Democracy By Numbers

Josh Landy
Shouldn’t everybody have an equal vote?

Ray Briggs
Isn’t majority rule just an excuse to keep minorities down?

Josh Landy
Is a truly fair democracy even possible?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from our respective living rooms via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Josh Landy
…continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy and I direct the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re thinking about Democracy by Numbers.

Josh Landy
The numbers are simple Ray: one person one vote—we should decide everything by majority rule.

Ray Briggs
Really, everything? Like, whether minorities should have human rights? Whether to burn down our national parks? If the majority voted to throw the Constitution off a bridge, would you do it too, Josh?

Josh Landy
Okay, alright. I agree, some things shouldn’t be up for a vote. But you know, for everything else like budgets, traffic laws, school boards, I think it’s okay to use majority rule for those.

Ray Briggs
What if the majority is ignorant and confused?

Josh Landy
Well, then we should figure out ways to pay for better education. I mean, what are you saying: you want rule by a minority party that doesn’t have the country’s best interests at heart?

Ray Briggs
Well, I didn’t say that. But democracy is complicated. You can’t just defer to more than 50% of the people 100% of the time.

Josh Landy
And why not? Isn’t that the way to be fair?

Ray Briggs
Not necessarily. The thing is, the majority opinion might be inconsistent.

Josh Landy
I don’t get it. I mean, let’s say 52% of the people vote for better housing or, God help us, for Brexit. Isn’t that a coherent position? I mean, maybe horribly misguided in the latter case, but but coherent.

Ray Briggs
But things don’t always work that way. Suppose you have three possible solutions to a budget crisis: you can raise taxes, you can reduce spending, or you can run a deficit. And suppose a third of the population supports each of those options.

Josh Landy
Okay, but I don’t see the problem here. Reasonable people can disagree. That doesn’t mean anyone’s being inconsistent.

Ray Briggs
Well, I’m not saying that the individuals are inconsistent. I’m saying that the group as a whole will be inconsistent. Look, a majority is going to be against raising taxes. And a majority is going to be against reducing spending. And a majority is going to be against running a deficit.

Josh Landy
Oh, okay. I see it now. So these three are the only options. But if you take a majority vote, the group as a whole is going to reject all of them.

Ray Briggs
Exactly. So voting creates as many problems as it solves.

Josh Landy
I don’t know. I mean, is it really the voting that’s the problem? What if it’s just the way you divide everything up? I mean, you can’t have people vote separately on taxes, spending and deficit—those things are all connected. That’s why we elect representatives. They use their expertise and judgment, whether well or badly, to decide problems like that, complicated problems, right? I mean, we don’t just have a referendum on every single issue that comes along.

Ray Briggs
And now that sounds like you’re the one who wants a minority ruling over us—you know, as long as we vote them in

Josh Landy
Well, voting them it makes a difference, right. I mean, electing our representatives makes them accountable to us. If we don’t like their policies, we can just vote them back out.

Ray Briggs
Yeah—unless they’ve changed the rules in order to stay in power.

Josh Landy
When would that ever happen?

Ray Briggs
I know, right.

Josh Landy
Okay but if voting on the issues doesn’t work, and voting on representatives doesn’t work, then what are we supposed to do?

Ray Briggs
Well, I think we really need strong social institutions—you know, branches of government that actually hold each other accountable, independent news, media, schools that teach kids about civics and critical thinking,

Josh Landy
Yeah, but also maybe we need to rethink the way we vote, so we’re less focused on picking a winner and more likely to take a range of issues into account.

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah? How’s that supposed to work?

Josh Landy
I’m so glad you asked. In recent years, civil rights lawyers have filed lawsuits, forcing cities to change their voting systems. We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter Holly J. McDede to find out why she files this report.

Holly McDede
Robert Rubin got a start in civil rights law in an unlikely way. In 1973, he landed a job teaching children with developmental disabilities in New York. While there he learned that administration was using psychotropic drugs to medicate and discipline students.

Robert Rubin
So before I knew what the term meant, I was a whistleblower.

Holly McDede
He turned over evidence of the abuse to the ACLU and was asked to testify about it during the trial.

Robert Rubin
I was sitting on the witness stand in federal court in Brooklyn, and I sort of had this flashing notion that I can be more effective as a civil rights advocate.

Holly McDede
So he decided to go to law school, and in 1979 became the sole attorney for the ACLU in Mississippi. He tried cases in front of a judge named Man of the Year by the Ku Klux Klan

Robert Rubin
He didn’t take too kindly to a Jewish yankee boy.

Holly McDede
Now he’s focused on using the power of the law to enforce voting rights.

Robert Rubin
Power structures don’t cede power voluntarily. They never have and they probably never will.

