidates. In the two elections where Alaska has used a Top Four primary plus RCV in the November election for governor, senator, U.S. representative, state senate and state house, over a third of the primary races saw a third party or independent candidate finishing in the top four (35% of the 2022 races and 36.5% of the 2024 races). Of those, about two-thirds were independents and one-third were third parties.

Following the Top Four primary, Alaska has used ranked choice voting in the November general election to elect majority winners. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski survived Trump’s attempt to primary her because of Alaska’s Top Four system. And Alaska elected a moderate Democrat to the House over right-wing Republican Sarah Palin. Also, in the new cross-partisan culture fostered by RCV, the majority Republicans in the legislature formed a coalition with moderate Democrats, rather than letting legislation be held hostage by a handful of their extremist MAGA Republican colleagues (as often happens in the US House).

A Top Five primary would be even better than a Top Four. By sending five candidates instead of four (or two) to the general election, and running the general election with the instant runoff feature of ranked choice voting, there can still be vote-splitting in the primary but, with five candidates advancing, any vote-splitting would have less impact. The odds of a general election with no Democrat or no Republican are infinitesimal. In addition, the odds are increased even more than in a Top Four primary that we would see more third party and women candidates and more candidates of color making it to the November election. And in November, the spoiler effect would also be eliminated by the use of Ranked Choice Voting.

It is time for California to upgrade its deficient Top-Two primary to a Top-Five primary plus RCV to ensure majority winners. That would produce a great win for democracy.

Paul Haughey

Share

Upgrade to $5 subscription

[Welcome to DemocracySOS, a newsletter about the failings of America’s “winner take all” democracy, as well as proposed reforms and solutions. If you like this article, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work. At $5 per month, it cost less than your morning muffin.]

The new common wisdom is that the US Supreme Court’s terrible decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which has dealt a decapitating blow to the six decade success story of the Voting Rights Act, should make proportional representation more attractive as a tool for retaining racial representation without single-seat, winner-take-all districts. But upon closer inspection, when you do a state by state analysis, that may turn out to be a fanciful illusion.

That’s because the toxic partisan climate in the United States of maximum mistrust and “win at all costs” has poisoned the well for either major party advancing “what’s good for democracy.” Historically Democrats, both as a party and among some notable individual legislators, have shown more support for political reform than have most Republicans. But redistricting reforms like independent line-drawing commissions significantly backfired against the Democrats. Democrats got burned. The folly of passing independent redistricting commissions (IRCs) mostly in Democratic states resulted in the unilateral disarmament of the largest blue states in the ongoing gerrymandering wars against an increasingly extreme right-wing MAGA Republican Party. Consequently, the GOP ended up controlling redistricting in 19 states and 41% (177) of House districts, while the Democrats controlled it in only seven states and 11% (49) of districts. In just three states, California, New York and Colorado – all states dominated by Democrats who would have ruled over a partisan redistricting process – IRCs cost the Democrats control of the US House of Representatives in 2022 and 2024.

Now, with many Democrats souring on reform, fairness, inclusion, representation and participation as democratic values are getting buried beneath the partisan avalanche. What’s left is raw naked power grabs, and by both political parties. With their audacious gambit to win more seats in the House via mid-decade redistricting, Trump and MAGA Republicans have called off the decades-long truce that conducted redistricting only at the start of each decade. In this toxic climate, neither major party is going to do anything in the short term to help the other party, even if it might help their own party in the longer term. The two parties are so locked into their un-civil war that they will not be able to step out of that role long enough to do anything positive or pro-democratic for the country. Quite the opposite, both parties will fight any political reform that is perceived as causing them to lose even an inch of ground to the evil opposition.

Certainly it’s a bitter pill to swallow that Democrats in a number of states who tried to do the right thing by supporting nonpartisan independent redistricting have discovered that their genuflections toward “fair democracy” backfired on their party. The battle lines are long and deep, the enemy partisans are positioned at the barricades, preparing for the next battle. But will this tragic scenario replay itself in the hope-inspiring effort to enact proportional representation, especially in response to the throttling of the Voting Rights Act? I fear the answer is: yes.

Does the toxic partisan climate make it harder to pass PR?

The organization that I have been long associated with as a co-founder and its second staff person, FairVote, pushed for a couple of decades for federal legislation that would create a “local option” for any state to use multi-seat districts instead of single-seat districts -- but only if the multi-seat districts were elected by proportional representation (PR). Let’s imagine for a second what might have happened if FairVote had succeeded at passing the local option bill.

