The Trouble with Voting in America
An Article of the Modern Survival Guide
I’ve been writing articles for the Modern Survival Guide for about four years, and a consistent refrain that any reader will take away from this series is the push to VOTE. It’s your primary, most reliable, and most powerful way to make changes in society — put the people who support the policies that you need into positions of power. Voting is the fundamental right you get as a citizen of a democracy, it’s a necessary component of our civil and political life, and it’s absolutely essential to the correct administration of the nation.
It’s a damn shame that it only barely works in the US.
This is a very contentious topic with some people, because Americans are repeatedly told, from childhood to death, that we have the best government in the world. It can be hard to overcome that kind of indoctrination inertia. That being said, it is incredibly important to our survival in the modern world that we do so, quickly. Democracies do not survive bad voting systems; not in the long term, anyway. And given that our governmental system is the most important factor that determines our quality of life, holding on to democracy is something that we should take very seriously.
There is no democracy without voting, and voting in America is at best seriously compromised, which leads to poor voter satisfaction. Everyone hates Congress; that’s been true for years. But the crux of that hatred is that it’s very, very difficult for us to actually elect people who are capable of solving national issues. There are at least five major problems with our system that result in poor voting outcomes and terrible politicians, and in my opinion they exist in this order of severity:
- Campaign finance contributions are legalized bribery.
- Voting barriers are on the rise.
- Election maps are utterly and completely gerrymandered, which promotes hyper-partisan politicians.
- Our voting system only allows for two political parties.
- The Electoral College is dumb, anti-democratic, and archaic.
We’ll go through these one by one, and then talk at the end about what can be done with this situation. Incidentally, looking at the minute count I see that this is one of the longer articles I’ve written, so now is a good time for a coffee and a snack if you want to continue on. And with that out of the way…
Campaign Finance Contributions & Lobbying — Basically Bribery
Ok, here’s the thing about the US: officially, our public officials don’t take that many bribes, compared to some other places. Unofficially, they get bribed every day. These bribes are simply sold as “campaign contributions.” It is ruinously expensive to get elected in the US, so every politician must solicit campaign contributions in order to keep their job and the power that comes with it. In fact, most of their time is spent raising money for reelection.¹
Lobbyists provide this money, and all sorts of other under-the-table bonuses (corporate board seats, free trips, gifts, employment opportunities, etc.) to politicians every day, all the time. The goal of every lobbyist is to stick a politician into their pocket and button them up. This is bad for democracy in general and bad for voting in particular, because it has an impact on who can run for election and who wins the election. There are some very high-profile exceptions to the rule, but most of the time, for most elections, the person with the most money wins.²
The problem with all of this, of course, is that it means voters aren’t the primary driver of policy. Campaign donors are. This runs counter to virtually every principle of democracy in action.
Voting Barriers — Obstacles to Casting Your Ballot
Ok, this one can get sneaky. Voting barriers are on the rise in the US, and without knowing it you’ve most likely supported at least one or two of them in your lifetime. That’s because most voting barriers sound legitimate… from a certain point of view.
A voting barrier in this sense is absolutely anything that makes it harder for someone in the population to cast their ballot and actually vote. They are legion, insidious, and actively maintained. The most common voting barriers in the US are:
- Lack of access to a voting place
- Inflexible voting hours
- In-person registration requirements
- Lack of access to ID
It is a very common tactic to restrict the number of polling places (places where one goes to vote) to just a handful per county in the US. Some counties only have one or two. Why is that a problem? Well… what if you don’t have a car? There are millions of Americans who don’t, mostly poor people. If you’re one of those people, are you going to spend hours on a bus (assuming you have access to a bus) to go vote? Remember, voting barriers these days aren’t about saying that someone can’t vote, they’re about making it hard.
Polling places are often closed under the guise of budget cuts or improvements to government efficiency. If that’s all you hear about it, it probably makes sense — someone will almost always argue that the thousands or millions of dollars needed to maintain polling places are better used somewhere else. Think of the children. And thus is another barrier to democracy raised.
Similarly, inflexible voting hours and in-person voter registration requirements play on the same barrier: time. If you can’t get to a polling place within the proscribed hours on one day of the year, or you can’t physically show up at a voter registration facility to sign up to vote, you can’t vote. If you’re working three jobs, or you’re reliant on public transport, or you’re a single parent with kids, you likely don’t have the time to either vote or register to vote without taking a day off of work. For many families, that’s the difference between food and no food. It’s a very hard choice, and it results in a lot of people not registering and not voting.
