Wednesday Interview: Jamin Raskin

POSTED BY Raleigh-Elizabeth Smith, 19 September 2007

Jamin Raskin first debuted his idea of “vote pairing” in Slate right before the 2000 election to a firestorm of response.   In the face of efforts to criminalize it, he redressed his plan for vote trading in 2004, and just last month, the 9th Circuit Court handed down a decision asserting its legality.  For this week’s Wednesday interview, we sat down and talked with the Maryland State Senator and American University professor about vote pairing, what’s wrong with our electoral system, and bigger possibilities for Ron Paul.

Veracifier:  We’ve read your first article on “vote pairing” in Slate.  Would you explain the idea to us?
Raskin:  Well, of course the Gore supporters and the Nader supporters were at each other’s throats in the 2000 campaign. And unlike in 2004, Nader had a very vibrant, substantial campaign, and Gore was locked in this incredibly tight race with Bush. You know people had been urging Nader to stay out of swing states, and some people were alleging that Nader was deliberately focused on swing states.  


It struck me that the question of swing states and safe states created a possibility for popular action to create a political alliance between Democrats and Nader supporters.  And the idea was that Gore supporters in safe Republican territory, like Alabama or Utah, would go online and they would pledge to vote for Nader in return for Nader supports in swing states like Florida or Ohio stating their intention to vote for Gore.  So this would allow Nader to keep the raw number of votes he was going to get while moving Gore towards 270 in the electoral college.

Veracifier: So what happened in that election?
Raskin: We know that somewhere around 35,000 people actually engaged in vote trading and it was probably many times more than that offline before vote pairing websites were shutdown.  But about a week before the election, you had this clear collusive effort by partisan officials in a number of states to shut down the vote trading movement.


Some of the things they were saying were pretty comical. The minutes of what the secretaries of states were saying this is totally fraudulent because people were voting for someone that they didn’t want.  That pretty much describes the vast majority of people voting in every election.  So now are we going to give people lie detector tests on the way in to make sure they’re not voting for their second choice strategically?


Veracifier: We know from your 2004 article that, despite what they said, vote pairing is entirely legal and within a voter’s constitutional rights.
Raskin: Well since then, of course, the 9th Circuit Court has ruled that vote trading activity is protected by 1st Amendment political speech and association, which truly it is. The decision was handed down about a month ago, my article in Slate has more.  But no money changes hands, nothing of material value, it’s just people getting together across state and partisan lines to form a political alliance.  

Veracifier: Right away, you encountered a lot of criticism about vote pairing being amoral and irresponsible.  How do you respond to that?
Raskin: There is nothing more or less irresponsible about vote trading than any other political activity.  It’s just people getting together to advance their political objectives in a strategic way.  Is it immoral when the Republican party has primaries to settle on one candidate?  Is it unprincipled when candidates who run for president in one party lose and later endorse that candidate?  I don’t think so.  It’s just the kind of bargains and trades built in to the nature of politics.  Anyone that’s been around the legislature knows that vote trading is standard legislative process.  You support my schools bill, and I will support your highway bill.  That’s not a crime, that’s democracy in action.

Veracifier: But looking at the 35,000 vote traders, we know there were alot of supporters, too.  
Raskin: I think it siphoned off a loft of the hostility between Democrats and Greens.  And that anger is an artifact of the particular electoral arrangement we’ve got.  We don’t have to have a system like that, where it’s a zero sum game.

Veracifier: So vote pairing is really a temporary solution – a band-aid – to the larger problems in our voting system.  What do you think can be done about it?
Raskin: The big problem with the electoral college is that it is in direct defiance of the principle of majority rule and one person, one vote.  We have had multiple elections as recently as 2000 when the national popular vote winner lost in the electoral college.  We should have a direct popular election for president, where every vote counts equally.  That’s what nearly every country on earth does to elect a president.  

The electoral college is a conservative institution that has thwarted political and social change at a number of points in our history.  But the vote trading idea is just one way of preventing the calamity of a Bush presidency.  And I think it came very close to working -- if we’d had another week and another thousand Nader supporters in Florida signed up to do it, the election would have come out differently.


Veracifier: So could vote pairing have any place in the ’08 election?
Raskin:  I don’t really see how it has a role now with no viable third party candidacy.

Veracifier: Why do you think there isn’t one?
Raskin: That reflects people’s correct sense that our constitutional democracy has been impaired in substantial ways by the Bush administration.  So I think that the whole public is focused on replacing the Republicans with a Democratic president.

Veracifier:  Well what about Ron Paul?  He isn’t going to get the Republican bid, and he’s got a huge following online.  
Raskin:  I know Ron Paul was a Libertarian for a long time.  If he ran as a libertarian I think there would be opportunity for an interesting Democratic-Libertarian alliance across state lines.

You know, to me, George W. Bush is any red-blooded Liberatian’s nightmare president.  He is big brother incarnate.  He has presided over massive expansion of the military and national security establishment, massive growth in federal spending, aggressive war abroad, opposition to women’s right to choose, opposition to the separation of church and state, increasing government surveillance, racial profiling, you name it.  Even if the purest Libertarians would prefer Ron Paul to Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, they’re going to have a lot more in common with the Democratic party than with Bush, Giuliani, or Tancredo.

Veracifier: So what if he doesn’t get the bid and runs as a Libertarian?
Raskin: Now that you pose it that way, if Ron Paul follows his principles and breaks with the big brother republicans, then I think the stage could be setfor a vote trading arrangement between progressive Democrats and Paul-supporting Libertarians.

Jamin Raskin is a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law.  He won the State Senate for Maryland’s District 20 by a 99% vote in September of 2006.  He is also the author of several books including Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court v. The American People (2003) and is a frequent contributor to Slate.