Suddenly, on a state-by-state basis, it would have been possible for states to elect their House delegation with a PR method, and move beyond the antiquated single-seat “winner take all” system. But that means in a state like California, where Republican candidates for the House in 2024 won 39.2% of the aggregated popular vote but only 17% of House seats, a proportional result for Republicans would give them another eleven seats. In a blue state like Massachusetts, where Democrats occupy all nine congressional seats and Republican candidates typically earn 30% to 40% of the vote, GOP candidates would likely win two to four more of the nine seats if elected by PR.

The same could be said for GOP-dominated states, like Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where their extreme gerrymanders made sure that Democrats won a much lower percentage of House seats than their share of the popular vote. In those states and more, a PR system would elect more Democrats.

If all Democrat- and GOP-controlled states opted together to use PR to elect their congressional delegations, that truly would be an enormous stride toward better, fairer and more representative elections. But is it likely that any red GOP states will exercise this option? Let’s not forget that when the House Democrats overwhelmingly passed HR 1, the “For the People Act,” which among other worthy political reforms expressly outlawed partisan gerrymandering and required states to use independent redistricting commissions, not a single Republican supported this legislation. After passing the House with only Democratic votes, HR 1 was strangled in the crib by a filibustering GOP in the Senate. The Republicans knew that passing that bill would have interfered in their efforts to gerrymander the hell out of the greater number of states they control.

So without GOP participation, enacting proportional representation for federal elections on a state-by-state basis would likely result in a similar dynamic that we saw play out with mid-decade redistricting – unilateral disarmament for Democrats. If blue state Democrats in a single state were to pass legislation to adopt PR, or even just passively stand by while election reformers passed a voter initiative, it would take away the Democrats’ ability to gerrymander the hell out of their states and maximize the number of elected Democrats. With Republicans declining to follow the same PR pathway in red states, then the net effects would facilitate an increase in the number of GOP representatives, while red states would continue to maximize their gerrymandering opportunities.

Share

How about state legislatures? Are they a better target?

Previously when I wrote about this topic in August 2025, I wrote that this dilemma at the federal level could be avoided by focusing on enacting PR for state and local legislative races only, and staying away from trying to reform federal elections for the US House until it can be done at the national level so that it applies to all states at the same time. But much has happened in the ensuing nine months. We have seen two drive-by hits by the Supreme Court against the Voting Rights Act, which has injected even more foaming-at-the mouth partisanship into congressional elections and unleashed an even more rapid sprint to re-re-re-redistrict and wipe out race-conscious districts.

Look at a state like California, my home state, where there is an earnest but under-resourced effort by three different reform organizations in a very large and populous state to pass PR. Democrats control 75 percent of the seats in both the state Assembly and Senate, yet they won only 59% of the popular vote in the Assembly and 62% in the Senate (if you aggregate the votes for each party in each legislative district). So if blue California were to adopt PR at the state legislative level, Republicans would win a lot more seats than they do now, about 12 more seats in the Assembly and 5 more seats in the Senate. Why would Democrats ever agree to that? Why wouldn’t they fight that, along with their allies in labor, the voting rights and environmental communities, as an existential threat with all the resources at their disposal?

A similar thing could be said about other heavily Democratic legislatures in Illinois (Dems won 66% of the state House seats on 55% of the popular vote; under PR, the GOP would win 13 more seats), Massachusetts (the GOP would likely win 10 more seats in the state House), Maryland (GOP would likely win 5 more seats out of 47 in the Senate), Washington (GOP likely would win 4 more seats in the Senate), Connecticut, Hawaii and Rhode Island (GOP would likely win 6 more seats in the House and 9 more seats in the Senate). On the GOP side, states like Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Arkansas, North and South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Idaho all have extremely lopsided GOP super majorities in their state houses. Why would MAGA Republicans ever accept proportional representation at the state legislative level when it would likely result in more evil Democrats getting elected?

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

PR in Colorado? Democrats would lose ground

Let’s zoom in on Colorado, where PR advocates have filed three proposed ballot measures, two for Open List PR and one for Mixed Member Proportional (Measures 262, 263 and 264). In the state House of Representatives elections, Democrats won 53.7% of the popular vote and 66% of the seats; in the Senate, Democrats won 56.4% of the votes and 66% of the seats. That means if PR were implemented, Republicans would win 8 more seats in the House and 3 more seats in the Senate. Given the poisonous national atmosphere, which has spread like a cancer to the states, why would Colorado Democrats not fight the coming of proportional representation – whether Open List, MMP or proportional ranked choice voting – with every ounce of their partisanship?

