The Democratic Imperative to Make Margins Matter

Daniel Wodak

Many commentators lament that American democracy is in crisis. It is becoming a system of minority rule, wherein a party with a minority of the national vote can control the national government. Partisan gerrymandering in the House of Representatives fuels this crisis, as does the equal representation of small and large states in the Senate. But altering these features of the legislature would not end minority rule. Indeed, it has long been held that majority rule cannot be guaranteed within any district system, as a minority of voters nationwide can be efficiently distributed such that a minority party wins a majority of districts by narrow margins.

This Article offers a way to save majority rule. Since the way a party can gain control of the legislature with a minority of the vote is to win a majority of districts by narrow margins of victory and lose a minority of districts by large margins of victory, the solution is to make margins matter. Hence, this Article proposes that we preserve electoral districts in which the candidate with the most votes wins, while making the weight of their vote in the legislature (a representative’s “legislative power”) a function of margins of victory. The first goal of this Article is to outline how this proposal, which I call “weighted voting by margin of victory” (“WVMV”), retains the democratic virtues of district systems while ending minority rule. This is the first basis for the democratic imperative to make margins matter.

There is, however, a second basis for that same imperative, which turns on the political equality of voters. The U.S. Supreme Court has long held that democratic equality should be understood in terms of equal voting power (one person, one vote). But when margins of victory do not matter, the power of a vote lies exclusively in its potential decisiveness. A vote that changes the margin of victory without changing the victor is “wasted.” But it is an electoral reality that votes in competitive districts are more likely to be decisive, and votes in uncompetitive districts are more likely to be wasted. As a result, candidates and parties are more responsive to some voters than others. So voters are not political equals; they do not have equal voting power, except in an empty formalistic sense.

By contrast, WVMV gives votes a second type of power. In addition to the power to potentially decide who wins, a vote has the power to actually change the legislative power of the victor. Each vote, in effect, transfers a unit of political power to a democratic representative. This “transference” power can be meaningfully equalized between voters. A voter in an uncompetitive district is far less likely to change who wins but is equally likely to change the margin of victory, such that their vote is no longer wasted. Under this system, candidates and parties have stronger reasons to be more equally responsive to all voters. Hence, there is a democratic imperative to make margins matter, in order to give voters a meaningfully equal form of voting power.

The final goal of this Article is to explain how we can implement WVMV in modern democracies, focusing on three particularly challenging cases: the U.S. Senate, the Parliament of the United Kingdom, and the U.S. House of Representatives. These cases are challenging for several reasons, the most pertinent of which turn on the ways we should understand margins of victory when electorates are of unequal sizes (as in the U.S. Senate); are contested by more than two parties (as in the U.K.); or are conducted under different voting procedures (as in many districts in the U.S. House). I argue that WVMV should be considered feasible in all such contexts, and hence offers a practical, rather than purely theoretical, alternative to the status quo.