If you’re wondering why there isn’t a national holiday for voting in the US, this is why. Many people don’t have a problem showing up to a polling place, or a voter registration center, and therefore don’t see what the problem is with only having one day to vote and only one place to sign up to vote. Those people have cars, and time. Everyone else is in trouble, and the people who set these rules are aware of this fact.
Last but not least, and certainly not exclusively, lack of access to ID is also a big problem in the US, because it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue; if you don’t have ID, it’s very hard to get ID. Take your driver’s license, for example. Most of us barely remember it, but in order to get our first driver’s license we had to show a birth certificate and in some cases our social security cards. What if you don’t have these documents? No driver’s license for you. And if you don’t have a driver’s license or birth certificate, it’s really hard to get a passport.
Noticing a trend here? All of these documents are things that proponents of voter ID laws want people to have to prove who they are when they vote. Most of the people who don’t have these documents are poor people and people of color. This is not a coincidence, nor is it a coincidence that we don’t have a national ID system. These measures are typically sold to the public as ways to ensure that people aren’t voting fraudulently on the one hand, and increasing your “freedom” by keeping the federal government from maintaining national ID databases on the other (spoiler alert: they already know who you are, where you live, and pretty much everything about you; this ship has sailed). It’s worth noting that the actual incidence of voter fraud in the US is, for all intents and purposes, nil.
Voting barriers act to restrict the voting population to the people that a party thinks will vote for them; usually that means deliberately disenfranchising the poor and people of color. Consequently, voting barriers pose a constant, insidious threat to democracy in the US.
Gerrymandering — AKA Weird-Shaped Districts
As you probably know, Congressional representatives are assigned districts — areas where their constituents, the folks they’ve been elected to represent, live. Every few years in the US, states redraw their electoral maps (the maps that determine who gets to vote for which candidates). Drawing a district map that heavily favors one party or another is called Gerrymandering, and it is a VERY BAD THING.
It’s also endemic in the US; virtually every Congressional district in the nation is gerrymandered to some degree. What this means functionally is that most seats in the US Congress do not — cannot — switch parties. Obviously, both political parties love gerrymandering, because if they can draw district lines around a mix of 70% of their supporters and 30% of the other party’s supporters, they’re virtually guaranteed to win elections.
This is a serious, longstanding, crippling problem that’s virtually impossible to solve in the US because the people who should be solving it are the people who are benefiting from it. And oh boy, does it create problems.
Gerrymandering creates a handful of big issues. For one, it essentially disenfranchises a certain percentage of residents in every district. For another, it pushes candidates to extreme positions. Are you curious why Marjorie Taylor Greene was able to get elected, crackpot that she is? This is why. It also makes corruption very, very easy.
Gerrymandering disenfranchises voters by making it impossible, or nearly impossible, for an opposition party to win a gerrymandered district. If a district is 70% Republican and 30% Democrat, the Democrats are simply never going to win; or at least, it’s extremely unlikely because all the Republican candidate has to do is stay quiet and they will probably win through inertia. Without competition, you don’t really have a democracy.
This can have the effect of causing migrations to and from heavily gerrymandered areas, which creates another problem, namely that segregated concentrations of people with opposing political viewpoints are not really good from the standpoint of peace. If you look at the history of civil wars around the world, one of the lead-in symptoms of the problem is population migration based on politics.
Gerrymandering also has the effect of creating the conditions that give rise to candidates who hold extremist views. To return to our example, in a district where the Republicans are going to win every time, the competition is all in the primary (the process each party runs to select candidates for an election). Candidates in primaries are also subject to first-past-the-post voting rules for the most part, which means that whichever candidate can get their voting base fired up the most usually wins. What gets the base fired up? Quite often, rabid conspiracy theories and raw populism, radically oversimplified statements (The terrorists are bad!), and appeals to the religious majority, not to mention blatant racism or homophobia. Not coincidentally, the worst kind of politicians typically use these tactics.
And of course, gerrymandering makes the job of corruption very easy. Why bribe two officials when you just have to bribe one? This is a lobbyist’s dream come true.
Bottom line, gerrymandering gets you stagnate, extremist, corrupt politics. It’s bad, and anyone who supports it is a bad person. Period, full stop.
Two Parties — BLUE or RED, That’s All
The most common form of voting system in the US, indeed really the only thing Americans think of when we think of voting, is what’s called a first-past-the-post voting system. This is a system where a candidate has to achieve a plurality of votes to win (meaning more than any other candidate), and once they’ve done that, they take the whole election.