What are the best reform targets?

These hard-boiled realities of the bitter partisan landscape suggests a narrower field of targets for PR reform. The first target should be those states where the partisan split is more even, closer to 50-50. Those would be states where neither the Democrats or Republicans have as much to lose by a change to PR. Looking at this link, that would push to the front of the line states like Arizona, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Alaska and Virginia (the House of Delegates).

The second target would be cities, most of which are nonpartisan so the dynamics in those places do not play so obviously in the current toxic partisan sandbox. Most cities are heavily dominated by Democrats, so it’s likely that PR would result in more Republicans getting elected. But the national partisan toxicities aren’t so prominent in cities, so it’s possible some well-meaning, good-government Democrats and liberals could join in efforts with some Republicans to enact PR at the local level. Because these are nonpartisan elections, the best PR method would be proportional ranked choice voting, or possibly cumulative voting. Open list PR really only works when you have formal political parties, so in nonpartisan cities it would not be a viable option.

However, a handful of large cities, like New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Houston, Indianapolis, Charlotte and Louisville, still have local partisan elections that are nearly 100% dominated by Democrats, who fill nearly all seats. So one could easily imagine the Democrats in those cities saying: “Screw proportional representation, it’s just going to elect more evil Republicans. Let’s kill it.”

National politics and increasingly poisonous partisanship have polluted US politics and corroded the two major political parties from the inside-out all across the country. That makes it a much trickier terrain for badly needed political reform. Each side will be weighing every reform to see, not “will this help me?” but “will this help my evil opponent?” Enacting political reform is hard hard work, so selecting the right targets is crucial. Better to know the exact contours of the landscape you are trying to traverse so you don’t get part of the way along your journey, only to find that the pathway is blocked.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

[This article is Part II to Monday’s SCOTUS voting rights demolition opens door to better representation, starting off where Part I ended]

With the right-wing majority on the US Supreme Court strangling to near-death the Voting Rights Act with its Louisiana v. Callais decision, numerous voting rights advocates, political scientists, legal experts and organizations are understandably contemplating: what’s next? Where do we go from here? With the ink barely dry on the Supreme Court’s ruling on April 29, a number of people are putting forward their own plans for how to maximize racial representation.

So which method would be best for filling the big shoes of the VRA? If racially gerrymandered single-seat districts are no longer fit for purpose, then the only remaining option would be some form of proportional representation (PR) electoral system, which uses multi-seat elections instead of single-seat. Instead of five single-seat districts, for example, you could combine those five into a single district with five seats. In a five-seat district, if a party or grouping wins 20% of the popular vote it wins 20% – one – of the five seats; if it wins 60% it is awarded 60% – three – of the seats. In a PR system, the drawing of individual districts lines would be greatly downgraded in impact and importance.

Cumulative Voting to the rescue?

In the United States, the alternative method that has had the longest track record of success at advancing minority representation is cumulative voting. With CV, in an election to elect five seats within a district, every voter would have five votes to cast however a voter wishes: five votes on a single candidate, or two votes on one candidate and three votes on a second candidate, or one vote on each of five candidates. The voter has the option of “spending” their votes however she/he wishes, and expressing a strong preference for a particular candidate. CV is a plurality system in which the “highest vote getters” win.

Over 100 jurisdictions in communities as diverse as Amarillo, Texas, Chilton County, Alabama and Peoria, Illinois have elected city councils and/or school boards by cumulative voting, often as a court-approved remedy to settle voting rights claims. CV has been especially helpful when the minority voting community has been too geographically spread out to benefit from the drawing of a majority-minority district, because minority-minded voters could cast multiple votes for a minority candidate. In many jurisdictions, CV has been successful at electing minority candidates for the first time, including in conditions of extreme racially polarized voting.

In Louisiana, for example, in the midst of its current VRA controversy, CV would provide the easiest and most straightforward remedy for electing Black representatives to two of the six US House seats. Candidates would run statewide, each voter would have six votes to cast. Black voters and those supportive of voting rights could put three votes on each of the two leading Black candidates. Under CV rules, each of those candidates would need to gain one-sixth of the statewide vote to win a seat, and with Louisiane being 33% Black, their chances of doing so would be excellent. Cumulative voting works well in the right situations, like in Louisiana and the other southern states with White-Black racial polarization, that are now re-redistricting, post-Callais, including Tennessee, Alabama and South Carolina.

