More Equitable Democracy

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

INTRODUCTION:

Hello everyone! My name is Stephan Kyburz and this is the 46th episode of the Rules of the Game podcast. Welcome back to the show!

People of color in the US have historically been oppressed, discriminated against and disadvantaged. Even though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as a result of the civil rights movement brought some fundamental achievements regarding political and judicial equity, the changes to the electoral system actually reinforced racial segregation and the lack of proportional representation prevents democratic institutions from reflecting the characteristics of the whole society. As the US electoral systems are almost exclusively built as winner-take-all elections that serve only the two parties in power, they don’t deliver fair representation. But how can more minorities’ representatives be elected into state parliaments, city councils and finally the US Congress?

This is just one of the questions I discuss with Colin Cole, Director of Policy, Outreach, and Communications of More Equitable Democracy. More Equitable Democracy is a racial justice organization to advance racial equity by transforming electoral systems. It launched in January 2018 and serves as a nonprofit intermediary that works with communities of color to improve democratic institutions.

Colin shares with us some of the key historical events related to electoral reforms during the Progressive Era and what we can learn from those for current and future reform efforts. A main strategy of More Equitable Democracy is to advocate for electoral reforms at the local level, where change is viable. Start small, start local, and make people experience the difference an electoral system can produce in better representing society.

Colin’s responsibilities include co-developing and advising on the creation of reform proposals, helping build coalitions led by traditionally underrepresented communities, and developing and maintaining relationships with strategic partners. Colin is also a co-founder of FairVote Washington, a Washington State organization dedicated to advancing proportional representation, and previously worked in political fundraising for Senator Maria Cantwell, in grassroots lobbying on progressive tax reform for All In for Washington, and the Bernie 2016 Presidential Campaign.

He holds an Executive Masters of Public Administration from the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance and a Bachelors of Arts from the University of Washington in Law, Societies & Justice, and Psychology.

I am your host, Stephan Kyburz, and this is the forty-third episode of the Rules of the Game podcast. I am a political economist with a PhD in Economics from the University of Bern in Switzerland. And I previously held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Center for Global Development.

You find a full transcript of this episode on my website rulesofthegame.blog. Please send any feedback to rulesofthegame.ddi@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to do me a favor, please give it a 5-star rating or a review. If you’d like to support my work, consider buying me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com and you find the link to it on my website rulesofthegame.blog.

Without further ado, please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Colin Cole.

DISCUSSION:

Stephan Kyburz: Colin Cole, welcome to the Rules of The Game podcast. It’s great to have you on the show.

Colin Cole: Thank you so much. I’m really happy to be here.

Stephan Kyburz: So my first question as always is, what is your first memory of democracy?

Colin Cole: My first memory is kind of silly, but it was in the year 1996. So I’m six years old and at the time there was a US presidential election going on and the children’s network Nickelodeon was having basically a kids’ choice Award where they were like, hey, kids, if you have an opinion on the presidential election, you can call in. Now, obviously, most kids aren’t gonna have cognizant political theory, but they’re gonna probably whatever their parents tell them is what they’re gonna think. But that’s what I remember is, I remember being aware loosely of this, of this election between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. I was seeing a lot of advertisements, my parents were talking about it and then this children’s cartoon channel basically gave an outlet for me to pick up a phone and dial in. And then there was a, you know, a pre-recorded voice of Bill Clinton who was like, hey, thanks for voting for me kid. And then, you know, the next night or whatever, they announced the results on Nickelodeon, which was like a week or two before the actual election. And most kids chose Bill Clinton. And I felt like I contributed to that. And so that was my first ever like, cognizant awareness of democracy and that would end up being a theme for me. I think being sort of steeped in a family environment where we talked about politics all the time instead of being one of those families where they kind of avoid it.

Stephan Kyburz: Cool. Yeah, that sounds like a fun memory. It’s kind of like a simulation of democracy for kids, right? And I think like, based on your bio, what I read on your website, you’ve been involved in politics all the way, you had several jobs. So how did you get so interested in politics and in democracy? And what inspired you to join the organization you’re working for, More Equitable Democracy? How did you get there?

