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Friday, November 19, 2004
Consensus And Constitutional Order: The One-Vote Effect
Whenever people flock to the polls to elect public officials or to decide some major matter of policy through an initiative or referendum, a curious potential arises. Though unlikely, it becomes possible that a single vote will decide how some office is filled or some weighty matter is settled.
It doesn’t matter what the threshold for passage is. Whether a plurality, a majority, or some specified supermajority is required to achieve a given outcome, there will exist a knife edge number of votes, one more than which is required to bring it about and one fewer than which would be insufficient.
No, this isn’t about Florida in Election 2000, though that did come close to exemplifying the effect at hand.
The one-vote effect is present in any voting situation. It’s so important that a large branch of finite mathematics is devoted to the study of it.
In some cases, the one-vote effect is overwhelming. For example, imagine a committee of four whose chairman has the power to break all ties. He will get his way unless all three of the other members align against him. His effective voting power is three times that of the other committee members.
Another example is that of the voter who’s permitted to wait until all the other votes are in and counted to cast his own ballot. His vote might not appear to be greater or less in overall effect than any of the others cast, but strictly because of his timing privilege, he can negotiate with the two sides in close elections, from a position of unassailable power.
“One man, one vote” is one of the shibboleths of democracy in our time. If more people understood the one-vote effect, there might be more time given to sober reflection on the proper limits of voting. In particular, we might be more cautious about the sorts of decisions that can be made or influenced by electoral processes.
Popular convictions about politics are buffered away from actual decision making by the electoral process. This has both positive and negative results. The positive side is that fads and transient passions are to some extent precluded from affecting public policy. The negative one is that our representatives are able to get away with things that, if left in place long enough, become “just the way it is,” and correspondingly difficult to undo.
There are many striking examples of policies put forward at such a time that the public, which opposed them vehemently, had no leverage with which to prevent their enactment. One of the most dramatic was the confiscation of all privately held gold by the Roosevelt Administration, a two-stage process originally advertised as a temporary emergency measure. Private citizens, in the large, knew what this “emergency measure” portended. But Congress had essentially ceded its powers to a dictator. That dictator was safe from removal for four years, after which his enormous extensions of the federal government and its powers had become “just the way it is.” (Change administrations and policies in the middle of the worst financial panic in American history? Unthinkable!)
That confiscation, at that time the greatest single usurpation of unConstitutional authority in the history of the country, occurred in the midst of a financial crisis. But it wasn’t foredoomed; it was the consequence of a presidential election. The losing candidate would not have done it. Indeed, the winning candidate had run on a platform that promised the opposite. Its fiscal plank, written by Democratic Senator Carter Glass, called for “a sound gold standard to be maintained at all hazards.”
The voters who provided Franklin D. Roosevelt with his margin of victory in 1932 are directly responsible for his successful usurpations and consolidations of federal power over the American financial and economic systems. True, there were many of them; Roosevelt didn’t win by a razor-thin margin. But had there been only one—had a single vote decided a single “swing state” that provided FDR’s Electoral College margin of victory—the sequel would in all probability have been the same.
Pseudo-Constitutionalists would have us believe that the important feature of the Constitution, and of any comparable document, is its provision for the “separation of powers.” This could hardly be further from the truth. Separation of powers, while all very well in a healthy constitutional system, does not preclude “unholy alliances” among the branches of government. Indeed, we can see one in the gold-seizure scenario: Congress ceded its legislative authority to the White House, which got its way on the gold seizure and a huge number of similar usurpations with the tacit connivance of a Supreme Court that didn’t want to take responsibility for thwarting the New Deal.
A constitutional system that does not explicitly enumerate the powers of the State, whether overall or by enumerating the powers of each branch, is massively vulnerable to the one-vote effect: even with an invisibly thin margin of victory, a newly elected official, be he executive, legislator, or judge, rises to infinite power.
The Constitution of the United States featured several constraints upon the federal government: the requirement for regular elections, the separation of powers among the branches, the enumeration of the powers of each branch, and the Bill of Rights. Of these, only the requirement for regular elections is still respected as written:
- By means of the entirely unConstitutional “executive order,” presidents have effectively legislated for the nation, without the muss or fuss of first gaining Congress’s approval.
- Federal judges now deem it within their purview to levy and raise taxes, to override the provisions of the federal Constitution (and several state constitutions) by fiat, and to nullify the provisions of the Bill of Rights in favor of a “compelling government interest.”
- The use of the Commerce Clause and the decorative phrase “general welfare” in Article I, Section 8 have allowed Congress to legislate well beyond their enumerated powers, on subjects the Framers would never have considered legitimate.
- The explicit provisions of the Bill of Rights, with the exception of Amendment III (no quartering of troops in peacetime), have all been violated to some degree. In the case of Amendment II (right to keep and bear arms), Amendment IX (unenumerated rights), and Amendment X (enumerated powers), they’ve been deleted from the document entirely.
Whether any person or group will be affected by these usurpations or others of varying character depends entirely upon the results of elections. The rights of all Americans are hostages to the whims of the men we elect to offices with effectively unbounded powers, and therefore to the one-vote effect.
Should one man, be he prince or pauper, saint or sinner, have that much power?
Liberals say not. They fear that their private pleasures and their entertainments will be censored at best, prosecuted at worst, by the force of the State.
Conservatives say not. They fear that their businesses and incomes will be stripped bare by social engineers determined to impose egalitarianism on the nation by the force of the State.
True Constitutionalists say not. Their appeal for a return to the strictures of enumerated powers is a substantial response to the fears of liberals and conservatives. They respect the one-vote effect even if they don’t completely understand it.
Frederic Bastiat, in his 1850 polemic pamphlet
The Law,argued that the mission of the law, and of the State that conserves it, is to protect all persons, all liberties, and all properties. Part of his argument was that the feuds over universal suffrage were as passionate as they were only because the vote was the key to the door of public offices that had far more power than they should:
In fact, if law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liberties, and all properties; if law were nothing more than the organized combination of the individual’s right to self defense; if law were the obstacle, the check, the punisher of all oppression and plunder - is it likely that we citizens would then argue much about the extent of the franchise?
Under these circumstances, is it likely that the extent of the right to vote would endanger that supreme good, the public peace? Is it likely that the excluded classes would refuse to peaceably await the coming of their right to vote? Is it likely that those who had the right to vote would jealously defend their privilege?
If the law were confined to its proper functions, everyone’s interest in the law would be the same. Is it not clear that, under these circumstances, those who voted could not inconvenience those who did not vote?
The path back to proper respect for Constitutional constraints on the powers of the State begins with the understanding of Bastiat’s argument—and with its corollary, the horror of the one-vote effect.
Comments
I meant to say in response to your post on welfare and illegitimacy that “Tenderhearted = Soft-headed” and those who are concerned that the soft-headed not gain (or keep) the ascendancy need to be more strident in their insistence that it not be so.
I think the same applies here. Those who can see and who care have a duty to themselves if to no other to make as much of a ruckus as they can to prevent laws’ being perverted to what seems like a good idea at the time—a compassionate move is almost always—no, make that ALWAYS—a mistake in the arena of government.
Of course, you’ll have to face down the cries of the tenderhearted (say with sarcasm in your voice) that you are cruel, mean-spirited, heartless, and cheap.
My old man used to answer, “Damned right—and proud of it, too.” Meeting such assertions with the derision they deserve.
Oh, the mischief government does in the name of compassion!
M
Posted by Mark Alger on 11/19/2004 at 12:27 PM
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