But CV has some downsides as well, there is no perfect electoral system. CV’s main shortcoming is the same as other plurality elections – spoiler candidates and split votes. If too many minority candidates run in the same race, voters may split their votes among all those candidates, who all spoil each other resulting in none of them winning. For that reason, CV is sometimes called “semi-proportional” rather than full proportional representation, because there is a crapshoot element to it. The fear of spoilers and split votes in turn can lead to a certain amount of local boss-ism, in which powerful players exert pressure on candidates to drop out of the race so that their racial bloc vote doesn’t split. Voters from that bloc need to be disciplined in only casting their multiple votes for the designated candidates, which introduces anti-democratic dynamics into the politics.

That’s why some fair representation advocates prefer proportional ranked choice voting (PRCV), because its ranked ballots mitigate cumulative voting’s defect of split votes among spoiler candidates. Voters have the option of ranking their ballots, and if their first choice can’t win their vote goes to their second choice. Multiple candidates of color won’t spoil each other and minority voters won’t split their votes. Some critics claim that RCV is too complicated for voters, especially minority voters. But the many studies of real world RCV elections has found the opposite, though there is certainly a lot of bogus research out there making the “confusion” claim based on the flimsiest of evidence.

Still, due to its successful track record and long-term use, cumulative voting would seem to have the inside pole position in this bid to figure out the best method to promote racial representation.

The false promise of Fusion Voting

Another method proposed in the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling is Fusion Voting. Dan Cantor, co-founder of the Working Families Party and now with the Center for Ballot Freedom, wrote an article titled “After the Voting Rights Act.” Fusion voting, which Cantor calls “America’s own unique form of proportional representation,” allows a voter to vote for a single candidate on multiple parties’ ballot lines. It is used in New York and Connecticut but whatever its merits, which fusion voting advocates claim are many, there’s no evidence that it has done anything to elect more minorities. Cantor sites an example from 1893 as evidence that it can help elect racial candidates, but an example from 130 years ago is not terribly convincing. The fact that he can’t cite something more recent is telling.

In fact, in New York City’s city council elections, it wasn’t until ranked choice voting was used for the first time that minority voters and candidates won a fair share of representation, with women of color tripling their numbers and winning a majority of seats on the city council in the first RCV election. Note that NYC already had fusion, as well as public financing of campaigns, for many years before that first RCV election. Yet minorities -- especially women of color -- remained vastly underrepresented. With the introduction of ranked ballots, suddenly voters were liberated to vote for their favorite candidates without fear of spoilers. And the power brokers couldn’t tell women candidates “wait your turn, if you run you will split our vote and be a spoiler.” I write this as someone who actually supports fusion, I wish its advocates had more success these many years in getting the courts to overturn the ban in 48 states, or in mounting ballot measure campaigns to win it in some states. Having fusion certainly wouldn’t hurt our democracy, and in some situations would help. But in response to this SCOTUS ruling, and the repercussions to come, I don’t see how fusion voting offers voting rights advocates and supporters anything at all.

Share

Could Open List PR help – or hinder -- racial representation?

Following the Supreme Court ruling, New America’s Lee Drutman proposed a generic PR system, but in the past he has strongly supported an “open party PR list” (OLPR) method. Political scientist Michael Latner and law professors Luis Fuentes-Rohwer and Guy-Uriel E. Charles also proposed an open list PR system immediately after the Callais decision, as did other academics.

But from the point of view of advancing minority representation, there is little evidence that OLPR will enhance racial representation, and it could in fact undermine it. The institutional structure of OLPR has some severe downsides from the point of view of racial representation. There are many different variations of OLPR, and depending on the details, just like cumulative voting and the dreaded plurality elections, OLPR could result in racial minority candidates who are forced to run against each other and spoil each other, as minority-minded voters are caught in the usual plurality trap of splitting their votes among too many candidates, resulting in no minority candidates getting elected.

Open list PR advocates often cite Brazil’s multi-racial democracy as evidence that the open list system can effectively produce fair racial representation. But in actual fact, Afro-Brazilians are way underrepresented in Brazil’s national Chamber of Deputies. While 56% of Brazil’s population is black or brown Afro-Brazilians, only 25% of the elected Chamber of Deputies is black/brown/Afro-Brazilian. Andrew Janusz, an assistant professor of political science and expert in Brazilian politics says:

“Brazil is home to the largest African descendant population of any country outside of Africa. Despite comprising a majority of the Brazilian population, though, politics is dominated by whites. At the local, state, and national levels, elected officials are overwhelmingly white. The more prestigious and powerful the office, the lower the chances that an Afro-Brazilian holds power.”