Colin Cole: Right. So I grew up in a fairly political household, you know, my dad worked at a union job. And I remember there was a lot of discussion at the time. He specifically worked at a union job in a natural gas and then electric company. And so he was affected by a lot of the oil prices that were skyrocketing during the US invasion of Iraq. And so I remember just having conversations, really overhearing conversations between him and my mom about the war in Iraq, the connections between Vice President Dick Cheney and Halliburton and Exxon Mobil and how Iraq wasn’t even involved in 9/11. And yet we were invading them and not the countries that were and how they were all these oil fields and this is sort of the discussion that I was raised in, that first got me thinking about politics. And also my mom’s side of the family was pretty conservative and my dad’s side of the family is pretty liberal. And so at family gatherings, politics would come up and I would sometimes, you know, try to be the peacemaker. And this is actually how I found out about alternative voting systems. It was because, you know, I learned that there’s different ways to do it. In some countries you vote for a party instead of a person. You can do it like golf where you score folks on a candidate scale of, you know, 1 to 5 or whatever. And the person with the lowest average score, the highest average score wins. You can do ranking. And I got my family, who often wouldn’t agree on political things, that they could agree on process, that these processes, I could teach them about, from doing research online, sounded more fair and they could both agree on that. And that was sort of what first brought me to electoral systems reform. And so it was something I was interested in for a long time and, you know, doing high school speech and debate, working in a bunch of non-political fields as well. So, you know, I was an usher at our local music hall. I got a chance to work at a community college. I would often bring up these better electoral systems just like I did in those family reunions and the consensus I would always hear is, oh yeah, like that sounds good. That sounds better. And it’s never gonna happen. There’s no way it’s never, we’re never gonna get that in the United States. And I just kept saying over the course of my young adult life. Oh, someone really needs to work on this because it’s better and then being told, yeah, but no one’s ever gonna actually do that. And then when I started working in the political space, in 2014, working on a campaign to mandate universal background checks on gun sales here in Washington State, where I live, my political coworkers would say the same thing: Yeah, it sounds good, but it’s never gonna happen. And in 2015, I moved to the State of Iowa to work on the Bernie Sanders campaign, back in the summer before he was polling well, he was still polling at like 4%. And here I was working with, you know, bright eyed, young idealists who had never worked in politics before, who had moved across the country to work to try to get this socialist Jew from Brooklyn elected the president and even they would say, oh, but it’s never gonna happen. And so in December of 2016, after I had also worked on the 2016 race back in Washington again. I was like, you know, I’ve had it. I keep saying someone needs to work on this, someone needs to work on this and no one’s doing it. Everyone’s telling me it’s never gonna happen. I’m just gonna work on it and I went online and I found a way to organize with some folks through, you know, some Google List servers. Basically me and another guy from up in Bellingham next to Canada organized a meeting in a coffee shop. We got 30 people together to start talking about what it would take to transform, you know, Washington’s electoral system. And doing that as a volunteer is where I really started doing the work in a protracted way, not just in a thinking about it way. And that’s sort of what led the path, that laid the foundation for doing the work now, that I have done for the last seven years.

Stephan Kyburz: So that sounds almost like a grassroots, or it’s really a grassroots initiation, right, that you built, and that’s really cool. Do you know what Bernie Sanders thinks on electoral reform?

Colin Cole: Yes. So it’s never been his number one issue. He talks more about money and politics, which is, you know, a big problem in the United States. But he has spoken positively previously about ranked choice voting. Burlington Vermont uses ranked ballots and he’s put it on his platform before, but I’ve never actually heard him give a speech about it. I’ve just heard it as a one off.

Stephan Kyburz: I think as for you and for me, you know, like electoral reform is so fundamental and I always think like, if we could change this part, like all the rest would kind of follow more naturally and more fair and just in like better politics, right? And, you know, America, the US, is, of course, it’s also very important for us, right? It’s like, you know, it has such a huge influence globally. And yeah, that’s why also for me, like with the podcast, I thought like, we need to talk more about those things like the fundamental rules of the game, you know, that’s why it’s called like that.

Colin Cole: And I think, you know, even like issues like money and politics, like that is a big issue. It changes election outcomes, obviously. But there’s also a fair amount of research that shows that moving to better voting systems and electorally better voting methods and electoral systems can decrease the influence of money. And so it, it really is the sort of first order question that precedes everything else. My co-host on the podcast, the Future of Our Former Democracy, George Cheung, who couldn’t be here today. He actually has a story that’s extremely relevant to your podcast title. Because one of his sort of awakening moments was reflecting on his high school geometry teacher who is named Mr Hall who like, you know, kids were trying to think about like why is geometry important? Like this is boring and, and Mr Hall said you can’t play the game if you don’t know the rules. And he was just talking about like the fundamentals of like math and trigonometry. But that planted a seed in George about how it’s not just the system that you’re operating in, but it’s how it works and that you need to understand that.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And there are so many examples from around the world, including Switzerland, you know, electoral reform moving to proportional representation in Switzerland also really changed the whole game, like how politics was done. And I think actually that’s another interesting case. Of course, I feel from the US, you know, Ireland, Northern Ireland, for example, or New Zealand, Australia, like those cases are just a bit closer, but there are lots of other cases which are also very, very interesting. And I also talked about that on my podcast in earlier episodes.