Holly McDede
Rubin has sued local municipalities over at-large elections. That’s where councilmembers must win the vote of entire cities or counties, rather than in districts. That can make it more difficult for people with fewer resources to complete, and harder for candidates of color to win. In 2017, Rubin and others sued the city of Santa Clara over its at-large system, arguing that it dilutes the votes of minority communities. The city is roughly 40 percent Asian.

Robert Rubin
This is a system I might add had been in effect for 70 years, and in that period, there was not a single Asian American elected to the city council.

Holly McDede
Then in 2018, after a court order, Santa Clara residents began voting for council members in districts rather than citywide. That same year, Raj Chahal was elected as the first Indian American council member in Santa Clara history. He was interviewed by Yo India TV afterwards.

Yo India TV
You are one of the senators who has made India proud, who is representing the community locally here in the United States.

Raj Chahal
I’m lucky to be elected as the first Asian American Council member from city of Santa Clara, and big support from our own community.

Holly McDede
This was just one of many lawsuits filed in recent years over at large elections. Karina Quintanilla sued the Riverside County city of Palm Desert over to at large elections in 2019. In a settlement Palm Desert agree to switch to two district election. The next year Quintanilla decided to run for a seat on the council,

Karina Quintanilla
Being able to allow me to focus on a district that has a population of roughly 10,000 instead of 50,000 makes a gigantic financial ability and evens the playing field for a new person to come in.

Holly McDede
And she won, defeating the incumbent to make history as the first Latina elected to the council in Palm Desert history. The lawsuit also called for switching to ranked-choice voting were voters the candidates by order of preference. The idea is that voters want options.

Karina Quintanilla
When we’re hungry—Hey, I’m going down the street to X place, what do you want? Oh, give me an A, give me a B, or if they don’t have that, how about a C? And if all else fails, even a D. So we have preferences of what we will be satisfied with or sometimes we’re very close on to candidates.

Holly McDede
Civil rights attorney Robert Rubin says California has made some progress when it comes to voting rights. But there have also been major threats nationwide. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted a key part of the Voting Rights Act. That allowed nine states, mostly in the south, to change their election laws without federal approval, Justice Antonin Scalia describe the provision as a racial entitlement.

Antonin Scalia
Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.

Holly McDede
Rubin remember sitting near the late Congressman John Lewis during the oral arguments for that case.

Robert Rubin
To see the look on John Lewis’ face as Justice Scalia was talking about a post racial society in which racial discrimination protections were no longer needed was a difficult thing to witness.

Holly McDede
Democrats renewed the push to restore the key voting rights provisions shortly after Congressman Lewis died.

John Lewis
My dear friends: your vote is precious—almost sacred. It is the most powerful non-violent tool we have to create a more perfect union.

Holly McDede
It may seem like a small way to uphold democracy, but on the local level Rubin and others continue to challenge cities holding on to at-large voting systems. The city of Santa Clara has fought back against the ruling in that case, but recently lost an appeal. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
You definitely get my first choice vote Holly—thanks for that great report. I’m Josh Landy. With me is my Stanford colleague, Ray Briggs. And today we’re thinking about democracy by numbers.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Moon Duchin, who’s a professor of Mathematics at Tufts University, and the Director of inter the Interdisciplinary Science, Technology, and Society program. She’s also one of the leaders of the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering group. Moon, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Moon Duchin
Hey, I’m really happy to be here.

Josh Landy
So Moon, you’ve been a fan of math for a long time, but at some point, you decided to apply your expertise to voting. What sparked that interest?

Moon Duchin
Well, that happened, I guess, now like five years ago, back in 2016, when I found myself having to teach our departments social choice class. So social choice, that’s like voting theory from a mathematicians point of view, so very much about these paradoxes of aggregating people’s opinions into into an outcome. And around the same time that I was taking that class on, I also got interested from attending talks here in there in philosophy and political science, I got interested in questions of fairness and district shape. And so I was doing some hybrid thing with the class, and it happens that one of my oldest and closest friends is a civil rights attorney. So I somehow talked her into coming up and visiting my class to give a talk. And when she was visiting, she said to the students, you know, there’s a crisis coming in civil rights litigation, because we really need experts. And, you know, a lot of experts who joined on in the civil rights era have kind of aged out, and we’re really looking for a new generation of people who can think about the math and the statistics and the fairness and the history, all at the same time. So who was this friend of mine,? So this is Kristin Clark, who just this week was named by Presidente-elect Joe Biden, as the new Assistant Attorney General. She’ll be the nation’s top civil rights attorney, leading civil rights at the DOJ, right. So for me, this was incredibly energizing to realize that all these interesting questions with somehow math like linking them together, could actually be actionable in courts and could bring in a new generation of expertise to these fundamental cases.

