The Quirks and Idiosyncrasies of American “Democracy”

Letters to Seffican

The answer to why we have such trouble finding leaders is that often, anyone who addresses national problems and promises to find solutions for them, loses to someone pandering to local and parochial interests

By Anil Madan

There is an incoherent coherence to America’s system of government. We often refer to our system as a representative democracy. The idea underlying such a democracy is that the election of representatives by the people (meaning, by a majority of the people) creates a body that will, on their behalf, pass legislation and manage the functioning of the government. Inherent in this type of governance is the expectation that elected representatives will appoint, designate, or employ competent functionaries to perform tasks essential to the efficient functioning of the government.

American Democracy. Pic – USSUSA.Org

That concept is simple and straightforward enough, but the structure of the American federal system has more layers to it. It is well known that the American Republic is a federation of sovereign states each of which has agreed, by accepting the terms of a written Constitution, to form a union and to delegate specified powers to a national or federal government.

Powers that are not delegated to the federal government are deemed to be retained by each state. As a practical matter, the sweep of federal power can be extremely broad and this often creates tension between the states and the federal government, but the federal government often prevails because the Constitution can be interpreted to confer sweeping powers to uphold most Congressional actions.

The federal government has three principal functions: Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. In theory, this structure is one of checks and balances, each co-equal branch checking the power — or rather the abuse of power — by the others.

Our system of government does not, however, choose the head of the Executive Branch (the President), or Members of the Senate to reflect a truly democratic government. And whereas we think of the judiciary as being one of the essential checks on the other two branches — mostly by ensuring that their actions conform to the Constitution and that they can be held to account for their omissions — as a practical matter, that is far from reality.

A bit of American history

Let us survey a bit of American history to get a better understanding of this quirks. The fundamental premise of a Democracy is that there is one vote for each person. But that is not how the United States started out. At the outset, women, Native Americans (American Indians) and slaves were not allowed to vote. So much for one man, one vote.

An additional complication was caused by the three-fifths clause. In a quirky way, without referring directly to slaves, the Constitution declared that, to the total number of free persons, excluding [American] Indians not taxed, there would be added three-fifths of all other persons. The point was to keep the northern states in which slavery had been abolished, from dominating the southern states. By counting the slaves as three-firths of a person, the population of the southern states was effectively inflated so that the system of appointing representatives to the House of Representatives in Congress, would prevent the northern states from dominating the House. Never mind that the slaves could not vote, it was enough to shift the balance of power to have them count, as part of the population, by counting a fraction of each person.

The Legislative Branch was divided into two chambers, the House of Representatives, and the Senate. But only the Members of the House were chosen directly by the majority vote of the people in districts within the several states. This was representative democracy in its purest form, except for that three-fifths embellishment. How did that work? Well, the solution was that the number of Representatives in the House for each state was determined by the population of the state, one Representative for “a discrete number” of so many people. We do not need to elaborate on the “so many” because the number changed as America’s population grew. Each state was to have at least one Representative, and the population was to be counted every ten years by taking a census.

And what about the Senate? Each state would appoint two Senators no matter how large or small its population. This, of course, detracted from the idea of a democratic government by giving states with smaller populations, a disproportionately larger voice in the affairs of government. By the terms of the original US Constitution, Senators were chosen by their respective state legislatures, meaning that each state’s elected representatives to the local government would vote to select their state’s senators.  However, this system was changed with the ratification of the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1913, which established that Senators are now directly elected by the people of each state through popular vote.

With 50 states in the Union, there are 100 Senators. The number of Representatives in the House is now 435.

Senators are chosen at large in each State by votes of all citizens of that state. However, Representatives are chosen by districts. And how are districts configured? By the legislature of the state, of course. This means that the party with majority control of a state’s legislature can divide the districts in such a way as to favour its own candidates, by carving up districts which disproportionately agglomerate voters who will tend to lean one way or other. This process is known as gerrymandering. In a legal quirk, the Supreme Court has ruled that districting is a political issue that is not justiciable, i.e., not subject to legal review except when it is based on prohibited criteria such as racial discrimination. In other words, politics is sport, and it is fair game to manipulate districts.