Colin Cole: And we definitely love to explore other places in future versions of our own podcast and just in a lot of our comparative work because we do find that it’s one thing to say, you know, here’s this concept of a better voting system and if you had 60% who supported B then blah, blah, blah and to give these abstract examples. But when you can talk about a real place and real people who have stories that might feel similar to your own, it really changes the way folks think about something and it stops being this abstract concept of math and it starts being this concept of, oh, it’s democracy. Oh, it’s, it’s a real thing that I could work on in my hometown.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, it’s stories, it’s people, right? It’s life, you know, it’s like all of that. And I think that’s why I loved your podcast episodes the Future of Our Former Democracy that you published. I think it’s a great outline and a great kind of combination of, you know, some technical stuff and some more, you know, like stories from the reportage in Northern Ireland. Yeah, and having people there talk about it.

Colin Cole: Well, thank you very much. We definitely put a lot of time into it and I’m pleased with the reception. It’s been getting so far when we were, you know, getting ready. I was wondering, oh, is this such an abstract concept? No one’s going to want to listen to it. But thankfully that hasn’t been the case.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah. I can highly recommend it to anybody listening and I will definitely also link to it in the show notes for sure. It’s a great piece of history, and politics and democracy.

Colin Cole: Thank you very much!

Stephan Kyburz: More Equitable Democracy, the organization you’re working for, started in 2018. So it has now been like six years. What was the process at the start? I’m not sure you were there or how early you joined? But what is the history of the organization? And what was the reason in 2018 to start it?

Colin Cole: The origin story at its simplest is that I had started this group in Washington State, Fair Vote Washington, along with a few others to start talking about electoral systems in our state as grassroots, as volunteers. And early on my co-host and colleague, the director of More Equitable Democracy, George Cheung, started coming to some of those meetings. And he and I got to help sort of, you know, shepherd and lead and build this organization together as volunteers, again, alongside a big team of others. I don’t, I definitely don’t want to glaze over the contributions of the many grassroots folks who made Fair Vote Washington a success. But he and I enjoyed working together enough and we kept feeling in sync and in meetings like we kept making eye contact and being like oh, what that guy just said is really good actually, that’s really smart. And we got to go out and collect signatures together and do presentations for different groups. We both went down to our state capitol to lobby legislators and we just felt that we worked together really well. And towards the end of 2017, he came to me and said that he was preparing to form a new organization that would work on some of these same concepts, but on a national level and focused specifically on racial justice and asked if I would want to come, keep working with him. And so I said, yes and so we did, but for us, the founding principle, really our like, ideological godmother is the recently passed US civil rights attorney named Lani Guinier.

Stephan Kyburz: I have her book.

Colin Cole: Yeah, it’s very good the Tyranny of the Majority.

Stephan Kyburz: Exactly.

Colin Cole: We talked about this a little bit in the first episode of the podcast, but she, back in the late eighties and early nineties, was talking about how the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which is sort of the foundation of the civil rights or the culmination of the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties, along with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that that was constrained by this use of winner-take-all electoral systems that ironically required segregation in order to provide equal access to the vote and equal ability to elect candidates of choice for protected classes. And she felt like this was wrong, that we obviously all agree segregation is wrong, that one of the fundamental goals of the civil rights movement was desegregation. And so the top voting rights law of the country requiring segregation in order to draw these districts that could ensure equal ability to elect candidates of choice, just sort of didn’t sit right with her. And she started writing about how different electoral systems could offer different pathways for communities, whether you’re segregated or not. And this really got into my colleague George’s head early on because he was following these conversations. Because she was considered by President Bill Clinton, who I voted for in the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards, he nominated her to run the civil rights division of the United States Department of Justice. And later she had her nomination pulled because Bill Clinton found out she was advocating for these radical systems called proportional representation. And as a result, she ends up not getting confirmed and she returns to teach law at Harvard. But this sort of foundation, foundational belief about electoral systems and the interplay between segregation and racial justice, that really was the kernel of truth that George clung on to, that then was the seed that More Equitable Democracy sprung from.

