What would the Founders and Framers do today?

For over two centuries, Americans have experimented with different ways of electing their political representatives. Where is the spirit of innovation today?

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Over 30 years ago, myself, Rob Richie and Matthew Cossolotto co-founded the organization that today is known as FairVote, with a mission to educate Americans about proportional representation and electoral system reform. Back in the 1990s, when any of us said the words ‘instant runoff voting,’ ‘choice voting,’ ‘list system,’ ‘single transferable vote’ or ‘proportional representation’ to elected officials, media pundits, prospective funders or even many political scientists, they looked at us like we were Mad Hatters with White Rabbit-sprouted ears.

Under the rah-rah influence of patriotic misinterpretations of Anthony Downs’s Economic Theory of Democracy, American political leaders blindly believed that the US political system was the best in the world because it allegedly elected moderate, centrist, median-voter focused governments. They had no knowledge-base or frame of reference through which to consider other electoral methods, and why would they since everybody knew that the paragon US superpower already had the best political system in the world. America was the indispensable nation.

Compare that past bias to today’s reality of ongoing and frequent meltdowns of our polarized, winner-take-all politics, as our nation gets slowly sucked into the vortex of post-democracy.

As a result of FairVote’s decades-long advocacy in a time of increasing winner-take-all breakdown, many more people have become open to the possibility that America’s political system has severe defects. Even more, interest in electoral systems among Americans has grown exponentially, with more people becoming knowledgeable and even conversant in the details of electoral systems. Not only has one of FairVote’s signature reform proposals, ranked choice voting, spread to many parts of the US, but it has been endorsed by leading media voices like the New York Times and Washington Post, and dozens of national political leaders on both the left and the right, from Senators (recently former) Mitt Romney and Joe Manchin to Senators Elizabeth Warren and Raphael Warnock.

While this slow paradigm shift sometimes feels like a new horizon, in fact the debate over how electoral systems affect representative democracy has American roots in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. The colonial Founders and their early political offspring understood and debated, sometimes with great passion, the impacts and consequences of electoral systems.

What the Founders knew

As far as the Founders were concerned there were two winner-take-all possibilities for elections: either single-seat districts, or at-large/multi-seat elections where the “highest vote-getter wins” (since alternatives like proportional electoral systems would not be invented for nearly 100 years).

The citizenry was no more than 4 million in 1790, and in 1820 the U.S. population was over 90 percent rural (and still about 80 percent rural in 1860). What neighbors thought about the important issues of the day was intimately connected to where they lived, who they lived next to, and to their survival needs that arose from geographic exigencies. Winner-take-all electoral systems seemed a fitting vehicle for political representation and to accommodate the representation and policy demands of a small electorate of perhaps 200,000 propertied white males that excluded the poor, women, African-descended slaves and indentured servants from voting. Despite its limitations, it was cutting-edge “democracy technology” compared to the divine right of a king.

Many of the Founders also were aware of the pros and cons of the two winner-take-all methods. For example, the monopolistic “sweep effect” of the plurality at-large electoral system (also known to them as the “general ticket”), whereby the electoral slate of one faction or political party with a bare majority or even the highest plurality could win all contested seats. As an example of how the sweep effect works, imagine there are five contested seats in a city or state elected by the winner-take-all, at-large electoral system. Under this method, a voter will have the same number of votes as there are contested seats, so in this example each voter will have five votes. Voters must use one vote per seat. The candidates with the most votes -- called a “plurality” -- win the seats.

What happens in this type of election system is that all five of the seats in this example actually are contested as five separate races, all elected at the same time. And because every voter has the same number of votes as there are seats, each time the voters step up to vote the most populous perspective (called the “largest plurality”) has more votes than all other smaller perspectives. Thus, the largest perspective is able to outvote those minority perspectives for each one of those seats, even if it doesn’t have majority support, winning 100% of the contested seats and producing the “sweep” effect.

The important thing to note about this winner-take-all, at-large electoral system is that these lop-sided results are not a by-product of which candidates work harder, or have more money to spend, or more volunteers, etc. It’s purely a matter of the mechanics of the system -- i.e. which voting bloc has the highest number of voters. With this type of electoral system, which is also known also as plurality at-large or bloc voting, the largest perspective can always out-vote the various minority perspectives, producing the sweep effect.