Ray Briggs
So at the beginning of the show, Josh brought up the ideal of one person, one vote. What do you think is appealing about that ideal?

Moon Duchin
Right, so one person, one vote comes from the 1960s. And that’s when the Supreme Court decided to take on redistricting in the first place. Before that, the courts have kind of avoided thinking about redistricting. But what was happening then was this malapportionment, namely that you had districts, some of them were nine or 10 times the population of other districts, but each electing one representative. So the idea of one person, one vote is that your intuition tells you that a situation like that is not equal weight to the votes of the various people. If you’re in a overpopulated district, your vote kind of owns a smaller share of the representative than if you’re in a small district. So that was the initial one person, one vote—people call that the apportionment revolution of the 1960s, when the court came in and said, well, as a matter of math, we want to balance population across the districts to get to something where there’s more equality in the weight and the power and the value of the vote.

Ray Briggs
This actually brings up a kind of funny question for me, which is why have districts at all? Why not just have a popular vote for an entire jurisdiction and elect representatives proportionately?

Moon Duchin
Yeah, great question. So districts, which are—we are in love with districts in the US. Some of that, you know, goes back to at least the Federalist Papers, where you see Hamilton and Madison going back and forth about some of the value of districts. And what they have to say there to me, if you read it, what it tells you is kind of two things about what districts are supposed to be for. And one is this kind of local-to-global principle. And then the other is securing some kind of minority representation within a majority paradigm. So the locality piece goes like this: every little part of the country will have its own local interest, and jealousies, as it’s put in the Federalist Papers. And then you can get a person who communicates those to the greater legislative body. And then, of course, the other—the minority representation within the majority paradigm. There it’s, I hope, kind of clear, if you have an unequal distribution of the population, then you can draw districts to capture, as the majority within a district, what would be marginalized in the entire body. So I think those are the two underlying intuitions.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about democracy by numbers with Moon Duchin from Tufts University.

Ray Briggs
What would it take for every vote to matter equally? Do some groups deserve special protection? Is true democracy even possible without a massive overhaul of the system?

Josh Landy
Democracy decisions and districts to be drawn—along with your comments and questions ,when Philosophy Talk continues.

You count the votes, but does it all add up to democracy? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs and we’re thinking about democracy by numbers with Moon Duchin, Professor of Mathematics at Tufts University, and one of the leaders of the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering group.

Josh Landy
a new year, a new president, but still the same old Coronavirus. So we’re continuing to pre record episodes from the safety of our homes. And we can’t take your phone calls. But you can always email us at comments at philosophy talked RG or you can comment on our website, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Moon, what would it take for everybody’s vote to count equally?

Moon Duchin
Yeah that’s the million dollar question. All right. Um, let me comment that right before the the court cases, the baker V. Carr, Reynolds V. Sims, that opens the gates to considering redistricting. The court had a case that was relatively easier. So that’s chameleon V. Lightfoot. And it comes from an incident in 1957 where Tuskegee Alabama, redrew itself, the city redrew its own boundaries, as happens from time to time. But what they did was they shrink themselves from something that was roughly square to what was later called in the, in the lawsuit, an uncouth 28 sided polygon, right. And so by strictly shrinking itself, what had happened was that a city that had been 80%, Black became 100%. White, right, so there was so much residential segregation to ski that the city council was able to just draw all the black people out of the city. And, of course, this makes some sense, historically, in the wake of a Brown v Board of Education, there was some anxiety that the franchise was calming for African Americans. So the court found that case pretty easy, because that was a case of denial. Once you’re drawn out of the city, you can’t vote from the Council for the mayor, you don’t get city services, that’s fairly easy, or the the weight of your vote has become zero. But what’s so much harder, and what’s been kind of flummoxing the court ever since, is when it comes to districts, you’re taking a state or county or city and you’re subdividing it, you’re partitioning it, so that if you’re not in one district, you’re in another right. And now it’s a much subtler question, how to think about the weight of your vote. And

Josh Landy
so what So how should I, you know, you hear these different strategies or these different criteria, right, for deciding whether a districting operation is fair or not like geography, right? The districts or at least be contiguous with each other and not look like salamanders or proportionality. Like if you if your party has a half of the voters, you should get a half of the seats or symmetry like, you know, how would you like it? If that was done to you if he if you wouldn’t like it? Right? That’s the kind of roles again, we’re thinking about, or competitiveness each each seat should be competitive or, or thing called the efficiency gap that I don’t entirely understand. But maybe you can explain what are all these things are bad and which is the which is the right way of thinking about what’s the right criterion to apply for fairness, and districting?