Stephan Kyburz: Wow, that’s super interesting. And also I actually, I tweeted a couple of times about this story of Bill Clinton nominating her and then the nomination was pulled back by him, which is a super weird story. But it seems like, obviously related to proportional representation, which is kind of an extreme idea, right? But of course, it’s about power, right? And for the Democratic Party, it’s all about power. I mean, we’ve seen that also historically, you know, electoral reform or in other countries, it’s about how much power specific parties can retain, right with a specific electoral system. And actually, I’m not sure, you know, Lani Guinier after this episode, later on, I thought, why isn’t she more public with this issue? Do you know, like in the later years, I didn’t find a lot of material, you know, that she would have talked about this issue?

Colin Cole: Yeah, she did continue to lecture on it. And to talk about it a little bit, but it never was something that she really was pushing, I think part of it was because after this experience, she decided that she wanted to focus more on teaching and less on activism just because it was such a challenging period in her life.

Stephan Kyburz: I guess. Yeah, that must have been very hard, right?

Colin Cole: But she never, like, she never repented, she never, you know, regretted it. And at one point actually, there was a conference recently where her son, who is a lawyer now as well, was reflecting on this story of his mother. And the question was asked, like, should she have pretended, she didn’t believe what she did and pretended like should she have basically lied? Should she have said, oh, those were, those were like radical ideas that I was writing about this for theory. But like, I’m, you know, I’m a standard, you know, person, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna rock the boat in order to get confirmed and then enact her, her ideas. And he said that, you know, a lot of folks in this round table were like, yeah, like she should have done it to get into the position of power so she could advocate for the changes she believes in. But what her son said and what he said that she said throughout her reflections on this process was no, because she believed what she believed. And she stood by her beliefs and that’s the right thing to do and if the country wasn’t ready for it or if she was going to get tarred and feathered for it, that was a principle that she was willing to stand for. And so she really did pay a big price in her career for it though.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, I agree. And I think, you know, if she had gotten the position and talked, started talking about proportional representation, they would have probably pulled her back anyway, maybe, or, you know, I guess she didn’t have tenure for life, right, in that position. Yeah, so, I think that’s really honorable, you know, that she just stood with her beliefs and with her views and even though the price was incredibly high. And do you know, like in the civil rights movement, I was always wondering, because I always was looking for that part of the story, you know, that kind of a more, a fairer electoral system would change politics in the US in a way that would make politics way better. And my first episode on the podcast was actually on this topic, on America and how proportional representation could change the game really. And I was always wondering why in the civil rights movement that wasn’t more a topic that was emphasized, you know, but I guess they were fighting on so many fronts that they couldn’t include everything, right?

Colin Cole: I think a big part of it really just comes down to timing. That in the late fifties and early sixties there, it didn’t feel like there was a good test case to point to, to make the case for proportional representation’s relevance. Obviously, there was a civil rights movement in Northern Ireland at the time as well that ends up calling for proportional representation in the mid seventies. And this proposal ends up stalling and it takes another 24 years to become enacted. But there really just wasn’t a lot of awareness of electoral systems in that way. And part of that I think also is due to the fact that a lot of the way in which people of color, particularly African Americans in the fifties and sixties, a lot of the ways in which they faced discrimination both electorally and in terms of their public life, and just existing, a lot of it was more about general outcomes. A lot of it was discrimination in housing, discrimination in abilities to get loans, discrimination in employment. And the access to vote side of things really felt like it was just one more of these pieces of the puzzle. And it felt like the problem wasn’t the voting system, the problem was access to the vote. And that surely if we give everyone equal access to the vote, and if we can tear down these at-large systems that let the majority of white folks elect every single city councilor, that will sort of help solve the problem. I think in a way there was, there was sort of a hope, and you can call it naive if you’d like that, once everyone had equal access to vote, the system itself was fair. At the time, there wasn’t as much rampant manipulation of the system as we see today with things like gerrymandering. And so I think a lot of how that would have shown up wasn’t present in public consciousness. It felt like the problem was at-large elections and access to vote. And so give everyone equal access, tear down at-large elections and we’ll be good. And a lot of the really egregious manipulations we see of the system come into place kind of in response to the Voting Rights Act because people start realizing, oh, how are other ways we can get around that? And I guess the other sort of challenge with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is that a lot of it was focused sort of more broadly on this concept of anti-discrimination of, and I guess that’s sort of the challenge is that it wasn’t broadly described, like, what does it mean to discriminate it was more this ideal of, you know, in America where you judge others, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. And as a result, a lot of the sort of mechanisms were sort of left up to judicial interpretation about what discrimination really means. Which has ended up in recent years, a problem as the Supreme Court of the United States has increasingly interpreted what discrimination means to be narrower and narrower and narrower to the point where a lot of the core, fundamental principles of the Voting Rights Act no longer apply. They’ve been either overruled or stripped out or stripped down or narrowed so incredibly in their scope that it’s extremely difficult to apply. To the point where today, if you want to fight for your rights under the Voting Rights Act, you essentially need a million dollars to even get into court and begin the proceedings. And so if everyone, if everyone has voting rights, but only those with a million dollars can protect them. Do you really have voting rights? And I would argue that you don’t and that we need something new.

