tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/ralph-nader-13675/articlesRalph Nader – The Conversation2018-06-24T17:55:14Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/987942018-06-24T17:55:14Z2018-06-24T17:55:14ZTrump’s new plan to consolidate federal food safety efforts won’t work. Here’s why<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/224504/original/file-20180622-26570-myl82n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An FDA lab technician inspects food for contaminants in Lenexa, Kansas.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-Domestic-News-Missouri-United-/f98b5654a2e5da11af9f0014c2589dfb/27/0">AP Photo/Todd Feeback</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Trump administration recently unveiled an ambitious <a href="https://www.performance.gov/GovReform/Reform-and-Reorg-Plan-Final.pdf">plan to consolidate</a> federal food safety efforts within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. </p>
<p>Currently, 15 agencies throughout the federal government administer 35 different laws related to food safety under the oversight of nine congressional committees. The administration calls this system “illogical” and “fragmented.”</p>
<p>“While [the USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service] has regulatory responsibility for the safety of liquid eggs, [the Food and Drug Administration in the Department of Health and Human Services] has regulatory responsibility for the safety of eggs while they are inside of their shells,” the document explains. “FDA regulates cheese pizza, but if there is pepperoni on top, it falls under the jurisdiction of FSIS; FDA regulates closed-faced meat sandwiches, while FSIS regulates open-faced meat sandwiches.”</p>
<p>Concern about this state of affairs has been fueling <a href="http://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1334&context=shlr">similar consolidation proposals for decades</a>. </p>
<p>But <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=yQUI6yEAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">my research</a> for a forthcoming book on the U.S. food safety system suggests that the Trump administration plan faces a number of challenges that make a major reorganization of federal food safety regulation both impractical and undesirable.</p>
<h2>Why food safety regulation is so complicated</h2>
<p>The curious division of labor between the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration dates back to the passage of two laws enacted in 1906.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/wcm/connect/fsis-content/fsis-questionable-content/celebrating-100-years-of-fmia/overview/ct_index">Meat Inspection Act</a> mandated inspection of all beef carcasses. The <a href="http://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/Pure-Food-and-Drug-Act/">Pure Food and Drug Act</a> prohibited the sale of adulterated food in interstate commerce. </p>
<p>Initially, both laws were implemented by officials at the USDA. Its Bureau of Animal Industry placed inspectors trained in veterinary science at every meat plant. Meanwhile, its Bureau of Chemistry employed laboratory scientists to test foods for adulteration. </p>
<p>In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt <a href="https://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/History/FOrgsHistory/default.htm">moved the Bureau of Chemistry</a>, by then renamed the Food and Drug Administration, out of the USDA and into the Federal Security Agency, which <a href="https://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/History/FOrgsHistory/default.htm">later became the Department of Health and Human Services</a>. Today, the FDA is responsible for overseeing the production of most foods other than meat and poultry. </p>
<p>Separately, the Bureau of Animal Industry was <a href="https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/informational/aboutfsis/history">renamed the Food Safety Inspection Service</a>, which is still responsible for all meat and poultry inspections.</p>
<p>Concerns about regulatory fragmentation grew as Congress assigned new tasks related to food safety to a variety of other agencies.</p>
<p>For example, Congress instructed the Federal Trade Commission to regulate food advertising, the Environmental Protection Agency to set pesticide tolerances and the National Marine Fisheries Service to inspect seafood.</p>
<h2>Efforts at reform</h2>
<p>Proponents of putting food safety under the roof of a single agency <a href="https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=624013110082094067003024026110089011052056061029027087091072076125102071125123072074053002099029105061121072067025070071078066039041082054021074095030121120089067046040116102069007072005099023127106074125093098088097126122120077066001126000095092&EXT=pdf">have argued</a> that the current system causes confusion because different agencies produce inconsistent standards. </p>
<p>They further allege that overlapping jurisdictions create inefficiencies and that inadequate coordination leaves gaps in coverage. They also worry that the involvement of so many different actors diffuses political accountability. </p>
<p>The first high-profile proposal to consolidate federal food safety regulation was made in 1949, during the Truman administration, when a presidential commission <a href="http://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1334&context=shlr">recommended transferring</a> food safety oversight to the USDA, just as the Trump administration has.</p>
<p>In 1972, consumer activist <a href="http://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1334&context=shlr">Ralph Nader advocated creating</a> a new consumer safety agency to oversee food safety. And a few years later, a <a href="http://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1334&context=shlr">Senate committee recommended</a> moving the USDA’s food safety responsibilities to the FDA.</p>
<p>Those are just three examples of more than 20 such proposals from both sides of the political aisle, including one by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/21/us/obama-proposes-single-overseer-for-food-safety.html">President Barack Obama</a> in 2015. </p>
<h2>Why Trump’s proposal is likely to fail</h2>
<p>None of these consolidation efforts succeeded for the same reasons the current one is unlikely to work now. </p>
<p>First of all, the many congressional committees that currently oversee agencies that regulate food safety are unlikely to support any reorganization that would reduce their power. Congressional oversight affords lawmakers who serve on committees opportunities to help interest groups and constituents in exchange for political support. </p>
<p>Similarly, industry associations are unlikely to support a reorganization that would disrupt their relationships with existing agencies. Consolidation threatens to reduce their access and influence over agency decisions. </p>
<p>In addition to the political obstacles to consolidation, there are practical problems. Merely merging the 5,000 food safety officials in the FDA and the 9,200 officials in the FSIS under the oversight of a single administrator would not eliminate the differences in jurisdiction, powers and expertise responsible for the current bureaucratic fragmentation. Meaningful consolidation would require a complete overhaul of federal food safety laws and regulations, a task of extraordinary legal and political complexity.</p>
<p>Moreover, consolidating food safety efforts in a single agency might create new forms of fragmentation. For example, transferring the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine’s program for regulating drug residues in beef and poultry to the USDA would separate it from the FDA’s veterinary drug approval program.</p>
<p>And finally, reorganization is costly and would take years for the different agency teams newly working together to develop bonds of trust and cooperation. And these costs would have to be paid upfront, without a clear idea of whether the expected gains will ever pay off. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/224503/original/file-20180622-26552-1cnzgvp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/224503/original/file-20180622-26552-1cnzgvp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224503/original/file-20180622-26552-1cnzgvp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224503/original/file-20180622-26552-1cnzgvp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224503/original/file-20180622-26552-1cnzgvp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224503/original/file-20180622-26552-1cnzgvp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224503/original/file-20180622-26552-1cnzgvp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">While whole eggs are regulated by the FDA, egg products are overseen by the USDA.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Economy/f06df2617f47496892c75ed0fd07e99a/14/0">AP Photo/Mark Lennihan</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>All or nothing?</h2>
<p>Consolidation need not be all or nothing. </p>
<p>For example, <a href="https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-318SP">some have proposed more modest consolidation</a> of inspection services, policy planning and communications that would be less costly and not so difficult.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, Congress has shown little interest in considering any bureaucratic reorganization of federal food safety regulation, even a partial consolidation. </p>
<p>In other words, the Trump administration may have to settle for the less ambitious goal of better interagency coordination, which offers an alternative way to address concerns about duplication and coverage gaps. This more modest approach would not, however, address the persistent problem of fragmentation.</p>
<p>In food safety, as in other regulatory reform arenas, it may turn out that half a loaf is better than none.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98794/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Timothy D. Lytton has recently been awarded a USDA-funded grant to study food safety among specialty crop producers.</span></em></p>The Trump administration wants to streamline federal food safety efforts under one roof as part of a sweeping new plan to reorganize government.Timothy D. Lytton, Distinguished University Professor & Professor of Law, Georgia State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/833872017-09-06T12:10:19Z2017-09-06T12:10:19ZBeware the cult of ‘tech fixing’ – it’s why America is eyeing the nuclear button<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184906/original/file-20170906-9862-iddu2f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'I will attack and I might like that.'</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/intercontinental-ballistic-missile-icbm-rocket-collect-688481440?src=boUUxc7YDSjMrLJgIEmDwg-1-2">Quality Stock Arts</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>With even Vladimir Putin <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/b4d37d7e-91d8-11e7-a9e6-11d2f0ebb7f0">now warning</a> of global catastrophe from the <a href="https://theconversation.com/if-trump-is-bluffing-on-north-korea-the-results-could-be-catastrophic-82340">recent tensions</a> in Korea, we are in arguably the worst period of nuclear brinkmanship since the end of the Cold War. It is partly thanks to a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/04/annihilating-north-korea-create-more-problems-than-solves-trump-us-right-nuclear-taboo">strand of thinking</a> among the American right that a nuclear attack on Pyongyang would succeed where decades of diplomacy has failed. </p>
