Democracy is coming to the USA,” Leonard Cohen promised a quarter-century ago. Cohen is gone, but we’re still waiting. It’s easy to blame Republican legislators and conservative jurists, with their voter-suppression schemes and assaults on the Voting Rights Act.
But the right-wing partisans who seek to roll back popular sovereignty are only part of the problem. For too long, Democrats have been too cautious about expanding the franchise—and about fully realizing its potential to transform the governance that extends from it.
The 2016 presidential election offered a reminder of just how much work remains to be done to guarantee the right to vote and, as important, to ensure that the will of the people is reflected in our election results. Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 2.9 million ballots, yet he assumed the presidency after securing the electoral votes of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump did not win a majority of the vote in those states, but he got just enough of a plurality to claim an Electoral College “victory” that in most countries would not have been a victory at all. Democrats in positions of power should have made the elimination of the Electoral College a priority long ago—and they should have made it mission-critical after the 2000 election, when Al Gore won the popular vote, only to see George W. Bush surf a dubious “win” in Florida to an Electoral College coronation. But Democrats were slow to respond, seeming to lack a basic sense of what was at stake. Until now.
At a March town-hall meeting in Mississippi, Senator Elizabeth Warren declared, “Every vote matters, and the way we can make that happen is [to] have national voting, and that means [getting] rid of the Electoral College.” The crowd responded with what The New York Times described as “one of her longest ovations of the night.”
Warren, who also says that “we need a constitutional amendment that protects the right to vote for every American citizen and to make sure that vote gets counted,” is not the only presidential contender going big on democracy issues. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is backing an amendment to “abolish the Electoral College” introduced by Senator Brian Schatz, while Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders have signaled their willingness to address the Electoral College’s anti-democratic impact, as have former representative Beto O’Rourke and former housing secretary Julián Castro. Possible presidential contender Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, says: “The Electoral College needs to go, because it’s made our society less and less democratic.” Buttigieg sees that move as part of a democracy agenda that includes ending gerrymandering, extending voting rights, and, probably, amending the Constitution to reverse the damage done by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. (Sanders has already proposed amendments to overturn Citizens United, which he decries as “one of the most disastrous decisions in [the Court’s] history.”)
thenation.com
