Modernizing Elections in the Age of Information, Part I

My apologies for a week's break from my series on the Two Party system and an emergent Third Party movement. Today, however, I will resume my discussions of this subject, focusing on electoral reform as an essential part of making government more representative and responsive. There are two aspects of substantive electoral reform that I will address: Methods and Means. By "methods," I specifically refer to issues of "form," by which our political value system is imposed into the election process. For example, we elect the President of the United States using "method" of the Electoral College. By "means," I am referring to issues of mechanics, that is, we use punch cards or optical scan ballots and we vote on Tuesdays in November.

One of the reasons that the state of American politics is in such disarray is that we are utilizing an electoral system that is not congruent with the society and technology of today. People frequently talk about the timelessness of the Constitution or even more scarily, of its Divine Inspiration (I wonder if they think that includes the parts concerning slavery...), but we ought to never forget that the U.S. Constitution was borne out of particular political crisis that ensued from the looseness of the Articles of Confederation, and was forged in Philadelphia as a political compromise over issues that are now at least a century out of date. This hardly diminishes what the men who founded what we now know as "America" accomplished in 1787, but at the same time, let us not forget that the framers of the Constitution were pragmatists, not idealists (as many people popularly believe, especially in the so-called "Christian Right").

First, the Constitution was written in a day when communication and travel were lengthy and laborious processes, sometimes taking several weeks of a journey to travel to the New York, which at the time was the U.S. capital. The country had just emerged from a confederate form of government, and retained many of the aspects of a confederacy with extraordinarily decentralized power until World War I. It was not until the advent of Radio, and especially Television, that the "dialects" of American English began to disappear and the country started to become more culturally homogeneous. The lack of integration near the turn of the end of the 18th Century presented a number of political problems that were addressed in the Constitution of 1787. The Electoral College, the election of U.S. Senators by the state legislatures, and the direct election of the House of Representatives (with the number of Representatives being set by the population, with no cap) were the features implemented to achieve some level of populist influence over government without giving the uninformed and disjointed masses too much power.

In 1787, few people traveled outside of their home town, much less out of the state, and their only exposure to current events in other states was likely a weekly newspaper and letters from family members who lived in other states. This kind of disconnectedness is quite divergent from today's instant information and global connections. I was text messaging with somebody in Argentina yesterday and received a call from my friend who was traveling in Paris. My blackberry now has Google Talk installed on it, and I can instant message, not even using the SMS network, with anybody who has a Gmail account and an internet connection. I receive news alerts instantly through email that pushes to my blackberry, or I can pull up the Drudge Report at any hour of the day to hear about the Earthquakes in Japan or read an editorial about the disintegration of the McCain campaign.

In the past three weeks I have flown from my home base here in Dallas to Little Rock, Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Salt Lake City and am flying to Las Vegas this week for a conference, only to come back to Dallas and hop a flight back to Salt Lake City. All of this would have been unfathomable to James Madison or Benjamin Franklin.

Furthermore, the digital revolution and the Interstate highway system have radically altered the way the economy works, from the way we get our milk to the way we trade stocks and do our personal banking. I can make a stock trade, and use the profits to bet against the Dollar by buying Euros in the forex markets in as much time as it takes for me to click through a half dozen screens on my web browser while sitting in Starbucks sipping a latte and Instant Messaging on my Macbook Pro. Considering that our electoral systems, both methods and means, have remained relatively unchanged for more than two centuries in the wake of massive changes in every other aspect of society, is somewhat mysterious. Is there really something sacred about "going to the polls" on a Tuesday in November? Surely people who worry about the corruption of online voting don't actually believe that the current voting system lacks massive corruption.

Tomorrow I will continue this discussion with Part II of "Modernizing Elections in the Age of Information," examining how our methods can be improved, and how that fits into the advocacy of an emergent Third Party.