Are staggered elections for a legislature highly problematic?
Is there a way to make an election interesting even to those voters who live in an enemy stronghold, where the voter has no hope of seeing their own party win?
When we wrote of monthly voting, with the assumption of staggered elections to long terms (maybe 9 years or 11 years), we got this response:
Staggered terms can be highly problematic.
English local authority councils are a decent example of this - many of them elect 1/3rd of the councillors every year to four year terms, with no election taking place in the fourth year of the cycle. This can lead to situations where it's mathematically impossible to change which party has the majority on the council at any particular election , which makes that election seem pointless to voters and can make the administration complacent.
One of the first things the Commissioners (central government officers appointed when a local authority has drastically failed in some way) usually recommend is to move to whole-body elections. Example, Liverpool City Council
To which we responded:
And yet, there are local councils that have been under the same party for decades. Maybe that is a problem or maybe not, but either way, why would it matter if the elections are staggered or not? There are Tories living in Labour strongholds and there are red voters living in Tory strongholds. People still go out and vote, even when they know it is hopeless.
I’d like to add to that.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that this is a big problem: people live in a district that always votes a particular way, and they have no hope of ever seeing their party win. Is there a way to make the election interesting to them, even when the situation is hopeless?
There are some ways. The most obvious is that other items can also be put on the same ballot. Indeed, in many USA states people come out to vote when their House district is hopeless, but they are motivated because a Senate seat is competitive.
The progressive activist, and documentary film maker, Michael Moore has suggested referendums as a way to mobilize voters. He pointed out that referendums for legalizing weed lead to a surge in youth turnout. Achen & Bartels detailed problems with referendums, but clearly there are ways to boost turnout even in hopeless districts.
A more obvious way to make such competitions interesting is to elect more than one person. Assume a voting system where people get 3 votes and the top 5 vote getters are elected. Now the losing side, the people who know they will never win, still have a reason to vote, because they are probably going to elect 2 representatives, and the voters probably have strong feelings about who those representatives will be, fighting the good fight in the minority. An interesting nuance is that the minority party in the district (in a hypothetical political system with districts) might be the majority party nation wide, so these voters might be electing the leader of the nation, even though they are in the minority locally.
Many people are disappointed with the political system. Some people don’t ever vote, because they see no options that interest them. Others are burned out from too many defeats, so they lose interest. Ultimately, there is no way to meet everyone’s emotional needs, nor anyway to promise victory to everyone, nor anyway to keep people interested. It is inevitable that there will be elections where the situation is hopeless for some group, and so they don’t bother to vote.
But if we were looking for a way to keep the maximum number of people involved, electing multiple people at once is the best option. Even when some voter has no hope of establishing the majority, they might have opinions about who should represent the minority.
Here in Australia (a) we have compulsory voting for both national and state elections, and (b) we have Preferential (Ranked Choice) Voting, so even though my preferred party never wins a majority, my second preference goes to assist the most similar centre-left party, and they often win this electorate (district). So elections remain "interesting", even if your favourite isn't going to win it.
We also have a strictly independent set of electoral commissions (both national and per state), and jerrymandering is therefore much reduced. Of course there are some electorates that have been in the hands of the same party since they were created, but that is a result of the demographics (in simple terms - rich, working class, or rural); about half the electorates are "safe seats", and about a quarter are marginal or swing seats.
However, if Party A wins 54% of the votes cast nationally, they will in general have a majority pretty similar to that (so in the House, say 80 seats out of 150) - the composition of the House broadly reflects the vote, once the preferences in each vote cast have been distributed.
The Senate is decided on state-wide proportional representation, so the six Senators elected each cycle will broadly represent voter intent, with the two major parties getting around two (sometimes three) Senators, and then there is a battle among minor parties and independents for the remaining one or two seats. So even if your House electorate is going to a party you don't support, a vote in the Senate is still a good reason to turn up.