Political Reform Program: Latest Articles

"America" - the concept, as well as the country - is facing a clash of values as it contemplates the best way to fill vacancies created by departing senators and governors in New York, Illinois and elsewhere who are joining the Obama administration. More is at stake than it might at first seem. Particularly as the United States embarks on a journey with a new administration in which so many have pinned so much hope, these early details matter.

Now that our country has elected a 21st century president, we should reconsider our 18th century electoral system.

What are you doing today? How would you like to be voting in runoff elections for the Board of Supervisors? That's what many would be doing if San Francisco hadn't voted in 2002 to replace the old December runoff system with an "instant runoff" system known as ranked choice voting.

Whether using ranked choice voting or December runoffs, the goal is the same: to elect officeholders with majority support from the public. But with ranked-choice voting, you accomplish this in one November election.

Now that a winner has emerged in Oregon's down-to-the-wire U.S. Senate race, one nagging question persists: What effect did the third-party candidacy of Dave Brownlow have on the election?

The question is important for a number of reasons. With the vote for Republican Gordon Smith and Democrat Jeff Merkley so close -- each received 47 percent of the total -- the more than 80,000 votes earned by Brownlow of the Constitution Party is far greater than the margin of difference between the two leading candidates. So when… more

The realm of electoral system design is still a fairly esoteric branch of political science in the United States--unfortunately so, since no single detail has a greater impact on the quality of representative government. The choice of an electoral system affects which candidate gets elected and all other aspects of a representative democracy, including the number of viable political parties, the quality of campaigns, voter participation levels, the role of campaign finance, legislative policy and more.

But despite the central importance of electoral system selection, the… more