Term limits are one step toward this goal. Term-limited legislators tend to seek office to address issues rather than personal goals, and are more independent of party politics and rent-seeking interest groups. Term limits would create a legislature of, by, and for the people rather than ruling class of career politicians detached from the private sector.  Several states limit legislators’ terms. The 22nd Amendment term-limited the President. U.S. Senators and Representatives should have similar term limits.

Another step is to restrain federal power by restoring state legislators’ influence on the federal government.  For example, repealing the 17th Amendment would allow state legislatures to once again elect Senators.

James Madison noted that having different constituencies electing the House and Senate provides an “additional impediment … against improper acts of legislation.”  As law professor Todd Zywicki notes, the 17th Amendment ushered in the era of legislation benefiting national special-interests at the expense of the people. For example, ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion threatens to bankrupt states.

Law professor Randy Barnett‘s “Repeal Amendment” is another way to restore checks and balances. It would empower two-thirds of states to repeal any federal law or regulation.

This originally was printed in the Boulder Daily Camera on August 13, 2011.

* * *

Thanks to Amanda Teresi of Liberty on the Rocks for bringing the Friedman quote to my attention. Check out their video, above.

If I had a higher word limit, I would have mentioned making elections more competitive by removing ballot access restrictions and using a type of range or approval voting system.

This version of preference voting reflects the electorate’s preferences better than our government elections do. If your favorite candidate is not a top contender, voting for him might make him a “spoiler” and help put your least favorite candidate in office. Instead of supporting your favorite candidate, you may resign yourself to voting for the proverbial “lesser of two evil” top contenders.

Newly-elected Secretary of State Scott Gessler endorses a solution: range voting. It’s like preference voting, but you can award each candidate any number of points within a specified range.  A simple version of range voting called “approval voting.” Vote for as many candidates as you like. The one with the most votes wins.  In this year’s election, if you preferred the Libertarian most and Michael Bennet least, you could vote for the Libertarian, but also for Ken Buck to help defeat Bennet. Some Buck supporters blame non-leftist candidates for spoiling a Buck victory. Instead, they should blame elected Republicans for supporting our crude voting system that makes spoilers possible.

“The state legislature should allow home rule municipalities and counties to develop voting methods that meet their needs, including approval voting and range voting,” says Gessler’s website. Boulder’s political parties should consider collaborating to bring one of these methods to Boulder County.

A version of this article was printed in the Boulder Daily Camera on November 6 2010.

Thanks to Dale Sheldon-Hess for pointing out the difference between range voting and preference voting.  I was operating within a word limit and wrongly figured that the MVP-style voting was a type of range voting.

Looking to fall, the Tea Party — though loosely defined and with no official structure or leadership — will play a major role in the November elections, having sealed up several important primaries. But some Democrats have chosen to see Tea Party victories as their own, saying that the Republican Party will be the one that suffers as the newly excited, more conservative base siphons votes from the establishment. What do you think?

My response:

Who cares if elections hurt political parties? What matters is how well winning candidates represent voters’ preferences.  But Democrats and Republicans cooperate to support our lousy voting system at our expense. Known as “simple plurality voting,” it shields the two major parties from third-party competition. Like all government barriers to competition, this degrades product quality. In elections, the degraded products are the candidates.

In our elections the winning candidate need only be the proverbial “lesser of two evils.” Because of vote-splitting, he need not best represent the preferences of the voters. For example, even if more voters prefer either Dan Maes or Tom Tancredo to John Hickenlooper, Hickenlooper’s victory is ensured if the other two split the vote.

The “Tea Party victories” in primaries also show problems with simple plurality voting. Voters who prefer either the “Tea Party candidate” or the establishment Republican may combine to exceed those who prefer the Democrat. But the Democrat need only defeat the Tea Party candidate.

