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QUOTA
QN2020C September 2020 www.prsa.org.au
References
to ‘the popular vote’ in
reports on
In late 2016,
the ‘popular vote’ was a much-reported aspect
of the nation-wide polls to elect the USA’s
538 Presidential Electors, which took place
under the 12th Amendment to
the U.S. Constitution, of 1804. That amendment
modified the framers’ 1788 version of Article
2 Section 1, after faults in that
version had
led, in 1800, to Thomas Jefferson and Aaron
Burr each being voted for as President by 73
Presidential Electors. After that tie
was resolved at the 36th House of
Representatives ballot, in
Jefferson’s favour, Aaron Burr became the
third Vice-President. Burr accused Alexander
Hamilton, who had been the first Secretary of
the Treasury, under George Washington, of
having worked against him in those House
votes, and challenged him to a duel. In that
duel, Burr shot and killed Hamilton, who had
also opposed Burr in New York State politics. The
Presidential Electors that pledged to vote for
Donald Trump - who the 2016 President of the
Senate, Joe Biden,
dutifully declared, at a Senate sitting, to be
the candidate duly elected as the President of
the United States - had gained far fewer
popular votes than those for the runner-up,
Hillary Clinton, as Table 1 shows.
Presidential
candidate Party Home State Popular vote for
the Electors Pledged Electors Electors’ actual
votes No. Per cent Hillary Clinton Democratic New York 65,853,514 48.18 232 227 Donald Trump Republican New York 62,984,828 46.09 306 304 Libertarian New Mexico 4,489,341 3.28 0 0 Jill Stein Green Massachusetts 1,457,218 1.07 0 0 Evan McMullin Independent Utah 731,991 0.54 0 0 Darrell Castle Constitution Tennessee 203,090 0.15 0 0 Gloria La Riva Socialism &
Liberation California 74,401 0.05 0 0 Bernie Sanders* Independent Vermont 111,850 0.08 0 1 John Kasich* Republican Ohio 2,684 0.00 0 1 Ron Paul* Libertarian Texas 124 0.00 0 1 Colin Powell* Republican Virginia 25 0.00 0 3 Democratic South Dakota 0 0.00 0 1 Others* 760,210 0.56 0 0 TOTALS 136,669,278 100.00 538 538 Table
1: Popular vote for Presidential Electors
versus the number of them actually elected *
Asterisk denotes ‘write-in’
candidates, whose names were not on
any official ballot papers, as 41 States
allow.
Commentators often referred to
Hillary Clinton as ‘having won the popular
vote’, presumably because candidates for the
Electoral College that had pledged to vote for
her had gained a plurality of that vote, but those
candidates were collectively 1.82 percentage
points short of having received an absolute
majority of
the popular vote. If - as in the direct election of
the President
of
the Irish Republic – U.S. voters were allowed to
provide more information about their wishes by
casting transferable votes, with their
preferred order of the candidates indicated to
the extent they wished, it could be
determined which of the two leading
Presidential candidates received an absolute
majority of popular votes cast. In such an election, if 80% of
Jill Stein’s ballots showed a later preference
for Clinton over Trump - as would seem likely
- a transfer of just 0.96 percentage points of
Johnson’s 3.28% of the vote would have had
Clinton gain over 50% of the popular vote, but
a less marked preference flow would have left
Trump winning an absolute majority of the
popular vote. Voters’ ability to cast
transferable ballots in direct elections of the President and
Vice-President would require amending the USA’s 18th Century
Constitution.
Until the popular vote is counted
differently from the only method prescribed by
law, which is the indirect use of the
Electoral College, and a direct transferable
vote is used, as in the Irish Republic, it
cannot be truly said that any candidate
gaining a minority of the popular vote has
‘won’ that vote. There were eleven candidates that
received part of the popular vote, only seven
of whom were on official ballot papers in one
or more States. The three Presidential
candidates whose pledged Electors gained the
highest popular vote above were the only
Presidential candidates whose names, or
pledged Electors’ names, appeared
on
the ballot paper in
all fifty States and in the District of
Columbia. There were eleven candidates that
received part of the popular vote, only seven
of whom were printed on official ballot papers
in some or all States as the candidates that
the candidates for the Electoral College had publicly
pledged to vote for, if elected, when
they met in their respective States. The twelfth Presidential
candidate listed above, Faith
Spotted
Eagle, received the
vote of one person elected to the Electoral
College, but her name was neither on the
printed ballot paper for the election, nor
could it be ‘written-in’, as South Dakota is
one of the nine of the 51 jurisdictions
involved that does not permit ‘write-in’
ballots. The President
and Vice-President are elected by a Heath
Robinson
system. What commentators neglected to
mention is that the United States has no
procedure or law that provides for any
counting of that popular vote other than its
use to elect the often obscure members of the
Electoral College, the
538
Presidential Electors. See comment in QN68. A U.S. Electoral College votes
only once every four years, and then has no
further role. By contrast, the lower houses in
Westminster-style parliaments are effectively
standing electoral colleges, with far less
skewing than the U.S. model in favour of
smaller States or Provinces. They can carry a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister or Premier, thus requiring the Governor-General or Governor to appoint a replacement, who must be able to withstand the same test while in office. There is no high barrier to the removal of a Prime Minister comparable with the U.S. impeachment process, which has never itself achieved the removal of a President despite now having been undertaken three times.