Looking at those numbers, that means Brazil – elected by open list PR -- is actually less racially representative than is the United States right now. In the US House of Representatives, 133 out of 435 seats (31%) are held by racial minority representatives, for a national population that is about 42% minority. So the “racial representation gap” is about 11% (42% minus 31%). In Brazil, the racial representation gap is 31%! (56% minus 25%).

Why does Open List PR underperform?

It can be hard to tease out cause from effect, but here’s what I suspect is the reason that OLPR underperforms. What distinguishes the “open list” PR system from its cousin the closed list PR system is that in OLPR, voters are permitted to vote for an individual candidate instead of just a political party, and that single vote then doubles as a vote for that candidate’s political party. Those votes, passing from the candidates to the political parties, are aggregated to figure out the proportion of legislative seats won by each party.

But how do you figure out which candidates will fill the seats? In OLPR, whichever candidates with the most individual votes from voters fill that party’s seats. So it’s a plurality election within the political party to decide the winning candidates. The real irony here is that, as these political scientists and legal experts are rushing to move away from plurality-wins-all elections in the US, the open list PR system they want to replace it with uses plurality elections within the party’s internal candidate selection process. That means spoiler candidates and split votes within the list will impact that system. And here’s where it potentially undermines racial representation: what happens if too many minority candidates are running to win a seat? The same thing that happens in plurality elections in the US – they run the risk of all their candidates splitting the votes from those voters supporting racial minorities, and spoiling each other and none of them getting elected.

But that’s not all. Because it’s a plurality election within the list, that means the candidates from that party who are white will likely have more votes from that party’s voters to move them higher up the list. Minority candidates will be dragged down by the same dynamics that exist in our current winner-take-all system (outside of elections where majority-minority districts have been drawn): a minority candidate normally loses to the majority candidate because by definition the majority candidate has more support than the minority – why wouldn’t it work the same way in an open list PR system, when it comes to which candidates within a party will win the seats?

To compensate for this discriminatory dynamic built into an open list system, a political party that wants to support diverse racial representation would have to employ racially preferential policies – such as promoting racial candidates more than white candidates, or encouraging voters to pick the racial candidates. Some countries using OLPR, such as Sweden, use a “partially open” system in which the political parties present a pre-selected ranking of candidates on their party list to the voters, and the voters have the option of using a “personal preference vote” for their chosen candidate. After the proportional number of seats won by the party are determined, the top candidates on the party’s list win those seats. If any candidates win enough individual personal votes from voters, they can leapfrog other candidates ahead of them on the party-selected list. However, political scientist Henry Milner says in Sweden most voters do not in fact vote for individual candidates, instead they follow the recommendations of the influential party chiefs (much like what happens in Australia’s PR system, known as Single Transferable Vote, in which most voters choose to vote “above the line” for all of a party’s candidates, instead of ranking individual candidates).

So whether the racial minority candidates are trying to win more individual votes than the white candidates, or whether they are trying to win the favor of party bosses who are arranging the pre-election list, either way in OLPR these racial minority candidates would have to win based on amassing a lot of votes from white voters, and most likely some visible support from white party leaders. That’s no different than how many minority candidates have to win currently in the US.

Share

How OLPR works in Finland

These dynamics of the open list PR system are explained clearly by Åsa von Schoultz, a professor of political science at Helsinki University in Finland, who has written a detailed paper about the Finnish Open List proportional representation system that is illuminating. Professor Von Schoultz writes that the Finnish electoral system has two levels of competition -- one level is that of a multiparty democracy using proportional representation, with lots of competition as nine political parties won seats in Finland’s most recent election, with parties awarded representation more or less in proportion to their share of the popular vote. But as Von Schoultz points out, Finland’s OLPR system unleashes a second level of competition – a high degree of intra-party competition, because within each party the candidates that win seats are those that garner the most personal votes from voters. That in turn means that candidates within the same party are all competing against each other to see who will be awarded the seats that the party collectively wins. Because candidates within the same political party are running against each other, that means they can spoil each other’s chance of election. Spoiler candidates within a political party can undermine the intra-party solidarity between those candidates.