Stephan Kyburz: I agree. And also, I guess the success of the civil rights movement was kind of a watershed moment and then probably people were like, ok, now let’s see how this works out right with more rights granted. And of course, then people started using the current state of institutions to tweak wherever they could get more power, right? With the gerrymandering and a bunch of other rules and regulations that would either include or exclude people on some level. And I think that’s also why for a long time, it wasn’t as present because that’s always the question that I have in my mind: why didn’t it come up earlier? Because now I feel like there is kind of like a movement, like organizations like yours, I had Lee Drutman, for example, on the podcast. And there seems to be a renewed interest in this question. But for a long time, it was kind of silent or, there were only a few contributions I guess from the political science perspective, they were talking about it. But even there, I didn’t feel like there was a lot and I think also because the system was seen as quite successful in some ways, because the United States was like economically growing, like developing and the country seemed like a success story. So I guess a lot of people didn’t want to change that, but of course, from a minority perspective, this looks very, very different, right?

Colin Cole: I think that’s a great point that especially during the post war period, the economy was booming. There was the sense that the United States is the most successful democracy in the world. Like what, let’s not shake things up. You know, we have a few wrongs to address in terms of the history and legacy of discrimination and racism. But like at its core, like American democracy is doing great. And again, that this notion of timing, that there weren’t a lot of other examples that were in the public consciousness around this concept of proportional representation. There’s this concept in political science, and Lee might have talked to you about this a little bit about realignment and about these opportunities for big political shifts that really only come along every 30 to 50 years. And as it happens, the different periods of realignment in the US just didn’t happen to coincide with public consciousness or awareness around proportional representation. We had a pretty big one during the post civil war period in the late 1800s. That was a big period of realignment and there wasn’t a lot of awareness at that point around proportional voting systems. A lot of alternative electoral systems were really coming online in the early 20th century. And this is actually when you do see in the United States, there’s some experimenting with proportional representation in cities like New York and Cincinnati and Cleveland. But this isn’t a period of great realignment. And so the opportunity wasn’t quite there even though there was this growing consciousness for a big US shift. And then the next time there is an opportunity for a big shift going out of the Great Depression. A lot of the focus on economic issues and then coming out of World War II, like we said, the shift was focused more on bringing more people into our system that we viewed as largely working. And so the conditions just didn’t line up in terms of awareness of PR and awareness of what the challenges are and what we’re trying to fix and that they’ve never lined up before. But it kind of feels like they’re starting to line up in this current period of US politics, which it’s too early to tell, I guess. But this may end up being something that we look back on 30 years from now as a period of realignment.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, there’s definitely some big shifts happening if we want or not. And I think, yeah, you say that period of ranked choice voting being used in several or in many cities actually, and then being repealed again, most of them were repealed in the 1940s again or in the 1950s. And so I guess that kind of movement also came to an end, right like a decade before the culmination of the civil rights movement.

Colin Cole: And there’s a lot of reasons for the repeal. But some of the repeal story also is a story of timing. There’s sort of four factors that happened in the repeal. The first is the most boring, but it’s pretty important. And this is something that Jack Santucci writes about in his book, More Parties or No Parties. But there’s this notion of basically the technical term is vote leakage. But this idea that Democrats in some cities like New York were electing ostensibly a majority of the city council. But some of the Democrats who were elected weren’t adherents to the Democratic Party. They were people who aligned with the Democrats on the campaign side, which is something that proportional representation specifically through the single transferable vote, rank choice voting system can allow for. And therefore Democrats were seeing, hey, on paper, you know, we have a 60% majority in this council, but on this last vote, only 45% of our members said yes. There are people that we can’t control, the system is electing Democrats who aren’t sufficiently in line with the Democratic Party. Let’s join forces with the Republicans and repeal the system. So there is that sort of dry behind the scenes political side of things. The other thing comes down again to timing where there was this quad facta of xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and anti-communist sentiment that all sort of came to a head, because proportional systems in cities like New York and also small towns, Massachusetts and also cities like Cincinnati and Cleveland and Ohio, it was electing for the first time ever black men to office and this is at the height of Jim Crow. Civil Rights Act hasn’t come into pass yet. And so folks are seeing the system as electing folks that they don’t want represented, specifically black people. And they see that as a direct consequence of the system in places like, again, Ohio, but also in Massachusetts, we saw some of the first ever elections of immigrants, especially Irish immigrants, which is relevant to our podcast, but also Hungarian immigrants and Polish immigrants. And there was a sentiment that this system is empowering foreigners and outsiders to control our politics. And in places like New York, it was leading to the first ever elections of members of the American Communist Party. And post war, most folks know that the US has this period called the red scare where there’s extreme anti communism that ends up showing up in legislation in terms of public culture, in terms of abuse of law enforcement. And even though the American Communist Party is only winning one or two seats on the 26 to 28 member New York City Council there’s a sentiment that there’s a single toe holes for communism in, in the United States, in the greatest city on earth. And it’s because of this electoral system that’s allowing this small group to get a seat at the table.

