Confidence can be useful, but “no confidence” is necessary.
When it comes to voting, that is.
In the U.S., voters are only given the option of choosing yes or no on some question or choosing one option from a list.
So your ballot may include questions like “should we change this tax rate to that?” or “which of these people should be President?”.
Which gives immense power to whoever gets to write the questions or make the lists.
So we (almost) never see ballots with questions like “should we just re-think how we do all this?” or “should anyone, really, get to be President”.
Because those questions would present real, fundamental choices to the voters and could very well lead to the ballot-makers losing their power to set the range of options.
And this is why we need a “no confidence” option: it requires re-evaluating the options presented for the vote.
I’ve discussed one voting system that uses this before, the ballot system for the Hugo Awards.
The Hugo Awards “no award” option is a specific example of the “no confidence” option; voting for it says that the voter thinks giving no award in that category is preferable to giving the award to any of the listed finalists.
There, I suggested some ways that a “no confidence” vote could be interpreted in political voting:
- proceed with the electoral office empty for a term
- re-run the election with the losing candidates barred from competing
- automatically call a Constitutional Convention on the desirability of that office
This lets the voter reject the options presented by the ballot.
But we also need a “no confidence” option on the system itself.
I’ve discussed this before too, in looking at evaluating the legitimacy of States by whether they genuinely had the consent of their voters.
There, I suggested that the only way a State could legitimately claim to have the consent of the voters would be to have every ballot begin with the question:
Should [country] continue to operate under its current constitution?
Or, more appropriately for the U.S.:
- Should [state] continue to operate under its current constitution?
- Should [state] continue as a member of [country] under its current constitution?
(And having thought about it longer now, I’d extend that down to the county and maybe city levels as well.)
This lets the voter reject the system that underlies the ballot.
Ideally, we also need a way for the citizens to call for a vote as well.
In the U.S., almost all elections are scheduled with most elected positions having terms of 2, 4 or 6 years.
That’s a long time to let things go on when an elected official (or the system itself) is misbehaving.
In the West we have initiative petitions and recall elections, but only for state positions and issues (and, in California at least, initiatives are specifically forbidden from making fundamental systemic changes). But the bar for an initiative even getting to a vote is onerously high.
So we need to get the country to implement initiative petitions, and lower the requirements for them so they can be reached without millions of dollars to pay professional signature gatherers.
This may seem like a lot to just add an option that (hopefully) would only be rarely used.
But it’s important because it gives a last resort other than violent revolution, which is all the current system leaves when something goes seriously wrong and the next scheduled election is years away.
I think most of you would agree that:
it’s better to just have a vote over it than it is to to start shooting
I’m concerned that it may be too late for the U.S. to make changes like this, but even if it is it’s still worth noting the problem so we can do better the next time.
