Tag: IRV voting

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

How to Fix Our Broken Electoral System

Every presidential election season spawns calls for reform of our rickety, antiquated system for electing presidents and representatives. In light of recent events, the urgency has never been greater. Here are some options to consider that would fix our problems.

Electoral College: Take the Electoral College. (Please.) Under our Constitution, state legislatures have exclusive power regarding the Electoral College. Any federal legislation to the contrary would be unconstitutional.

You could consider having states allocate Electoral College votes by congressional district, as Maine and Nebraska do. But all that’ll do is import the pathologies of gerrymandering into the presidential election.

Steve Mulroy

Or states could allocate Electoral College votes pro rata, based on each candidate’s share of the statewide vote, rather than on the current winner-take-all basis. But this is only a slight improvement. It would still make a vote in Wyoming mathematically worth three times as much as a vote in California (because each state gets two Electoral votes, regardless of its population). More fundamentally, it would still allow a candidate with more nationwide votes to lose to a candidate with fewer. (These same two criticisms also apply to the Maine/Nebraska approach.)

And, as I explain in my book, Rethinking U.S. Election Law, mathematically, it would still allow a small number of large states to dominate the campaign and get outsized attention in governance, as they do now. Because most states have a small number of Electoral College votes (average is 11, median is 7), even the most aggressive campaign effort could only change one Electoral vote in most states. So the incentive would still be to focus on a few big states with 20 or more Electoral votes and ignore the rest.

Better is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (nationalpopularvote.com), an agreement among state legislatures to award their state’s Electoral votes to the nationwide winner regardless of the vote count in their own state. This makes every vote in the U.S. mathematically equal to every other. Swing states won’t dominate, no one is ignored, and a candidate with fewer nationwide votes can’t beat out someone with more.

Within the last 10 years, 14 states representing 196 Electoral College votes have signed on to the Compact. They’re now 70 percent of the way toward the goal of 270 Electoral votes, at which point the Compact takes effect and the Electoral College is rendered harmless.

Gerrymandering: That “proportionate share” approach works better as a solution to gerrymandering. Nonpartisan redistricting commissions should become de rigueur. We’re the only advanced democracy that still lets politicians draw their own district lines. Voters don’t choose their representatives — it’s the other way around.

But because of “the Big Sort,” with Democrats overconcentrated in big cities, even the best such commissions can’t avoid “natural gerrymanders” that result whenever you superimpose single-member district lines and winner-take-all elections onto the unruly, demographically clustered populations of the U.S.

You still have a “skew,” which allows a party’s share of seats in the House to deviate significantly from its share of the overall vote. And you still have an overwhelming number of “safe” Republican and Democratic districts, where the only real competition is in the primaries. This incentivizes candidates to move to the extremes of left and right to avoid being “primaried,” with no real incentive to work across the aisle on constructive compromise.

Even better would be at-large or multi-member district elections using Proportional Representation, where 40 percent of the vote nets 40 percent of the seats. This would help Republicans in New York and Democrats in Mississippi get their fair share of representation; make all elections competitive with high turnout; and end gerrymandering once and for all.

The Fair Representation Act, currently pending in Congress, would give states the option to go this route, which has worked well in Australia for 60 years and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for 80. (The multi-member districts would be drawn by nonpartisan commissions, but instead of a single winner-take-all election, three to five members would be elected at once, with each party getting its proportionate share of seats. And because the elections would use Ranked Choice Voting, where voters could choose their first, second, and third choices, third parties would have a decent shot at getting at least some representation.)

In conclusion, our electoral system needs real fixes. Now is the time to consider them.

Steve Mulroy teaches election law at the University of Memphis law school. He is a former Shelby County commissioner and Voting Section lawyer for the U.S. Justice Department.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Challenge the Candidates

Though we’re supposedly in the middle of a Memphis city election campaign, there’ve been precious few chances for voters to press candidates (especially incumbents) on where they stand. Our city government isn’t as responsive to the will of the voters as it should be. Institutions like the police, and the Memphis City Council itself, are insulated from public opinion.

If you get a chance to press the candidates, emphasize issues of structural reform. Unlike some other (certainly important) campaign issues of funding priorities, these reforms would last a long time, well past the current budget cycle. Moreover, they’d make it easier for voters’ other priorities to pass through the filter of self-interested incumbents.

Steve Mulroy

Candidates should commit to structural reforms like the following. Seven council members could vote to make these happen, either by ordinance or through a charter amendment referendum.

Single-Member Districts. Memphis currently elects its city council using seven single-member districts plus two overlapping super districts. Each super district takes up half the city and elects a total of three members. So each Memphian has four different city council representatives. This system is unnecessarily confusing for the voter. The super districts, each with 192,000 voters, are simply too big and sprawling. Campaigning in them is so expensive, it unfairly disadvantages challengers and favors incumbents.