<p>Welcome to the cult of the “technological fix”. It is the conviction that social and political problems can be side-stepped by clever engineering. The same logic finds its way into many recent initiatives. It helps explain why Donald Trump <a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/us-commissions-first-prototypes-for-controversial-border-wall-a3624491.html">continues to</a> pursue a 1,000 mile wall with Mexico as the answer to America’s problem with illegal immigrants, for example. </p>
<p>Technological fixes are nothing new, of course. Controlling the flow of populations with physical obstructions lay behind the medieval <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/great-wall-of-china">Great Wall of China</a> and <a href="http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/hadrians-wall/history/">Hadrian’s Wall</a> in England in the second century. The layout of 19th century Paris was <a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/avant-garde-france/second-empire/a/haussmann-the-demolisher-and-the-creation-of-modern-paris">transformed</a> with broad avenues to prevent mobs from barricading the streets. In the 1880s, streetcar manufacturers experimented with automatic doors to make joyriding impossible.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184907/original/file-20170906-9202-ncxfzg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184907/original/file-20170906-9202-ncxfzg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184907/original/file-20170906-9202-ncxfzg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184907/original/file-20170906-9202-ncxfzg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184907/original/file-20170906-9202-ncxfzg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184907/original/file-20170906-9202-ncxfzg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184907/original/file-20170906-9202-ncxfzg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184907/original/file-20170906-9202-ncxfzg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Great Wall of China.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ISSArt/iss_art2.php">NASA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the 20th century, technological fixes were packaged and given the name by one tireless promoter, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/21/obituaries/21weinberg.html?mcubz=0">Alvin M Weinberg</a>. Weinberg was a reactor designer during the wartime <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Manhattan-Project">Manhattan Project</a>, the Allies’ bid to be first to create an atomic bomb. He went on to become director of a <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=s-qyvnSvSpUC&pg=PA251&lpg=PA251&dq=sean+johnston+weinberg&source=bl&ots=bdw5tSlsCI&sig=pgOV_Ubr9qSmNJJSRoKECO9x5kU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi36cnYzI7WAhVFLVAKHafgArAQ6AEISDAJ#v=onepage&q&f=false">national laboratory</a> exploring applications of nuclear energy. </p>
<h2>Science supreme</h2>
<p>Imagining a world transformed by nuclear power, Weinberg became convinced that technological innovation was the best way of dealing with any social issue. Well placed to gain the ear of engineering peers and American policymakers, he <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/157/3792/1026">invented</a> a durable term for this confident new environment: Big Science.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184909/original/file-20170906-9823-11d36ks.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184909/original/file-20170906-9823-11d36ks.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184909/original/file-20170906-9823-11d36ks.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=711&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184909/original/file-20170906-9823-11d36ks.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=711&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184909/original/file-20170906-9823-11d36ks.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=711&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184909/original/file-20170906-9823-11d36ks.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184909/original/file-20170906-9823-11d36ks.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184909/original/file-20170906-9823-11d36ks.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Weinberg.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Alvin_Weinberg.jpg#/media/File:Alvin_Weinberg.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For Weinberg, conventional problem solving through education, law enforcement and moral guidance was slow and ineffective. Convert such issues into technological problems to be solved by engineers, he argued. The Hiroshima bomb had dodged the need for political negotiation, he claimed, stabilising international relations in the process.</p>
<p>In the wall-building stakes, Weinberg was Trump’s fellow traveller. He petitioned the <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/presidents/lyndonbjohnson">Johnson administration</a> to build a wall between North and South Vietnam, though privately admitted shortly after that his scheme was “very amateurish”. He also <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=y5WjYgMc7eEC&pg=PA150&lpg=PA150&dq=weinberg+bresee&source=bl&ots=Ck9DuOLjW9&sig=vB9BcEYloFWnlsVwjrhRiy0715c&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi-o8uNzo7WAhUIJ1AKHRtICyYQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&q=weinberg%20bresee&f=false">promoted</a> the idea of funding air conditioners in slum districts, arguing they would literally cool down tensions during the hot summer months to avoid urban riots. </p>
<p>This too was left on the drawing board, but other <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=WAgAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA4&lpg=PA4&dq=weinberg+%22social+engineering%22&source=bl&ots=M1KDpNfg6f&sig=bmmDJYRrAhJ6g_wiwLC5AFpMdDU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwju9Oizyo7WAhUCJ1AKHbQ3AaE4ChDoAQgsMAE#v=onepage&q=weinberg%20%22social%20engineering%22&f=false">less provocative</a> ideas gained traction. He shared road safety campaigner Ralph Nader’s observation that car seatbelts were more effective than traffic laws or driver education for reducing fatalities. He <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SbNAfWWdNQsC&pg=PA292&lpg=PA292&dq=air-conditioners+weinberg&source=bl&ots=HteFUeXN0H&sig=a0qD4CYwBfaPVv4_tHTwEiqLMNI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiplOWMz47WAhXRL1AKHTTWB70Q6AEIOzAE#v=onepage&q=air-conditioners%20weinberg&f=false">claimed</a> that intra-uterine contraceptive devices like the coil meant birth control was no longer “a desperately complicated social problem”. He pushed cigarette filters as an easier way to reduce the harms of smoking than persuading users to quit. </p>
<h2>The cult of the tech fix</h2>
<p>Weinberg’s faith in engineers is even more widespread today. His championing of the likes of cigarette filters anticipated the way we value technological fixes for improving individuals – particularly their health and well-being. </p>
<p>To address our cultural preoccupation with weight control, for example, why have diet plans or exercise regimes when there are low-calorie sugar substitutes, over-the-counter appetite suppressants, gastric bands and liposuction? And if you eat healthily and exercise anyway, don’t worry: there are wearable technologies to monitor, cajole and regiment us further. </p>
<p>When Apple <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szrsfeyLzyg">came up with</a> “there’s an app for that” to promote software-based tech fixes, it epitomised Silicon Valley’s reinvention of Weinberg dogma as <a href="http://www.techrepublic.com/article/silicon-valleys-solutionism-issues-appear-to-be-scaling/">solutionism</a>. Where Weinberg promoted societal benefits, now it had become about personal empowerment for the “me” generation. </p>
<p>The message is that if you’re deficient in willpower, attention and consistency, it’s okay – a consumer engineering fix is only a few clicks away. And the future promises to be still brighter. Say hello to <a href="https://theconversation.com/genome-editing-poses-ethical-problems-that-we-cannot-ignore-39466">genetic engineering</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-science-drugs-and-tech-pushing-our-brains-to-new-limits-65281">nootropics</a> and <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-computer-startup-a7916891.html">implantable microchips</a>. </p>
<p>Weinberg’s agenda also endures at the policy level. To address terrorism, we have locks on cockpit doors, metal detectors, surveillance monitoring, bomb-sniffing devices and body scanners at airports. We seem to prefer such responses to anything so socio-political as negotiation or education. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184913/original/file-20170906-9202-1fjvnhx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184913/original/file-20170906-9202-1fjvnhx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184913/original/file-20170906-9202-1fjvnhx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184913/original/file-20170906-9202-1fjvnhx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184913/original/file-20170906-9202-1fjvnhx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184913/original/file-20170906-9202-1fjvnhx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184913/original/file-20170906-9202-1fjvnhx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184913/original/file-20170906-9202-1fjvnhx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Step this way, sir.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/passenger-passing-through-security-check-airport-322320815?src=6xjXqpERpY3MVbQn21mNGQ-1-28">Monkey Business Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Environmental concerns are another favourite. <a href="https://theconversation.com/five-reasons-why-you-might-be-driving-electric-sooner-than-you-think-71896">Electric motors</a> promise more cars on the road with less air pollution. Oil-digesting microbes <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-microbes-helped-clean-bp-s-oil-spill/">promise to</a> clean up oil spills. Plastic packaging <a href="http://www.tikp.co.uk/knowledge/material-functionality/uv-resistance/the-effects-of-ultraviolet-light-on-polymeric-materials/">that degrades in sunlight</a> could make litter disappear without clean-up campaigns. </p>
<p>Geo-engineering could even deal with climate change overall – limiting <a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/geoengineering-technology-could-cool-the-planet-2017-7">temperature rise</a>, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/geo-engineering-technology-climate-change-environment-climeworks-carbon-dioxide-chemicals-dimming-a7860356.html">carbon dioxide levels</a> or both. Life can continue as usual, we are told again and again. </p>
<h2>Downsides</h2>
<p>For all this confidence and hubris, we need to pay more heed to the drawbacks. Critics have long argued that technological fixes overlook deeper problems. Weinberg himself conceded they can look like “band-aids”, but believed they were still worthwhile while a better solution was being sought. </p>
<p>Yet this risks settling for the band-aid. We might become so pleased with electric cars that we stop worrying about the continued proliferation of roads, sedentary lifestyles and social segregation. If Trump’s wall reduces illegal immigration, progressive Americans might lose interest in helping Mexico to become prosperous. </p>
