Auction the Powers

In proportional voting schemes, each party gets a fraction of the available seats roughly equal to the fraction of the votes they received. For example, if there are ten city council seats, and the Sensible Party gets 37% of the vote, then the Sensible Party will get four of the ten seats.

Many people, including a large number of political philosophers, believe that proportional voting is fairer than traditional systems. For the city council elections, the traditional method might be winner-take-all races in geographic partitions of the city. If voters strongly prefer having representations that share their party affiliation over having representations that share their rough location, they will probably be happier under proportional voting.

(At least they will modulo endless and tedious arguments about the second order effects of what proportional voting does to the nature of political parties and to the stability of Democracy Itself. Like a teenager attempting to hide a cold sore under mounds of lip balm, we will gloss over these issues.)

Proportional voting has the drawback that it can only be applied to multi-seat elections. If your town in its municipal wisdom has decided that it needs exactly one elected dog catcher, then you could try an instant runoff election, but proportional voting isn't going to help.

Or could it? Say 51% of folks vote for Sam, and 49% of folks vote for Charlie. Traditionally, Sam would be the next dogcatcher, but that seems awfully unfair to the Charlie supporters. I know of at least two ways to mitigate this problem. One is to compensate the Charlie voters in some way. For example, we could give them two votes for the next dogcatcher election, on the theory that your vote only gets used up if your candidate wins, and you bank it otherwise.

Another mitigation would be to proportionately divide up the dogcatcher's term of office. For a one year term, Sam would be dogcatcher for the first 0.51 * 365 = 186 days, and Charlie would be dogcatcher for the remaining 179 days. That seems much more fair, and if a thousand people vote, each of them can go away secure in the knowledge that their vote directly determined who would officially dogcatch for 365 * 24 / 1000 = 8.8 hours of the year.

Now, that may be more trouble than it's worth for a dogcatcher, but it is worth considering similar schemes for when the stakes are higher. Take the President of the United States, for example. They are widely considered to be the most powerful person in the country, and one of the most powerful in the world. And presidential elections are almost always quite close: the margin between the two parties is usually under 10%, with occasional "blow-out" elections like in 1984 or 1972 when it is closer to 20%.

I mention the power of the President because besides the fairness angle, there is also an inequality angle to consider. Discussions of inequality usually revolve around income or wealth inequality, but by any meaningful measure, political inequality in the United States is vastly worse. Consider: the person who made the most money in the U.S. in 2014 was probably Warren Buffet, whose net worth increased by $13.5 billion. That's a lot of money, but it is also only 0.075% of the $17 trillion total made by everyone in the U.S. By comparison, I would put the political power of the President in 2014 at well over 1% of the total political power in the country. (My estimates are roughly that the federal government has half of all political power, the executive branch has half of that, and the President has over 10% of that.)

To put it another way: the wealthiest 1% of Americans is said to control 40% of the nation's wealth. For political power, the top 0.4% of Americans control 100% of the power. (Math: The number of elected officials was last estimated by the census as 513,200 in 1992, at which time the population was 256.5 million. I estimate the number of unelected officials with political power as approximately equal to the number of elected officials.)

Now, many people say that political inequality as so defined isn't really a problem, because of certain properties of the process by which political inequality is acquired. A different set of many people say the same thing about monetary inequality, just with different properties. Neither account is convincing to those who don't believe it, but I suppose that's always the case.

To summarize, when a close presidential election occurs, at least two bad things happen. First, there's unfairness. 50.5% of the electoral votes go to George, and 49.5% go to Al, and all the Al supporters go away unhappy. Second, there is a near doubling of political inequality, at least as compared to a hypothetical world in which George and Al both got to be half-President.

Neither of the mitigation schemes suggested above would directly address the inequality aspect of the problem. Bankable votes would in practice just lead to the parties strictly alternating control of the Presidency every four years, and term duration proportionality would just change that to be approximately two years. (Remarkable fact: under term duration proportionality, each of the 127 million people who voted in the 2012 election would have been solely response for almost exactly one second of the Presidency!)

But here's an idea that does address both concerns: take all of the Presidential powers enumerated by the Constitution, and then auction them off using electoral votes as the currency. (Or, if you prefer, using the popular votes in 0.1% increments.) At the start of every round, the person with the most remaining votes would pick the next power to be auctioned. My suggestion would be to use a traditional, "English" auction; second price auctions and the like might have nicer theoretical properties, but open ascending price auctions make for better TV.