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

Lessons for the US in the Callais aftermath

Think about that. How could anyone who has observed racial politics unfolding in the US for the last few decades believe that OLPR would somehow result in racial minority candidates, and the racial constituencies of voters that support them, winning their fair share of representation? It would be a miracle if it did. That article by Professor Von Schoultz also has important analysis showing why OLPR can also result in a lack of proportional representation among competing factions within a political party. If these dynamics regularly occur in Finland’s OLPR, why wouldn’t they happen in the US and further undermine racial representation?

Unfortunately from the point of view of racial representation, open list PR systems have some of the same defects that our current winner-take-all, single-seat district system has. Sure, with OLPR the votes cast by voters for those minority candidates will still accumulate for the political party itself, and will help that political party to win its proportional share and maximize its seats. If all these OLPR advocates really care about is proportional representation among competing political parties, it will do fine.

But if none of those seats are filled by racial minorities, should the racial minority candidates who unsuccessfully ran to get elected, and the voters who voted for them, feel okay about that? Should they feel like they are “represented” even though the candidates they voted for individually didn’t win? Will they feel “included” if the numbers of racially diverse representatives is pitifully small to nonexistent? Aren’t these dynamics eerily similar to those American racial minorities have to deal with now in our winner-take-all districted system? Is OLPR just shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic, from the point of view of racial representation?

Unfortunately, these are the types of details that I find that the proponents of Open List PR don’t seem to care about. They certainly don’t appear to have thought them through very clearly. Or have they decided that, despite the bitter racial and cultural history of the US, a priority on racial representation as part of the nation’s crucial definition and realization of the “good society” is no longer necessary? If that is the case – which will be revealed by their actions more than their words – then why should voting rights leaders, supporters and communities, whose backs are smack against the wall right now, and are counting closely to see who their real allies are, trust these OLPR advocates and support their reform efforts?

Don’t get me wrong, I am a supporter of open list PR systems. It has worked marvelously well in a number of countries to elect multiple political parties in proportion to their shares of the popular vote, especially in democracies that have relatively low levels of racial diversity. But the truth is, if the goal of representative government is to approximate John Adams’s famous “an exact portrait of the people at large” standard, which in today’s context would mean a legislature that reflects the face of a racially diverse population, there are better methods to accomplish that than open list PR. And proponents of OLPR do a disservice to robust representative government – and risk coming across to voting rights advocates and supporters as either insincere, naïve, opportunist or all three – if they continue to ignore these realities in the midst of their reformers’ zeal.

Besides, the US is a big country, with tens of thousands of elections, so what is good at the local level in Kansas or Ohio might not work so well at the state level in Oregon or Illinois or at the federal level. There is no one-size-fits-all blueprint about what electoral system will necessarily work in all places and situations. Open List is a great system, but not necessarily everywhere. And when it comes to filling the shotgun holes in voting rights advocacy left by the right wing SCOTUS majority, the best that can be said about OLPR is that its potential for beneficial effects are unproven.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

[Dear DemocracySOS readers, new and old. If you like what you are reading, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work. Or, if you are already a paying subscriber, consider giving a $5 gift subscription to a friend, colleague or family member. Thanks for considering it.]

In reaction to the right-wing Supreme Court majority’s decision last Wednesday to gut the Voting Rights Act, numerous experts and pundits have rushed to get their reaction pieces out there to catch the news cycle. I thought I would take this past weekend to read through a range of commentary about the likely impacts, and think about what comes next. The decision, Louisiana v. Callais, is a terrible ruling, whether on the legal merits or its utter illogic and hypocrisy, as well as on the expected consequences. But it also was wholly expected, this has been coming for some time in decision after decision. As has been said before about the John Roberts Supreme Court, “Five votes beats a reason, any day.”

But amidst all the justifiable shock, I’ve been surprised that more expert commentators haven’t recognized what an opportunity this is – both for an overall better democracy as well as the potential for better representation for most race-identified voters who never lived in the 133 House districts out of the 435 that elected a minority congressperson. The unspoken truth is that, six decades ago with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the advocates of representational justice for black Americans made a devil’s bargain with the winner-take-all, single-seat district electoral system. Winner-take-all methods, by design, only elect majorities. By definition, minorities of all stripes – whether racial, party-based or geographic – do not normally win representation in majoritarian systems.

