The Hartford Courant

Pork in the Sky | Hartford Advocate

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:06:00 -0400

But it's a lousy way to guide foreign policy, says Frida Berrigan, a military expert with the New America Foundation. "Not to say the Connecticut jobs aren't important, but we can't base our foreign policy on 2000 jobs in Connecticut and 6000 jobs in ...

Vote System Gave Hamas Huge Victory

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 03:00:00 -0500

Much hand-wringing has resulted since Hamas, a group on the Bush administration's terrorist list, won a sizable majority of legislative seats in the recent Palestinian elections. But the planners of the elections could learn a thing or two from the recent Iraqi elections.

The problem is that the electoral system used for the Palestinian elections gave grossly unrepresentative results in which Hamas won nearly a super-majority of seats even though they did not win even a majority of votes. If the Palestinians had employed the electoral methods used in Iraq and in many other democracies around the world, the story would have turned out very differently.

The Palestinian elections used a combination of a U.S.-style winner-take-all electoral system and a more European-style proportional voting system. Palestinian voters had a vote for their favorite political party (the proportional vote) and votes for individual candidates (the winner-take-all vote). Unfortunately, the winner-take-all part broke down, and Hamas won way more seats than their votes should have given them.

Look at the actual results. In the proportional vote, which is a national vote and therefore the best measure of the overall support for each political party, Hamas won about 45 percent of the popular vote and about the same percentage of seats -- 30 of 66 -- no majority there. The incumbent party, Fatah, won 41 percent of the popular vote and 27 of 66 seats, only three behind Hamas.

So the election was actually quite close, and if those were the only election results, Hamas would not have won a majority of seats and would have needed to form a coalition with other political parties. A likely possibility is Hamas would have formed a grand coalition with Fatah, which would have provided a stable transition.

Instead, the winner-take-all seats, which are allocated by local districts, completely threw the election to Hamas. Though Hamas and Fatah had nearly equal support nationwide, Hamas won 46 of 66 seats, 70 percent in the winner-take-all districts and Fatah won only 16 district seats.

Overall, Hamas won a stunning 58 percent of legislative seats even though their national support was only around 45 percent. It was a tragic breakdown of the electoral system. Instead of talking about negotiating a coalition government for the Palestinians, the talk now is about picking through the shards, figuring how to salvage the road map to peace.

It didn't have to be this way. The designers of democracy in Palestine had only to look to neighboring Iraq to figure out how to design a better method that would have produced more representative results and provided more stability for the peace process.

On Dec. 15, Iraq held its second election, with Iraq's 18 provinces electing 275 members of parliament using a proportional voting method. Each political party was awarded legislative seats in direct proportion to their vote in each province. Because of Iraq's proportional method, when the dominant Shiite party failed to win a majority of the popular vote, they also failed to win a majority of legislative seats. Surely if they had used a winner-take-all method like that used in the Palestinian elections, the Shiite bloc would have won a strong legislative majority even though they lacked a popular majority.

Instead, now the Shiites in Iraq are forced to negotiate with their legislative partners, including the Sunnis and Kurds, producing a government that preserves the fragile consensus in Iraq.

It is really a shame that for all the billions of dollars in aid poured into Palestine, no one had the sense to make sure the elections were conducted using a method like that used in Iraq that would guarantee representative results.

Various political analysts are saying Hamas' victory is a disaster built on short-sighted policies by the Palestinians, Israel and the United States. The truth is a bit more mundane. Hamas' overwhelming victory is the result of a poorly designed electoral system. Unfortunately, when you are trying to jump-start democracy, the devil is in the details.

Panel Wants Universal Registration, Revamped Primaries

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

This month's report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform headed by Jimmy Carter and James Baker deserves serious attention. Although dominated by aging politicians of the major parties, the commission makes recommendations that would greatly improve our elections.

The commission's boldest call is for universal voter registration, a practice used by many democracies around the world in which all eligible voters are automatically registered to vote. Universal registration would add more than 50 million unregistered Americans--nearly three in 10 eligible voters, disproportionately young and low-income--to voter rolls.

The devil is in the details, and the commission fails to lay out a clear plan for how to ensure that all eligible voters are registered. But if implemented fully, this would be one of the single most important government civil rights actions since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Other commission recommendations respond directly to problems in our recent elections. They include:

Nonpartisan election officials. In the wake of presidential races in which secretaries of state in Florida and Ohio made controversial decisions affecting a tightly fought national race, the commission calls for nonpartisan election officials. This would help rid our elections of the appearance of fraud, and might dissuade actual fraud.

Paper trails. Heeding a rising tide of grass-roots activism founded on a mistrust of the privately owned voting equipment companies that run our elections, the commission calls for a paper audit trail that has been verified by each individual voter.

National elections assistance. Challenging the majority view of the old guard National Association of Secretaries of State that voted in February to restore what essentially amounted to the pre-2000 decentralized regime for administering elections, commissioners call for ongoing federal election funding and a strong Election Assistance Commission.

Revamped presidential primary schedule. The commission supports overhauling the presidential primary schedule. The current system is absolutely bankrupt, with states chaotically advancing their primaries in the hope of gaining candidate attention--but collectively making it even more likely that Iowa and New Hampshire will be the only states that matter.

True, none of these proposals are the transformative changes that might truly shake up partisan calculations. There's no call for getting rid of the Electoral College, a constitutional right to vote, instant runoff voting to accommodate more choices, nor nonpartisan redistricting, campaign finance reform, fusion and proportional voting to bring choices and better representation. They don't suggest citizen assemblies to put such reforms on the table.

In addition, as part of a trade-off to secure bipartisan support for policies designed to increase the voter rolls, the report recommends measures to prevent vote fraud that are problematic. Absentee voters need only sign their ballot to prove validity, for example, while voters at the polls would have to present a photo ID. And although the commission recommends that IDs be free, states may seek to charge fees and other practical barriers that would be tantamount to a poll tax.

The commission in general falls short by failing to establish a national system. There is no doubt that some states will abuse these recommendations, jumping to require photo IDs while not registering all eligible voters. But Americans are increasingly fed up with both major parties, and efforts to block reasonable steps toward free and fair elections could be political folly.

Certainly it is high time to call for clean and complete rolls with 100 percent registration. Who would have thought that James Baker and Jimmy Carter would lead that call?