Inevitably as the election season nears, more and more media attention is given to voting. Everything plummets into a tawdry love affair with words designed to inflame debate and bolster ratings. So, I am going to use all these hyped-up, over-used, beat-the-dead-horse-while-it’s-down words now to get them out of the way: hanging chad, voting machine, paper trail, recount, and Florida (sorry, Floridians).
But, to be honest, none of these words really are about the voting. They are either about people throwing a temper tantrum for not getting their way or about throwing a temper tantrum because the people did not get their way. No one raises their hand, calls time-out, takes a step back, and wonders why we have the implicit assumption that the system is perfect, just not working right.
So here I am, raising my hand and calling a time-out to do just that.
Why, dear reader, does every political analyst trying to get serious media attention think that democracy is the be-all and end-all of governmental philosophy? And why do so many of those think that America’s particular version of democracy is the best among them? If these people were to be believed, all we would need for good government is voting to represent the will of the people – never mind that the will of the people has been responsible for some spectacularly stupid events in human history. Also never mind the times when democracy – even when working perfectly – does not represent the will of the people.
OK, perhaps I need to back up a step or two. Any government needs a method of determining when to do its government-y things – typically making and enforcing law. In a dictatorship, a specific person gets to make all these decisions. In an oligarchy, a group of people make these decisions. In a krytocracy, judges make the decisions. And in a democracy, people vote and a decision is reached.
Note that I did not say that in a democracy the people decide, because there is an additional step involved: the tabulation process. When there are only two choices, the process is simple, but when there are three or more choices, as there often are in a representative democracy, different tabulations can give different results.
The great example of this in recent memory is the 2000 election. Whatever you may believe about who won the popular vote in Florida, one fact remains clear: Had Nader not been on the ballot, Gore would have likely won. Put another way, more people preferred Gore to Bush than Bush to Gore, and yet Bush won. Call me crazy, but that does not seem to be the will of the people.
In most of the democracies in the world, this system, known as plurality, is used: Each person gets one vote and whoever gets the most votes wins. It is a nice system for simplicity, but as noted above, it suffers from many problems. Almost any other system would be better. Voting theorists will point out, though, that every system has its own flaws, and where some fail, others succeed. In complex cases there might be several different, equally valid wills-of-the-people.
And then, in different situations, different methods might be more practical. In extremely large settings, direct democracy would be impossible. In extremely small settings, representative democracy would be unnecessary.
Those who wax romantic about democracy forget about these details. They blur over differences while chanting a mantra of “The people! The people!” all without realizing why democracy is a better system of government than those that came before.
There is nothing inherently wrong with a dictatorship; something must be wrong with the dictator. Nothing about a dictatorship says it must be unjust or oppressive, but the nature of the system lends itself to leaders who would make it so. In response, democracy does not allow a single person to gain that kind of power. If someone in a democracy did try to exploit everyone else, the people would simply vote in their better interests to remove that power.
But in pure democracy, nothing prevents a similar situation arising where the majority would oppress the minority, because the latter cannot muster the votes to stop them. The courts and enumerated rights help to prevent this, but again, if a supermajority can be reached, those rights can be rescinded and the oppression can continue.
Democracy is not a perfect system and should not be treated as such. Instead of simply bandaging the problems that arise, we should try to improve the system and prevent the problems from ever beginning. Perhaps someday that will mean abandoning democracy entirely. I do not know when or if that will ever happen; I am just a dreamer, for now content to smile at every slack-jawed expert who has never heard of the Condorcet criterion and teach them something new.
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