<p>An even deeper concern is with placing problem solving in the hands of narrowly trained technical experts. Take the coil, for example: unlike condoms or the pill, where users make a daily choice, intra-uterine devices are a one-off insertion under a doctor’s authority. The flip-side of relying on engineering cures may be a passive and powerless public. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184915/original/file-20170906-9871-1d1d9gu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184915/original/file-20170906-9871-1d1d9gu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184915/original/file-20170906-9871-1d1d9gu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184915/original/file-20170906-9871-1d1d9gu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184915/original/file-20170906-9871-1d1d9gu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184915/original/file-20170906-9871-1d1d9gu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184915/original/file-20170906-9871-1d1d9gu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184915/original/file-20170906-9871-1d1d9gu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">That 2016 feeling.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Donald_Trump_supporters_in_Maryland_(29638831625).jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Weinberg never used the term “technocracy”, yet he <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-009-2207-5_10">did acknowledge</a> that some technological solutions were incompatible with liberal democracy. Ironically, of course, it is exactly such frustrations that helped usher the current American president into office. </p>
<p>None of this is to say technological fixes are always wrong; more that they can be overly seductive. We need to recognise when they seem too good to be true, and consider them cautiously. That way we can steal back some of that democratic thunder before it’s too late – starting, one would hope, by avoiding nuclear war in Korea.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83387/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sean Johnston has received funding for this research from the British Academy grant number SG132088</span></em></p>What do intercontinental missiles and Apple’s app store have in common? Alvin M Weinberg.Sean F. Johnston, Professor of Science, Technology and Society, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/749732017-04-12T00:38:29Z2017-04-12T00:38:29ZBeyond instant runoff: A better way to conduct multi-candidate elections<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164512/original/image-20170407-27621-1e5q4aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A vote is cast in New Hampshire 2012 primary. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/APTOPIX-New-Hampshire-Primary-2012/de5da42595844cceb510a83af8150039/15/0">AP Photo/Matt Rourke</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Last November, <a href="https://theconversation.com/maine-ballot-initiative-would-let-voters-rank-candidates-67694">Maine voters approved</a>, by a slim majority, a ballot initiative to adopt a voting system called “instant runoff.” </p>
<p>This system has been proposed as an alternative to our traditional election method – called “plurality voting” – by several politicians, including 2016 Green Party presidential candidate <a href="http://www.jill2016.com/ranked_choice_voting">Jill Stein</a>. It has also been implemented in <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/rcv#where_is_ranked_choice_voting_used">various municipal elections</a> in the United States. </p>
<p>Many other multi-candidate election methods have been proposed. Most of them have the drawback of being complicated, and therefore are probably not politically viable. I want to suggest a method that I believe is much better than both plurality voting and instant runoff, and just as simple as instant runoff. </p>
<h2>Plurality voting and its problems</h2>
<p>In plurality voting, every voter names their favorite candidate, and the candidate named most often wins. </p>
<p>This is the only reasonable thing to do when there are only two candidates, but it becomes problematic when there are more. The problems are <a href="https://electology.org/blog/top-5-ways-plurality-voting-fails">well-recognized</a>. For example, if you were every voter’s second choice among five candidates, you’d be doing very well, quite possibly better than any other candidate by most reasonable measures – yet you would lose. Plurality voting in fact appears to promote the emergence of two-party systems. Political scientists call this <a href="http://scorevoting.net/Duverger.html">Duverger’s Law</a>.</p>
<p>When there are two major candidates and some much weaker third-party candidates, plurality voting leads to “spoiler” problems. The weak candidates can change the outcome, sometimes in ways that their supporters find highly undesirable. For instance, the presence of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader on the presidential ballot in Florida in 2000 may very well have caused Al Gore to lose Florida, and thereby the presidency, even though it’s likely that a large majority of Nader voters preferred Gore to George Bush. </p>
<p>Attempts to improve plurality voting have a long history, with primaries in the U.S. as well as runoff rounds in presidential elections in France, Brazil and other countries. </p>
<h2>Instant runoff and its problems</h2>
<p>With instant runoff, every voter ranks the candidates. The candidate who is ranked first by the fewest voters is then removed from the ballots, and candidates who were ranked underneath the removed candidate move up by one notch. Then the process is repeated until only one candidate remains. That candidate wins.</p>
<p>In practice, one would want to allow voters to rank only some, not all, of the candidates, and one would want to allow ties. These are complications that are important, but also easy to deal with. For simplicity, we’ll assume here that all voters rank all candidates, with no ties.</p>
<p>When there are two strong candidates and some much weaker third-party candidates, instant runoff clearly does away with the spoiler problem. Weak candidates are eliminated early on. </p>
<p>For example, if instant runoff had been used in the 2000 presidential election in Florida, Gore would likely have been president. Nader would have been eliminated early on in the process, and those among his 97,421 voters who preferred Gore over Bush would have been counted as Gore voters. Considering that the final official margin by which Bush won Florida was 537, it seems likely that this would have changed the outcome.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, instant runoff – just like plurality voting – also immediately eliminates the candidate who is everyone’s second choice but nobody’s first.</p>
<p>And, just like plurality voting, instant runoff does not work well when there are more than two strong candidates. It can then produce quite arbitrary outcomes. If there are five strong candidates, should you really be eliminated just because 18 percent of voters put you first, while the other four candidates were placed first by 19 to 22 percent of voters? Shouldn’t we look at how many voters put you second, for instance, before ruling you out as the winner? </p>
<h2>Condorcet and Borda</h2>
<p>Two French noblemen of the 1700s thought about how to organize multi-candidate elections: the Marqis de Condorcet and Jean-Charles de Borda. (Condorcet was friends with Thomas Jefferson, who appears to have paid little attention to Condorcet’s writings about voting.) </p>
<p>Condorcet suggested that, if an absolute majority – more than half the voters – prefers Candidate X to Candidate Y, then Candidate Y should not be the winner. That seems very reasonable. Why not make the majority happier by making X the winner? </p>
<p>Unfortunately, when there are more than two candidates, this principle can easily rule out everyone. There can be a situation where, say, 55 percent of voters prefer Candidate A to Candidate B, 60 percent prefer B to C and 65 percent prefer C to A. </p>
<p>Condorcet didn’t say what should happen in such a case. His proposal refers only to situations in which there is a single candidate, the “Condorcet candidate,” who would beat every other candidate in head-to-head contest. He suggested that a Condorcet candidate, if there is one, should win. </p>
<p>As sensible as this sounds, both plurality voting and instant runoff violate it. Take my earlier example of an election with five candidates. If you are ranked second by every single voter, you might well win head-to-head contests against each of your four competitors. But, under plurality voting or instant runoff, you will lose.</p>
<p>Borda proposed <a href="http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/borda-count">his own election method</a> that allots each candidate points based on their ranking. For instance, if there are five candidates, then Borda proposes to give a candidate five points for first place on a voter’s ballot, four points for second place, and so on. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, Borda and Condorcet can clash in a rather dramatic way. Even if an absolute majority of voters place you first, Borda may have you lose if most of the other voters strongly dislike you.</p>
<p>Borda’s method tends to handicap polarizing candidates. This seems like a good thing. However, if an absolute majority of voters place me first, then I should win, according to Condorcet, and most people would probably agree. When Borda’s method makes me lose because I am strongly disliked by a substantial minority, one could – and Condorcet would – argue that this goes a bit too far.</p>
<h2>Merging Condorcet’s and Borda’s ideas</h2>
<p>Merging Condorcet’s and Borda’s ideas creates an election method which, in my view, is much better than instant runoff, and just as simple. (I discuss this method at greater length in <a href="http://epubs.siam.org/doi/book/10.1137/1.9780898717624">my textbook</a> on this subject.) </p>
<p>In the system I propose, voters rank candidates, as in instant runoff and many other election methods. The outcome is then evaluated in two stages: a “Condorcet stage” where we pick out the strongest candidates, followed by a “Borda stage” where we identify the winner. </p>
<p>In the Condorcet stage, we determine the “strong” candidates. We define the “strong” candidates to be the smallest group of candidates with the property that everybody inside the group would beat everybody outside the group in two-person races. (This is also often called the <a href="http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Smith_set">Smith set</a>, after the mathematician <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_H._Smith_(mathematician)">John H. Smith</a>.) For instance, if there is a Condorcet candidate X, then X is the only strong candidate. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164701/original/image-20170410-8840-rpb1l5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164701/original/image-20170410-8840-rpb1l5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=441&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164701/original/image-20170410-8840-rpb1l5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=441&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164701/original/image-20170410-8840-rpb1l5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=441&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164701/original/image-20170410-8840-rpb1l5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164701/original/image-20170410-8840-rpb1l5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164701/original/image-20170410-8840-rpb1l5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Condorcet stage.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Christoph Borgers</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We then remove all candidates who are not strong from the ballots, and move on to the Borda stage. The winner is computed with the reduced ballots based on Borda’s method. </p>