Stephan Kyburz: And everybody got scared.

Colin Cole: Right. And it ends up electing also for the first time white women and you have outlets like the New York Post that write that one of the most objectionable features of this system of proportional representation is that it supports the empowerment of women. And so obviously, we’re still sort of a racist and xenophobic and misogynistic society today because a lot of those things are ingrained in culture and it takes time to undo those. But I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone who wouldn’t agree that overall we’re in a better place now than we were 70 years ago. But in the 1950s, this sort of combination of those in power, not liking the system. And then the system itself electing black people, white women, immigrants and communists at a time when culturally the United States hated those four groups, especially in politics. It just led to a really right field to undo and roll back all of those systems and reinstate the sort of winner-take-all systems that we use today, which definitely have major flaws but keep those groups out.

Stephan Kyburz: So it was really a strategy to keep out all the people, like they were kind of afraid of taking power. I mean, I read this story of Ted Berry in New York, oh no, in Cincinnati and it was fascinating, what he had to struggle with as a black man and being a member of the Communist Party and how the laws were used to really take him down. And imprison him and it really destroyed his political career.

Colin Cole: His story is very similar to Benjamin Davis junior in New York, a black communist who got elected ironically to represent the island of Manhattan, the US Financial Center. And similarly he ends up imprisoned under anti-communist legislation and his political career is destroyed as a result and he goes through hell and he really was in a lot of ways in New York, the face of the repeal campaigns.

Stephan Kyburz: If you look at it, like a crazy period in American life and now moving forward to today, it also, things got more kind of out of hand in some ways. But looking from the perspective of your organization, More Equitable Democracy, you started in 2018. What is the focus of your work and where do you think you have the best leverage to bring about change to the electoral institutions?

Colin Cole: So More Equitable Democracy focuses on local level change and particularly our lens that we talk about proportional representation through or that we look at proportional representation through is focused on racial justice and racial equity. And I say that because there are a lot of organizations in the United States that focus on election reform. But the reason that the different organizations focus on election reform really changes both the way that they talk about it, but also the policies that they advocate for. So some organizations are more focused on decreasing polarization, trying to bring the two extremes of the US political system closer together and electing more folks from the middle. And some folks are focused more on, just sort of solving the spoiler effect. This notion that the majority of the vote can be split between two similar candidates like you saw in 1992 with Ross Perot and George H.W. Bush, or like you saw in 2000 with Ralph Nader and Al Gore, like you arguably saw in 2016 with Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein. And so when those are the problems you’re focused on, you aren’t drawn as much to proportional representation or you’re not necessarily drawn as much to proportional representation. But from our organization’s perspective, racial justice is one of the core, fundamental problems facing the American people that we’ve still never really truly grappled with. And this shows up not just at the federal level and not just in terms of access to the ability to cast a ballot, but in so many aspects of everyday life, from interactions with police to interactions with the public schooling system, to how climate change policies are adopted or not to where streets are paved, where potholes are fixed, where new highways are put on which neighborhoods are invested in. And our sort of organizational sense is that trying to solve each of those different problems and many more that we don’t have time to list is sort of attacking the symptoms and they’re worthy things to fight. They are areas of discrimination where the outcomes are real and people of color are disproportionately impacted by these policies. And that sort of 1000 fights that you have to fight all at once, all the time. But if we could work on our electoral system first, if we can transform our electoral system away from a winner-take-all system and to a proportional system, that as a consequence, the people making the policy decisions that affect police and schools and streets and and bussing will start being able to more accurately reflect those parts of the community that are disproportionately impacted. And so for us, looking at electoral systems reform is a first order question that we think can then ripple out and affect all these other policy areas. And because local government affects your day to day life far more than the federal government, a lot of our focus is working with communities on the local level to transform their city, their school board, their county elected bodies with an idea that, number one, that will help impact your day to day life more directly. And, two, that can help lay the foundation for bigger change eventually at the state or federal level. And we actually saw something like this in Northern Ireland where after the 1974 Sunningdale Accord, which is a failed attempt to resolve the troubles, there was this 20 year period where local government started experimenting with proportional representation and finding out that it helped alleviate a lot of the challenges that they were facing their community and this sort of test case, the series of test cases and local experiments were sort of the proof and concept that when it came time for the 1998 Belfast, Good Friday Agreement, to finally bring the the 30 year period of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland to an end. They were able to point to these local examples and say: this system is working and it’s something that we should try here. And our sort of hope aspirationally is that the work that we’re doing to help reform local elections today can help start being the foundation for even bigger reforms at the state and national level in the next 20, 30 years, even if that reform isn’t happening tomorrow. Because we think that the current US Congress is never going to support something like proportional representation. They just, most of them haven’t even heard of it. They don’t understand it. They’ve never had to grapple with it. And so we want to focus on building out these test cases to show what it is that it works and that it can be done in the United States to really help give that legitimacy when we start making the case to a larger scale system change.