Moon Duchin
Yeah, well, so starting at the top with geography, you already heard some of that in chameleon. That’s isqi case, because what was wrong with the new district was partly its bizarre shape, right? They were complaining that it became an erratic polygon. And so I think that comes from the idea that if you’re really carefully trying to compose your demographics, you’re going to have to weave around certain populations to include some and exclude others, and it’ll show in the shapes. So that’s an idea that’s been out there. You know, ever since the original gerrymander the salamander that gave us the word back in after the 1810 census. It just doesn’t turn out to work very well. That is, you can get away with crazy extreme outcomes with benign shapes. If you try it. That’s what we’ve been learning in the last few years.

Ray Briggs
How does that work?

Moon Duchin
Why can you do that? Yeah. Well, I would say it’s because partly is the scale of the space of the universe of possibilities, which is, I think, been under appreciated, well, certainly under appreciated by me till I started really getting in the weeds. But you know, you have these particles, which are the Census Blocks, there are 11 million of them in the country. There’s a lot. And then what’s a districting? Plan? You grab a state, like, say, my home state of Massachusetts, you take all those census blocks, and you chop them into nine contiguous districts. It turns out there like gazillions of ways to do that. I mean, you know, Alito wondered if there might be 1000s It’s more like a Google the kinds that preceded right, so

Josh Landy
the point with an O L, right.

Moon Duchin
Original OG original Google. Um, yeah. So I think Part of the answer to the question, why can you do so much even under restrictions? It’s because the ways to do things are so vast that it kind of there are lots of ways to do any one thing. And just empirically, it turns out that you can get, and we saw this in Pennsylvania and in North Carolina in the last few years, under pressure, the legislature redrew pretty looking maps with all the same properties.

Ray Briggs
So so why is it sort of intuitively that I can manage to like suppress people’s vote while letting them vote? If I just draw the lines around the districts differently?

Moon Duchin
Yeah, great, great question. Right. So this is what this is not vote denial, but vote dilution. And so the the major mechanism is what we call packing and cracking. The idea is that if you have, you’re in group and you’re out group, the optimal strategy would be to pack the out group into huge majorities in a small number of districts, and then for your own group have bare majorities in the rest of the districts. And if you do the math in your head, and you can see that this lets you double your vote share, you can turn 40% of the vote into 80% of the seats this way if you’re ruthless about it. So that’s the problem that because there’s some non linearity in first past the post, when all you have to do is have 50% plus one in each district, that gives you a bunch of non linearity that you can exploit if you’re the line draw.

Josh Landy
So wow, yeah, it’s that sounds as bad as it is. Right. So it’s clearly unfair. In addition, it’s polarizing, because this leads to seats that are so safe, that the candidate is the only threat to the candidate is being primaried from the extreme wing of their party. So that’s not good. It discourages voters from even bothering. So that seems like a bad situation. But I know you’ve been involved in devising solutions, or at least part solutions. You tell us a little bit about that, that kind of work, you’ve done with modeling to, you know, to provide a at least a step forward.

Moon Duchin
Sure, yeah. Well, this, this circles back to what you were asking about before, which is these other kinds of fairness tests like proportionality or the efficiency gap. So how do those work? Basically, they leverage some intuition about what should happen in the state of nature, no one’s trying to, you know, put a thumb on the scale. A lot of people’s untrained intuition would be that if you just draw districts without regard to say, party, that 40% of the vote would get 40% of the seats. And actually, when you model it, and I’ll say a couple words about how to do that, you can see that that’s just not so. So as a matter of structural properties, districts are pretty punishing to minorities. So they turn out to be a crummy device for that one thing they were supposed to do in the first place. And that’s what makes all of those off the shelf tests, proportionality efficiency, gap symmetry, a little suspect, if you ask me, because it’s not the case that the neutral state of affairs for geographic partitions, leads to good scores by the lights of these metrics.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about democracy by numbers with Moon do Chen from Tufts University. So moon, you’ve said the words efficiency gap a couple of times. Could you explain to us in our listeners what that is?

Moon Duchin
Yeah, absolutely. So efficiency gap goes like this. Remember how packing and cracking were the kind of mechanisms of getting extra seats for yourself. So packing again, was like wasting your opponent’s votes in certain districts. And cracking is spreading out their votes over several districts, when they might have been enough to control a district instead, you disperse them that’s cracking. So efficiency gap reasons are the you know, it’s it’s proponents reason that you can count all that up with the arithmetic of wasted votes. So a wasted vote would be any losing vote, or any excess winning vote. And then here we go. Ready for the efficiency gap? It’s very simple. The two parties should waste the same number of votes. That’s it.

Ray Briggs
I see. So so if I vote for a losing candidate, I might as well not have voted. And if I sort of go over the margin for winning candidate, I might have not might as well not have voted. So that makes my vote wasted.

