A structural fault in society owing to a design flaw in the electoral system

An individual vote in an election has no meaningful effect in the objective world, and no effect whatsoever on the official outcome of the election; whether the vote is cast or not, the outcome is the same regardless. Beneath this fact lies a structural fault that emerges here and there in society as a series of persistent discontinuities between facts and norms, or contents and forms. One rightly expects to be free because he lives in a democracy and has a vote; but the truth is, he has no political freedom at all. I trace the underlying cause of this fault to a technical design flaw in the electoral system wherein the elector is physically separated from the ballot. This separation removes the elector as voter (the active decider) from the social means and product of decision thereby rendering him individually powerless.QCW

1. The fact of an objectively meaningless vote

[An individual vote in an election has no meaningful effect in the objective world, and no effect whatsoever on the official outcome of the election; whether the vote is cast or not, the outcome is the same regardless.]

2. A structural fault in society

I used to believe that I was free because I lived in a democracy and had a vote; but the truth is, I have no political freedom at all. Whether I vote or not, and regardless of who I vote for: (i) the candidates are chosen ahead of time, and I have no influence over the choice; (ii) the course of the election is the same regardless; (iii) the outcome is the same; (iv) the powers of the state are unaffected by my vote; and (v) the laws are unaffected. Yet, if I disobey the powers of the state, or the laws, then I am brought into submission by force. My only freedom in this regard is disobedience, and yet the cost of exercising it is physical confinement. The same political liberties that are denied to a citizen of China, or to a subject of Saudi Arabia, are also denied to me.

The modern individual is the bearer of human rights, most fundamentally the right of freedom. Political freedom in a modern state is defined in terms of opposition to political power. Since political power consists in force and threat of force, the only effective means of opposition is the counteracting force of a separate power. For this purpose, each citizen is granted a share of constitutional power in the form of an electoral vote. The intent is to enable the citizen to secure her (or his) own liberty by way of voting in state elections. However, as we have seen, the citizen's vote has no actual force in those elections; she is thus left powerless before the state and consequently unable to secure her own liberty. This abrupt discontinuity between a fact of freedom unattained and a right of freedom asserted is just one aspect (B) of a structural fault that appears to extend through modern society.

One might counter that political freedom could never, in any case, be secured by the action of a single individual. The citizen's vote is a necessary means to liberty, but is insufficient in itself to attain that end. It was always understood that the citizen might join forces with others, such that their combined votes could have an effect on the election. Political parties are organized for this very purpose. The constitution recognizes a right of free association, and together with the voting right it underpins a system of competitive political parties. The citizen is free to join any party. She may join a party that offers primary elections, where she may participate in the selection of candidates, or even stand as a candidate herself. These rights are sufficient to enable political freedom.

If I were to exchange my independence for a party membership, it would gain me little. The party would grant me a vote in the primary, but the outcome of the primary would be unaffected by that vote. What I lack is not what the party member has, but what the party itself has. The party has influence in the selection of candidates; in the success or failure of their campaigns; and in the drafting and passage of laws. Yet I never heard it said that a party has a right to these political freedoms that are denied to me.

The misassignment of liberty is another aspect (C) of the structural fault. The actual subject of political freedom is the group, wheras the rightful subject of any freedom is the individual. This is obvious in the case of the familiar constitutional freedoms, such as expression, thought, religion and association; clearly each of these is realized by the individual who speaks, thinks, worships or associates freely, and not by any proxy group that somehow exercises that freedom on behalf of the individual. The impropriety of the proxy is less obvious in the case of political freedom. Lacking experience in this freedom, one defers to tradition and accepts the fact of misassignment as the moral norm. To gain a feel for how wrong it can be, imagine an alternative world in which the misassigned and unrealized liberty is the more familiar one (to us) of free speech:

Where I live, we have freedom of speech. It is a precious freedom, because not all places in the world have it. I cannot actually speak to anyone, of course, nor can anyone speak to me. To exercise my freedom, I join a speech party. The speech party has a special booth, where, on special occasions, I speak into a microphone. My voice is recorded and mixed with the voices of other party members. The combined result becomes the voice of the party. The voice of the party is broadcast every night on the radio together with the voices of other parties. The parties speak to each other, and they speak to me. I enjoy listening! We are lucky to have freedom of speech; I wish every place in the world could have it.