Last decade, the Shelby County Commission switched from a similar system to one with 13 small single-member districts. It has worked well. These manageable, neighborhood-based districts made it easier for first-time candidates to campaign and for constituents to reach their incumbents. If we did the same for Memphis, each district would have 30,000 voters rather than almost 200,000. Activists have been asking the council to do this for years, but the status quo favors incumbents, so nothing changes.

Implementing Ranked Choice Voting. Speaking of incumbents protecting their own … Over the last two years, the council has repeatedly spent your tax dollars fighting an election reform approved by voters in referendums. In three referendums in two elections over the last 10 years, Memphians have said they want to try Ranked Choice Voting (RCV, also called Instant Runoff Voting), where voters can pick their first, second, and third choice. (There is another form of RCV, which would work well in the existing super districts, that is a viable alternative to the 13-single-member district system discussed above.) The council should stop using tax dollars to fight it in court and should adopt the technical policy guidance requested by the local election commission. They should be facilitating the people’s will rather than fighting it.

Plain English Referendum Language. Voters have complained in recent years that ballot question language is too confusing. In the best of times, it’s dense legalese; at worst — like last November’s term limits and anti-RCV referenda — they are deliberately misleading.

Our charter should require that in any referendum, in addition to any required legalese operative language, there should be a statement in plain English explaining how the law stands now, how it would change if the referendum were approved, and specifically saying “A YES vote would … [explain]” and “A NO vote would … [explain].” This language should be written by a neutral party, like the city attorney or the League of Women Voters. Similar “plain English” ballot measure requirements have worked well in other cities and states.

CLERB Reform. The Civilian Law Enforcement Review Board (CLERB), our civilian oversight body for police conduct, has no teeth. The current police director ignores its recommendations and refuses to cooperate with its requests for documents and witness testimony when it investigates allegations of police misconduct. Worse, the state legislature this year passed a law preventing local governments from giving such boards subpoena power, requiring instead that every request for investigative information be accomplished through a subpoena approved by a full vote of the entire city council. This cumbersome procedure is designed to frustrate CLERB investigations, especially given the council’s disinterest in challenging the MPD.

City council adoptions of CLERB subpoena requests should be routine. Only a showing that a CLERB request for documents or testimony is severely burdensome, or harmful to a sensitive ongoing investigation, should overcome a strong presumption of city council cooperation. Candidates should pledge to act accordingly. There are other important structural reforms, but these will do for now. Memphis voters should insist that they’ll vote for no city council candidate who fails to make his or her position clear on these issues. Steve Mulroy is a University of Memphis law professor and a former Shelby County Commissioner.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Election 2018: Winners, Losers, and Close Calls

CREDIT: JB

JB

The thrill of victory was experienced by (l to r) Aaron Fowles, Steve Mulroy, and Racquel Collins, opponents of the losing referendum to repeal Instranr Runoff Voting.

Note: For reasons that remain obscure, the following text, published in the early morning of November 7, vanished from online, to be replaced by an earlier election-highlights brief that was posted on election night itself. I am happy to see the longer piece, like Lazarus, freed from untimely interment and restored. — jb

When the final report was done, the last round poured, the surviving hors-d’oeuvres wilted, the election results locally mirrored those nationally. There were lots of near misses, college tries, and moral victories — mainly among Democrats who had aspired to overturn the verdict of 2016 (or, in many ways, of the last few decades).

But the inherent limitations of the near miss, the college try, and the moral victory would rapidly become obvious as the reality of defeat and the resilience of the status quo sunk in.

The purest and most unsullied triumph locally was enjoyed by the band of activists in Save IRV Memphis and their sympathizers, who resisted a concentrated effort by the Memphis City Council on behalf of three ballot referenda that, the activists contended, were designed to protect the incumbency of Council members.

To start there, the count was 62,316 for and 104,431 against in the case of Ordinance No. 5669, which would have repealed the prior 2008 referendum authorizing IRV (a method of vote -counting that successively redistributes runner-up votes in a given race until a majority winner emerges). The vote was 67,220 for and 101,607 against for Ordinance No. 5676, which (via language that was ambivalent, to say the least) would have lengthened term limits for mayor and Council members from two to three four-year terms. And Ordinance No. 5677, which would have abolished runoff elections altogether, lost out by a vote of 77,223 for and 91,184 against.
The Democratic candidates, all first-time candidates, who attempted to oust Republican state legislators in the suburbs, made a good run of it, but fell short. In the most avidly watched race, Gabby Salinas, the three-time cancer survivor and budding scientist lost to incumbent District 31 state Senator Brian Kelsey by the relatively narrow margin of 40,313 for Kelsey to 38,793 for Salinas.

