But I trust in my heart that even as this more equitable and representative election system becomes the norm our candidates and fellow voters will innovate new and exciting means to treat each other like shite. The Senate is a conundrum when it comes to proportional representation, breaking the two party duopoly, and representing the people. One key reason is that the constitution requires that every state send exactly 2 representatives.
Those states could choose to collaborate and synchronize their 3 senatorial tier elections senators are elected for 6 year terms and every senator will either be up for reelection in , , or So say by , we got some states to agree to this. If any person running for senate in that term between those different states reached a certain percentage threshold, they would get a seat. Utah has a Senator up for reelection in as well.
Every state would eventually get someone up for reelection, so Colorado would still be able to vote in this one. So there are 4 seats to fill and anyone in those 5 states can rank their favorite candidates that are running. But those five states would probably always have at least one Navajo Senator, at least one Mormon Senator, at least one Libertarian senator, and at least one Democrat per senate tier electoral cycle.
They would have 3 tiers and 10 total senators as a block. Rank choice would be decent with the president, especially as an executive executing policy, a head of state, etc.
It is truly inspiring to see change, but multimember and other preproduction systems would be truly life-changing. Pardon my typos, I was apparently drowsy. In an earlier draft of this post I had been using 4 states rather than 5, so pardon the part where I refer to 8 senators in the block, as I said later it would be I think your proposal as it stands would not be acceptable to the smallest state population in any proposed multi-state district, as the voting power of residents in that state would be diluted strongly.
The senate system in the US was originally designed to protect the smaller states from being overruled by larger states. While still adhering to Article 5, perhaps senate seats could be increased to 3 per state, and then align the elections so all 3 seats in any particular state are elected at one moment as a 3 seat proportional district.
Click here to cancel reply. Facebook Facebook. Adopting proportional representation would unskew US elections. Adopting proportional representation would unskew US elections Share this:. Proportional Representation can unskew US elections But it does not have to be this way. Advantages of Proportional Representation STV has proven over time to provide roughly proportional results. This has been the experience where RCV has been used in the US The good news for PR proponents is that it would not take a federal constitutional amendment to adopt it.
Previous post Next post. Tom Kelleher March 29, at am - Reply. Amy and Steve Mulroy March 29, at pm - Reply. Daniel January 27, at am - Reply. I just had an idea hit me, inspired by your post.
Even if Chifley was confident of retaining office, many in the caucus feared that their time was up. Labor had won 15 of the 18 Senate seats at the election and before the election had 33 to the opposition's three Senate seats. Thus Labor had a near monopoly of long-term sitting Senators and faced the prospect of winning half of the enlarged group seven from each state as a one-off transitional arrangement of 42 newly elected senators under the reformed electoral system, promising to give it a very healthy majority for many years.
The alternative was to stick with the traditional system and risk losing this large swag of Senate seats to the incoming Menzies government.
At the general election, Labor emerged in a minority position in the enlarged member House, with 47 to Menzies 74 seats but won a victory in the Senate with 34 seats to the governments Labor lost office but the Senate gamble worked.
A useful portrait of the pre-reformed Senate is contained in Denning' s Inside Parliament. It seems that even Curtin as Labor leader a decade before the election at the party conference had favoured an enlarged Parliament on the condition that the Senate be altered through PR. After preliminary cabinet discussion in July relating to the prior need for reliable census information, cabinet finally established a sub-committee in December , comprising the minister for the Interior Victor Johnson as chair of the sub-committee the minister for Health and Social Services Senator McKenna and the minister for Information and Immigration Arthur Calwell.
So tradition has it: Calwell made PR a reality. At a caucus meeting on 17 February , Prime Minister Chifley called on senator McKenna to report on the cabinet sub-committee proposals which had been agreed on by cabinet in January.
So much for the formal record of caucus decision-making. The best insider account is available in the entertaining memoirs of veteran Labor parliamentarian Fred Daly who was a young House of Representatives member at that time. Daly reports that Chifley was personally opposed to PR and may well have voted against it in the cabinet.
Proportional representation in the Senate was disastrous for the Labor Party'. The major parties which managed the transition to a PR system gave little thought to the possible effects in encouraging the formation of minor parties, even though the historical case against PR was that it would jeopardise the conventions of strong party government.
Despite Calwell's involvement in developing the basic policy, it was Attorney-General Evatt who introduced the legislation in the House. Opposition Leader Menzies clearly identified Labor's partisan strategy in which a Labor majority in the Senate was an insurance policy against the probability that they lost office at the next election, as in fact happened.