An objection may be raised at this point that some liberties are necessarily socially bound. An example is free speech itself. The active subject is clearly the individual, but the value of speaking freely can only be realized before an audience. It therefore depends on the cooperation of other subjects, each of whom assumes the role of passive listener. Political liberty is also bound by social relations, though here the relations are among peers. The individual citizen as the subject of liberty is dependent on other subjects, each of whom likewise assumes the role of active citizen. Crucially, the inter-subjective activity of these citizens must be coordinated, and being coordinated it will necessarily take on the appearance of group activity; likewise for any liberty that is won by the individual citizens through that activity, it too will take on the appearance of a group liberty. This appearance is to be expected and cannot be taken as evidence that the liberty was misassigned to the group. Granted that the individual has no electoral power, it remains possible that some other liberating power is effective within a social context, and that that context is a political party.RI

[answer by stating the criteria for such a social context; then call on empirical science to decide the issue of whether B stands or falls on the evidence of the political party]

[other aspects of the fault have yet to be described, see table FAU.]

3. A design flaw in the electoral system

The electoral system uses a flawed model of the social world and no valid decision may be extracted from its results. The results depend upon a voting procedure in which the individual person as an elector is separated from her ballot (or his ballot) prior to the formation of a decision. This procedure not only invalidates the decision, but physically causes the structural fault in society between the individual person and the individual vote, thereby raising the possibility of broader societal failures. That fault and those failures are the topic of the previous and subsequent sections respectively, while this section deals with the root cause in the design of the electoral system.

[REL]Causal relations among a formal failure of technical design (left) and actual failures in society (right). See descriptions in text of (a), (b), (s).

Consider the voting procedure. On election day, the individual elector arrives at the polling place and enters a voting booth. There she (or he) places a pencil on the ballot and marks an 'X'. By this act, she becomes an actual voter. As a voter, she walks over to the ballot box and deposits her ballot, then walks away a non-voter again. She and her vote now go separate ways, her vote to remain in the ballot box to be summed with the others; and she perhaps homeward to await the announcement of the results. This, in essence, is the procedure for every voter in every state election. It appears to be the indirect cause of the structural fault in society, which here assumes its immediate physical form in the disconnection (S) between elector and ballot as multiplied across the population.

The individual votes are summed in the count engine to produce a numeric result, which in turn decides the final issue of the election - one of the candidates enters office, for example, while the others do not. This issue is interpreted as a legitimate decision of the voters. Some doubt might be cast on this interpretation, at this point, by observing the state of expectant curiosity in which the voters, now bereft of their votes, await to hear the decision. Ordinarily a group of decision makers is cognizant of the decision they are making. This doubt as to legitimacy takes on a technical form in the observation that the interpretation of results is lacking in material grounds. The formal aggregate of votes in the count engine does not correspond to an actual aggregate of voters in the social world. The individual votes are brought together to make a result, but the individual voters are not brought together as such (s) to make a decision; therefore no valid decision can be extracted from the result.

One might counter at this point with the argument that, as the decision comes entirely from the votes and the votes entirely from the voters, the decision must also have come from the voters.QMR This argument may be tested against a thought experiment. Imagine an extreme form of society that is constructed of cubicles. Each cubicle is provided with a television receiver, a voting slot and a single occupant. The occupants have free movement in the world, but no communication with each other. Periodic elections are held in which each occupant marks a ballot, drops it into the voting slot and awaits the announcement of the results. In this extreme situation of a "cubicle society", it is clearly possible that someone (or something) behind the television receivers could be making all of the decisions. This remains a possibility even though the decisions are executed in proper form through the intermediation of the voters and their votes; the content of the television signals may nevertheless be exposing the occupants to a manipulative force that determines the content of the decisions. Note that exposure to such a force would be contingent on either (or both) of the following forms of separation:

1. Separation of person from vote
2. Separation of person from person

To see why, imagine an extreme anti-cubicle society in which both these forms of separation are eliminated. The voters retain (1) possession and control of their votes during the process of decision formation, and (2) freedom to intercommunicate and interassociate. Here it becomes apparent that only the voters could decide the issue of the election. No matter who (or what) had control of the television signals, it could never gain sufficient traction to sway the decision. Together the voters would see through any such attempt and follow up individually by adjusting their votes.