For understandable reasons, the advocates of representational justice accepted the only deal that was offered to them by the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which was to contort and manipulate the district lines – often times drawing ridiculously shaped districts, such as the infamous Z-shaped district, districts shaped like dumbbells, another that was compared to the shape of a smashed mosquito, still another the shape of splashed spaghetti sauce – to turn a racial minority constituency into a majority within a particular district (alongside the zany Picasso districts drawn for incumbent protection reasons). With the careful gerrymandering of legislative district lines to capture the right pockets of racially-minded voters, the winner-take-all electoral system was literally twisted and wrenched and forced to do something that it was never meant to do – elect representatives of a minority perspective.

And lo and behold, over time, racial gerrymandering worked. Not perfectly, it had some real downsides which I’ll get to in a minute, but the ghost white United States Congress began to resemble the burgeoning racial diversity of the nation. A decades-long full court press of legal actions to enforce the drawing of black-majority districts was unleashed, later followed by efforts to draw Hispanic-majority or -influence districts. Long-overdue representational justice was achieved relatively quickly, with the number of elected black House members tripling in 15 years, from 6 to 18, and continuing to climb steadily to today’s record of 61, along with 46 Hispanic, 18 Asian American (also a record) and 3 Native American members out of 435 – whites are still vastly overrepresented, with 69% of House members and only 59% of the U.S. population.

Backlash at the Supreme Court

But as the US Supreme Court has turned more right-wing (due to the constitutional bias that gives overweighted representation and influence to US Senators from low-population conservative states), the federal courts began turning against the goals of racial representation. Supreme Court decisions like Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), Shaw vs Reno (1993), Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), have been making Swiss cheese of voting rights jurisprudence for many years now. Indeed, law professor Rick Pildes observed, following this latest ruling, “For many voting-rights scholars, a surprising aspect of this week’s decision is that Gingles survived as long as it did. Almost 20 years ago, the court’s trajectory had already become clear, as I wrote in an academic article back then: ‘Gingles now looks more like the last gasp of an older, dying era than the framework for a new one.’”

Now that the shining star of the VRA has reached its white dwarf stage, in which it will gradually cool and fade to a dead core, it’s a good time to review why its achievement was always a pyrrhic victory, and for reasons that are particularly important to review and remind ourselves about at this time.

Share

1. More minority representation = fewer Democrats elected

First, as racial representation expanded and grew, it became clearer that it was resulting in the election of fewer Democrats. As it turned out, the packing of high concentrations of minority voters into “majority-minority” districts not only elected more minorities, it also had the effect of bleeding minority voters out of all the surrounding districts. Given that minority voters have been the most reliably Democratic voters, that made all of the neighboring districts more Republican.

It was a surprise to many when, during the 1991-92 redistricting, GOP House minority leader Newt Gingrich embraced this strategy of drawing majority-minority districts, as did the Bush Administration’s Justice Department. But the reason quickly became clear. In Gingrich’s home state of Georgia, the US House delegation went from 10 Democrats -- one black -- and one Republican (Gingrich) in 1992 to eight Republicans and three Democrats -- all three black -- in 1994. The newly elected black (and later Latino and Asian) representatives mostly were replacing white Democrats, and the increase in minority representation came at the expense of electing fewer Democrats overall. Virtually overnight, white moderate Democratic House members disappeared from the South.

The regional partisan demographics expressed within a district-based, winner-take-all electoral system turned the Voting Rights Act into an effective GOP tool that allowed the party to take control of the House of Representatives in 1994 for the first time in four decades (Gingrich became Speaker of the House). The Democrats and minority voters were tripped up by a classic Catch-22: even as legislatures were becoming more diverse, they were ironically becoming less friendly to the agenda of racial minorities. Not only that, with the disappearance of many white Democratic House members, that allowed GOP strategists to further “racialize” the Democratic Party and alienate it from white working class voters.

2. The VRA didn’t empower “orphaned” minority voters

Second, another reason racial gerrymandering should have been only a short-term stop gap solution – instead of the institution it became -- is because it only representationally empowered those minority individuals who lived within those districts that elected minority representation. In today’s US House with 133 minority electeds, all other minority-minded individuals living in the other 301 districts are not blessed with any representation at all, unless you can argue that a black person in Wyoming gets her or his representation from Congresswoman Maxine Waters in Los Angeles or Cleo Fields in Louisiana. Which is obviously a stretch, by any reasonable definition of the term “representation.” These are “orphaned” voters – voters without an electoral home. There are actually a lot more orphaned minority individuals living in those 301 districts than there are minorities fortunate enough to have an electoral home in those 133 districts. The current system, even at its best, never provided tens of millions of minorities with a chance to elect a minority representative. Election after election, most minority individuals learned through repetition whether they were deserving of representation or not, contributing to an understandable cynicism toward American democracy and its recurring representational shortcomings.

