California's Democratic Reform?

California lawyer Thomas Hiltachk on July 17 submitted a ballot initiative in his home state that would overhaul the way in which electoral votes are allocated to presidential candidates. As in most states, California currently apportions its electoral votes in a winner-take-all system; in this system, if one candidate wins 51% of the popular vote in the state and the other gets 49%, all of California’s 55 electoral votes (1/5 of the 270 needed to win the presidency) go to the former candidate; the rest are, in effect, uncounted in the actual election of the president. The initiative, entitled the Presidential Election Reform Act, seeks to adopt the voting system already used in Maine and Nebraska, allocating two electoral votes to the state’s overall winner, while the other 53 go to each candidate proportionally, one vote for every congressional district won.

This has sparked outrage: although Democrats have won California in every presidential election since 1988, the vote within the state has been much more divided. In 2004, George W. Bush won 22 districts, despite Mr. Kerry winning by double digits statewide. As the USA Today points out, this creates the potential for the GOP to grab an Ohio-sized chunk of electoral votes (Ohio will have 20 in 2008) simply by changing how they’re counted.

Oh, and it gets better. It turns out Mr. Hiltachk is not only Gov. Schwarzenegger’s elections lawyer, but also the managing partner of the firm that represents the California Republican Party. I guess Hillary Clinton’s “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” is coming back to (potentially) bite her in ways she could have never foreseen during the Lewinsky scandal.

Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker doesn’t disguise his outrage at the proposal in an article entitled “Votescam” published in this week’s issue. He says:

In a narrow sense, [the initiative is] good if you like Party B, but not so good if you like Party A (in this case the Democrats). Or if you think that in a democracy everybody ought to play by roughly the same rules.

Ironically, he brushes aside the fact that two states already play by different rules, since “they are so small—only five districts between them—and so homogeneous.” But if what we are concerned about is the rules—the process—then size or composition is irrelevant. Furthermore, I like to think that in a democracy everybody ought to play by roughly the same, fair rules. Mr. Hertzberg, if all the other states jumped off a bridge, would you?

The crux of his argument, though, rests in futility. He continues:

Imagine, as a thought experiment, that all the states were to adopt this “reform” at once. Electoral votes would still be winner take all, only by congressional district rather than by state. Instead of ten battleground states and forty spectator states, we’d have thirty-five battleground districts and four hundred spectator districts. The red-blue map would be more mottled, and in some states more people might get to see campaign commercials, because media markets usually take in more than one district. But congressional districts are as gerrymandered as human ingenuity and computer power can make them. The electoral-vote result in ninety per cent of the country would still be a foregone conclusion, no matter how close the race.

Although I would hate to complicate the work of graphic designers by making the red-blue map “more mottled,” and the loss of campaign commercials is sure to be much-lamented by Americans, this argument commits the classic fallacy of making the good the enemy of the perfect. If gerrymandering is the problem (and no doubt it is, at least, a problem), then let’s work to fix it, not shut down any progress that might run into that snag. Perhaps we should move to repeal the electoral college and instead take the concept of localized presidential voting to its logical conclusion, the individual. But that’s not the argument being made; instead, the status quo is being defended at the expense of increasing the public’s voice.

So let’s just be honest with ourselves: the reason we’re upset about this the Presidential Election Reform Act is because it is a cheap political power play. But all politics is cheap power plays. The motives of those presenting these proposals are irrelevant in analyzing the merits of the proposals themselves, and so should not be considered in their debate. Nor should we sacrifice positive reform on the basis of its likely electoral outcomes. In undergoing an objective analysis of Mr. Hiltachk’s proposed initiative, we may still conclude that his policy is wrong. But then we can at least be sure that our judgment is right.