<p>In a presidential election, voters would all rank all the candidates: Republicans, Democrats and others. A computer would then determine the strong candidates. (No cause for alarm: Anybody who knows the election results could quite easily verify the computer’s work by hand.) Borda’s method would then decide from among this group. </p>
<p>I believe that many of the people who now support instant runoff should, and would, like this scheme even more. It eliminates weak candidates right away, removing the possibility of spoiler effects. It allows two candidates from the same party to run without interfering with each other so much that neither can win. It allows more than two strong candidates to emerge. When there are several strong candidates, the results are intuitively sensible. The method retains one of the advantages of Borda’s method – namely that polarizing candidates often lose – but, unlike Borda’s method, it does not allow a Condorcet candidate to lose. Equally importantly, the method is simple and transparent, and therefore might be politically viable. </p>
<p>There is no doubt that the issue is important: We cannot value democracy, yet refuse to think about the question how to conduct elections in a fair way.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74973/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christoph Borgers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Some American voters hope that instant runoff can make our elections better. But a mathematician has an idea for another solution.Christoph Borgers, Professor of Mathematics, Tufts UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/692062016-12-02T02:59:47Z2016-12-02T02:59:47ZHow majority voting betrayed voters again in 2016<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/148160/original/image-20161130-17000-nguzzj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">What if this was our choice on Election Day?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photos/Gary Landers and Paul Sancya</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The system for electing the U.S. president went woefully wrong from the very beginning of 2016. </p>
<p>First, the two <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-distaste-for-both-trump-and-clinton-is-record-breaking/">most disliked candidates ever nominated</a> – Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donald J. Trump – emerged victors from their parties’ primaries, but shouldn’t have. Second, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/three-common-arguments-for-preserving-the-electoral-college-and-why-theyre-wrong-68546">increasingly controversial</a> Electoral College system will formally elect Trump on December 19 despite Clinton’s lead of over two million in the popular vote.</p>
<p>The system is “rigged” all right, not for a candidate but against the voter. It fails to elect candidates the voters really want. Why? And what should be done about it? </p>
<p><a href="http://www.ams.org/samplings/feature-column/fcarc-apportionii3">Years of work</a> in developing <a href="http://www.mathaware.org/mam/08/EliminateGerrymandering.pdf">fair</a> <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-make-the-house-of-representatives-representative-32921">methods</a> of representation and systems for <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/majority-judgment">electing candidates</a> that truly respond to the opinions of the electorate have convinced me that the real culprit is majority voting and not the Electoral College. I will give my reasons.</p>
<h2>Majority voting’s failures</h2>
<p>Majority voting (MV) is an extremely crude approximation of the opinion of the electorate that has often elected a candidate counter to the popular will. </p>
<p>Walter Lippmann – claimed by many to be the most influential American journalist of the 20th century – <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Phantom_Public.html?id=fnk-a3IX5ZgC">realized this in 1925</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“But what in fact is an election? We call it an expression of the popular will. But is it? We go into a polling booth and mark a cross on a piece of paper for one of two, or perhaps three or four names. Have we expressed our thoughts … ? Presumably we have a number of thoughts on this and that with many buts and ifs and ors. Surely the cross on a piece of paper does not express them … [C]alling a vote the expression of our mind is an empty fiction.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>There have been 57 presidential elections. By my count, 12 of them elected candidates that were almost certainly not the true choices of the electorate, the last three occurring in 1912, 1992 and 2000. </p>
<p>Woodrow Wilson was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1912">elected in 1912</a> (with 41.8 percent of the popular vote) against incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft (23.2 percent) because of the Bull Moose candidacy of the former Republican President Teddy Roosevelt (27.4 percent): Either of them would most likely have won head-to-head against Wilson.</p>
<p>A similar <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1992">scenario occurred in 1992</a> with Bill Clinton (43.0 percent) winning against George H. W. Bush (37.4 percent) because of the candidacy of Ross Perot (18.9 percent): Bush (father) would almost surely have beaten Clinton head-to-head. </p>
<p>And in 2000 George W. Bush (47.9 percent) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000">won with a bare majority</a> of 271 Electoral College votes against Al Gore (48.4 percent) because of the candidacy of Ralph Nader. Bush’s lead of a mere 537 (out of nearly 6 million) votes in Florida would have easily been erased if the 97,000 who voted for Nader could have expressed their preference for Gore.</p>
<p>Why does this happen? Because, as Lippmann suggested, MV does not permit voters to express their opinions fully.</p>
<p>In 1912 it was impossible for a Roosevelt voter to express a preference for Taft over Wilson, or a Taft voter to express a preference for Roosevelt over Wilson. Similarly, it was impossible for voters to express their preference for Bush (father) and Perot over Clinton in 1992, or for Nader voters in Florida to express their preference for Gore rather than Bush (son) in 2000. Had they been able to express their opinions of the candidates more accurately, the outcomes would have been different.</p>
<p>MV, as old as the hills, is merely a mechanism that has been accepted by force of habit. As Thomas Paine <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/147/147-h/147-h.htm">wrote in 1776 in “Common Sense”</a> – “the <a href="https://www.amrevmuseum.org/read-the-revolution/biography/revolutionary-characters">most incendiary and popular pamphlet</a> of the entire revolutionary era”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Majority voting is such a thing. It is thought to be democratic, but isn’t, as these examples (and many others) show. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/148164/original/image-20161130-17047-civz9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/148164/original/image-20161130-17047-civz9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148164/original/image-20161130-17047-civz9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148164/original/image-20161130-17047-civz9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148164/original/image-20161130-17047-civz9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148164/original/image-20161130-17047-civz9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148164/original/image-20161130-17047-civz9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Don Lamb, an employee of La Scala Restaurant in Little Rock, Arkansas, cleans the front window of the restaurant, Saturday, Oct. 31, 1992.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Danny Johnston</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Ranked voting’s failures</h2>
<p>Some reformers advocate another mechanism, “ranked voting” (RV). Instead of choosing one among the candidates the voter lists them all from their most to their least preferred.
This <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count">18th-century idea</a> (from the French mathematician and political scientist <a href="http://gerardgreco.free.fr/IMG/pdf/MA_c_moire-Borda-1781.pdf">Jean-Charles de Borda</a>) is a better scheme for voters to express themselves – and so it must have seemed to the narrow majority of 51.99 percent of <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Maine_Ranked_Choice_Voting_Initiative,_Question_5_(2016)">Maine’s voters</a> who adopted one version of the possible methods based on RV, Ranked Choice Voting, in a statewide vote on November 8. </p>
<p>However, I argue that they were sold a bill of goods: RV’s drawbacks completely disqualify it. </p>
<p>First and foremost, RV is far from permitting an adequate expression of the voters’ opinions. A voter cannot reject all candidates, cannot consider two candidates equally good and cannot express strong versus lukewarm support (or rejection). </p>
<p>Furthermore, when RV has actually been used by juries in such competitions as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISU_Judging_System">figure skating</a>, <a href="http://www.fig-gymnastics.com/publicdir/rules/files/mag/MAG%20CoP%202013-2016%20(FRA%20ENG%20ESP)%20July%202015.pdf">gymnastics</a> and <a href="http://www.fina.org/content/diving-rules">diving</a>, its results have sometimes been so wildly peculiar that increasingly it has been abandoned in favor of methods that ask judges to evaluate competitors instead of ranking them. Figure skating juries’ rules, for example,<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/majority-judgment"> made the change</a> in response to the 2002 winter Olympic scandal in pairs figure skating. </p>
<h2>Majority judgment</h2>
<p>My colleague, Rida Laraki, and I <a href="https://theconversation.com/trump-and-clinton-victorious-proof-that-us-voting-system-doesnt-work-58752">have developed a new method</a> of voting, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/majority-judgment">majority judgment (MJ)</a>, which avoids the drawbacks of MV and RV. </p>
<p>MJ asks voters a simple and natural question such as that recently posed by the Pew Research Center: “What kind of president do you think each of the following would be – a great, good, average, poor or terrible president?” In its <a href="http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2016/11/03170033/10-27-16-October-political-release.pdf">last national survey </a> of registered voters (Oct. 20-25) Pew reported the following results (here adjusted to sum to 100 percent):</p>
<iframe id="datawrapper-chart-VlROX" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/VlROX/2/" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" oallowfullscreen="oallowfullscreen" msallowfullscreen="msallowfullscreen" width="100%" height="270"></iframe>
<p>All one needs to do is look at the evaluations of the two candidates in the table above to conclude that Clinton is better evaluated than Trump. </p>
<p>But what exactly is the majority opinion? </p>