Here’s a simple way to run elections that both avoids these problems and chooses candidates that better represent voters. First, repeal or liberalize ballot access restrictions. Government should not keep candidates off ballots. Second, use “approval voting,” which means you can vote for as many candidates as you want. Whoever gets the most votes wins.

For example, you could vote for both Tancredo and Maes. No spoiler effect. No vote splitting. No in-fighting.  And compared to instant runoff voting, approval voting is simpler and does not punish popular second-choice candidates.

* * *

There’s some debate about which is system is better: approval voting or instant-runoff voting (IRV).  Last month I endorsed instant runoff, thinking that the range voting was the only better, but prohibitively complicated, alternative. But approval voting is the simplest form of range voting: you give a candidate either a “1″ or “0″ instead of more discretized range, e.g., 1, 2, or 3.

A couple of articles about IRV vs. approval voting are:

Approval Voting vs. Instant Runoff Voting, FairVote.org (groups favors IRV)
Range and approval voting vs. IRV, by “Maikeru,” which links to an article at RangeVoting.org about how instant-runoff can promote 2-party domination.

I haven’t read this book, but have heard good things about it: Gaming the Vote:  Why Elections Aren’t Fair (and What We Can Do About It), by William Poundstone.

Election rules should not create such conflict, or the related “spoiler effect” where voting for your favorite candidate helps your least favorite candidate win. Elections need not bind voters this way.

For example, a few U.S. cities use instant runoff voting, where to vote is to rank candidates according to your preference. Say the only candidates are Maes, Tancredo, and Hickenlooper, and you rank them in that order. If Dan Maes gets the least total first-choice votes, then he’s eliminated, and your vote is transferred to your next choice, Tancredo. In the runoff only Tancredo and Hickenlooper remain, and whoever has the most votes wins.

Critics of instant runoff voting point to possibly unfair results for popular second-choice candidates, or counter-intuitive results of Burlington Vermont’s recent mayoral election. But even with these potential drawbacks, instant runoff voting is preferable to today’s plurality voting. It remedies vote splitting, spoiler effects, and “wasted vote” concerns. More nuanced voting systems may improve upon instant runoff voting, but added complexity could limit their appeal.

This view on Colorado politics was originally printed in the Daily Camera (Boulder) on August 14 2010.

More resources on how the Democrats and Republicans shut out competition from third-party candidates:

• Book:  Not Invited to the Party: How the Demopublicans Have Rigged the System and Left Independents Out in the Cold, by James T. Bennett.
• The Cato Institute had an event on this last year. Watch or listen to it. Here’s a summary from the Cato site:

Free markets have few barriers to entry. Individuals and firms can offer new products or services to consumers, thereby fostering competition and choice. American elections, in contrast, are dominated by two parties. Not Invited to the Party synthesizes political science, economics, and history to demonstrate how the two-party system is the artificial creation of a network of laws, restrictions, and subsidies that favor the Democrats and Republicans and cripple potential challengers, depriving voters of truly vigorous political debate. Consequently, Americans are deprived of choices on election day and arguably, deprived of effective and accurate representation in Congress and the presidency.

Some food for thought by Robert Nozick, an excerpt from Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 290-292 (1974), winner of the National Book Foundation’s National Book Award in 1975.

Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is about you.

1. There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal master’s whims. He often is cruelly beaten, called out in the middle of the night, and so on.

2. The master is kindlier and beats the slave only for stated infractions of his rules (not fulfilling the work quota, and so on). He gives the slave some free time.

3. The master has a group of slaves, and he decides how things are to be allocated among them on nice grounds, taking into account their needs, merit, and so on.

4. The master allows his slaves four days on their own and requires them to work only three days a week on his land. The rest of the time is their own.

5. The master allows his slaves to go off and work in the city (or anywhere they wish) for wages. He requires only that they send back to him three-sevenths of their wages. He also retains the power to recall them to the plantation if some emergency threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths amount required to be turned over to him. He further retains the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain dangerous activities that threaten his financial return, for example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking.

