A Tenth Amendment Voting Strategy?

Introduction

The purpose of this article is to discuss an apparently unusual way of thinking about voting, and to ask the question: Is there a simple voting strategy that can reinforce the checks and balances that are designed into the American Constitutional system of government?  I don’t claim to answer the question here, but here are some opening thoughts.

From half a lifetime’s worth of observation of the public at large, it seems to me that there are three widely espoused voting strategies: (i) Vote for all candidates from one political party; (ii) Research all candidates on the ballot and vote for the most qualified candidate; or (iii) Don’t vote.  It also seems to me that these strategies are all ineffective.

It is important to recognize that the vote of an individual typically doesn’t matter, but the aggregate of voting strategies is what decides our country's balance of power.  So if large groups of people are following ineffective voting strategies, elections are bound to be unsatisfying.  Despite the negligibility of influence from an individual vote, I would argue that choice and promotion of a voting strategy is still an important civic role.

In this article, I intend to discuss three possible replacement strategies that can harness the incentives of two-party politics and make use of the checks and balances built into our system of government.  One form of checks and balances include so-called “horizontal checks” which are the contests between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government.  A second form is the “vertical checks” which are delineated by the 10^th amendment to the Constitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

These vertical checks arise from the tensions that exist between state and federal levels of government.

The next  section will contain cursory coverage of the existing voting strategies.  Suffice it to say that current events seem to prove that these strategies have been insufficient.  The final section will contain brief thoughts about some other possibilities.

Common Strategies
As noted, this coverage will be cursory.  After all, this is a blog post, and I’m brain-storming.

Straight Ticket

The problem with voting straight ticket is that it often leads to a consolidation of all power on one side of the aisle or the other.  This weakens both horizontal and vertical checks and balances.  Over time, as each set of voters attempts to correct past voting decisions, it also leads to wildly increasing oscillation between extremes, especially at the federal level.  Additionally, over the years, power is steadily funneled to and captured by the federal layer of government.  Both parties make use of the powers that have already been captured, so power rarely flows outward.

Most Qualified Candidate

The first problem with this strategy is that it’s impractical.  I am a somewhat informed voter, but I have never voted in an election where I knew who every candidate on the ballot was.  In my opinion, it is simply not feasible for most Americans to spend enough time researching to execute this strategy effectively.  Even if you can somehow wade through all the information and perfectly research every candidate to identify the one who’s qualifications and opinions seem to make them best-suited to the office, you’re still left with the second problem.  Politicians lie.  In the end, the person you elect is rarely the person you think you’re voting for.

Don’t vote

Nature has an analogue for voting in colonies of bacteria.  It’s called “quorum sensing.”  Bacteria signal their presence to one another using chemicals in order to make collective decisions like when to become virulent or when to become luminescent.  As with human voting, an individual bacteria’s signaling is largely irrelevant.  What matters is the aggregation, but the colonies only make good decisions if enough individual cells participate.  So, although I admit I’m on tenuous ground, I do think that voting is morally important.  If enough people decline to vote, the quality of decisions will be even worse.  Since I come from the libertarian perspective (in the Nolan Chart sense, not in the Non-Aggression sense), I want to spend a little more time on this and briefly address two common objections to voting.

If you vote, you are responsible for the bad things government does

In short, this is nonsense.   It’s the same collectivist non-logic that leads progressives to ban guns after every mass shooting and conservatives to ban drugs after every celebrity overdose.  The person who does a thing is responsible for the thing.  If I vote to delegate power for defensive use, I am not responsible when the power is used aggressively.  Further, if my vote has zero measurable influence on an election,  how much influence can it possibly have on policy decisions that pass through entire legislative bodies months and years later.

If you vote, you are committing aggression against your neighbor

There are two problems with this argument.  Usually, when I vote, I am voting to protect my interests not to infringe on another.  As noted above, if I vote to delegate power defensively, that does not constitute aggression – even if my elected official uses the power aggressively.   The second problem is that as soon as the size of relationships in a system extends beyond two people, aggression and/or collectivism must be admitted into the system as moral principles.  If one person abuses another and a third person intervenes to stop it, I believe that third person is in the right, despite the aggressive or collectivist nature (depending on how you define it) of their action against the first person.  Hence, as odd as it seems to say, it seems to me that there is a minimal role for highly-regulated aggression and/or collectivism in society.  The only way two ways to deny this claim while maintaining logical consistency are: (I) to be a full-out pacifist; or (ii) to claim that a third person may not intervene with force to stop someone else's abuse.  Non-aggression, understood to permit "defense of self or others" is implicitly introducing collectivism or aggression, although many libertarians don't seem to recognize that.

Incentive Driven Voting Strategies

In this section, I consider possible voting strategies that are organized around the partisan nature of our political system and the checks and balances that are built into our government.  The reality is that we cannot know a whole lot about the people we vote for, but we do know about their partisan and governmental incentives.  Why don't we use that information to formulate our voting strategies?  Here are some possibilities:

Split Party State and Federal

Vote for one party at the federal level and the other party at the state level.

This strategy is easy to understand and implement.  It would appear to strengthen vertical checks and balances while weakening horizontal checks and balances.

Split Party Executive and Legislative

First, choose your presidential vote based on the current constitution of the Supreme Court.  Pick the presidential candidate who, after appointments, will most likely lead to a balanced court.  Second, pick legislative candidates from the opposite party of the president or presidential candidate.  Finally, pick state executive and legislative candidates in reverse of the federal split in order to complement the federal level (Why?  Because we like symmetry...)

So if we vote for a Democratic Party president, then we would vote for federal legislators from the Republican Party.  Then, at the state level, we would vote for a governor from the Republican Party and legislators from the Democratic Party.  If we have time left to research individual candidates, we would spend it researching the local candidates, who should be the most influential in any person’s life.

This strategy appears to strengthen horizontal checks and balances, but doesn’t really do much for vertical checks and balances.

Decentralizing Strategy

As with the split executive and legislative strategy, start by voting for the President in order to try to balance the Supreme Court, then pick federal legislators from the opposite party.  Next, vote for a single party for all positions at the state level, based upon the parties' platforms and your policy preferences.

This strategy would strengthen horizontal checks and balances at the federal layer and it would also strengthen vertical checks and balances.  By choosing a single party at the state level, the aggregate of state governments would be relatively stronger than the federal government and would begin reclaiming some of the powers that have, thus far, been siphoned to the federal officials.

Conclusion

The first objection has to be that this is all pretty complicated for the “average Joe”, and I agree.  To be effective, I think some organizations would need to create state by state web pages and sample ballots to help voters to follow these sorts of strategies.  I’m also not sure how the Libertarian party fits into the picture.  That will require more thought.  Another objection is that even if a strategy like this is successful at controlling the parties, the parties will adapt and develop counter-measures.  I agree, but it's a problem for a different day.

In my opinion, for today’s environment, the Decentralizing Strategy is appropriate.  Later, in order to maximize liberty, the "Split Party Executive and Legislative" might begin to make more sense.