<p>Clinton would be an Average President because in a majority vote between Average and any other “grade,” it wins. This is most easily seen by noting that a majority of 8%+27%+20%=55% believes she would be at least Average – so Average defeats any lower grade – and a majority of 20%+11%+34%=65% that she would be at most Average – so Average defeats any higher grade. It suffices to start from each end of the spectrum adding percentages until a majority is reached; in practice the sums from both directions will always reach a majority at the same grade. </p>
<p>Similarly, a majority believes Trump would be a Poor President because 54 percent believes he would be at least Poor and 57 percent that he would be at most Poor. With these evaluations majority judgment elects Clinton since the majority evaluates her above Trump. </p>
<p>MJ simply uses the majority principle – the idea that the majority can represent the whole – to deduce the electorate’s evaluation of every candidate, called their majority-grades, instead of using it to compare the number of votes each candidate receives. </p>
<p>No system is perfect. But majority judgment is far superior to any other known system. Here’s why:</p>
<ul>
<li>It is easier and more natural for voters since grading is familiar since school days; </li>
<li>It obtains more information from voters and puts more confidence in them by permitting them to express their opinions accurately;</li>
<li>It gives more information about the standing of candidates in the eyes of the public – had Clinton won she would have known her standing: Average;</li>
<li>Most importantly, it elects the candidate highest in the esteem of the electorate.</li>
</ul>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/148161/original/image-20161130-17028-73izta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/148161/original/image-20161130-17028-73izta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148161/original/image-20161130-17028-73izta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148161/original/image-20161130-17028-73izta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148161/original/image-20161130-17028-73izta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148161/original/image-20161130-17028-73izta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/148161/original/image-20161130-17028-73izta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">John and Colleen Kramer, of Stockton, Missouri, vote at the Caplinger Mills Trading Post on Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016, in Caplinger Mills, Missouri.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What happened this year?</h2>
<p>Pew Research – without realizing that their question serves as the basis of a method of voting – posed exactly the same question this year in January, March and August as well as late October. </p>
<p>In every case the majority evaluated Clinton an Average President and Trump a Poor President; moreover, their respective grades remained remarkably similar over all four polls, suggesting that despite all the hoopla – emails, sexism, racism, walls, FBI, secret speeches, jail and so much more – the electorate’s opinions concerning the two candidates remained very much the same throughout the year. </p>
<p>And yet Trump beat Clinton. Why? MV denied voters the right to express their opinions adequately in the state face-to-face encounters. </p>
<p>U.S. voters were in revolt, determined to show their exasperation with politicians. But how, with the majority vote, could they express this disgust other than by voting for Trump? </p>
<p>With majority judgment some of them would surely have rated Clinton as Poor or Terrible to make the point, but Trump as Poor or Terrible as well, exactly as the Pew survey shows. </p>
<p>This could well have been the case in each of several states where their total votes were close such as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/florida">Florida</a> (a difference of 1.3 percent in their vote totals), <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/michigan">Michigan</a> (a difference of 0.3 percent), <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/wisconsin">Wisconsin</a> (a difference of 0.8 percent) and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/pennsylvania">Pennsylvania</a> (a difference of 1.1 percent). With MJ the result would then have been much closer to a true expression of voters’ opinions and so of the popular will: 307 Electoral College votes for Clinton, 231 for Trump.</p>
<p>Well before the vote on Nov. 8 something else went wrong. Trump and Clinton should not have been the victors in the Republican and Democratic primaries – they are, after all, generally considered to be the least popular candidates of recent history. But the primaries were decided by majority vote as well. Had the primaries used <a href="https://theconversation.com/trump-and-clinton-victorious-proof-that-us-voting-system-doesnt-work-58752">majority judgment</a>, the general election would have pitted Bernie Sanders against John Kasich. </p>
<p>Imagine how different the country and the world would feel today – and be tomorrow – had they been the candidates!</p>
<p>The time has come to replace the obviously undemocratic mechanism of the majority vote by a method that captures the true will of the electorate: majority judgment.</p>
<p><em>Editor’s note: this article was updated to make clear that Ranked Voting has different versions, including Ranked Choice Voting.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/69206/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michel Balinski is related to an employee of The Conversation US. </span></em></p>In this year’s election, the system of majority voting didn’t allow voters to express their opinions adequately. If they had, the choice would have been between Kasich and Sanders.Michel Balinski, American Applied Mathematician, Mathematical Economist, and O.R. Analyst. "Directeur de recherche de classe exceptionnelle" (emeritus) of the C.N.R.S., École polytechniqueLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/587522016-05-09T15:17:46Z2016-05-09T15:17:46ZTrump and Clinton victorious: proof that US voting system doesn’t work<p>Having outlasted all his opponents, Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. Hillary Clinton is closing in on locking up the Democratic nomination. </p>
<p>Clinton and Trump may have won primaries, but are they really representative of what the American people want? In fact, as we will show, it is John Kasich and Bernie Sanders who are first in the nation’s esteem. Trump and Clinton come last. </p>
<p>So how has it come to this? The media has played a big role, of course, but that Trump versus Clinton will almost surely be the choice this November is the result of the totally absurd method of election used in the primaries: majority voting. </p>
<p>This is a strong statement. But as mathematicians who have spent the last dozen years <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/majority-judgment">studying voting systems</a>, we are going to show you why it’s justified and how this problem can be fixed. </p>
<h2>The problem with majority voting</h2>
<p>With majority voting (MV), voters tick the name of one candidate, at most, and the numbers of ticks determine the winner and the order of finish. It’s a system that is used across the U.S. (and in many other nations) to elect presidents as well as senators, representatives and governors. </p>
<p>But it has often failed to elect the candidate preferred by the majority. </p>
<p>In 2000, for example, George W. Bush was elected president because of Ralph Nader’s candidacy. In the contested state of Florida, Bush had 2,912,790 votes, Al Gore 2,912,253 (<a href="http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/2000presgeresults.htm">a mere 537 fewer</a>) and Nader 97,488. There is little doubt that the <a href="http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/lewis/pdf/greenreform9.pdf">large majority of those who voted for Nader</a>, and so preferred him to the others, much preferred Gore to Bush. Had they been able to express this preference, Gore would have been elected with 291 Electoral College votes to Bush’s 246. Similar dysfunctions have also occurred in <a href="https://theconversation.com/pour-eviter-un-nouveau-21-avril-instaurons-le-jugement-majoritaire-58178">France</a>.</p>
<p>Imagine how different the U.S. and the world might be today if Gore had won. </p>
<h2>The 2016 primaries</h2>
<p>A quick glance at the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/primary-calendar-and-results.html">U.S. presidential primaries and caucuses held on or before March 1</a> shows that when Trump was the “winner,” he typically garnered some 40 percent of the votes. However, nothing in that result factors in the opinions of the 60 percent of voters who cast ballots for someone else. </p>
<p>As Trump is a particularly divisive candidate, it is safe to suppose that most – or at least many – of them strongly opposed him. The media, however, focused on the person who got the largest number of votes – which means Trump. On the Democratic side of the ledger, the media similarly poured its attention on Hillary Clinton, ignoring Bernie Sanders until widespread enthusiastic support forced a change. </p>
<h2>The source of the problem</h2>
<p>An election is nothing but an invented device that measures the electorate’s support of the candidates, ranks them according to their support and declares the winner to be the first in the ranking. </p>
<p>The fact is that majority voting does this very badly. </p>
<p>With MV, voters cannot express their opinions on all candidates. Instead, each voter is limited to backing just one candidate, to the exclusion of all others in the running. </p>
<p>Bush defeated Gore because Nader voters were unable to weigh in on the other two. Moreover, as we argue further on, majority voting can go wrong even when there are just two candidates. </p>
<p>The point is that it is essential for voters to be able to express the nuances of their opinions.</p>
<h2>What is to be done? Use majority judgment</h2>
<p>Majority judgment (MJ) is a new method of election that we specifically designed to <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/majority-judgment">avoid the pitfalls of the traditional methods</a>. </p>
<p>MJ asks voters to express their opinions much more accurately than simply voting for one candidate. The ballot offers a spectrum of choices and charges voters with a solemn task:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To be the President of the United States of America, having taken into account all relevant considerations, I judge that this candidate as president would be a: Great President | Good President | Average President | Poor President | Terrible President</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To see exactly how MJ ranks the candidates, let’s look at specific numbers. </p>
<p>We were lucky to find on the web that the above question was actually posed in a March <a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2016/03/03-31-2016-Political-topline-for-release.pdf">Pew Research Center poll</a> of 1,787 registered voters of all political stripes. (It should be noted that neither the respondents nor the pollsters were aware that the answers could be the basis for a method of election.) The Pew poll also included the option of answering “Never Heard Of” which here is interpreted as worse than “Terrible” since it amounts to the voter saying the candidate doesn’t exist. </p>
<p>As is clear in the table below, people’s opinions are much more detailed than can be expressed with majority voting. Note in particular the relatively high percentages of voters who believe Clinton and especially Trump would make terrible presidents (Pew reports that <a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/2016/03/3-31-16-March-Political-release-1.pdf">Trump’s “Terrible” score increased by 6 percent since January</a>.)</p>