Menzies also foreshadowed the possibility of a government using the barely tested procedures for double dissolutions to attempt to restore majority representation in both houses, which is exactly what he did in For Menzies, the existence of the constitutional provision for double dissolutions and subsequent joint sittings was proof enough of the subordinate place of the Senate in Australian government. If carried, such a referendum would have meant that the House could then be enlarged without any increase to the size of the Senate.
The government defeated this Opposition move, arguing that this proposed change would jeopardise the interests of the smaller states, whose representation would suffer disproportionately, and be a body blow to the future of the Senate. There were those who clearly identified the costs of re-legitimating the Senate. The issue of the States' rights function divided parliament. Better alternative schemes of representation included indirect election by state Parliaments.
For the purposes of this background paper, it is important to return to the historical origins of the Australian Senate and to recover the original rationale for its intended contribution to Australian parliamentary life and to try to discern any evidence of early anticipations of the choice for PR. The story that emerges is that PR is not a late addition to the institution of Parliament but one of the original ingredients assembled and prepared by the constitutional framers and successor parliamentarians, although not successfully used until But the legitimacy of that decision takes on a new dimension when seen against the background of earlier expectations of a Senate based on PR.
Once we appreciate that the history of expectations about the Senate and PR goes back well beyond the fifty years since the election, we can begin to look anew at the merits of the decision made by the Chifley government.
The reform can then be seen as a late delivery on a very early promise about the importance of a proportional Senate in Australian government. As we approach the centenary of Federation, it is important that we see the events and institutions of in light of the original intent of the constitutional framers in the pre-Federation decade.
A search for the term will throw up many false leads, such as discussion of the nexus between the two parliamentary chambers where the relationship in size of House and Senate members was understood by the framers to be one of proportionate representation.
The existence of representation proportional to population was frequently cited as a prerequisite of democracy, with Canadian precedents drawn from the composition of the Senate of Canada. But it is only in reference to debates over the role of the Senate that we find any real evidence of the framers' interest in what we mean by PR.
It is well known that the design of the Senate repeatedly gave rise to the most protracted disputes during the s Conventions in which the Constitution was framed. Progressive liberals tended grudgingly to accept the Senate as the price that had to be paid for federation and the transition to the new nation. Perhaps the most exaggerated liberal view was that of Victorian framer H B Higgins. Higgins fought for as small and as insignificant a Senate as possible, in the belief that the primary institution of responsible parliamentary government would be the appropriately named House of Representatives, from whose majority the governing party would be drawn, and to whose majority that government would be solely accountable.
At the other extreme were conservatives like Hackett, famous for his preference for federalism and States' rights over traditional responsible government: a preference which elevated the Senate into a place of co-ordinate importance with the House within the institutions of government.
There were of course many views caught between these extremes, with two loose clusters associated with the two great colonial Premiers and proven masters of responsible government: on one hand, Parkes' open tolerance of a Senate designed to represent each of the States equally; and on the other hand, Griffith's more adventurous enthusiasm for reshaping traditional conventions of responsible government by conferring equality of power on the two institutions of the new national Parliament.
The first federal election of took place, of course, without any federal electoral legislation. Senators, for example, were elected according to prevailing state electoral law, with Tasmania adapting its established Hare-Clark system of PR. Although the exception, the Tasmanian model of PR was by no means inconsistent with the framers' intentions in regard to the Senate.
From time to time, delegates at the s Constitutional Conventions raised the question of the most appropriate electoral basis for a federal house of review, eventually deciding to have the Constitution leave electoral arrangements to be decided by the federal Parliament. It is clear from the scattered commentary and such practices as the Tasmanian reliance on PR that the framers considered PR to be an acceptable, possibly even the preferred, electoral basis of the upper review house.
The Convention records reveal too little for a conclusive case to be made, but what calls that there were for the use of PR attracted only scattered rebuttal. The argument was in two steps: first, the theoretical case for protecting minority representation, by which was meant not a claim to rule by minorities but the rights to parliamentary representation of those who support the non-governing parties; and second, the practical case for the provision contained in s9 of the Constitution which kept the door open to PR by allowing Parliament to legislate as it saw fit, thereby protecting the option for PR for the Senate if there was sufficient parliamentary support.
The framers' theoretical case for PR is scattered and largely implicit. So much for the framers' political theory. The practical case about the feasibility of PR is perhaps more surprising, in that very prominent framers like Deakin and Barton went on the record predicting that Parliament would probably opt for PR for the Senate.
The Australian framers had two models of federal upper houses designed to operate as houses of review. The first model was derived from fully-operational Senates: the set of constitutional provisions then in place for the two main examples of federal upper houses, the Senates of the US and Canada.
