* * In our “winner take all” elections, we’re all losers

Virginia’s House of Delegates, like the U.S. House of Representatives, should be as John Adams said, “An exact portrait of the people.” The founders stipulated that our representatives be directly elected and face the voters often, in both cases every two years.

In the November election, less than half our incumbent delegates faced any opposition at all, only 5-7 races were considered competitive, and only two changed parties. The game isn’t fair, the playing field isn’t level, and the will of the people is not being heard.

Because most districts are so politically lopsided, the lucky incumbent can be as vitriolic and unproductive as he or she wishes, because the voters will not remove him from office. When elections don’t have consequences, it leads to rancor, gridlock and legislative paralysis.

The problem is three-fold. Here’s how to fix it.

Problem one: districting. Virginia districts are now drawn in a partisan fashion every ten years by the party in power. Both parties have used re-districting to their advantage. But the computerized tools are better now and the results are increasingly effective at benefiting that party. Re-districting by a non-partisan commission is essential. In Arizona, Idaho, California, and Washington State, boundaries are now drawn by independent, non-partisan commissions. There, voters choose their representatives – as it should be – rather than the other way around.

Problem two: money. Money buys exposure and races cannot be effective without it. But incumbents benefit from extraordinary contributions from corporations, PACs, and special interest groups, which are uninterested in balanced donations to challengers. Challengers are therefore relegated to seeking “small money” from individual donors in amounts that cannot compete. It takes extraordinary scruples for an incumbent not to be “bought” by his major donors whose money is essentially bribery.

The most obvious solution is to have publicly funded campaigns, where qualified candidates receive equal amounts of our tax dollars determined by a subsidy formula. Over 100 years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt recommended just that, a ban on private and corporate contributions in favor of public financing. Perhaps a more palatable system is to allow each candidate to raise no more than $50,000, with no single contributor giving more than $1000, the total that would then be matched one-for-one by public financing.

Problem three: our winner-take-all system. We’re accustomed to this type of system, but “proportional representation elections” using one of several proven permutations, produce fairer outcomes and deserve consideration.

Currently, in a region perhaps 60/40 Republican/Democrat, every district could easily be defined to produce Republican winners, even if the districts were designed without favoritism, leaving all Democratic voters unrepresented. The ideal solution would be a 60/40 split in representation.

Our goal should be a system where the party that gets most of the votes gets most of the seats, but not all of them. One way of doing this is by having larger districts with multiple Delegates.

Virginia has 100 districts represented by 100 delegates, each with 1/100 of the state’s population. Instead, lets have twenty Delegate districts, each having 5% of the population, with each responsible for five delegates. Elections would be contested by up to five candidates each from the two major parties, plus any additional candidates that qualify by getting signatures from perhaps 0.1% of the voters. Citizens vote for one candidate only. The winners would be the top five vote getters. Most voters would be represented by at least one Delegate they voted for.

The best reason for this type of system is that once elected, Delegates would be motivated to work together and do the work of the people, knowing they would face real competition every two years.

I am not aware of anything in the state or federal constitutions that prohibit these changes. In fact, similar schemes are already working in local elections. This could work for congressional elections, too.

Like every change in the established way of doing things, this new system would produce winners and losers. The winners would be the people, all of us who believe in fair representation and democracy. The losers would be the entrenched incumbents and the “big money” sources that now own our governments. 

Change won’t come easy, especially given that our leaders who must make these changes are those who benefit from the status quo. Nelson Mandela said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” We must envision a better system before we can obtain it. Our quest for real democracy is ongoing as is our commitment to our founders.