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<p>Using majority judgment to calculate the ranked order of the candidates from these evaluations or grades is straightforward. Start from each end of the spectrum and add percentages until a majority of voters’ opinions are included. </p>
<p>Taking John Kasich as an example, 5 percent believe he is “Great,” 5+28=33 percent that he is “Good” or better, and 33+39=72 percent (a majority) that he is “Average” or better. Looked at from the other end, 9 percent “Never Heard” of him, 9+7=16 percent believe he is “Terrible” or worse, 16+13=29 percent that he is “Poor” or worse, and 29+39= 68 percent (a majority) that he is “Average” or worse. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121600/original/image-20160507-32021-ihpi5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121600/original/image-20160507-32021-ihpi5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121600/original/image-20160507-32021-ihpi5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121600/original/image-20160507-32021-ihpi5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121600/original/image-20160507-32021-ihpi5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121600/original/image-20160507-32021-ihpi5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121600/original/image-20160507-32021-ihpi5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Governor Kasich on the presidential campaign trail.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/80038275@N00/17214592312">Michael Vadon</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Both calculations end on majorities for “Average,” so Kasich’s majority-grade is “Average President.” (Mathematically, the calculations from both directions for a given candidate will always reach majorities at the same grade.) </p>
<p>Similarly calculated, Sanders, Clinton and Cruz all have the same majority-grade, “Average President.” Trump’s is “Poor President,” ranking him last.</p>
<p>To determine the MJ ranking among the four who all are rated “Average,” two more calculations are necessary.</p>
<p>The first looks at the percentage of voters who rate a candidate more highly than his or her majority-grade, the second at the percentage who rate the candidate lower than his or her majority-grade. This delivers a number called the “gauge.” Think of it as a scale where in some cases the majority grade leans more heavily toward a higher ranking and in others more heavily toward a lower ranking. </p>
<p>In Kasich’s case, 5+28=33 percent evaluated him higher than “Average,” and 13+7+9=29 percent rated him below “Average.” Because the larger share is on the positive side, his gauge is +33 percent. For Sanders, 36 percent evaluated him above and 39 percent below his majority-grade. With the larger share on the negative side, his gauge is -39 percent.</p>
<p>A candidate is ranked above another when his or her majority-grade is better or, if both have the same majority-grade, according to their gauges (see below). This rule is the logical result of <a href="https://portail.polytechnique.edu/economie/fr/recherches/publications/cahiers-de-recherche/2016">majorities</a> deciding on candidates’ grades instead of the usual rule that ranks candidates by the numbers of votes they get. </p>
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<p>When voters are able to express their evaluations of every candidate – the good and the bad – the results are turned upside-down from those with majority voting. </p>
<p>According to majority judgment, the front-runners in the collective opinion are actually Kasich and Sanders. Clinton and Trump are the trailers. From this perspective the dominant media gave far too much attention to the true trailers and far too little to the true leaders.</p>
<p>Tellingly, MJ also shows society’s relatively low esteem for politicians. All five candidates are evaluated as “Average” presidents or worse, and none as “Good” presidents or better.</p>
<h2>Majority voting’s failure with two candidates</h2>
<p>But, you may object, how can majority voting on just two candidates go wrong? This seems to go against everything you learned since grade school where you raised your hand for or against a classroom choice. </p>
<p>The reason MV can go wrong even with only two candidates is because it does not obtain sufficient information about a voter’s intensity of support.</p>
<p>Take, as an example, the choice between Clinton and Trump, whose evaluations in the Pew poll are given in the first table above. </p>
<p>Lining up their grades from highest to lowest, every one of Clinton’s is either above or the same as Trump’s. Eleven percent, for example, believe Clinton would make a “Great” president to 10 percent for Trump. Trump’s percentages lead Clinton’s only for the Terrible’s and Never Heard Of’s. Given these opinions, in other words, it’s clear that any decent voting method must rank Clinton above Trump.</p>
<p>However, majority voting could fail to do so. </p>
<p>To see why, suppose the “ballots” of the Pew poll were in a pile. Each could be looked at separately. Some would rate Clinton “Average” and Trump “Poor,” some would rate her “Good” and him “Great,” others would assign them any of the 36 possible couples of grades. We can, therefore, find the percentage of occurrence of every couple of grades assigned to Trump and Clinton. </p>
<p>We do not have access to the Pew poll “ballots.” However, one could come up with many different scenarios where the individual ballot percentages are in exact agreement with the overall grades each received in the first table. </p>
<p>Among the various scenarios possible, we have chosen one that could, in theory, be the true one. Indeed, you can check for yourself that it does assign the candidates the grades each received: reading from left to right, Clinton, for example, had 10+12=22 percent “Good,” 16+4=20 percent “Average,” and so on; and the same holds for Trump. </p>
<p>So what does this hypothetical distribution of the ballots concerning the two tell us? </p>
<p>The first column on the left says 10 percent of the voters rated Clinton “Good” and Trump “Great.” In a majority vote they would go for Trump. And moving to the tenth column, 4 percent rated Clinton “Poor” and Trump “Terrible.” In a majority vote this group would opt for Clinton. And so on. </p>
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<p>If you add up the votes in each of these 11 columns, Trump receives the votes of the people whose opinions are reflected in four columns: 10+16+12+15=53 percent; Clinton is backed by the voters with the opinions of columns with 33 percent support; and 14 percent are undecided. Even if the undecided all voted for Clinton, Trump would carry the day.</p>
<p>This shows that majority voting can give a very wrong result: a triumphant victory for Trump when Clinton’s grades are consistently above his!</p>
<h2>A bird’s-eye view</h2>
<p>Voting has been the subject of intense mathematical research since 1950, when the economist Kenneth Arrow published his famous <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/256963">“impossibility theorem,”</a> one of the two major contributions for which he was awarded the 1972 Nobel Prize.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121601/original/image-20160507-32037-1atmha2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121601/original/image-20160507-32037-1atmha2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121601/original/image-20160507-32037-1atmha2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121601/original/image-20160507-32037-1atmha2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=692&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121601/original/image-20160507-32037-1atmha2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121601/original/image-20160507-32037-1atmha2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121601/original/image-20160507-32037-1atmha2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) was a French philosopher and mathematician.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This theorem showed that if voters have to rank candidates – to say, in other words, who comes first, second and so forth – there will inevitably be one of two major potential failures. Either there may be no clear winner at all, the so-called <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voting-methods/#3.1">“Condorcet paradox”</a> occurs, or what has come to be called the “Arrow paradox” may occur. </p>
<p>The Arrow paradox is familiar to Americans because of what happened in the 2000 election. Bush beat Gore because Nader was in the running. Had Nader not run, Gore would have won. Surely, it is absurd for the choice between two candidates to depend on whether or not some minor candidate is on the ballot!</p>
<p><a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/majority-judgment">Majority judgment</a> resolves the conundrum of Arrow’s theorem: neither the Condorcet nor the Arrow paradox can occur. It does so because voters are asked for more accurate information, to evaluate candidates rather than to rank them. </p>
<p>MJ’s rules, based on the majority principle, meet the basic democratic goals of voting systems. With it:</p>
<ul>
<li>Voters are able to express themselves more fully, so the results depend on much more information than a single vote.</li>
<li>The process of voting has proven to be natural, easy and quick: we all know about grading from school (as the Pew poll implicitly realized). </li>
<li>Candidates with similar political profiles can run without impinging on each other’s chances: a voter can give high (or low) evaluations to all.</li>
<li>The candidate who is evaluated best by the majority wins.</li>
<li>MJ is the most difficult system to manipulate: blocs of voters who exaggerate the grades they give beyond their true opinions can only have a limited influence on the results.</li>
<li>By asking more of voters, by showing more respect for their opinions, participation is encouraged. Even a voter who evaluates all candidates identically (e.g., all are “Terrible”) has an effect on the outcome. </li>
<li>Final grades – majority-grades – enable candidates and the public to understand where each stands in the eyes of the electorate.</li>
<li>If the majority decides that no candidate is judged an “Average President” or better, the results of the election may be rescinded, and a new slate of candidates demanded.</li>
<li>It is a practical method that has been tested in elections and used many times (for judging prize-winners, <a href="https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00753483/document">wines</a>, <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.2014.1269">job applicants,</a> etc.). It has also been formally proposed as a way to <a href="http://tnova.fr/rapports/reformer-l-election-presidentielle-moderniser-notre-democratie">reform the French presidential election system.</a></li>
</ul>
<h2>Reform now</h2>
<p>It should come as no surprise that in answer to a recent Pew poll’s question “Do you think the primaries have been a good way of determining who the best qualified nominees are or not?” only <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/05/voters-have-a-dim-view-of-primaries-as-a-good-way-to-pick-the-best-candidate/">35 percent</a> of respondents said yes. </p>
<p>Democracies everywhere are suffering. Voters protest. Citizens don’t vote. Support for the political extremes are increasing. One of the underlying causes, we argue, is majority voting as it is now practiced, and its influence on the media. </p>
