You Should Be Able to Send a Message With Your Vote

Even modest reforms to US elections could add an expressive element to the ballot

Yes, this Substack has finally launched. Thanks to the surprising number of you who have already subscribed or followed. This won’t be a frequent column — I’m aiming for a post every two weeks or so — but I’ve got a few in the pipeline: One will ask whether regulating the influence of money in politics is a lost cause, and another on whether ideology is still the driving force of polarization. I promise to mostly avoid election-year punditry in search of the longer-term story of American democracy and its possibilities.

“Get over yourself,” Hillary Clinton in April advised voters dissatisfied with the electoral choice between President Biden and Donald Trump. Her scolding was tone-deaf, condescending, and unlikely to be persuasive, as that phrase usually is.

She wasn’t entirely wrong, though. Elections are a choice, and winner-take-all elections often present us with the paradox that voting for our first choice means boosting the chances of a candidate or party we see as the worst choice. That can feel like no choice at all. “Get over yourself” is not just a message from Hillary Clinton, it’s a message sent from the system itself, embedded in the code of our country’s unusual practice of single-winner, two-party elections.

There are two different situations that can force voters into this uncomfortable paradox. One is when we actually have a first choice candidate or party we prefer, but we settle reluctantly for a lesser candidate if our first choice has been defeated in the primary, or if a third-party candidate would be a spoiler in a general election. That’s an unavoidable feature of any democratic electoral system, even one with proportional representation or ranked-choice voting. Making decisions with thousands or millions of other people, with their own preferences and intuitions, inevitably means that we don’t always get the choices that match our preferences.

But there’s another scenario — one that better represents the current situation for many dissatisfied voters in 2024— when we want to express a view about policy that isn’t represented by any of the available candidates, or when the candidates who share that view are unacceptable for other reasons. For those opposed to Biden’s support of Israel in its atrocious Gaza war, it’s not just that “Trump would be worse” (though he would be, for many reasons including his limitless personal corruption), but that the Biden policy reflects a longstanding cross-partisan consensus of nearly unconditional support for Israel. Not only do almost all Republicans take an even more hawkish position in support of Israeli policy, so too does the most prominent independent candidate for president, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Despite the deep ideological divide between the two parties, policy toward Israel remains a singular area of multi-partisan agreement, and while change is both overdue and likely, reversing a decades-long consensus backed by money and passion is going to take time.

So how can a voter effectively express a view that challenges such a consensus? Or a view that challenges their own party’s policies — whether on Gaza or another issue, such as single-payer health care — without making a worse policy outcome more likely? In several of this year’s Democratic primaries, voters had the option to mark their ballot for “Uncommitted,” “No Preference” or other terms that indicated some measure of discontent with President Biden. Those expressive votes, which amounted to roughly ten percent in most of the states where it was an option, weren’t meant to have any effect on the nomination; they were at best a gentle signal of dissent from President Biden’s policies. But they represented one of the few opportunities voters this year have had to voice views that differ from the administration’s policies.

But many voters want a way to express their view more emphatically, and with teeth, in the general election. A typical version of this sentiment comes from human rights advocate Sarah Leah Whitson a few months ago: “While in short run this may result in a worse candidate winning—Trump—in long run, there’s simply *no* *other* *way* to shift US policy on Israel than to show democrats that they will be punished for unconditional Israel support.”

There are other ways to send such a message, of course, though without the same punishment. Protest is one, so is joining or donating to organizations that advocate for a change in US policy. But each of those require either money or time, and protest requires a willingness to risk arrest or harassment. Voting is our most basic and universal form of democratic engagement, and it should offer more of an opportunity to express a view, along with choosing a candidate.

For those frustrated by the “Get over yourself” message we encounter in the voting booth, it wouldn’t require dramatic changes to the electoral system or an amendment to the Constitution to give a vote more of an expressive value. Even modest, achievable reforms would create a small mechanism to express a first choice without helping the worst choice, or a way to indicate a policy preference in addition to a preferred candidate.

This expressive value has never been the main selling point for reforms such as ranked-choice voting, fusion voting, or proportional representation. Each of these proposed changes has its own merits, flaws, and unknowns when weighed against goals such as increasing competition, improving governance, or creating more meaningful political parties. But one thing all the reform ideas on the table would do is add a bit of voice to the ballot. Ranked-choice voting, for example, would allow voters to name a first choice and then a second or third. If used in this year’s primaries, for example, it would have allowed Democrats to endorse first a candidate closer to their views, and then perhaps Biden, forcing Biden to reach out and earn those second-round votes, assuming that more candidates with different views would come forward in such a system. (It could also be used in the general election, but the interaction with the Electoral College would be complex.)

An even more promising reform, for the general election, would be ballot fusion, which involves simply allowing parties to nominate a candidate who is already on the ballot under another party. A new party with a platform that included, for example, changes to US policy in the Middle East or stronger action on climate change might endorse Biden but a vote for Biden on that party’s line would indicate a strong preference for a different approach. That party could also indicate to Biden or any other candidate that they had to earn their position on its line, by changing or promising to change their position. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie explains the value of fusion as a means of expression in this short video. Fusion isn’t a dramatic change — it’s a familiar practice in two states that allow it, New York and Connecticut, where the Working Families Party takes advantage of it as others have in the past. In other states, it was prohibited by law around the turn of the 20th century, often in order to block alliances between populist and progressive parties. Those bans could be overturned by statute or by courts.

The point here is not to make the case for fusion and multi-party democracy, which my colleagues and I have made elsewhere. It’s just to point out that there is an alternative to the “get over yourself” message, and the frustrations with this year’s choices. Both the frustrated voters and the scolds who insist there is no alternative should be more aware of those possibilities and perhaps get behind efforts to enact change, if not for this election, so that we don’t face such demoralizing constraints in the future.