We need to rethink our systems of governing
Vermont State House
On Election Day, as I confronted my voting ballot in the Hinesburg Town Hall, I was daunted to find that for the first time there were few candidates other than those running for president that I really wanted to vote for. I did vote comfortably for three incumbent state officeholders and the two incumbent congressional officeholders but puzzled over my other “choices.”
There are other ways to better engage citizens in voting and offer them a wider choice of candidates. We could rethink our state primary system and adopt ranked choice voting, an election method that allows voters the option to rank candidates in order of preference: first, second, third, etc. Ranking candidates differs from simply selecting one candidate, which is termed plurality voting.
With ranked choice voting, if a candidate receives more than 50% of the first choices, that candidate wins, just as in any other election. However, if there’s no majority winner after counting the first choices, the race is decided by an instant runoff. The candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and voters who ranked that candidate as their first choice will have their votes count for their next choice. This process continues until only two candidates remain; the remaining candidate with the greatest number of votes is elected.
Burlington adopted ranked choice voting in 2021 and uses it now in all its local elections. A bill expected to be put forward in Vermont’s upcoming legislative session would bring ranked choice voting to the 2028 primary presidential election.
As of 2022, Alaska uses ranked choice voting for state and federal elections. Frustrated by a perpetual slate of conservative candidates with no wider choice offered, Alaskans authorized in a state referendum “nonpartisan, top-four primary elections.”
There’s one ballot with all candidates regardless of political party or political group affiliation. Voters may cast a vote for one candidate in each race, regardless of their political affiliation. Up to four candidates in each race — those who receive the most votes — advance to the general election. So, the primary election no longer determines the nominee of a political party or group. This opens up elections to a greater spectrum of choices.
Over the years, politicians of all stripes have gamed our traditional electoral system with gerrymandering and other sleights-of-hand. It’s time to move to “one-person-one-vote.” When I vote, I want to see all my candidate options — a panoply of choices and ideas regardless of their party or politics.
I didn’t this time and wasted my vote writing in candidates I thought would offer Vermont leadership but who had no chance of winning. I spoke with other Vermonters who did the same.
As to national elections, Vermont has taken an initial step in eliminating the Electoral College. As of April 2024, National Popular Vote bills has become law in 18 jurisdictions around the country for a total of 209 electoral votes, but it will only become federal law when enacted by enough states to total 270 electoral votes (a majority of the 538 electoral votes). That means 61 more votes are needed.
These states are leading the way, Vermont is among them.
- 6 small jurisdictions (District of Columbia, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont),
- 9 medium-sized states (Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington), and
- 3 big states (California, Illinois, New York).
It’s noteworthy that in two fairly recent presidential elections, Al Gore won the popular vote but lost to George Bush, and Hillary Clinton also won the popular vote — by some 2.9 million -— but lost to Donald Trump.
Among the reasons to abolish the Electoral College is the fact that candidates focus only on campaigning in states with high electoral college numbers. Some 94% of presidential campaign spending occurs in just seven closely divided states.
According to a recent Pew poll, 63% of Americans support eliminating the Electoral College and choosing leaders by popular vote.
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Now to the next step. We Vermonters love to criticize our citizen legislature.
“Mountpeculiar … Oh, if they’d just convene for a few hours instead of months,” and the like.
All three branches of our government are indeed losing their effectiveness in a rapidly changing world with diminishing social and economic boundaries and a fungal growth of disinformation sources.
In the executive branch, we rarely choose governors with vision and leadership skills but instead elect the guy (sic) we’d like to have a beer or a round of golf with — but is “likeability” a measure of leadership?
In the judiciary branch, we’re failing to fill judgeship positions around the state causing a severe backlog in hearings and trials and adding more detainees to our prisons. It costs Vermont an average of $57,615 a year to incarcerate someone.
As for the Legislature, the problem isn’t the people we elect to serve in our Legislature, it’s the aging architecture of the Legislature itself. Vermonters revere tradition even when its utility has decayed over time.
I first began paying attention to Vermont politics during the administration of Governor Dean Davis. At the time, issues were comprehensible and straightforward.
- “Should we sell whiskey on Sunday?”
- “Do we really need daylight savings time?”
- “Does Vermont still need “fence viewers?”
Today’s complex issues of environmental degradation, healthcare, education finance, housing, and criminal justice require broader resources to elicit viable solutions. Legislators don’t currently have the research and analytical resources in Joint Fiscal and Legislative Counsel to analyze and grapple with these complex systems.
Without additional resources for confronting Vermont’s complex challenges, legislators fall prey to lobbyists who inundate them with “education.” Now more than ever, legislators need independent, scientific, unconflicted information resources and ideas. They can also partner with academia and the business and nonprofit communities to expand their options for implementing solutions.
Prescriptions for effective legislative change:
Our legislature doesn’t need to be as big as it is with 150 members in the House and 30 in the Senate. With adequate research, data analysis and strategic-planning partners, a third of that number could fulfill the same mission. The money saved could be used to provide better resources to those serving.
Is the traditional bicameral architecture relevant today when local control is a fading reality in a community of 650,000 people? Vermont’s original legislature was a single elected body, and it was only to conform to the legislatures of other states that Vermont adopted a bicameral legislative body in 1830.
In the 1920s, broad dissatisfaction with state legislatures led to many local proposals for a single-chamber system and in 1934, Nebraska adopted a unicameral legislature, though this turned out to be the only change from the bicameral system in U.S. states. What might we learn from Nebraska?
I have long inveighed against the two-year term. Decades ago, Republican Senator Bill Doyle, the longest serving state legislator in Vermont history (1969-2017), would ask me annually to come and speak to his Government Operations Committee about the folly of the two-year term. It became a joke between us.
The two-year term is a waste of energy and focus. The executive and legislative branches should be elected for four years with a four-term limit (16 years), so we refresh our resources and ideas and make way for new ones.
Another long overdue change… let’s pay legislators an amount equal to the average per capita income of Vermonters. That will alleviate the embarrassment of voting for their own raises while making it more practicable to be a public servant. That amount was $41,680 in 2022. The current estimated yearly income for a Vermont legislator calculated from their weekly salary is around $20,211. As such, only the privileged or retired can serve.
We must relax our grip on the past and plan for the future.
