It’s tempting to think of politics in terms of personality problems: if only Obama were warmer, he might be able to break through Congressional gridlock. If only Dino Rossi weren’t such a hard-nose, he wouldn’t inspire such negative campaigns. But with wave after wave of negative campaigns, it seems the problem is not really politicians’ personalities. Maybe all politicians are not bad apples. Maybe our voting system is a bad barrel. The apples are fine when they go in; the barrel itself makes them rot.
In my last article, I explained the problems that winner-take-all voting creates: unrepresentative government that gives short shrift to women, racial minorities, and third parties, and the solution that multi-member districts and ranked-choice voting offers for generating proportional representation in which women, racial minorities, and political minorities have a voice in government proportional to their strength in the populace. In this article, I’ll show that winner-take-all voting spawns negative campaigns. But fair voting—multi-member districts with ranked-choice voting—creates more civil and engaging campaigns.
Problem: Campaigns are negative and divisive.
North Americans have a long history of outrageously negative campaigns, reaching back to 1800 when John Adams’ campaign called Thomas Jefferson a “mean-spirited low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father” all the way to a more recent campaign in which Canada’s Conservative Party opened its home page with an animated puffin defecating on the opposition leader’s shoulder. It isn’t because North Americans are uniquely antagonistic; it is because winner-take-all elections inherently reward negativity.