Here is the rough order I would expect for the valuations:

Chief Executive Officer: "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States." (Article II, Section 3). Basically, the ability to tell everyone in the executive branch what to do, and have it carry the weight of law. For obvious reasons, this power should also be combined with Article II, Section 2's power to appoint executive officials (with the advice and consent of the Senate).

"Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States" (Article II, Section 2). This would include executive power over the CIA, NSA and other agencies that intentionally do bad things in other countries. It would also include the red button, which is a large part of the reason it is at #2.

I may be making a big mistake here, but I'm not merging Commander in Chief with Diplomat in Chief (see #5 below). It seems to me that the State Department and the armed forces already have two different foreign policies, so in some sense, I'm just going with the status quo.

Sign and veto legislation (Article I, Section 7). Technically, these are two different powers, but it would be unnecessarily silly and confusing for one President to try to sign a piece of legislation before another could veto it.

Appoint members of the Supreme Court and other federal judges, again with the advice and consent of the Senate (Article II, Section 2).

Power to make Foreign Policy. "He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors," (Article II, Section 2) plus "he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers" (Article II, Section 3). This power should also be combined with executive power (including appointments) over the State Department and other non-defense agencies that deal with foreign policy.

"Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment." (Article II, Section 2). This would be an especially choice power for third parties to try for; I'm thinking of say a Green/Libertarian coalition to pardon everyone convicted of drug crimes.

"Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session." (Article II, Section 2.) Less exciting now that the 17th Amendment allowed states to hold special elections to fill the vacancies, but still potentially impactful.

"he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper" (Article II, Section 3.) Has this ever been used?

Power to propose legislation to Congress (Article II, Section 3.) I'm not sure this even a power, since technically anyone could email a proposed bill to their representative. For fun, though, we could wrap this up with the obligation to give the State of the Union address.

One power that I'm explicitly not putting up for auction is the right to have a paid staff of advisers and assistants. Almost all of the above powers would require having some staff, so I would propose a rule like "you get a number of paid assistants equal to the number of electoral votes you received". (For reference, the White House had 454 employees in 2011.)

So what would be the consequences of putting this into effect? Here are some of the ones I can think of:

More focus given to important decisions. Not only does the current system place too many choices on just one set of shoulders, but the politics of the Presidency also dictate a crazy temporal structure: you are very much encouraged to initially focus (in the "first hundred days", even) on domestic affairs, and only when you can now longer impact them, turn your consideration to the international realm. Needless to say, each of powers #1 - #5 could greatly benefit from sustained attention.

Possibly less democratic control over non-domestic powers. My thinking is this: Americans mostly don't care about foreign policy and the like, so over time they would punish parties that bid too highly on the Command in Chief or Diplomat in Chief powers. You could then get into a situation where a motivated third party could pick one of those parties up. The outcome would be "efficient" in the limited sense of giving everyone what they say they are willing to pay for, but if decisions made by a smaller percentage of the electorate turn out to be systematically worse, then the costs of those worse decisions would be born by all. (Or to say it another way: political power is inherently an externality, and the political power to declare war especially so.)

To some extent, of course, this has already happened: foreign policy in both American parties is mostly made by an elite that isn't very responsive to voters. But it is possible that this proposal might make things worse.

Higher voting participation rates. Right now, lots of people will stay at home and not vote if they think the election outcome is a sure thing. But because the auction values for the various powers will always be potentially in flux, you can never be sure if your vote is the one that will give The Very Silly Party the power to fill those upcoming Supreme Court vacancies.

(The careful reader will note that I'm intentionally not declaring whether higher voting participation rates are a cost or benefit.)

Higher election spending. This is the flip side of the previous item, and unambiguously a cost to all but the most die-hard Keynesians.

Greater third party participation. No big surprise here, all proportional voting schemes increase the attraction of third parties, because you are no longer "throwing your vote away".

It is also perhaps worth noting that with greater third party participation comes at least a slight third party moderation: having to actually exercise political power leads ever so gently away from the purely expressive politics that third parties are otherwise drawn to.

A really awesome TV event. I can't emphasize this one enough. For a full month after Election Day, there will be speculation on who will bid how much for which powers, and then on the Auction Day, you get one, maybe two hours of pure excitement. The stakes couldn't be higher!

I would say that the above has no chance of ever being adopted, except that I would have said the same thing about the Single Transferable Vote, and that's now used all around the world. Email your comments to me at thomaswc@gmail.com; good ones will get incorporated into the document.