New
website: USA’s ‘Second-rate Democracy’
A consistent
U.S. advocate for the single transferable
vote, Douglas Amy, Professor Emeritus of
Politics, of Mount Holyoke College in
Massachusetts, has established the new
website, ‘Second-rate Democracy’,
which lists seventeen issues he thinks justify
his use of that title for it. The four of
his issues below are prime electoral examples
of how Australia’s constitutional regime
benefited by its establishment in the late
19th Century, rather than the USA’s late 18th
Century. Issue
8 - Gerrymandering: The word comes from a signatory
to the U.S. Declaration of Independence,
Elbridge Gerry. The ‘Latin
earmuffs’, Illinois’s
4th Congressional District in 2017, is an
obviously outrageous setting of electoral
boundaries. Both the USA and Australia used to
suffer from the separate problem of
malapportionment, but Australia’s law
devolving boundary-setting on its impartial
Australian Electoral Commission has, unlike
the USA, stopped intentional gerrymanders. Issue
9 - Electoral College: The
last paragraph of the preceding article
explains how Westminster-style de facto
‘electoral colleges’ operate in appointing
Prime Ministers and Premiers much more
flexibly and democratically than the USA’s
1788-1804 version ‘elects’ U.S. Presidents. Issue
12 - Winner-take-all
elections: In
each of Australia’s lower houses, except for
Tasmania and the ACT, which use PR-STV
in 5-member electoral districts, the winner
still ‘takes all’, but every such winner does
need to be preferred to the runner-up by an
absolute majority of voters. In every U.S.
lower house, the winner only needs to gain a plurality
of the votes cast, thus quite unfairly letting
a minority candidate ‘take all’. Issue
17 – Frozen Constitution: There have
been 25 successful
amendments that
continue to modify the original U.S.
Constitution, but only 8 altering Australia’s
Constitution, though most of those U.S.
changes were 11 afterthoughts in the last
twelve years of the 18th Century. A
U.S. change needs a ⅔
majority in each federal House, and ¾ of State
congresses to agree to it. In Australia, an
absolute majority of the lower house, and a
referendum carried by a majority of voters,
and by a majority of voters in a majority of
States, has always sufficed.
Table 2:
Amendments still modifying the Constitution
This Parliament of Victoria
‘chooses’ four unelected MLCs to replace
elected MLCs Since the
first of the four successive quadrennial
general elections for Victoria’s Upper
House, held so far using PR-STV counting, in November 2006, there have been sixteen MLCs that have
resigned
during their terms, and been replaced by
persons that have not been elected to
those positions by the voters. The number
of MLCs involved per term is shown in
Table 3 below.
Table 3: Unelected Victorian
MLCs by year and party Table 4
below lists the four MLCs that have resigned
before the second Andrews Labor Government
has reached the first half of its 4-year
term.
Table 4: Victoria’s
unelected MLCs since the 2018 polls Unfortunately, the PR-STV
counting in five-member electoral districts
that has applied for Victoria’s Legislative
Council elections from 2006 was accompanied
by an undemocratic method of filling casual
vacancies, whereby the Parliament itself
‘chooses’ the replacement MLC. That ‘choice’
is notional, as only a single candidate is
ever proposed. Victoria’s democracy would
benefit from the direct election of
replacement MLCs that applies in the ‘countback’ method for
Tasmania’s House of Assembly and the
Legislative Assembly of the Australian
Capital Territory, or even the ‘recount’
method for Western Australia’s Legislative
Council.
The Far North District Council
is, as its name suggests, the Council for the
northern-most municipality on the North Island
of New Zealand. That Council voted, without
dissent, to change the system used to
count votes at its
general elections from the default system,
which is a multiple
plurality system, to
the only permitted alternative, which is
Proportional Representation using the Single
Transferable Vote (PR-STV), with
the Meek
method.
PR-STV will apply for the
municipal general elections in 2022 and 2025
but, under NZ’s Local Elections Act 2001, the
Council elected at that 2025 election has to
vote on whether it confirms that decision.
© 2020
Proportional Representation Society of Australia National President: Dr Jeremy
Lawrence npres@prsa.org.au |
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