This is not the only available voting system, but it is the main reason why America has two dominant political parties. The logic goes something like this:
Let’s say there are four parties in an election, parties A, B, C, and D. The candidate for Party A gets 10% of the vote, B gets 20%, C gets 40%, and D gets 30%. Party C wins; they achieved a plurality. After the election, parties B and D look at each other and say, “Hey, if we worked together, we could get 50% of the vote. That’s enough to beat Party C!” So they do, and it is. Then Party C looks at Party A and says, “Hey, if we worked together, we could match the BD coalition, and the election would be a tossup. We’ve got a better chance together, friends.” So they join up, and the elections come down to who can swing the most votes in the middle.
You now have two big-tent political parties, each composed of some very strange bedfellows, who work together to win elections and then spend most of their time fighting within the tent if they gain power. Sound familiar?
So what happens if there’s a third party? First of all, they need an issue that’s different enough from the AC and BD coalitions to draw attention; otherwise people will just vote for one of the big parties. That almost certainly puts them on the fringe, since by definition the existing coalitions already contain the majority of issue groups that appeal to the most people. The third party then proceeds to go to the election and suck votes away from whichever of the coalition parties is most like them, usually causing that coalition to lose the election. The third party never or rarely wins at a national level, because they are representing a fringe interest group that doesn’t appeal to the majority of people.³
Therefore, it never makes sense in a first-past-the-post voting system to have more than two parties. Enter the Democrats and Republicans.
Ok, fine, I hear you say, so why is this a problem? You already said that the donkeys and the elephants by definition contain most of the interest groups in the country. What’s the problem?
There are a bunch of problems. In the first place, your vote in most cases narrows down to one person from one party, who upon election will implement the will of their party, usually ignoring the other. That means that a certain percentage of your population always feel disenfranchised. That’s never a good thing in a democracy; people who don’t feel that they have a say in government start insurgencies. That’s literally how our country came to be in the first place.
Second, this poor sap Everyman Politician has to represent all the issue groups in his party, which is virtually impossible since any big tent political party contains some mutually exclusive interest groups. Somebody is going to get left out, which opens up rifts within the party and dilutes the party’s brand. A Democrat from California is probably not representing the same issues as a Democrat from West Virginia, for example. This makes it harder for John Q Public to know who to vote for, especially in national elections, since it’s harder to tell who actually represents their interests.
Third, because candidates have to appeal to a huge swathe of the electorate to get elected, they tend to avoid mundane issues and focus on trigger issues instead. That’s all well and good, except that it’s the mundane stuff that will occupy 90% of their time in office, and which has 99% of the real impact on voters, and we really don’t vote for people on that basis anymore. The 2nd Amendment comes up every once in a while, sure, but what really ought to worry you is what’s in the Farm Bill this year. I promise you, it has more of a direct impact on your life.⁴
Fourth (and this is by no means all of the issues) two-party systems create a more streamlined opportunity for corruption. The US has some of the most influential lobbyists in the world party because it makes sense to lobby when you’ve only got to buy one or two politicians. It’s more cost-effective than having to bribe half a dozen.
Look, first-past-the-post voting probably made sense back in 1789, in much the same way that a Model T Ford made sense back in the 20s. Times change, the world becomes more complex, and this is hardly the most efficient, representative, or fair voting system choice in the world today.
The Electoral College — Needless and Anti-Democratic Complication
Finally, we come to the Presidency in particular. As you probably already know, presidents in the US are nominally voted for by the public, but according to the Constitution they are actually picked by the electors of the Electoral College. Each state is assigned a certain number of electors, based on population, and many states apply first-past-the-post voting rules to determine who their electors vote for.
There are several problems with this, but I’ll only list three.
Firstly, the Electoral College is simply terrible from the standpoint of actual democracy, because in practice what it means is that it’s possible to lose the popular vote and win the electoral college. This has happened twice already in my lifetime: both George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 lost the popular vote but won the election. This is ridiculous and stupid for any nation that claims to have a representative government, and it blatantly disenfranchises the voters.
Secondly, the Electoral College essentially disenfranchises small states in general. Because their votes aren’t simply added to the national total, but rather assigned to electors, they frequently don’t matter when it comes to electing a president. Why is that a problem? Simple. It means the president doesn’t have to care about them. The whole point of democracy is that politicians should have to take into account the sentiments of the voters. But if your vote doesn’t matter, because you live in South Dakota (or a rural county literally anywhere), the president simply has no incentive to care.⁵
Thirdly, there is always the possibility that the electors will go rogue (these are called “faithless electors”). This has happened 165 times in American history, and has never swung an election. These days, many states have laws that prohibit their electors from voting contrary to the popular vote. But laws are subject to change, and as long as the Electoral College exists this issue poses a risk to democracy.
Basically, the electoral college does nothing good for democracy in America. It was deliberately put in place to insulate the presidency from democracy, and it’s been doing a great job at that, but that is an objectively bad thing. It needs to go.
FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT
Fine, I hear you say, I might as well stay home. My vote doesn’t matter. It’s all over but for the screaming.
Well, no, not really. Your vote still matters quite a bit, and it’s vitally important that you cast it. It matters a lot if you vote for people who campaign on fixing these problems. There are several of them running around, and they need your support. It also matters quite a lot that you make noise and demand that your current representative starts fixing problems. And frankly, there are still quite a few contentious elections out there where your vote does, in fact, make a difference.
But ultimately, this is an issue that we, the people, are going to have to solve because they, our representatives in office, don’t want to. The deck is stacked against us. There is, however, a process to fix these things, and it’s called a “constitutional amendment.” We’ve had several of them so far in American history, and it’s probably time for a few more. Here are a few suggestions, in my priority order:
The single most important fix that we, the people, can implement in the American voting system is campaign finance reform — limiting how much money people (and other entities) can give to campaign financial funds. Setting up designated forums and modes of campaigning would be a plus, but getting dark money out of American politics is the issue you should vote for every time it comes up. Sadly, at this point the only way to do that appears to be by constitutional amendment, as the Supreme Court (in their questionable wisdom) has paved the way for infinite money in politics.⁶
The second most important fix that we, the people, can implement in the American voting system is voting access reform — setting clear rules about who gets to vote where, establishing a metric for how many polling places are needed, establishing a national ID that is not dependent on a driver’s license or passport, and establishing a national holiday to allow people to vote. This would ideally nuke the current issues with voting barriers, enabling more people to vote in any given election. Again, this will likely require a constitutional amendment because voting access laws vary so wildly from state to state, and so many politicians benefit from voting access barriers.
The third thing we could do would be to implement an amendment to set clear rules for voting districts. Specifically, we can and should require that every voting district contains a roughly equal number of voters of each major political party. This would effectively remove the entire concept of gerrymandering from American politics, or at least shift it such that gerrymandered districts are set based on issues that appeal to a majority of both parties in an area. Not perfect, but better.
In fourth place, I would suggest an amendment to shift America away from first-past-the-post voting. There are a small legion of other choices available, and they’re almost all better than our current system. Pick one. We can fight about which one gets the nod later. It’s almost certain to be better than what we’ve got. Changing our voting methodology, root and branch, is necessary to get us away from the current toxic two-party system which is contributing so much to the dumbing of American politics.
Fifth and finally, I would suggest an amendment to remove the Electoral College. It’s a relic of a bygone era, implemented specifically because the Founders didn’t trust the hoi polloi. We’re past that. It’s time to move on. The only reason this is in fifth place is that, on the balance, the Electoral College hasn’t affected as many elections as any of the other items on this list, since it only affects the presidential elections.
I am deadly certain that there would be unintended consequences from these changes. There always are. However, I think that we should, for the sake of our survival as individuals and as a nation, implement these changes sooner rather than later if we want to preserve the great experiment of democracy in the USA.
To close this out — this is an article in a series called the Modern Survival Guide. It’s sometimes hard to see it, but your survival and prosperity depend entirely on the political system of your nation. If the political system is broken, it is always at least partially your job to fix it. There’s simply no guarantee that anyone else will. Voting to fix a broken political process is always in your interest, and contributing to organizations which are trying to implement fixes is also a good idea.
The nation expects that you will do your duty as a citizen. That’s what being a citizen means. And it is central to your survival in the modern world.
¹https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1136&context=shlj
³This is called Duverger’s Law in political science, if anyone is curious.
⁴A “trigger issue” in this sense is any issue which causes an emotional response in the voting base that tends to override logic. Gun laws, LGBTQ stuff, religion, and sex are all trigger issues in the US.
⁵Let’s take an example. It takes 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. California has 54 votes in the electoral college, compared to 6 each for Mississippi, Arkansas, Utah, Nevada, Iowa, Kansas, North & South Dakota combined, and Delaware & Vermont combined. If I’m trying to get votes, I need to sweep all ten of those states or I can just get California. That’s money and time, neither of which I get back. My incentive is therefore always to focus on California. California is worth 54 of the nation’s electoral votes, Texas is 40, Florida 30, New York 28, Illinois 19, Pennsylvania 19, Ohio 17, North Carolina and Georgia are 16 apiece, Michigan has 15, and New Jersey has 14. If I win those states and one more of my pick, I win the presidency. That’s 12 states out of 50. The rest of the nation can get fucked. This doesn’t happen in real life right now because these states are split between the political parties… but it certainly could happen in the future. If anyone’s curious, here’s a map of the current situation: https://www.270towin.com/
⁶See the Citizens United case, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