Choosing a President

How then do we choose a President out of this political stew? To answer that question, we have to understand the system of Electors or, as the combination of all Electors is known, the Electoral College.

Technically, the people of each state do not vote to choose a President, but rather to cast votes that are allocated to Electors. There is, in each state, one elector for each Congressional District, and one for each Senate seat. So, with 435 members of Congress, that accounts for 435 electors, and 100 more for the Senate seats brings the total to 535. An amendment to the Constitution allocates three electors to the District of Columbia (Washington, DC), so this brings us to today’s magic number of 538 electors. A majority of the number 538 is 270 which represents the number of electoral votes that a presidential candidate must win to be elected president.

Every state except two, Nebraska and Maine, has a winner-take-all allocation of delegates, meaning that the candidate winning a majority of the vote in the presidential election wins all the delegates of that state. The two exceptions, Nebraska and Maine allocate two electoral votes to the winner of the overall popular vote in the state, and then one electoral vote to the vote winner in each congressional district. Maine has 2 districts, Nebraska has 3. (Note that adding electors for the two Senate seats in each state gives Maine 4 electoral votes and Nebraska 5.)

Inspiring and competent leaders

What does all this have to do with why we have such difficulty in finding inspiring and competent leaders? The system for determining the nominees of the two major political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, virtually guarantees that presidential candidates will be extremists or goofy in some way or other.

Given that the two major parties dominate American politics, third parties have a very slim to nonexistent chance of putting up a candidate who will stage a successful run for the presidency. The best that such a third-party candidate can do is prevent the two major party nominees from accumulating the necessary 270 electoral votes.

Both the Republican and Democratic parties choose their nominees by staging primary elections in which, for the most part, only those voters who are registered as members of their party, can vote for candidates vying for the party’s nomination. But this is only the first step. These primary elections are held over a period of months, sometimes one state primary in a week, and sometimes multiple state primaries in a week.

And the object of the state primaries? Why, it’s a microcosm of the presidential election. In each state, each party’s hopeful for its nomination vies with other hopefuls to collect enough electors to have 270 at the end of the process and thus win the party’s nomination. There is, however, a complication. Some states have a winner-take-all primary system in which the popular vote winner gets all the delegates (equal to electors) allocated to that state, whereas some states apportion delegates according to the percentage of the vote that each candidate wins.

The result is that candidates with extreme positions appeal to local voters and can capture commanding positions in state primaries, especially in states that do not follow the winner-take-all system of allocating delegates.

Sometimes, fringe candidates or locally popular candidates can sew up enough votes to ensure that no one gets the required 270 delegates on the first ballot at the party’s Convention. This means that they have enormous leverage to exact concessions from potential nomination winners.

And what happens if nobody wins 270 delegates through the primary election process, or worse yet, in the presidential election? Well, we will explore those quirks next time.

For the moment think of this. Given the electoral college system, it is entirely possible that a presidential candidate could win the majority of the votes cast across the nation in the general election and still not win the presidency. How is that possible? Well, we saw that in 2000 when Al Gore won the majority vote but not the presidency, ditto in 2016 with Hillary Clinton.

So, it is possible in the country that touts itself as the exemplar of the world’s democracy, for a person who does not win the popular vote, to become president.

Ultimately, the answer to why we have such trouble finding leaders is that often, anyone who addresses national problems and promises to find solutions for them, loses to someone pandering to local and parochial interests.

We have also seen that the American media can be relentless in stripping away layer upon layer of every candidate’s personal life, relishing exposé over explanation.

Many competent people will not venture into that thicket. Many other competent people feel that they have the skill to solve the nation’s problems, but it is not worth the effort because they do not have the skills to weather the storm of dysfunctional scraping away layer upon layer of their personal lives to get to being a nominee.

Cheerz…

Bwana

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 1 November 2024