Stephan Kyburz: That sounds super interesting. And also, I guess, the kind of right strategy to go ahead to experiment or to support cases on the local level, maybe at the state level and then when people see how it works and that it just yields more fairer results, then people can understand what’s happening and that might be the starting point for the way bigger fight for the elections for Congress.

Colin Cole: And ultimately, obviously, we do want to change those things, but we think we have to do this work first, that starting national is just an uphill battle and it’s unlikely to yield change. Whereas starting locally is a battle that’s winnable, it’s likely to yield change and it will ultimately make that bigger fight easier.

Stephan Kyburz: And how do you feel now about the movement? Like, where do you stand? What’s the dynamic? And do you have a lot of partner organizations you’re working with?

Colin Cole: Yeah. So I think there’s a lot of increased interest in proportional representation, particularly in the last few years. It used to be that, you know, on national calls with other election reformers, we would always stick our hands up and say, hey, have we looked at proportional representation yet? Like, hey, we’re doing this big poll on national feelings about election reform. Could we put in a question about proportional representation? And folks would just say, yeah, we’re not going to do that right now, or yeah, we’ll get to that someday but not now or we don’t even need to bother testing that because we think we know how people feel. And especially since really starting with the January 6th, 2021 attempted insurrection in the United States going up through the midterms in 2022, and then with these most recent elections in 2024, they’re keeping these surges of folks who are sort of coming to the conclusion that maybe we do need something more fundamental, that tinkering at the edges isn’t working, that these small baby step incremental reforms aren’t sufficient to meet the challenges that we have of the day. And so, number one, there are a lot of national organizations who are increasingly talking about or thinking about proportional representation, which is great and encouraging. But also one thing that is a little different about More Equitable Democracy, that I really like, is that most of our partners, I mentioned that they’re grassroots, local level partners, but most of them aren’t election reform organizations. Most of them are community based and either they’re focused on an issue like racial justice or a constituency like the Asian-Americans or indigenous people, or they are actually focused on serving their community and providing mutual aid, making sure that folks are aware of what’s going on in civic life and keeping, just advocating for these communities in general across policy issue areas. And increasingly these community groups are becoming aware that some of the challenges they’re facing, it’s not just a matter of getting out the vote harder or showing up on election day that sometimes the system itself fundamentally is a barrier to advancing the racial justice policies that they have as an organization. And so they are adding election reform as one of the things that they’re working on. And to me, that’s the really inspiring work that I think is going to make this happen because it’s one thing when twelve democracy reform organizations sign in to testify to say we should reform democracy. But it’s another when 10 or 20 or 30 organizations who focus on things totally unrelated to our electoral systems, say we need to change our electoral systems. That’s really what makes folks start paying attention and taking it more seriously.

Stephan Kyburz: And also potentially big organizations, that already have a huge network, that have a huge audience, if they take up this issue, that might be, way, way more powerful, right? And also I think in general your organization focuses on minorities and people of color, but it’s also about general representation, right? For everybody, you know, it would not just increase or improve representation for those groups, but in general, for all Americans.