Republican incumbent Mark White turned back Democrat Danielle Schonbaum in the District 83 House of Representatives race, 15,129 to 11,376. And incumbent GOP state Representative Jim Coley defeated Democrat Allan Creasy by a vote of 12,298 to 10,073 in District 97.

More decisive victories were won by Republican incumbent Kevin Vaughan over Democear Sanjeev Memula in House District 95 and by the GOP’s Tom Leatherwood (a ballot replacement for the late Ron Lollar) over Democrat Dave Cambron in District 99.

Democratic state Rep. Dwayne Thompson, an upset winner in 2016 in House District 96, retained his seat by a vote of 14,710 over 10,493 for Republican challenger Scorr McCormick.

In the races for Governor and the U.S. Senate, local totals were:

For Governor: Democrat Karl Dean, 173,699; Republican Bill Lee, 105,369
For U.S. Senator: Democrat Phil Bredesen, 188,923; Republican Marsha Blackburn, 95,351.

Those local totals were almost diametrically opposite the statewide ones, which showed resounding victories for Lee over Dean, 1,291,458 (59.3 percent) to 846,186 (38.8 percent); and for Blackburn over Bredesen, 1,224,042 (54.7 percent) to 981,667 (43.9 percent).

Though arguments on the point can and will rage indecisively, the statewide results possibly reflected the natural dispositions of red-state Tennessee in cases where the Democratic challenge is muted by politesse. Dean and Lee reciprocated their gentlemanly approaches to each other, while Bredesen’s acknowledgement of partisan differences was minimal to the point of non-existence.

Bredesen surely qualifies for the 2018 “Oh, Yeah?” award for his mid-race statement to Jonathan Martin of the New York Times: “I’m in the fortunate position that people on the left are enraged enough that they will find almost anything I do, with the D after my name, acceptable.”
Count that as arrogance or as self-deception. It was demonstrably incorrect.

Bredesen’s public embrace of President Trump’s Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh and his suggestion in a late ad that he and Trump (“a skilled negotiator”) could blissfully work together to lower drug prices were downers to his base, whereas Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s throwdown of the gauntlet to Republican incumbent Ted Cruz in the Texas Senate race almost brought him a victory. Texas is clearly no more liberal a place than Tennessee.

The local difference in the gubernatorial and Senate races manifestly arose from the demographics of Shelby County, where Democratic turnout was at levels approximating those of presidential years. The stout showing of the Democratic challengers in legislative races was also buoyed by the turnout, a continuation of sorts of the blue wave that crested so strong in the august election.

The turnout factor was also prominent in the blowout win of 9th District Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen over GOP perennial Charlotte Bergmann, 143,690 to 34,710, though it was not too much help to Democratic challenger Erika Stotts Pearson in the wider West Tennessee expanse of the 8th Congressional District, where Republican incumbent David Kustoff triumphed, 66,889 to 32,578.

More to Come:

There were races in most of Shelby County’s suburban municipalities, too — the most dramatic being those in Germantown and Lakeland, where the issues of city spending and economic development loomed large.

In Germantown, Mayor Mike Palazzolo apparently won reelection by the razor-thin margin of 10,240 to 10,113 for challenger John Barzizza, who declined to concede, pending a final certification of results. The main issue in the mayoral contest was Palazzolo’s backing of Thornwood, a mixed-use development on Germantown Parkway.

Meanwhile, Palazzo’s coattails proved unavailing for two candidates he endorsed for city positions: Scott Sanders, a Barzizza endorsee, defeated Brian White in an alderman’s race, while Robyn Rey Rudisill lost a School Board race to angela Rickman Griff. Two other mayoral endorsees, Alderman Mary Anne Gibson and School Board member Betsy Landers triumphed over Jeff Brown and Brian Curry, respectively.

In Lakeland, where the primary issue was Mayor Wyatt Bunker’s development plans, including those for a new high school, Bunker was upset by challenger Mike Cunningham, 2,648 to 2,324.
Apparent winners for the city Commission were Richard Gonzales and Michelle Dial, while School Board winners were Kevin Floyd, Laura Harrison, and Deborah Thomas.

Categories
News News Blog

Council Faces Criticism Over Public Information Campaign on Ballot Questions

Some Memphians are troubled with the Memphis City Council’s move Tuesday night to fund an educational campaign on three council-created referenda.

The resolution was introduced by Councilman Edmund Ford Jr., in response to an influx of questions from the public on the three ballot questions, which cover run-off elections and term limits. The council approved the measure 5-3. Council members Worth Morgan, J Ford Canale, and Kemp Conrad were the three to vote no. 

The resolution was introduced and voted on without the item having been listed on the agenda.

