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BROKEN ELECTION SYSTEM

Your recent article “Fixing Our Broken Election System” [Spring 2021] does a nice job laying out many of the shortcomings with American democracy as well as the solutions being proposed to combat them. Unfortunately, since the article’s publication, it’s become increasingly clear that not only are voting rights under attack across the nation, but so are the procedures to count votes and resolve election disputes. How the U.S. addresses these challenges could have enormous implications, and I’m glad so many Fords are working to uphold democracy’s foundational principles. —David Levine ’04 (Elections Integrity Fellow, Alliance for Securing Democracy, German Marshall Fund of the United States)

Seeing the work of my fellow alums in the article “Fixing Our Broken Election System” struck a chord with me and my wife, because of our work with FairVote Illinois (fairvoteillinois.org), an ally of FairVote, to promote ranked-choice voting (RCV) in Illinois and throughout the country. We were pleased that the article presented dilemmas, but also solutions, as does RCV. The article ably explains ranked choice voting, thanks to Rob Richie ’84, president and CEO of FairVote. We would add to Richie’s praises with our own plaudits that RCV enhances diversity in both ideas and candidates, ensures that a winning candidate has a clear majority of votes cast, and empowers voters and candidates by creating an opportunity to coalesce without loss of identity. It could be one more of the foundational structures for electoral reform. Thanks, also, to Ms. Goldberg’s excellent presentation of the other issues plaguing our democratic system, such as gerrymandering, campaign

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The Magazine of Haverford College

SPRING 2021

FIXING OUR BROKEN ELECTION SYSTEM

★ ★ ★ Alumni advocates outline the problems—and the solutions that are gaining ground

CoverF.indd 1 4/7/21 3:04 PM

finance, winner-take-all versus fair representation, Electoral College versus popular vote issues, and voting enfranchisement, and, finally, to her clear, cogent, and concise style. —Malcolm Litowitz ’86, P’15 and Susan Lee P’15

Progressive Democrats have taken a page from the Trump playbook. As we all know, Trump lost the recent election and then claimed “foul.” If only the election had been carried out fairly, he continues to proclaim, he would have won.

But now, the progressive segment of the Democratic Party, as represented in a recent article in Haverford magazine, follows the same path. “There is a myth in America that we are a conservative country,” so a representative of Justice Democrats exclaimed, but instead “we are a progressive country with antebellum institutions. … We don’t have a democracy that represents the will of the people.” (p. 43)

Those are strong words, and essentially repeat what Trump has said: that the electorate was rigged to deprive their side of the correct outcomes. While the former president posits that current laws were broken, the Justice Democrats’ position is that current laws violate fundamental democratic principles. In both cases, however, the same judgment is reached: Current outcomes are “cooked” and thereby not legitimate.

A proposal often advanced is to elect presidents through a national popular vote. On a fundamental level, that would represent an important shift towards a unitary form of government and away from the federal structure on which this country was founded. Substantial majorities in a small number of large states could be sufficient to carry an election, and both smaller and more divided states would have little or no role in the outcome.

We have faced divisive times before, but have always found solutions under our constitutional structure. It has promoted our prosperity and our dominant position in the world today. While there remain major issues before us, largely in our efforts to limit currently outrageous degrees of inequality, we should nonetheless hesitate to tinker with our federal system. We should be very wary of reducing its effective structure of checks and balances. —William S. Comanor ’59 (Distinguished Professor,

Fielding UCLA School of Public Health)

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