For instance in 1790 in Pennsylvania, that state’s general ticket/plurality at-large election led to a Federalist Party sweep of all eight House seats. Not only that, but most of the eight elected Congressmen (yes, they were all men) hailed from the eastern part of that state, around the largest city of Philadelphia. So western Pennsylvanians pressured their legislature to adopt a single-seat district system that would more adequately reflect the state’s regional differentiation.

Thus, it became widely understood during the founding years of our nation that, compared to the monopolistic general ticket electoral system, district elections could help geographic minorities overcome their statewide, numerical disadvantage by making them a majority within their own smaller geographic subdivision. And that would allow the statewide geographic minority a chance to elect a representative sympathetic to their needs. James Madison declared in Federalist Papers Number 56, “Divide the largest state into ten or twelve districts and it will be found that there will be no peculiar local interests in either which will not be within the knowledge of the Representative of the district.” Hamilton stated at the New York ratifying convention that “the natural and proper mode of holding elections will be to divide the state into districts in proportion to the number to be elected.”

Thus, district elections were viewed by many Founders as the only way in which a state’s geographic, i.e. regional minorities might gain adequate representation. But true to their states’ rights sympathies, the Founders left it up to the states to decide the choice of electoral system. Thus, when the first Congress was established in 1789, the electoral systems used varied widely among the original thirteen states. Only five states (Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia) elected all of their House representatives from districts, while six (Connecticut, Delaware, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island) used the general ticket at-large system, and Georgia and Maryland used a combination of districts and at-large that permitted all citizens in the state to vote for each district representative.

Reforms of 1842, and then 1967

The second Congress marked the beginning of a trend that would hold until 1842: large states opted to elect their U.S. House delegations by district elections, in a conscious attempt to give representation to geographic minorities; while low-population states chose the plurality at-large system in a conscious attempt to maximize their fewer votes in Congress by sending more politically unified delegations i.e. all Federalists or all Democratic-Republicans, that result from the sweep effect. Given the propensity of winner-take-all, at-large elections to cause glaring representational deficiencies due to the sweep effect, not surprisingly the Congressional record from 1789 to 1839 reveals an unmistakable pattern in which one party consistently won a disproportionate share of the at-large states’ seats.

In the early 19th century this debate did not go away, in fact it intensified. Numerous attempts were made to enact a constitutional amendment that would mandate single-seat district elections for the U.S. House, with twenty-two states adopting districting resolutions from 1816 to 1826; that proposal won Senate approval three times. Reading the transcripts of the often heated legislative debates from that era, one can see that the discourse over how electoral systems affect representative democracy was inherently tied to larger considerations of democratic goals and values -- values like fairness, inclusion and minority representation, but also passionate defenses of states’ rights, which only intensified as the decades progressed and the issue became linked to the much larger struggle between the states and the federal government over slavery, tariffs and centralized federal authority that was to culminate in civil war.

In the transcripts of the 1842 debates, one can read thoughtful and fervent arguments for the representation of minorities, “minority” at that time meaning geographic and political minorities orphaned by the monopolistic sweep effect of winner-take-all at-large elections. Typical of this view, as documented in the Congressional Globe annals of House debate, were the words of Senator Isaac Bates of Massachusetts, who in 1842 pointed out that “The general ticket (at-large) system disfranchises the minority in a State, however near it may approach a majority, and in however so many districts it would actually constitute a majority, and be entitled to a representation in Congress.”

Despite a tide of fierce opposition, the cause of minority representation eventually trumped those of states’ rights when Congress passed the Apportionment Act of 1842. This outcome illustrated how fundamental the concept of minority representation had become. But because these debates occurred in the context of a rural and agrarian society still mired in the slave-holding and sexist attitudes of the 19th century, the “minorities” needing representation were not blacks or women but geographic and political minorities -- political partisans living in one part of the state being overwhelmed by the rest of the state. So in the mid-nineteenth century, winner-take-all districts were seen as the preferred democracy technology to promote the values of inclusiveness and broad representation.