<p>Misled by the results of primaries and polls, the media concentrates its attention on candidates who seem to be the leaders, but who are often far from being deemed acceptable by a majority of the electorate. Majority judgment would correct these failings.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/58752/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michel Balinski is related to a member of The Conversation's editorial team. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rida Laraki does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Two mathematicians explain why majority voting often fails to elect the candidate preferred by the majority and propose an alternative, ‘majority judgment.’Michel Balinski, Applied mathematician and mathematical economist, "Directeur de recherche de classe exceptionnelle" (emeritus) of the C.N.R.S., École polytechniqueRida Laraki, Directeur de recherche CNRS au LAMSADE, Professeur à l'École polytechnique, Université Paris Dauphine – PSLLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/409482015-05-04T02:05:36Z2015-05-04T02:05:36ZThe right to know vs the need for secrecy: the US experience<p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/shortcodes/images-videos/articles-democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Thomas Jefferson once wrote that “information is the currency of democracy,” or so it is easy to learn online. Fortunately, it is just as easy to learn that he wrote no such thing. The people who run the website for Jefferson’s <a href="http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/information-currency-democracy-quotation">home at Monticello</a> cannot find that quotation anywhere in Jefferson’s papers.</p>
<p>And there is really no need to spend time searching. The American founders rarely spoke of democracy and they did not label the American form of government “democratic” but “republican”. They judged democracy to be unstable and undesirable. So we can feel confident that Jefferson never uttered nor wrote these words.</p>
<p>It was not Jefferson but political activist Ralph Nader who declared information the currency of democracy. In 1970 <a href="http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/hcrcl5&div=6&id=&page=">Nader claimed</a> a “well-informed citizenry” to be the “lifeblood of democracy” and <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=gzZXiLubV9QC&pg=PA422&lpg=PA422&dq=%E2%80%9Cinformation+is+the+currency+of+power%22&source=bl&ots=r6ZmQ3n6YV&sig=PYzcNHr51KQltH8zoBvOXA53EuI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=CNpCVZ3FMsS_mwXXxYGAAQ&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9Cinformation%20is%20the%20currency%20of%20power%22&f=false">wrote that</a> “information is the currency of power”.“ Later, in 1986 and 1996, <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=gzZXiLubV9QC&pg=PA403&lpg=PA403&dq=Nader+%22Information+is+the+currency+of+democracy%22&source=bl&ots=r6ZmQ3n9-_&sig=gWZ2bJgwxsP3RRGXI1_vLNotoAU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=V9tCVaaOHcLBmAXesoGwAw&ved=0CEIQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=Nader%20%22Information%20is%20the%20currency%20of%20democracy%22&f=false">he condensed these</a> not entirely consistent propositions into:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"Information is the currency of democracy.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Don’t forget right to privacy and security</h2>
<p>Nader’s proposition, however, stands on shaky grounds. It is not difficult to think of instances where reasonable people would prefer that some information the government possesses be kept from the public. </p>
<p>In the interest of public safety, a citizen who is being watched by undercover police officers, operating according to the law, should not be informed of the surveillance. In the interest of personal privacy, the public should not have access to personnel records of government employees without good cause. Nor should genuine national security information be publicly available.</p>
<p>Activists who support transparency in government do not generally advocate complete transparency in all facets of government. Most democrats accept many limitations to complete disclosure of government information.</p>
<p>In the United States, many of these limitations are long established and well institutionalised, including their incorporation in explicit provisions of the pioneering US <a href="http://www.foia.gov/about.html">Freedom of Information Act</a> (FOIA) of 1966. This was the first such law in the world since Sweden enacted something like it in 1766 and Finland in 1951.</p>
<p>Earlier in North American history, there were many conditions under which subjects, later “citizens”, did not have full access to relevant information. It troubled the government of Virginia in 1682 that an upstart printed the laws of the colony without a licence. He was punished, since printing was forbidden in Virginia until 1729, and from that point until 1765 the governor controlled the only printing press in Virginia.</p>
<p>In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a political entity with an elected assembly, legislative proceedings were confidential, even including how one’s representative voted on particular measures. It is hard to imagine a matter more central to democracy than the availability to voters of a public record of how their representatives vote, but this was not something the people of Massachusetts in the 1700s demanded. </p>
<p>Nor did the people of the United States demand it until 1970 – 1970! Only then did the US House of Representatives make members’ votes on amendments to bills part of the public record. Only then did a reform coalition in the House sponsor a set of “anti-secrecy” measures that ushered in a major increase in the public visibility of legislative action.</p>
<h2>What can we learn from history?</h2>
<p>There are several important historiography lessons in all this. </p>
<p>First, there is a strong tendency, at least in the United States, to attribute all wise political acts and ideas to people who lived at the end of the 18th century and correspondingly to attribute all ill-conceived and disastrous political ideas to our contemporaries – particularly those of the other party. Yet when we look closer, this assessment of history requires re-adjustment, especially to account for the dramatic ways in which democracies have come to operate at least since 1945. While these changes are problematic in various respects, they also incorporate huge advances in pluralism, tolerance, diversity of representation, and transparency.</p>
<p>Second, sources of progressive change do not always come “from below”. In some instances they do – the US civil rights movement is a stunning example. (Although, even there, a long history of the <a href="http://www.naacp.org/">NAACP</a>’s legal efforts to challenge segregation and discrimination operated in the courtrooms of the nation, not in the streets.) But in the particular case of the right to know, the drive for freedom of information was pursued with scarcely any popular interest, let alone a popular movement.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80029/original/image-20150501-30735-16clb6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80029/original/image-20150501-30735-16clb6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=690&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80029/original/image-20150501-30735-16clb6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=690&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80029/original/image-20150501-30735-16clb6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=690&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80029/original/image-20150501-30735-16clb6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80029/original/image-20150501-30735-16clb6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80029/original/image-20150501-30735-16clb6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">John Moss, architect of the US Freedom of Information Act, drew on Cold War rhetoric to demand executive accountability to Congress.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Moss#/media/File:John_E._Moss.jpg">Wikimedia Commons/Congressional Pictorial Directory</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Freedom of Information Act came out of a decade-long effort in the Congress to control the expansion of an ever more powerful executive branch of government. This was much more a battle between two branches of government than between two political parties or two theories of governing. It appealed to a popular Cold War rhetoric, urging members of Congress to recognise that growing executive power and executive secrecy were establishing a “<a href="http://nieman.niemanfoundation.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Winter-1958_150.pdf">paper curtain</a>” in Washington, violating principles of “openness” that distinguished the “free world” from Soviet totalitarianism. </p>
<p>Presidents both Republican and Democrat resisted the congressional challenge; members of Congress both Republican and Democrat vigorously urged it forward. While journalists and associations of journalists like the American Society of Newspaper Editors applauded FOIA, the general public took little notice.</p>
<p>Third, there is a challenge that few scholars have taken up concerning the role of higher education itself in fostering both insight and oversight as public values. Higher education in the US grew enormously after 1945 in the percentage of young people attending college.</p>
<p>Even more important, it changed decisively in the development among college faculty and students of a more critical attitude toward received cultural knowledge. This included a growing integration of the sciences into college curricula once largely dominanted by the arts and letters.</p>
<p>Over time, as historian Thomas Bender <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=WomGOI8I4UgC&pg=PA22&dq=increasingly+professionalised+disciplines+were+embarrassed+by+moralism&hl=en&sa=X&ei=putCVeS_F4_ooATA2YDYBA&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=increasingly%20professionalised%20disciplines%20were%20embarrassed%20by%20moralism&f=false">has observed</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The increasingly professionalised disciplines were embarrassed by moralism and sentiment; they were openly or implicitly drawn to the model of science as a vision of professional maturity.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Tracing the impact of higher education on the broader society is a task that deserves far more attention than it has received. One of those impacts, I suspect, was a growing resonance of challenges to authority, including the authority of public officials who operate behind closed doors.</p>
<h2>Sometimes there are good reasons for secrecy</h2>
<p>Making government more accessible to the public is vital to improving the quality of democracy, yet this does not make transparency an ultimate good that should be honoured under all circumstances. There really are military secrets that should not fall into the hands of fanatics, practical jokers, or deranged people. There really is a need for government decision-makers to be able to trust in the confidentiality of their meetings and of their electronic communications if there is to be a free flow of conversation among them.</p>
