Electoral Reform

“One Ballot, Two Votes”

By John Taylor; 2007 July 25

Here is news from the Times of India about the first Hindu prayer to open the US Senate, and the mixed, positive and bigoted, reactions that it provoked.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Hindu_prayer_in_US_Senate_sparks_debate/articleshow/2229281.cms

The prayer is available on Youtube, which has this comment: “He is the first Indian after Vivekananda to have an effect on the American public on the subject of Hinduism ...Hindu prayer in session is American values on faith in practice at their very best.” Baha’is will recall that Vivekananda spoke to tremendous acclaim at the first Parliament of Religions, where the first major mention of the Baha’i Faith in public also took place. Vivekananda offered for one of the first times in the West what we now consider an essential Baha’i principle, the Oneness of Religion.

My buddy Ed sent me this link to an impassioned speech given by a girl who at the time was the same age as my daughter Silvie is now, twelve. It brings tears to your eyes. For me, I get a vague feeling of vindication, that even though I often get angry and show it in my essays, at least I am not the only one; the insanity of world leaders fully justifies anger.

http://www.terrapass.com/blog/posts/2007/07/kids-and-their-power-to-move-us.html

The site says: “You may be wondering who this amazing orator and activist is, and where she is now. She is the daughter of Canadian environmental guru, writer and leader David Suzuki. Fifteen years later, she is now an environmental leader in her own right <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severn_Cullis-Suzuki>.”

One of the main causes of the problems of the world right now, including bigotry, poverty and the environmental degradation that so discouraged this young girl, is the sorry state of democracy. Since Churchill made his famous witticism, “Democracy is the worst form of government in the world, except all the others,” the democracies of the world have done little to improve or update how they choose leaders. Our ways of voting are obsolete; our elections horrifically corrupt and inadequate.

If you want a picture of modern democracy, think of an abandoned, derelict house. If we have poor governance, it is because the only denizens of this abandoned house are phantoms, their only vision, phantasms. For years I have been calling it “gun-to-my-head democracy” because that is just what voters are doing, we are inviting the highest bidder to shoot us in the head. A candidate in the present presidential campaign cannot hope to enter the “race” without raising a cool half billion dollars from corporate sponsors. That is the price Americans are presently asking to be executed by shot to the head; at least they are not selling themselves cheap.

Anyway, I was delighted yesterday to come across a pamphlet in our library describing an innovative bid to reform the electoral system in Ontario. You can read more about it at: http://www.citizensassembly.gov.on.ca/ Even the way the proposal was made is innovative. A citizen’s assembly was chosen randomly from each riding in Ontario; they studied election reform around the world for a year and made a simple suggestion to change the way we cast our votes. The chair of the citizen’s assembly writes on their web site: “The Assembly brought together 103 randomly selected Ontario citizens to learn, consult with their fellow Ontarians, deliberate, and come to a decision on an electoral system for Ontario. The Assembly was guaranteed its independence from government, and direct access to Ontario voters through a referendum if it decided to recommend change.” Their idea is summed up in the title of the pamphlet: “One Ballot, Two Votes.” You get a vote for an individual and one for a party. The brochure shows a sample ballot, and it looks fairly simple. There will be a referendum on this proposal on my 51^st birthday, October 10, 2007.

I am so happy that any kind of improvement to democracy is being considered that I am willing to overlook the problems that this particular idea poses for Baha’is. We are asked to vote for the individual not the party, as you probably know. But this system will make it impossible not to vote for a party. I do not know if voting only for the individual half of the ballot will be counted as a spoiled ballot or not. If so, Ontario Baha’is will probably have to seek guidance from Haifa, not for having multiple votes – we get more than two votes in Baha’i elections after all, we get nine – but for being forced to vote for an inherently divisive system, groupings based on competition and preconceived opinion rather than encounter with a reality that has not yet taken place.

Myself, I wish I had been selected to be on this citizen’s committee because I have dozens of ideas about how voting should be reformed. These are just my thoughts; they have nothing to with my being a Baha’i.

For one thing, I did not vote in several elections through the years, not by choice but either because I forgot or because I had other last minute tasks to do on Election Day that made it impossible to get to the ballot boxes. This gave me an idea: why do we only get one shot, one time, at voting? Why not have a standing vote? By standing vote I mean one that stands all the time, until the day I die. With a standing vote I could switch my support around whenever I wished and however often I wanted. You may say: that would blur the line between an opinion poll and a vote. Exactly. As it is, opinion polls are done unofficially by private companies, and they have tremendous influence on policy. Why not admit that they exist and force them out of the closet? A standing vote, you might object, would boot out world leaders in the second half of their second terms, when they almost always become unpopular. Exactly. That would be more, well, democratic, wouldn’t it?

What would enhance standing votes would be more use in elections of both randomness and meritocracy. Start with randomness.

I was pleased that this citizen’s committee was chosen randomly. We do not make nearly enough use of the tossed coin, or whatever the computer equivalent is. The democracy of Ancient Athens made many far more important choices of judges and leaders by lot. It is a great way to get around the inherent biases involved in human selection methodology, including popular elections.

Meritocracy could be mixed in much better with the egalitarian “one man one vote” aspect of the democratic system. With standing votes you could enhance your vote by gaining expertise in certain areas, which would include the privilege of voting in periodic plebiscites on specialized issues.

Take, for example, medical issues. If people got a special right to vote along with their credentials when they graduate, their expertise would shape policy much more effectively. But why only involve experts? There are some issues that only experts have anything worthwhile to say about, but other medical concerns require only an interest and a grasp of a small number of pertinent facts. Here the principle of one person one vote would come into play. Standing votes would allow a “community of interest” to work along with the professionals in decision making. Thus if you are like me and have a lay interest in medical things without any special expertise, you would earn the right to vote by studying up for the next plebiscite. You would take a basic test proving that you have grasped the technical facts, and then you would cast your “lay” vote. The lay election would be balanced by the expert voting, according to how specialized the issue is. If I persist in my interest in medicine, testing might be reduced or dropped, only being given randomly to a percentage of voters, in order be sure that a large enough number of experienced lay voters are sufficiently well informed. This would be borrowing from the sophisticated statistical ways of pollsters.