3. White individuals can be orphaned voters too

Third, it must be recognized that white people living in those 133 majority-minority districts were in the same boat – no representation according to their race. Today, for example, in most legislative districts, a white Christian Republican can be living next door to a Latina single mom Democrat who lives next door to a gay independent Korean small businessman living beside a Sierra Club member and Green Party supporter, etc., etc., ad infinitum. But with only one seat being elected, only one of these voters will end up with “representation” in any genuine sense. In actual fact, the real minorities who have been damaged, election after election, by the winner-take-all single-seat district system has been any geographic minority living within any district. There are entire sub-regions where geographic minorities of many persuasions are swamped by the winner-take-all avalanche that dominates their electoral districts. The rising star of the Voting Rights Era for these last 60 years ignored all of this and accepted these on-the-ground realities as part of the devil’s bargain.

4. The “racialized” environment contributed to Trump’s rise

Fourth, it’s clear that decades of successful voting rights actions only served to perpetuate the continued use of winner-take-all districts and their racially-tinged context. It has unintentionally reinforced the same racialized culture that has fed into the current MAGA white backlash. It is understandable why voting rights leaders have continued down this loaded path, since it has led to levels of electoral success that had not been seen since pre-Jim Crow Reconstruction. But it contained the seeds of its own undoing.

And so now, here we are. Faced with these four buried secrets that have been churning beneath the surface for so many years. It’s a good time to unearth them, in the hopes of better understanding the path forward.

Upgrade to a $5 subscription

What now? Many ideas, so little time

Perhaps this moment gives us an opportunity to finally get this right. There are other methods, under the broad category of proportional representation, that arguably would do at least as good a job as racially gerrymandered districts, and might even do a better job because it would allow minority voters -- no matter where they live -- to have a chance to cast a vote that actually helps elect their preferred candidates. However, some of these proportional methods are better than others for the specific purpose of electing racial representation.

Possible options include cumulative voting, which has a long and successful history of being used to settle voting rights cases in over 100 jurisdictions. It’s a good method, but its defect is the problem of spoiler candidates and split votes – if too many minority candidates run in the same contest, race-minded voters can easily split their votes among all those minority candidates, who all spoil each other, resulting in none of them winning.

A better method therefore than cumulative voting is proportional ranked choice voting (PRCV), because its feature of using ranked ballots mitigates cumulative voting’s defect of split votes among spoiler candidates. Voters have the option of ranking their ballots, and if their first choice can’t win their vote goes to their second choice. Multiple candidates of color won’t spoil each other and minority voters won’t split their votes. Some critics claim that PRCV is too complicated for voters, but the many studies of real world PRCV elections has found the opposite, though there is certainly a lot of bogus research out there. In New York City’s city council elections using single-winner RCV, women of color tripled their numbers and won a majority of seats on the city council in the first RCV election. That success for candidates and voters of color in RCV elections has been repeated in cities as diverse as Portland OR, Minneapolis, St. Paul, San Francisco, Salt Lake City and more.

Dan Cantor, co-founder of the Working Families Party and now with the Center for Ballot Freedom, has proposed fusion voting as part of the salve for this bitter moment. Calling fusion voting “America’s own unique form of proportional representation,” it allows a voter to vote for a single candidate on multiple political parties’ ballot lines. It is used in New York and Connecticut, and there’s little evidence that it has done much of anything to elect more minorities. It’s hard to imagine how fusion voting offers voting rights advocates a lifeline in this confusing, lost moment.

Over at New America, political scientist Lee Drutman has proposed an “open party list” proportional system as the remedy that racial representation advocates need. It’s a method with some merit, but from the point of view of advancing minority representation, open list PR has real problems. Like cumulative voting, it would likely result in spoiler candidates and split votes among minority-minded voters that result in poor racial representation. If the goal is a “mirror legislature” that reflects the face of a racially diverse population, there are better methods than open list PR.

In a second article to come, I will write a more detailed review that compares and contrasts different electoral methods and their ability to facilitate racial representation. This is an important moment in the history of our representative democracy, and it is worth taking some time to try and understand the best pathway forward for the very diverse, complex and bitterly divided society that we have become. Hopefully in this delicate, vulnerable moment we can avoid the usual political opportunism, as everyone tries to push forward their favorite method, regardless of the evidence of whether it will actually help facilitate racial representation.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

Share

Upgrade to a $5 subscription