Congress and the various states vacillated back and forth over the next century between requiring districts or looking away while certain states ignored the federal prohibition against using the winner-take-all, at-large system. As late as 1967, some states still were electing their state and federal representatives by this method. So Congress once again decided to pass another single-seat district mandate, preventing states, especially in the South, from using at-large elections to dilute the newly enfranchised black voting power.

Thus districting legislation has always promoted the values of inclusiveness and minority representation. The debates surrounding the two most important districting mandates, one in 1842 and the second in 1967, illustrate that Congress periodically reconsidered its ideas on the best forms of political representation.

The battle over democratic values manifests in the electoral system

Despite the progress in recent years in raising awareness about the democratic centrality of the electoral system, for most Americans it still comes as a great surprise to find out that you can take the same votes and count them using different electoral systems -- single-seat districts vs. plurality at-large/multi-seat districts vs. proportional representation vs. winner-take-all vs. instant runoffs/ranked choice voting etc. -- and end up with completely different results, in terms of who gets elected. Indeed, electoral systems greatly affect the Big Five Pillars of representative democracy: Representation (who gets elected and which voters have an opportunity to elect a representative); Participation (how many voters will turn out and participate in the elections); Political Debate (the quality of political campaigns and the extent that campaign finance inequities affect representation and policy); National Division (tribal division and regional balkanization); and, ultimately, Popular Policy (what kind of coherent policy gets passed, how supported is it by the majority).

The particular electoral system used is so fundamental to the entire political system that it profoundly affects these five fulcrum dimensions of our politics. You cannot justifiably study one of these factors in isolation from the other (though, to my consternation, that’s exactly what many political scientists, journalists and reformers often do). They are all so intimately and dynamically interconnected that together they form a holographic unit, where each part reveals a bit more about the whole, and without being able to “see” the whole you cannot fully understand the parts.

In fact, when you select an electoral system -- whether winner-take-all, proportional representation, instant runoffs, districts, at-large, cumulative voting or one of the other many methods available -- for your local, state or national elections, in a sense you are selecting a set of values and philosophy of government. Consequently, more than talking about studying the winner-take-all electoral system, it is more appropriate to talk about the winner-take-all political system.

The challenge today

While single-seat districts usually are much better than plurality at-large elections in allowing geographic minorities to win representation, they also have numerous drawbacks that greatly impact our representative democracy. In fact district elections, and their sole reliance on geographic representation, which is what made that method so valuable in the milieu of the 18th or 19th centuries, are particularly ill-suited for today’s modern world.

That’s because our nation is galloping toward a degree of societal diversity that the democratic world has likely never experienced before. Society today is composed of a mosaic of multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-jazzed, multi-religious, multi-gendered, multi-partisan zones of impressive color and panache. Incessant conflict naturally emerges over the sharing of the land, resources and wealth that we all need to live. Will our political institutions and practices be able to accommodate and adjudicate this overwhelming human complexity? Or will they increasingly pit the different partisans, tribes and identities against each other for a scarce commodity -- political representation?

This great diversity simply cannot be divided up to give each perspective its own “viewpoint district.” Districting has therefore become an ineffective and outmoded tool for providing Americans with the type of democratic representation they want, deserve and need. A political system based exclusively on geographic representation that creates such representational and policy distortions will prove increasingly disastrous in a diverse, pluralistic society. This is simply a matter of how the geographic, district-based winner-take-all system works. It is malignantly suited for today’s democratic needs and the future.

As a result, it is time for our country to adopt a flexible electoral system that can accommodate this diversity without further dividing and polarizing the nation. It’s time to reformat that 1967 law that mandates single-seat districts for the US House of Representatives, and allow states to implement multi-seat districts using alternative voting procedures of proportional representation. This single act would allow states a much wider array of options with which to confront their vexing policy dilemmas, providing them with more alternatives to an increasingly precarious defect in our winner-take-all system that is hastening our slouch toward post-democracy.

As the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the foreword to my book 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy: “The way to honor the Founders is not to worship them…it’s to do what they did: diagnose what’s wrong; be fearless about innovation; learn from experience; design political mechanisms with a view to taking account of human imperfection and marshaling the self-interest of politicians for the common good. The question isn’t, ‘What, way back when, did Jefferson (and Madison and Hamilton) do? The question is, What would they do now?’.”

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776.bsky.social @StevenHill1776