Moon Duchin
Yeah, exactly. And some critics have pointed out, well, maybe those two kinds of votes aren’t equally wasted. And you might want to put some coefficients in front. Okay, but it turns out that after you crunch the numbers in here, I’m talking like, you know, eighth grade algebra level number crunching. You What you learn is that whereas proportionality says, for every additional percentage point of votes, you should get an additional percentage point of seats. That’s proportionality. It turns out that efficiency gap just throws a two in front says, For every visual additional point, a vote share, you should get two points. So seizure just turns out to reduce to that. And so I think it calls up all of our same questions about why would we expect that to obtain in the state of nature?

Josh Landy
Man we have, we got a really interesting email from a listener named Daniel who has a fascinating proposal, we want to run by you for a different way of organizing things in each of the 50 states of the current national union, one chief executive or national president will be elected by popular vote every four years at the statewide level, and limited the residents of that state, a presidential college be established constituted by those elected to it by each of the individual states, the chief executive or acting president would be rotated between the members of the presidential college once per month, 48 times reached four year period, with the two remaining members elected by the members of the college itself at the beginning of each four year term as Dean’s, for purposes of its internal management. This is a very different vision of the future of the United States. What do you think about that? Well,

Moon Duchin
I’m not sure I tracked all the details, but that sounded a whole lot like the US Senate. Right? I mean, after all, so we have this bicameral Congress, and the Senate is elected by popular vote from the States. Right, whereas it’s the house districts that are supposed to be population balanced. That was a design feature, it was a choice to kind of make a compromise between equalizing states, as you know, sort of seated around the table, or equalizing people. And so we do a little bit of each. A lot of people think the Senate is really problematic these days, because it’s wildly violative of the one person one vote ideal.

Josh Landy
Yeah, what do you How does math come in there? Because we’ve been talking so far, mostly about the house. But what are you what are your research? Was your research tell you what is math tell us about the fairness or otherwise of the way that we handle Senate elections?

Moon Duchin
Oh, yeah. So I think it’s worth saying that I think of this whole project as being mathematical in places and philosophical and places, you know, obviously, political and other places. But the fairness questions, the normative questions, the math not going to answer for you. And so I like to say that as a as a math model, or what you can do is, is take a framework of rules and see how good of a job you do living up to those rules. But it’s it’s not necessarily the best advice for devising the rules, right? So you know, for instance, when we were talking about proportionality, it doesn’t come for free, just because you’re not an evil mustache, twirling gerrymander? Well, you can you can measure the effect, you can look at a state like Pennsylvania, you can and here’s the main modeling tool that my lab has developed over the last few years. You can use like a Markov chain or random walk model to draw lots of districts only according to the stated rules that you see, there’s a big blank space there for what the stated rules and priorities and goals are right. And then when you implement that, and you randomize, then you can see how the chips fall. And you’re not trying to gerrymander, I like to think it’s some fundamental progress on this age old question, what’s the baseline? So in this cycle, everyone’s about to do their redistricting, we’re just waiting with bated breath for the new census numbers. And I’ll be working with the People’s maps commission in Wisconsin in this cycle, trying to help them do some work upfront, because they’re going to be drawing their own map, you know, in parallel with the work of the legislature, and that’s another split control state. And they’re the the question is, if we articulate some priorities, and then we make some proposed plans, can you tell us how good of a job our plans do it living up to our priorities? And that’s a really juicy modeling task, because you have to say, Hey, you’re doing really well on these not so well on these, here are some alternatives that were generated by kind of this random process. Start over and you get to iterate. What’s beautiful about that is that it’s the math and sort of philosophy of governance in iterated conversation.

Ray Briggs
Moon, we have an email mark in Aptos, California says, I’d love to hear an explainer on the impossibility theorems with regard to voting. Are all voting schemes really unfair in some way? Or is the math unnecessarily alarmist because it doesn’t fully take into account how society handles voting in the real world?