6. The master allows all of his 10,000 slaves, except you, to vote, and the joint decision is made by all of them. There is open discussion, and so forth, among them, and they have the power to determine to what uses to put whatever percentage of your (and their) earnings they decide to take; what activities legitimately may be forbidden to you, and so on.

   Let us pause in this sequence to take stock. If the master contracts this transfer of power so that he cannot withdraw it, you have a change of master. You now have 10,000 masters instead of just one; rather you have one 10,000-headed master. Perhaps the 10,000 even will be kindlier than the benevolent master in case 2. Still, they are your master. However, still more can be done. A kindly single master (as in case 2) might allow his slave(s) to speak up and try to persuade him to make a certain decision. The 10,000-headed master can do this also.
   

7. Though still not having the vote, you are at liberty (and are given the right) to enter into the discussions of the 10,000, to try to persuade them to adopt various policies and to treat you and themselves in a certain way. They then go off to vote to decide upon policies covering the vast range of their powers.

8. In appreciation of your useful contributions to discussion, the 10,000 allow you to vote if they are deadlocked; they commit themselves to this procedure. After the discussion you mark your vote on a slip of paper, and they go off and vote. In the eventuality that they divide evenly on some issue, 5,000 for and 5,000 against, they look at your ballot and count it in. This has never yet happened; they have never yet had occasion to open your ballot. (A single master also might commit himself to letting his slave decide any issue concerning him about which he, the master, was absolutely indifferent.)

9. They throw your vote in with theirs. If they are exactly tied your vote carries the issue. Otherwise it makes no difference to the electoral outcome.

The question is: which transition from case 1 to case 9 made it no longer the tale of a slave?

“Barack Obama ran an unprecedented Presidential campaign – utilizing the power of design to help secure the seat of the President of the United States of America. However, his iconic emblem, the ever present “O”, holds more power than even Obama knows. Bill Whittle points out the dangers of branding an ideology with an icon and how, perhaps, the powerful symbol will be used against the very man it built up.”

(via Reason.tv)

But what if the ballot is just one more government form to be filled out and filed. What if the process itself is nothing more than a ritual designed to give you a feeling of control over your life, and elections are what they give you instead of real change? …

Tonight I’m addressing the specific act of voting that involves giving your personal sanction – usually by pulling a lever or marking a ballot. I’m talking about giving your personal sanction to a candidate in order to assist that candidate into a position of power over the lives of others – a position like senator or president. …

Politically speaking, I believe your consent and the right to withhold it is the most important thing that an individual can possess. Quite apart from the voting issue, as a larger statement, your consent is the most politically powerful thing you own. …

I want to pause … to look at a common pro-voting argument that makes no sense to me. And, by the way, it would make no sense even if I believed in voting.

This particular argument derides non-voters – as most of the arguments do – but it also is vaguely threatening. It is: “if you don’t care enough to vote, then you have no right to criticize the outcome.” In other words, if you don’t vote, you lose your voice – or at least you lose the right to voice specific criticism of the government that emerges.

I think the opposite is true. Those who vote, those who play the election game, have implicitly agreed to the rules and they are the ones who have no right to complain about an outcome they don’t like. It is non-voters who say “no” to the game and reject the rules who have a moral right to complain about outcomes.

Imagine a comparable situation: you are urged to play Russian roulette – a form in which a 2nd person controls the gun. You say “hell, yes!” At that point, with the act of saying “yes”, you have the lost moral right to complain about whatever happens when the trigger is pulled. Why? Because you agreed to the rules, you said “yes” to the rules. If you say “no” at the outset, however, then when the gun is fired, you have a right to scream bloody murder. …

… many dictatorships – including the former Soviet Union – make voting mandatory….