<p>The recent dust-up over Hillary Clinton’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/clintons-reversal-on-openness-may-impact-more-than-her-presidential-ambitions-38516">use of her personal email account</a> while in office as US Secretary of State is only the latest case of uncertainty over the rules of acceptable behaviour when there is a clash between a legitimate confidentiality of internal communications and a public right to information. Should the Secretary of State be forbidden to shield some of her communications by conducting them on her personal e-mail account? </p>
<p>What about a professor at a public university? Should he or she be able to shield communications in the same fashion, making them unavailable to citizens who use state public records laws to demand release of e-mails? </p>
<p>Some groups have sought access to professors’ e-mail to discredit researchers whose work supports the scientific consensus on climate change. Others have tried to discredit professors who are sceptical of the scientific consensus. Some states exempt university professors’ records from public records laws on the grounds that the preservation of academic freedom is a vital democratic good that, within limits, trumps the public’s right to know.</p>
<p>There really are good reasons for, say, the secrecy of the voter’s ballot in a world where the strong can intimidate the weak if their preferences are known. There really are good grounds for protecting privacy and, in the realm of everyday social interaction, maintaining civility by tact in the withholding of honest appraisals. And there really is a value in authentic intellectual inquiry related to public issues that deserves to be weighed against a public right to know.</p>
<p>Still, reforms toward the greater visibility of government activity and demands for greater frankness in other domains of life, too, have contributed to the improvement of society. Almost everyone recognises the danger to democracy of overclassification and enforced silences that exist only to save an individual, office or policy from embarrassment and not to protect national security, personal privacy or decision-makers’ legitimately confidential deliberations.</p>
<h2>So what do we make of Edward Snowden?</h2>
<p>And <a href="https://theconversation.com/patriot-games-the-odds-are-stacked-against-whistleblower-snowden-15785">Edward Snowden</a>? Mr Snowden has indicated that he has not released all of the government records in his possession. Nor, apparently, will he do so. Some of them, it seems, if made public, could endanger public safety.</p>
<p>I have no reason to doubt Snowden’s good intentions in withholding these records but nor do I have any reason to judge him an expert at, let alone a legitimately selected representative for, deciding what information is or is not in the public interest. Why is this his right to decide? </p>
<p>Responsible government secrecy requires a democratic process of oversight. Theft, brave and selfless an act as Snowden’s appears to have been, is not a good model of holding government accountable.</p>
<p>I understand the distrust of government secrecy. I share it. I do not understand a lack of distrust of informational vigilantism and even, in some quarters, antic glee at Snowden’s coup. We can be grateful that he opened a window on wide-ranging US government misdeeds in <a href="https://theconversation.com/political-wheel-may-be-turning-on-the-nsas-surveillance-programs-19646">National Security Agency surveillance</a>, but it is much harder to sympathise with the way he went about it.</p>
<p>In a world of grave dangers to life from weapons we have made, of devastating threats to earth’s resources that we have callously exploited, and of hate and intolerance we have failed to sanction, it is often difficult to see bright spots in recent decades, but surely one of them is an expansion of a culture of frankness and of expectations of public disclosure. These advances are not untroubled, as anyone who honours the value of privacy knows, but on balance there has indeed been progress.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This article is based on <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/event-a-surprisingly-short-history-of-the-right-to-know/">the author’s lecture</a>, A Surprisingly Short History of the ‘Right to Know’, at the University of Sydney. The ABC will broadcast a recording of the lecture on Radio National’s Big Ideas program at 8pm on May 5 and it can then be accessed <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/40948/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Schudson has in the past received funding from the Spencer Foundation and the US National Endowment for the Humanities and a fellowship awarded by the MacArthur Foundation. He is contracted to receive future funding for research on "cultures of health" from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.</span></em></p>The idea of the right to know as the ‘lifeblood of democracy’ is a surprisingly modern development. And in an age when transparency is prized, privacy and secrecy can still be justified in many cases.Michael Schudson, Professor of Journalism, Columbia UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/345122014-11-25T10:15:25Z2014-11-25T10:15:25ZBeyond left and right: revelations from the Common Core debate<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65247/original/image-20141123-1049-456319.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">New Jersey high school students</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/33193739@N06/3094838806/">j.sanna</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A paradoxical situation seems to confront today’s political scene and the choices it generates. </p>
<p>On the one hand, the market and its particular logic have come to dominate more and more human affairs. Even after the Great Recession and the documented failures of this logic, we continue to be told of the need to bring a market rationality to solve a host of public problems – from the “crises” in public education to the efficient delivery of mail. </p>
<p>On the other hand, the state – the occasional counterbalance to market swings and excesses – has become more business-oriented itself. Today’s state is attempting to rationalize, audit and assess all public expenditures and “nudge” people toward particular types of market appropriate behavior. This can be seen in attempts to offload more of the cost of a university education in order to reduce tax burdens,create efficiencies and make students more responsible and risk-aware. </p>
<p>The upshot is that the tension between market and state that once was more overt seems now to have dissolved. The boundaries between the two at times seem indeterminate.</p>
<p>This paradoxical state of contemporary politics can be observed in the current debate over the <a href="http://www.corestandards.org/">Common Core</a>and standardized testing. </p>
<h2>An emblematic debate over Common Core</h2>
<p>Common Core has been readily condemned on both sides of the political spectrum. </p>
<p>On the one hand, there are individuals such as academic Diane Ravitch and schoolteacher Mercedes Schneider, and organizations like the National Education Association and the Chicago Teachers’ Union. They deplore the testing mania, the push to privatization, and the excessive influence of venture philanthropies such as the Gates and Walton Foundations on education policy as well as the loss of teacher autonomy they believe Common Core generates. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum are people such as Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, TV host Glen Beck and Senator Rand Paul and groups like FreedomWorks and the libertarian Cato Institute. They condemn Common Core as a power grab by the federal government. They see it as a part of the government’s efforts to further nationalize education and indoctrinate children. </p>
<p>Adding to this Common Core confusion is a great motley mixture of supporters, ranging from Jeb Bush, the Business Roundtable and Conservatives for Higher Standards to former DC Schools Chancellor Michele Rhee, the National Governors Association, the Southern Poverty Law Center and, somewhat tentatively and timidly, the American Federation of Teachers.</p>
<p>What, then, does Common Core’s reconfiguration of the usual right and left political positioning signal about the state of contemporary politics in the US? </p>
<h2>Beyond left and right</h2>
<p>Explaining these unlikely alliances and divisions over education policy requires a very different understanding from the usual liberal versus conservative framework that has come to dominate our thinking on political matters in the US. </p>
<p>For the last few decades a new political model has been unfolding in various places around the world, one that brings together an activist, pro-market state that has intensified its monitoring of public agencies with a less regulated and more expansive market. Or, put it another way, what we are seeing emerge is a highly regulated public realm coupled with a highly deregulated private realm. </p>
<p>In this new configuration we encounter what I would call a “worst of both worlds situation.” Markets expand into what was previously the public domain and go largely unchecked in order to stimulate the never ending pursuit of growth and accumulation. Meanwhile, thanks to <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/%7Eachaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Public_choice_theory.html">public choice theory</a> (which gives material interest priority) and new forms of public management in institutions like schools, the public sector – and the people in it such as teachers or government workers – are no longer trusted by governments. As a result, they are increasingly monitored and managed from above instead of from within their own professional ranks. </p>
<p>It is in this newly created political space that the strange politics of Common Core are currently playing out.</p>
<h2>Strange bedfellows</h2>
<p>In the resistance to Common Core we are seeing the emergence of a style of politics that links libertarians who fear the increased intrusion of the state with the anti-corporatist activists who fear the growing dominance of the market. </p>
<p>Interestingly, this is similar to the situation that emerged in the 1930s that resulted in political coalitions between those Americans who feared the intrusions of state-centered socialism like Nazism and Soviet Communism and those who protested the the growing economic inequality that resulted in the Great Depression. These coalitions were ultimately responsible for launching the social liberalism that came to dominate American politics for almost fifty years. </p>
<p>More recently such a political take can be found in Ralph Nader’s new book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State and his rather astonishing appearance over the summer at the Cato Institute. </p>
<p>The debate over Common Core reveals, to my mind, that the Occupy Movement and Tea Party both have valid points to make in their critiques of contemporary political scene. In America democratic participation has been usurped. Power today has become centralized in the hands of both the market and state. Politically speaking, it is simply a matter of which centralizing power one focuses on in a given moment. </p>
<p>The political story of Common Core is dramatic proof that the real problem is both.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/34512/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Steven C. Ward does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A paradoxical situation seems to confront today’s political scene and the choices it generates. On the one hand, the market and its particular logic have come to dominate more and more human affairs. Even…Steven C. Ward, Professor of Sociology , Western Connecticut State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.