Some have called for Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland to veto the resolution that will allow the council to spend $30,000 to $40,000 of the council’s general fund for an informative campaign. Though Strickland said he disagrees with the resolution in a Tuesday night tweet, under city charter, he isn’t able to veto it.

“Under the City Charter, I don’t have the authority to veto resolutions because they don’t require my approval as mayor,” Strickland said. “The Charter only allows the mayor to veto ordinances. While I disagree with this expenditure, I don’t have authority over how City Council spends its budget.”

Carlos Ochoa, media coordinator for the group Save Instant Runoff Memphis worries the campaign will be “mis-informative” and “one-sided.” The group is concerned that the council will use taxpayer money to fund a “vote yes” propaganda campaign.

“Save IRV, Inc. condemns the City Council’s use of taxpayer money to misinform voters toward passage of referenda which merely help the Council stay in power,” Ochoa said in a statement late Tuesday night.

Myron Lowery, former city council member and Save IRV board member said he is “outraged,” that the council is using taxpayer dollars to fund a “one-sided campaign.”

“It is deceitful,” Lowery said. “It’s unethical. It never should have been done.”

State Representative and Save IRV board member Johnnie Turner also chimed in, saying “if you ever needed yet another reason to vote against all these referendums, the city council just gave you one.”

The council has not yet said how the campaign will look, but here’s a screenshot of Councilman Berlin Boyd’s chairman’s recap regarding the decision. 

Councilman Berlin Boyd’s Chairman’s Recap

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Jackson Soldiers On

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose very presence has an inspirational quality, may have been spread somewhat thin on Sunday, when the great icon of civil and human rights made appearances in Memphis relating to both the city’s forthcoming homage to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to Operation PUSH, Jackson’s own self-empowerment initiative, and to the celebration of Black History Month.

Jackson also needed to be mindful to the demands of various important local projects and causes, such as the ongoing campaign of CME Church functionaries to renovate the Collins Chapel Health and Recreational Center (aka Correctional Hospital) for African Americans with special needs, one of several community improvement projects whose aims are aligned with the purposes of Jackson’s PUSH organization.

The Reverend has made repeated visits to Memphis on behalf of its renovation, the estimated price tag of which has risen from $3 million a year ago to its current projected level of $5 million. 

Earlier on Sunday, Jackson participated in a press conference upon his arrival at Memphis International Airport, preached the morning service at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church, and toured the Collins Chapel facility, after which he took part in yet another press availability.

Then came an evening visit to Mt. Pisgah CME Church for what was billed as a “community town hall forum.” At Mt. Pisgah, a palpably tired Jackson (recently he announced that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease) turned out to be essentially a guest observer, sitting at a conference table in the church’s front aisle, along with various church and school and public officials, while other officials and political candidates of various kinds sat in the congregation itself. 

His role during this phase of the program was to be a witness to the proceedings, which would go on to include lengthy speeches from those sharing the conference table with him — on issues ranging from Collins Chapel to school issues, and to matters involving Kroger vacating Orange Mound and rising MLGW rates.

All the while, Jackson sat silent, taking things in. There arose one potentially controversial moment, when City Councilman Ed Ford Jr. rose to expound, first on the grocery-desert problem developing in Orange Mound and then on the issue of a forthcoming November referendum on the November ballot by the council.

The referendum, backed enthusiastically by Ford, calls for the cancellation of a Ranked Choice Voting initiative approved by the city’s voters in a previous 2008 referendum and scheduled for implementation by the Election Commission during the forthcoming 2019 city election. In a nutshell, RCV would allow voters to cast as many as three votes for an office, ranking their preferences. The procedure distributes the voting results in such a way that runoffs in cases where there is no majority winners would prove unnecessary.

“Ranked Choice Voting, in my eyes doesn’t help us,” Ford said, comparing RCV to poll tax procedures of the Jim Crow past. He spoke of having debated the matter against “somebody in from Minneapolis” and against University of Memphis law professor and former County Commissioner Steve Mulroy, an RCV supporter.

“They must have gotten desperate,” he said, noting that his debate opponents had cited both former President Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson himself as RCV proponents. At this, Jackson, clearly determined to stay out of a local controversy, evinced no response whatsoever — though it is a fact not only that he has endorsed RCV as a progressive measure but that his son, U.S. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., has sponsored legislation supportive of Ranked Choice Voting in Congress.

When Jackson finally got his pulpit moment, he was content to lead the congregation in one of his patented self-empowerment chants. His only intervention into a local issue occurred when he joined County Commissioner Van Turner — head of the Greenspace nonprofit that had removed two Confederate memorials from parks purchased from the city — at the pulpit. The Reverend joined hands with Turner and raised both their arms overhead. Then, having soldiered on for justice one more time in Memphis, Jesse Jackson paid his respects to the congregation and left the building.