The situation of an actual, modern society is unlike either of these two extremes. Although the electoral system formally enforces (1) the separation of person from vote, no part of society enforces (2) the separation of persons. In this situation, we cannot confidently predict the actual source or sources of the electoral decisions, or how exposed they are to manipulation. The content of the decisions might originate entirely with the voters, or not at all, or in some mix of different sources; we are left in doubt. At this point, it is useful to restate the criteria of reasonable doubt in a simpler form:

3. Separation of voter from voter

To the extent that the voters are separate during the formation of the decision and out of communication with each other, we may reasonably doubt that the decision was theirs. We certainly know that the electoral system enforces (1) a separation of person from vote. We also know that a person who does not actually possess and control a vote is not formally speaking a voter. It follows that regardless of any communication that occurs person to person (2), the electoral system nevertheless guarantees (s) the formal isolation of voter from voter. Here the design is working toward the ideal of the cubicle society, in that it works to maximize our doubt (b) concerning the source of the electoral decisions. Given that the purpose of an electoral system is quite the contrary, this particular design violates the basic engineering principle of efficacy, and this, in turn, enables us to conclude with some confidence that the design is flawed. Moreover, since the flaw may be having a significant effect on the content of the decisions, we may further conclude that those decisions are invalid. Finally, since the meaninglessness of the individual vote arises from the objective certainty that the vote is not a source of decision, the flaw can only be contributing to that meaninglessness; in fact, by separating the elector from the ballot and the voter from the voter, it closes off (a) all external avenues of communication for the voter as such to overcome the rounding procedure at election's end. This seals the vote's fate as a numerical nullity. Its only effect is internal, and that effect is nullified once the fine-grained sum is rounded to a coarse-grained outcome (who gets into office).

4. First hypothesis: Power's need of free opinion

5. The rise of the first public sphere

[Educated, middle class society of the 1700s and 1800s was able to partly overcome the design flaw by engaging in politically animated practices of decision formation and expression that, even without the benefit of a concrete ballot, were nevetherless voter-like. This ad hoc practice of "abstract voting" enabled them to hold a share of electoral power within the flourishing communication networks of the day.]

[NEW]Newspapers started in Britain, cumulative totals from 1665 to 1861. Data from Lawrence.Law09p36-7

6. The collapse of the public sphere onto the party system

[As voting rights expanded into the population, the franchise came to include more people who lacked the personal means to engage in abstract voting and thereby make rational decisions. Their cumulative disengagement amounted to a power vacuum that coincided with the rise, after 1867, of the modern party system in Great Britain. The modernized Liberal and Conservative parties responded by each packaging its own ready-made decision, thus reducing the input of the elector to a choice of which package to consume.]

7. Second hypothesis: Free opinion's need of formal support

[The transfer of power from the weaker members of the electorate to the organized parties in the later 1800s was the historical event that opened up the structural fault. It opened between the two formal components of political liberty, namely individual power and equality. These two components were torn apart for lack of any structural binding in society. Society is well equipped to handle the various forms of inter-personal or mass communication in which electoral power alone exists, but it lacks any concomitant support of equality. The ballot itself formalizes equality, but only internal to the electoral system; its equalizing structural strength cannot be realized unless it is externalized and personally bound to the elector. With that as a foundation, society could have provided electoral services on the basis of form rather than content; services in support of decision making as opposed to a one-size-fits-all consumption. Ordinary competition among service providers would then be sufficient to ensure that all electors regardless of personal means had access to their share of constitutional power and its associated opportunities. It was only ever a technical design flaw that precluded this development in the first place, and brought us instead to the present situation where the organized parties make the decisions and exercise the rightful power and political freedom that were intended for the citizens.]

Notes