24-Hour Voting 

I support advocating for the provision of 24-hour voting, which involves instituting a 24-hour period during which residents with less typical working hours (e.g., service workers, artists, etc.) can vote in person in addition to existing regular and early voting options. The city should also advocate for automatic and/or same-day voter registration.

Money In Politics

We need to lessen the impact of money in politics. This is a root cause of untold corruption and dysfunction. Political participation based on giving money to elected officials handicaps those of lesser means in pushing their priorities. Influence is instead concentrated among the wealthiest. This system also creates politicians whose time is spent calling up rich donors for hours on end and listening to their every thought and concern instead of constructing effective policy. Politicians, that is, who are inevitably more beholden to and who become more sympathetic with these backers. 

Consequently, it is the opposite of shocking that policies benefiting the wealthy are realized at the expense of those benefiting anyone else. This increases the wealth gap, further disadvantaging the less wealthy in their ability to influence. The spiral ultimately results in crippling the ability for struggling people to have comparable political voice and deep neglect of their needs.

Let’s lead the country in building a system that serves our people, not the highest bidder. Here in Cambridge, individual campaign contributions are capped at $1000 per person, per year. This is better than in many areas. However, we live in a reality where more than one in three Americans would have trouble paying an unexpected $400 expense, let alone a $1000 gift.

Also, there is no limit on what candidates themselves can contribute to their own campaigns. Nothing prevents a billionaire from plowing as much as they want, without limit, into an election that directly enriches their bottom line. Amazon already tried to do this in Seattle, injecting millions into a local city council election that would decide real estate decisions impacting their office headquarters.

Something similar can happen here. And why wouldn’t it? Cambridge contains research headquarters for nearly every multinational tech giant on the planet. Not to mention our density of pharma giants. We must plug this loophole.

No, money raised by a candidate does not, in itself, guarantee victory. There are other factors at work. Money is just one necessary, influential piece. But it’s not just about who wins elections; it’s about who is able to run in the first place. I have witnessed several prospective fellow candidates hesitate or opt out of running because they felt they didn’t have the personal funds or monied connections to be a viable contender.

This, in itself, is disgusting. There are few means for silencing an entire demographic more clearly disempowering than effectively barring some from holding office. Or, at the very least, imposing substantial, unnecessary, and wholly discriminatory added barriers. If we ever feel disappointed by an unimpressive selection of personalities from whom we must choose our governors, councillors, and presidents, we should look at our system for getting elected. Our process filters out nearly all but heavily-backed partisans. That is simply reality. 

Cambridge should model a better way. There are limits to what local government can do, given unfortunate federal court decisions about money as political speech. However, even if we cannot fully implement 100% public financing, we must do everything possible to further restrict the impact of campaign donations. Boulder, Colorado, for example, a city of comparable size to Cambridge, enforces a limit of $100 per donor per election cycle for each municipal candidate. We should follow Boulder’s lead to further limit maximum donations via a home rule petition. 

Five-Star Voting

Cambridge’s ranked choice voting (RCV) system is a substantial improvement over traditional voting. Nevertheless, our process for determining who actually wins in an RCV election is complicated, obscure, and generally unintelligible to the average voter. 

The system also incorporates an element of chance. This means that a recount of a perfectly valid RCV election result can produce a different, but equally valid outcome. RCV systems can also exhibit a phenomenon in which increasing a candidate’s support can cause them to lose or decreasing their support can cause them to win. For some examples of how this can ever happen, see here. 

Although RCV surpasses traditional voting in some ways, such as reducing the probability that any given vote is wasted on a candidate who can’t win, it has major drawbacks in terms of fairness, public confidence, and transparency. 

An Alternative System

I propose experimenting with “five-star voting.” This involves simply rating each candidate out of five-stars–similar to many online rating systems–with unrated candidates getting a default of 3 stars. Voters can rate as many candidates five-stars (or one star) as they would like. Winners are those with the highest average scores. 

This is a form of score voting, a system shown to outperform other voting systems in nearly every way. Score voting fully solves the problems of wasted third-party votes, chance outcomes, and non-monotonicity (when expressing support for a candidate causes them to lose). The tallying system is also much easier to understand.   

Accountability

Five-star voting differs from other kinds of score voting in its ability to hold candidates much more accountable. For example, unlike approval voting (another score system where voters simply check off as many candidates they would like that they “approve”), five-star voting establishes a default rating that is neutral (three stars). 

This matters, since it empowers voters to submit negative feedback above and beyond simply not voting for a candidate. For example, an official who utterly fails in their duty of service can receive a rating of one star, an outcome worse than if that voter had never submitted their ballot. 

This substantially changes the dynamics of accountability. It means that saturating airwaves with sensationalized antics is no longer a guarantee of getting even a few more votes. In fact, in five-star voting this strategy may actually hurt a candidate’s chances. Unlike traditional voting, scoring candidates means that a high profile paired with poor evaluation may penalize candidates more than if they hadn’t additionally sensationalized our media discourse. Five-star rewards those to garner positive evaluations from their constituents, even if they may have a lower profile. 

Also, right now officials who do the bare minimum (or less) in their jobs still benefit from the passive marketing of simply being elected leaders. In other words, the current system is a mechanism for entrenching incumbents even if they are poorly performing, which increases governing stagnation and worsens inertia. Under five-star voting, however, an incumbent is under greatly increased pressure both to be known and to actually serve their constituents. 

This also means, however, that voters are under their own additional pressure to do their homework before casting a ballot. That is because they have an enormous amount of power: Do they truly want to rate a known disappointment worse than a lesser-known entrant? That is now a viable option. Voters may feel pressure to actually get to know entrants, since doing so in this new system almost always actually matters. All candidates are equally at the mercy of the voter and all have a more reasonable chance at victory. 

Do we want this type of unprecedented accountability for our elected officials? Do we want this amount of power in the hands of ordinary citizens? My answer is that I simply cannot imagine a dynamic more aligned with the underlying values of democracy.  

More Nuanced Citizen Voice

An additional value of score voting is that elections can reveal more nuance in voter preferences. For example, we could see which candidates are most polarizing (rated most often either one or five-stars). This is actually of great public value, as it enables our government to better understand the revealed political and policy preferences of our populace and perhaps better respond to underlying needs. If it turns out that voters tend to vote only either one or five stars for each candidate, that is okay, too. This still reveals nuance in who voters care about versus who they do not bother to score. 

This policy might seem abstruse, but in fact it may be the single most impactful way by which to resolve substantial systematic dysfunction in our democratic system. It is akin to modifying the DNA of democracy–a lever with cascading, radiating effects on every other downstream decision. I am tired of living in a world where Uber drivers are held to greater account than our president. 

Pilot Testing

No government of which I am aware has implemented this version of score voting. In embracing our role as a forward-thinking city, however, I see no reason why Cambridge should not be first to test it. I would never suggest making any dramatic change before implementing low-stakes testing. Perhaps our next election can include a second ballot allowing voters to record their preferences according to five-star voting. The five-star results would be informally tallied and reported but would not ultimately affect the election outcome. It would, however, be a learning experience for both voters and policymakers.