The second model was theoretical: being derived from the influential political argument advanced by, among others, John Stuart Mill, for the institution of PR in a house of Parliament. It would certainly be possible to combine these two sources of influence and construct an upper house appropriate to the purposes of a federal polity, and credit goes to those framers who, as I shall show, attempted to do just that.
Yet the two types of models contain many interesting examples of institutional features which were not adopted by the Australian framers, but which might be important to an effective review capacity. It all depends on the task of political representation considered appropriate to the Australian Senate. Some attention should first be paid to the institutional design principles inherent in each of the two types of possible models, in order to recover the latitude of scope open to the Australian framers in equipping the Senate with a notional review function , regardless of whether the institutional review capacity was sufficiently considered.
The framers certainly had a model before them of a Senate designed to perform differently from a lower house: many commentators have recognised the powerful presence of the US Senate as an instructive working model of a house of review, even if the lessons were primarily of a sobering negative kind for constitutional designers operating in a parliamentary environment. Still, many of the constitutional features of the US Senate held the attention of many Australian framers in search of the institutional roots of a house of review.
The Australian framers derived only a limited range of provisions from the US model. Stripped of exclusive constitutional functions, the Australian Senate had no need for those other structural devices designed to differentiate the Senate from the House and so enhance the review capacity: such as the different age qualification—again attempted in but later abandoned [47] —and commitment to as small an upper house as feasible.
The creature of understandable s over-reaction against the States'-rights orientation of the US system, the Canadian Senate was an appointive body, with the gift of life-membership in the hands of the federal government BNA Act, ss Eligibility qualifications for Senators which hint at a conscious review capacity included a lower age limit of 30 years, together with tests for property and against indebtedness.
The world of political theory also opened up the prospect of PR. Many important constitutional framers were convinced that PR would give substance to the promise of the Senate as a house of review, by establishing a different parliamentary institution capable of representing a range of community views either not wanted or needed in the House.
The academic literature on PR identifies two British authorities and two Australian champions as the standard bearers acknowledged by the constitutional framers. Hare is the originator of the Hare system of PR which J S Mill did so much to publicise as the best basis of parliamentary reform. This is not the place to review Hare's distinctive contribution to electoral systems but some attention should be given to the Australian reception of Hare's version of PR, first published in a series of publications in the s, and here it is instructive to note the role played internationally by Spence in promoting electoral reform.
But the international scholarship gives due recognition to Catherine Helen Spence, who stood unsuccessfully for election to the Constitutional Convention after a very busy international career promoting the ideas of her British friends Hare and Mill.
Spence's Autobiography tells the story of her original discovery of the principles of PR through her observation of her father's work as town clerk of Adelaide, when he used PR-like mechanisms in Adelaide's initial city council elections of Arguably, Mill's account of the merits of a second chamber organised on PR provides one of the important missing ingredients in the framers' confident recipe for a federal house of review. Deliberation might sound like too elevated a task for Australian parliamentary bodies, but Mill himself identified Australian discussion of PR as evidence that the Hare method was not unduly complicated and that it could be introduced and made to work.
Mill's case is made most conveniently in his Considerations on Representative Government. PR makes good the promise of a friendly critic of democracy, and defender of the elusive principle of democratic equality which might otherwise suffer at the hands of the utilitarian practice of majority rule.
Institutions based on this supplementary form of political representation will never have overwhelming moral authority, or even the crude voting power, to compete with popular elective bodies for the right to rule or determine broad public policy. Nanson was an adviser to the first Commonwealth government and is regarded as the source of the legislative provisions relating to PR for the Senate.
Nanson's important role has been covered elsewhere and for this occasion it is preferable to share the spotlight around and to treat others, like Spence and the Ashworth brothers, who were more politically active than professor Nanson. She and her supporters lent their considerable support to Glynn during the Constitutional Convention and Glynn in turn publicly advocated her cause.
By way of illustrating the breadth of interest in PR at the time of Federation, I can take one of the many examples identified by Reid and Forrest to suggest the colour and cogency of the electoral reform movement. The Ashworth book deserves brief comment for several reasons. First, the book was published during the year on the eve of the elections for the first Commonwealth Parliament.
It was designed to broaden Australian interest in PR at the outset of the Commonwealth. Second, the authors take pains to demonstrate the many varieties of PR and in particular to promote their own version of a list system which is designed to consolidate rather than fragment the two party system of parliamentary government, much like some contemporary critics from the major political parties.
Their target was to balance out the imbalance of seats between the governing majority and the Opposition party by protecting the parliamentary presence of the official Opposition as an integral component of the system of government. To the Ashworth brothers, the Senate is important as a site for PR but not as important as the House of Representatives where Government and Opposition should face each other on the basis of their proportional electoral strength.
