NUMBERS SHOW SYSTEM NEEDS IMPROVEMENT
Colorado Springs Gazette, 2-21-08
Math and
politics: Two of my favorite things. After I attended my first caucus, I knew I’d
have to write about them.
As I sat in
my precinct meeting, I thought about the mathematics of representative democracy. The presidential nomination process has multiple
levels to it. Because we’re electing
delegates, it’s just like electing senators or congressmen: We’re voting for voters. But when political decisions are made at the
intersection between the abstract world of numbers and the physical world of postal
addresses, interesting things can happen.
Try this
thought experiment. Suppose there were
five legislative districts in Colorado, which I’ll call El Paso, Boulder, Jefferson, Summit, and
Gunnison. Suppose that each county had 5
registered voters. Suppose furthermore
that Boulder, Jefferson and Summit each had 3 Democrats and 2 Republicans,
while El Paso and Gunnison each had 4 Republicans and 1 Democrat. Colorado holds an election, and the Democrats
win a majority of the five seats in the legislature. If a majority vote is all that’s required,
they can pass all the bills they want.
But go back
and count: In the scenario above,
Republicans outnumbered Democrats! That’s
because in representative democracy, how much political power you get is connected
not just with how you vote but where you live.
This means you can have anti-democratic results in a democratic system. Particularly in a winner-take-all, two-party
duopoly.
The
connection between math and politics comes up in all sorts of places. Because
school funding is tied to property taxes, which are based on where people live,
we have rich schools and poor schools.
Legislatures all over the country do something called “gerrymandering”,
where the boundaries of districts are redrawn based on the voting patterns of
those who live there. Change the space,
change the numbers. Change the numbers,
change the power.
You can
also show mathematically that if people have just a slight preference for
people of their own skin color, neighborhoods become segregated. The same is true if you want your particular
racial, social or economic group to have clout.
You all have to live somewhere close to one another so you can outnumber
people. But if everyone wants to be part
of a majority in a district, then people have to segregate themselves.
I thought
about all this on Super Tuesday. My Republican
precinct caucus had 47 people. In our
straw poll, Mitt Romney can in first, with barely more than half the
votes. Huckabee came in second, with Ron
Paul and John McCain tying for third.
When it
came time to elect delegates, however, the first five nominated were all Romney
supporters. Nobody else ran, so Romney
got the whole ball of wax. I wanted to
run, but I just couldn’t in good conscience commit to the time required. Instead, I put my name forward as an
alternate and voiced my support for Ron Paul.
I got 17 out of 47 votes, more than a third, which I thought was pretty
good. But in a winner-take-all system, I
was shouting into the wind.
Of course, the
winner who took all in my precinct is now out of the race. My candidate tied with the new frontrunner,
but nobody cares about that. Because the
power of my vote was based on my postal address, my only option was for me to
go around my precinct and convince people to vote the way I want. But who has time for that?
The other
possibility, I suppose, is for everyone who shares my pro-freedom,
pro-responsibility politics to pack up and move to the same place. New Hampshire and Vermont have been kicked
around as possibilities, along with a floating offshore man-made country. Hey, we libertarians are nothing if not
idealistic.
But why
should politics be so important that I should have to consider moving to begin
with? Why must we segregate ourselves
and differentially fund our schools just to wield political power? Is politics
really that important? Does it really
deserve the enormous role it now plays in our lives?
There are
so many better alternatives worth exploring.
Open up the system to competition.
Adopt proportional representation.
Let voters rank order candidates.
Take constitutional limits on government power seriously. Do more locally.
After all, people’s
lives are important. Too important, it
seems to me, to be tossed aside by the cruel mathematics of politics.