Moon Duchin
Yeah, I love that question. So that’s the heart of the social choice theory, which I mentioned, you know, I started teaching five years ago, and got hooked on all this stuff. So Ken arrow, who’s an economist, kicked off social choice theory with famous Impossibility Theorem, and I think it was 1951. And it got followed up with a whole lot more. And basically, the structure of those theorem says, okay, name a few fairness axioms. Now, there’s no system that you can possibly choose that will satisfy them. So So here’s a version of have arrows Impossibility Theorem. If you want to have a single winner system, and you want to have just a few axioms, I won’t go into what those are unless you want to hear what they are. But as soon as that sounds so innocuous, to give you a quick sense, one of the axioms is, if everybody has the same first choice preference, that person should win. Boy, does that sound like basic? You don’t want a system without that property. Right? So you put down just a few of those axioms. And then the conclusion, the flashy conclusion is the only system that works is dictatorship. Just let one voter decide. And that’s it. You know, that kicked off a lot of really interesting math, but I appreciate the way the question was framed, is that actually relevant to the decisions that we have to make about how best to represent ourselves, I find social that flavor of social choice theory to be really limited. Partly because a lot of the disqualifying attributes of certain systems of election are from corner cases, like really, theoretically possible, but super rare outcomes, such as an exact tie or other kinds of, of, you know, uncommon outcomes. So I think a really interesting direction in social choice that’s happened in the last 1020 years, is thinking about it computationally. And looking for kind of typical versus rare anomalies and trying to reason from typical election outcomes to what kind of system best upholds the the properties that we want.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about democracy by numbers, with mathematician moochin. from Tufts University,

Ray Briggs
is it time to abolish the Electoral College? could rank choice voting be the way of the future? What is the best way to fix our democracy?

Josh Landy
The future of elections, plus a conundrum from one of our listeners when Philosophy Talk continues.

If I’m just a one in 10, can I still have a voice in a democratic state? I’m Josh Lambie. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray braids. Our guest is Moon du Chien, from Tufts University. And we’re thinking about democracy by numbers.

Josh Landy
So moon with the powers vested in us by KALW, we’re gonna make use czar of US election. So what’s the first thing you’re gonna change?

Moon Duchin
First, I’m just so gratified to be the new czar. Well, what should we change about elections? Well, I think if you understand districts and some of their power and some of their limitations, you start to see a lot of circumstances where they just can’t do the work that you want them to do it right now in the US, we have a law in place that says that congressional districts must be single member districts. But once you get down below the state level to or even within states, but also to the local level, you have a lot more latitude. So I’m really happy that ranked choice keeps coming up. I think it’s one of the very exciting directions for civil rights in the 21st century. So just to say a super quick word about that. Usually, when people are talking about rank choice, they’re talking about STV single transferable vote, which broadly is just a system where when your first choice candidate has been either elected or eliminated some of that voting strength transfers down to the next candidate on your ballot, talk more about how that works. But that’s just broadly that’s why it’s called single transferable vote.

Ray Briggs
So why is that better than just having everybody choose their first choice? Well, I

Moon Duchin
mean, oh, no, very, very simple level, you’re, you’re getting more information from people. And part of what’s going on with voting is, is civic engagement is a feeling of responsiveness is the feeling of being represented. Ideally, you’d like to feel represented, even when the person that you selected didn’t win. And so I take very seriously the idea of voting as expression. That’s one element. But you know, more practically, here’s the big thing about single transferable vote, when you use it to elect multiple people. I want to actually caveat that that’s important. You guys are sitting in California, where rank choice voting is used very often to elect a mayor or a single person. But when you use it to elect multiple people, you know, I’m in Cambridge, Mass right now. And that’s how we elect our nine person City Council. What it has is something that I call emergent proportionality. In other words, if some share of the voters have a preference that aligns with slate of candidates, they will tend to seat those candidates in proportion to their voting strength. When they’re cohesive, so it’s it kind of circumvents party in a way to help you know, an interest, like maybe environmentalists who aren’t spatially congregated the way that we associate with traditional arrangements of racial minorities. It helps people who are geographically spread out, maybe coalesce and be able to elect candidates.

Josh Landy
Can we talk about other things you might do Azhar like I’d be I have a whole laundry list like automatic registration make voting day, a national holiday, the John Lewis act that restores voting rights amendment and want to hear

Moon Duchin
really unglamorous one, but I think it’s yeah, yes. I was actually just needling a congressman about this earlier today. Um, data transparency, man, you wouldn’t believe what an unholy mess precincts data from around the country is. And part of that is because it’s so decentralized, again, by design, there’s a lot of state and local control of election administration. But for someone like me, who really wants to know, not only how many people voted for, for whom, or for what, but also where they are located, getting a precinct shape file together, that you can match all those different data to that’s kind of a holy grail. So yeah, if you’re listening, new Congress, put that put that very first bill, just get some data transparency in and you’ll see a whole lot of good flows out of that that’s hard to predict up front, just because without the data, you can’t really evaluate how good of a job you’re doing at representative democracy.