Their interest in securing PR in both chambers rests on their belief that both would be driven by the pressures of party politics and ideally should fairly display the community's balance of governing and opposing parties. The authors state that their intention in writing their book was to prevent the adoption of the block vote for the Senate.
The original Senate elections were held of necessity on state-wide systems, with Tasmania and South Australia using state-wide systems for their initial election of House members as well. But only Tasmania adopted a form of PR for the elections: indeed, for both of its federal houses. The parliamentary records for the first year of the Commonwealth Parliament include two reports which would appear to have helped prepare the ground for the government bill proposing PR.
Home Affairs minister Sir William Lyne convened a committee of parliamentary experts on electoral law and practice. This group reported to him in July in favour of PR for the Senate. This report in particular was cited as authority during the parliamentary debate over the electoral bill. The electoral bill introduced by the first post-election federal ministry was, after a false start in the House, introduced in the Senate and provided for PR as the basis for counting of the Senate vote.
The Labor party respected the occasion by granting its federal members a free vote on the issue. The proponents of PR stopped well short of advocating minority rights to rule, but they did defend minority rights to representation. The great divide was that over the merits of strong party government.
The proponents of PR argued that the British conventions of party government did not suit the circumstances of the new federal polity, and that to the extent that British conventions held sway then due account should be taken of electoral reform sentiment in Britain which pointed the way to the future. It is instructive to note the early assessments of contemporary authorities like Harrison Moore to the effect that Parliament had not yet in this case, as at given favourable consideration to any scheme for PR for the Senate: as though such consideration was only natural and would one day come to pass.
Further, he defended the Senate as displaying more progressive tendencies than those evident in the House of Representatives. Moore points out the potential for Senate reform.
The aim of this listing is to illustrate the evolving depth and eventual breadth of attraction for PR. Seen against this background, the decision is part of an evolution of Australian parliamentary institutions that gives due recognition to a form of political representation long anticipated as an essential component of the Australian constitutional system.
The Labor party was ambivalent about the merits of Senate reform. By the party had committed itself to abolition of the Senate but this represents something of an ambit claim. With ranked-choice voting, voters indicate their preferences by ranking their candidates on the ballot.
If your top choice is the lowest vote-getter when the votes are first counted, that candidate gets crossed off — but your number two choice then gets counted. In the single-winner version, candidates then get eliminated from last place up, until one candidate emerges with a majority. In a multiple-winner system, say five, the process ends when five candidates remain after all vote transfers are completed.
We should also use ranked-choice voting for Senate elections — though because states have only two senators, typically elected at different times, Senate elections would still have to be single-winner, ranked-choice voting. Bernie Sanders, and another represented by former Vice President Joe Biden, and at least two parties running candidates on the right, one represented by President Donald Trump, another represented by former Ohio governor John Kasich or another more centrist Republican.
We might see more candidates, too. Depending on the issue, they formed different kinds of coalitions. Second, proportional, multiparty democracy is the norm among advanced democracies, and has been for over a century. Compromise and coalition-building are always hard.
But because multiparty systems require both to form a government, parties eventually figure it out. Proportional multiparty democracy would likely increase voter turnout. US voter turnout has long been at the bottom of OECD countries, despite countless efforts to improve participation. When your vote is irrelevant, why bother? Under proportional representation, by contrast, all votes matter equally. Because all votes matter, parties and candidates have more incentive to mobilize more voters.
The Framers despised political parties, but what they really feared was a binary two-party system. They feared that if just one party became the majority, it would use its power to abuse the remaining minority party, and that close two-party competition would be destabilizing.
They were spot-on. How are we going to upend our entire voting system? The electoral reforms I propose would be a major change. And it would take a broad social movement and lots of public pressure to help bring about change. Change is already taking root at the state and local levels. Maine adopted ranked-choice voting in New York City adopted ranked-choice voting in , joining several other major cities, and Massachusetts may adopt it in Democracy reform in the US has almost always been a state-led process.
And there are plenty of state-level opportunities. Moreover, the history of American democracy is also a history of reform. The primaries, direct elections of senators, and single-member districts were all affirmative reforms that changed American democracy. In the first two decades of the 20th century, most Western European democracies adopted proportional representation. Though each country had its own distinct path, in each country a majority of democratically elected representatives moved to a different voting system because they thought it would be an improvement over the status quo.
In the s, New Zealand ditched first-past-the-post elections and adopted a version of proportional representation, responding to massive public discontent with the existing system.
Reform is always unlikely.
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