It should also raise the corollary question: why do the tyrants want you to vote? Or expanding that question; why do all politicians want you to vote? They want it so much that their ads claim to not care if you vote for them or their opponents. …

To understand the politician’s desire for everyone to vote whatever his or her vote might be, you have to look deeper. An old joke says, “don’t vote, it only encourages them.” The underlying message of the joke is that you should be so disgusted and disillusioned with the political system that you will not sanction it through your participation. …

whatever you think of the man George W. Bush – even if you think he cheated his way into office — you respect the authority of “president” because you accept the institutional legitimacy of that position. You believe that anyone who wins enough votes has a right to occupy a position of such vast power over your life and the lives of others …

And that’s why all politicians want you to vote… that’s why even the worst tyrant will conduct a massive election charade. Your act of voting legitimizes their office of power. It transforms their office from raw, unjustified force into a position of just authority. …

In concluding, let me return to a point I raised at the beginning of my talk. And that is – I think voting is a very serious matter.

I know that some of you will think I am making too much of the act of voting…and, by extension, you must think the “get out the vote” people (who take the act as seriously as I do) are also over the top. Some people will say that marking on a ballot is nothing more than a “slide of ink”…saying “yes” to candidate is nothing more than an expulsion of air. In short, giving your approval, your personal sanction to a political candidate is no big thing; it doesn’t mean that you bear any responsibility for the candidate’s later actions.

Well…a mark on a ballot is a slide of ink in the same way that your signature on a contract is. Saying ‘yes’ to a politician is an expulsion of breath in the same manner as a verbal contract.

I take your word seriously. I hope you do too. And I hope the word you use in November is “no” to the entire process.

No one likes to hold their nose and vote for a candidate they perceive as the “lesser of two evils.”  But voting for your favorite minor-party candidate can help elect the “greater of two evils.” The preferential voting systems mentioned above could remedy this.  Another benefit is that if minor parties had a chance to win, media gatekeepers would report on them more.  This would help publicize worthwhile policy proposals that major parties don’t mention.

But don’t expect elected officials to support any such change. They support self-serving campaign finance laws and ballot access regulations that protect incumbents and the two major parties at the expense of minor-party candidates.

In any case, it’s wrong to claim, as some do, that voting should be mandatory or that it’s a “civic duty.” Our only obligations as citizens is to abstain from violating the rights of others.

To vote is to express a political opinion or preference.  Just as government should not prohibit such expression, nor should government mandate it.  Who benefits when you’re forced to express a preference for a politician you consider to be “the lesser of two evils?” The politician, of course.  Votes signal approval, and government should not force citizens to express approval for ideas or candidates they dislike.

I credit this perspective on mandatory voting to Ayn Rand, who wrote in a letter dated February 21 1950:

A proposal to introduce compulsory voting is worse than mere looting of material property. Such a proposal establishes the principle that the government has the right to use compulsion against the human mind and to force an expression of political opinion from men who do not choose to express it.

Harvard’s Sendhil Mullainathan and Yale’s Ebonya Washington, in a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, examined surveys conducted from 1976 to 1996 that asked young adults about their attitudes toward a candidate two years after the candidate’s election. They discovered that those who were eligible to vote two years earlier were “twice as polarized as ineligible ones” in their opinion of the candidate. The ones who got to vote showed more approval for “their” candidate, and more disapproval for the one they didn’t vote for, than those who started with the same opinions but couldn’t vote to express them.

Yet another instance of how People Are Irrational about Politics.

I still can’t get over the idea the people want each other to vote, regardless of how. I’m pretty sure that many Democrats would prefer an 80% voter turn out, even if they all voted Republican. Same with the Republicans, but maybe to a lesser extent, as may, just maybe, the terms “Democrat” and “Republican” still actually mean something.

In other news, I was touched by this article about Nobel Prize winner Eric Cornell, who has been in the hospital for the past few days. What people say about him confirm my positive view of him, though I’ve never met him formally. I’ve seen him speak at CU, exercise at the Rec Center, and play softball. He has a great spirit, very positive, and I wish him the best.