Josh Landy
That sounds very sensible to me. So I want to propose something to you, that may be less sensible. Lottery, like should you know, in ancient Athens, the magistrate positions were decided by law, which meant no one could buy them. So that was good. On the other hand, you could see some disadvantages. Do you think there’s any role to be played by lottery system in our, in our democracy, and

Moon Duchin
that way, you know, that kind of comes full circle to the beginning of the conversation, where I had been intrigued by philosopher Alex Guerreros work on autocracy. That was one of the things that kind of perked up my interest in this area. I would say to that there’s, there’s certainly a sense in which random feels fair. But so much of the work that I’ve been doing on this for a few years and a lot of the insights that, that for me that have come out of that, or that we really want to pull those apart, random from fair, I do think there’s something to the ideal, you know, not always the reality of representatives, as, as experts, as people who build up some governing expertise, or certainly have the time, or who have the staff to investigate things in much greater detail than it’s possible for the public to do. You know, I think about things like I used to live in the Bay Area in California, and there were all these voter referenda every time, and that there’s something very appealing about that. But on the other hand, I think we know from studying that, but something as simple as a misleading name for a voter referendum, like taking an anti affirmative action measure and calling it the Civil Rights Initiative, something as simple as a misleading name is going to cause a lot of people to vote in a way that they don’t intend. So, you know, I think these are fantastic conversations for us to be having. Maybe a compromise is what you’re seeing in some states, when they’re doing new Commission’s and sometimes independent commissions pulling the job of redistricting out of the legislature, there will often be a lottery aspects to see during the commission. And that’s something that I’m very interested in, you know, in Michigan, they sent out 10,000 Commission applications to random residents of the state. So there are ways that you can engage with this kind of breadth and randomness without holy giving over governance to the lotto.

Ray Briggs
So I have a question about the 2020 election, actually, which is one striking thing about it was that it was conducted in the middle of a pandemic, where a lot of people had to stay home or if they’re voting in person voting to socially distance way. And well, I certainly don’t love everything about politics in the US. I’m pretty impressed about how a lot of electoral Commission’s handled this. Yeah. Yeah, we think we can learn from that experience.

Moon Duchin
Yeah, that’s been fascinating for me as someone who thinks about elections on several levels, including election security, I was fortunate enough to be on the National Academies of Science Commission on voting security and voting technology. A few years ago, I learned a lot about vote by mail modalities, and now we got we got a real fire drill for it because of COVID. As you say, I totally agree. I was really impressed around the country with Election Administration and how well it held up under Stress. I do think that there are pros and cons to, to male voting. One of the great things about it is that it lowers barriers for a lot of people. But it leaves open more possibilities for intimidation, see concerns, especially coming from domestic violence advocates, you know, things I might not have thought of before I was exposed to some of the arguments on different sides. But my sense is, there’s no going back, we had an election in which some of the estimates that I’ve seen are that more than half of the ballots that were cast in November, or cast by an alternative modality, you either by early voting absentee voting or by mail, um, it’s pretty hard to undo that shift. And so I think Election Administration and election evaluation and assessment, it’s just gonna have to keep up.

Josh Landy
Well, I’m really happy to hear you, you know, issuing that sort of upbeat note, because I keep thinking about Lincoln’s line, the rule of a minority is a permanent arrangement is wholly inadmissible. And I think about the way the Electoral College functions for the presidency, I think about the structural imbalance for the Senate, I think about gerrymandering in the house, I think about the governorship of Georgia getting stolen 2018. So I’m very happy that we get to end this show on this positive note. And I thank you so much for joining us today, man. It’s been a great pleasure. Our guest has been Moon Dikshit, Professor of Mathematics at Tufts University, and one of the leaders of the metric geometry and gerrymandering group. So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Oh, you know, leading up to this show. I’ve been really worried that over the last four years, there’s been an erosion of our democratic institutions and public trust in the government. But I’ve also found it really comforting to be able to just think about the mathematics of democracy because it’s sort of more eternal and unchanging than our human foibles.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I love that Ray. I love that moon has found a way to apply those eternal truths to our current questions. You know, some people think that mathematics is just an artificial human construct that never makes contact with the world. But man, Moon is bringing those two things together, and incredibly powerful and important ways. But this conversation continues on our website, philosophy, talk, or G, where you can also become a subscriber get access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a conundrum, that’s bedeviling you a personal dilemma in your life that might benefit from philosophical insight, send it to us at conundrums at Philosophy Talk dot o RG. And maybe we can think through it together on the air. In fact, I believe we’ve got one right now. So, welcome to Philosophy Talk. Thank you. So where are you from? George.

George
I live in Visalia, California.

Ray Briggs
And you’ve got a conundrum for us today.

George
Well, it’s something I thought about with last week’s program, which was about blame and moral responsibility for large issues like climate change, and whatever, you know, whatever the issue is of the day, and how individuals can or cannot respond or affect that. I think about it, because every time I pass an Exxon station, I pass it ever since 1989, when the Exxon Valdez crashed in Alaska, I have not knowingly bought Exxon gas. My friends say, oh, that’s ridiculous. All the oil companies are the same. And it would be great if I could boycott all oil completely, but I can’t. So I’m boycotting Exxon and BP now. But I have told the companies that I’m doing it, which didn’t get any response. But I’ve told them by through their websites. So it’s kind of a quandary for me what good it does, etc. Another boycott, here in the valley was the great boycott in the 70s supporting Cesar Chavez, and mean friends, a lot of friends boycotted grapes. And they say the grape boycott was effective. So the boycott, what is the philosophy of boycotts? And do they do any good? Who are they helping? Are they helping me? By making me feel better? Are they actually working? It’s a company.

Josh Landy
Right? So So since you know, since we can point to some cases where boycotts are effective, I think we should definitely bear that in mind. Right. So there might be two parts to this. One part is, is it having an effect on the actual behavior of companies? And well, maybe sometimes it doesn’t, but sometimes it does. So there’s a kind of consequentialist reason for doing that. And it sounds like there’s also the other part, which is the deontological reason for doing it. You were saying it makes you feel better. Maybe we could even go stronger than that and say, it’s the right thing to do. Right, right. So

Ray Briggs
so one thing I noticed about the two boycotts that you mentioned is that there’s this difference in kind of who’s doing them so that the grape boycott was a An organized thing we’re a bunch of people agreed to do and not buying Exxon is a thing that you’ve done. But I don’t know of an organized like group of people who’s doing it. So I think this actually taps into some of the stuff that we talked about group actions. So I’m not really responsible for climate change. And it seems like I’m not responsible for the behavior of the grape industry. Even if I, as an individual buy grapes, like there, there’s a group doing this action of boycotting. And so like, it’s kind of cool and weird that I can participate in a group action as an individual. But I think that’s kind of a an important distinction.

Unknown Speaker
A little conundrum within that, that I really don’t like grapes. So it wasn’t a sacrifice. It seems like sacrifice,

Ray Briggs
right? That’s super weird, because you can engage in the group action of not eating grapes, even though you were already engaging in the individual action of not eating grapes, versus seems like a different action still to me.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I mean, I’m not boycotting cilantro, I just hate it. But here, here’s a potential quandary. Um, how do we tell the difference between punishing companies for bad behavior, which, you know, sets a good precedent? So kind of a deterrence? For other companies don’t behave as badly as Exxon, or this will happen to you with your consumers. But between that and sort of over punishing, you know, obviously, it was a long time ago, the the Exxon Valdez and what if it turns out they have taken steps in between times to mend their ways. In that case, maybe what we should do is, in fact, reward them for changing their ways. That’s assuming it’s a big assumption, but assuming that they actually have mended their ways. What do you think about that?

Unknown Speaker
Well, yeah, that’s a good point. And I suppose if I heard that they had made their ways I think about it at least. But I just read blowout by Rachel Maddow, if you haven’t read that. It goes on and on and on. They haven’t stopped. It would change anything. What they did was renamed their tankers, so they don’t have the word Exxon in their in the name.

Josh Landy
Yeah. Okay, that that definitely has positive change.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, the other thing you said was about the inadvertent consequences of a boycott. And, you know, the great boycott certainly hurt the great producers, but it also hurt the workers, they didn’t have jobs. You know, like your boycott of franchised restaurant or something and, and who you’re hurting, you’re hurting the franchisee you really don’t have any. There’s a local person, probably, and doesn’t have any control over what the corporation does to you. So you have these conflicting interests, and you’re boycotting them all by boycotting you.

Ray Briggs
Right. I mean, I think this is true of a lot of collective action, actually, like disruptive kinds of collective action, not not just boycotts but things like strikes, where the whole point is to disrupt everyday life, and a lot of people who get their everyday lives disrupted didn’t do anything to deserve punishment.

George
Yeah, or taking over a city street.

Ray Briggs
Right. And we usually think of that as like an acceptable cost of a boycott or a strike, which has this larger purpose, but the people whose day was ruined, or whose livelihood was harmed, still still had to suffer that harm.

Josh Landy
So George, what are you thinking now? Are you are you illuminated and lightened, clarified? Or have we just made things vastly worse?

George
Well, not worse, I think. Clarify. You know, I can’t say my positions were hardened, because I wasn’t going to go to any of those places we talked about anyway. But I know what I’ll do. I’ll drink more wine now. Because that’s made with great. I’ll take care of that problem. And we’ll see if that leads to me buying oil from

Ray Briggs
George, thank you so much for your conundrum and your conversation. I really enjoy talking to you.

George
I enjoy talking to you and thank you.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2021.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
…not even when they’re true and reasonable! The conversation continues on our website philosophy talk dot o-r-g, where you can subscribe to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
…and thank you for thinking.