Colin Cole: That’s right. And one thing I often use as a thought experiment, thinking about political parties is that you can point to say the millions of Republicans who live in California and say that their vote effectively often doesn’t end up counting or mattering for the White House, for the Governor, for members of Congress. And the same thing is true for Democrats in places like Texas or Alabama, Missouri that you can find in most states, there’s a sort of a sense that the urban population centers have a lot of power and the rural areas don’t as much or even within cities, you might find a lot of the power is concentrated downtown and that the rural outlying areas doesn’t. You might have a democratic city where Democrats are 65% of the population, but they win every single city council seat or you might have a more rural county commission where Republicans are 60% of the population, but they win every single seat. And what I found is when you tell someone, hey, should Republicans have more representation in Seattle? Their answer depends on their political viewpoint that if they’re Republican, they say yes. And if they’re a Democrat, they say no. But if you say, should Republicans have more representation in Seattle and Democrats should have more representation in rural eastern Washington. That’s when folks are like, oh yeah, that does sound fair because everyone can find a community group that’s unrepresented somewhere. And so when you start talking about helping rural Democrats and urban Republicans, when you start talking about people of color in white neighborhoods, but also people of color in highly segregated areas. When you start talking about renters being able to achieve their fair share of representation, not just homeowners, you can point to areas of town where young people are consistently, you know, a third of the electorate and yet the only people who ever represent them are over the age of 55. That’s when a lot of light bulbs start going off for folks when you’re able to tell folks that it’s not just one community who will benefit from this, but that every community across a geography all sort of stands to have better and more fair representation. And actually one thing that we grapple with a lot on the municipal level is, you will have times where maybe Democrats are winning all the seats, or Republicans win all the seats, but it’s one specific type of Democrat. So maybe it’s, you know, a moderate, Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries type democrat who wins every single seat in Buffalo New York. But there are Republicans in New York who aren’t getting represented. And there are more progressive Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders who aren’t getting represented. And so really across the political spectrum, a proportional system allows more communities to be represented and not just one type of one type of community, a subset of a subset.

Stephan Kyburz: Exactly. That’s why I also say it improves representation for everyone. Essentially people are just so more complex, right, then we often, you know, say this group and that group, but it’s, you know, like, right, as we’ve seen also in the last election, people have changing opinions and it’s just so important that everyone is well represented. But for your organization, the election of Trump and the Republicans taking over the Senate, the House and the Supreme Court, they already had, it must have been both like a devastating moment. But also maybe the realization that this fight is real and is important and what was going on in your organization after the election?

Colin Cole: For our organization the election in a lot of ways, the outcomes of the 2024 election were sort of unfortunately vindicating in a way that kind of felt bad, that we’ve been saying for the entire existence of our organization that our electoral systems are unreliable and they’re vulnerable to these 180 degree swings where a small change in turnout can completely in a 180 degree way change the direction of government. And that continues to be unreliable and that it’s delivered bad outcomes in the past and it’s going to deliver bad outcomes again and that there’s often too much focus on getting one person elected, you know, who can, who can fix everything. And we saw some of that, a lot of that, I think in the sort of lead up to the 2024 election and we saw a lot of the tensions of winner-take-all elections in sort of the campaign strategies where it felt like to a great extent, both the Kamala Harris and Donald Trump campaigns were pursuing the same voters, the same sort of group in the middle. When one thing we’ve discussed before on our podcast is that oftentimes they actually, there aren’t a lot of people in the middle, most people actually are on one of the two sides. And so when your system says this group of white working class folks in rural America, like they’re the decider, that group really only represents, you know, 1 to 2% of the country. Most people aren’t swing voters. Most people either don’t vote or vote reliably for one of the two parties. And the system doesn’t really encourage you to talk to your own people. And so we saw a lot of that in the Democratic Party as well where a lot of the Kamala Harris campaign was focused on trying to win these swing voters over and sort of taking a lot of their base for granted assuming that, what’s the base gonna do? They can’t vote for the other guy. The other guy is so much worse when what ends up happening is a lot of folks didn’t vote for the other guy. It looks like Donald Trump is on par to get about the same exact number of votes as he got in 2020. A little bit more, probably one or 2 million more votes. But Kamala Harris is on track to get about 5 to 8 million votes less than Joe Biden. And so it’s less that his support has grown over time and more that the Democratic Party’s base seems like it wasn’t really invested in the offerings of the Harris campaign. But one thing that I think is, has been really sort of gratifying for organizations is we’ve spent a long time supporting activists in Portland, Oregon to transform their electoral system. Way back in 2018, when More Equitable Democracy first launched, some of our first meetings were with advocates in Portland who wanted to transform their electoral system. And so in 2022 they voted to change their system by 58%, 57.8%. And in 2024 for the first time, they used this new electoral system. And in a night where overwhelmingly the US electorate swung to the right, Portland was this rare example of a place that saw election results that really represented the full community because this is the thing that we were just talking about where there are a lot of Republicans in the United States and they deserve representation. But there’s also a lot of Democrats and across a lot of the country, after 2024 a lot of those Democrats aren’t going to have representation that they also deserve. But what we saw in Portland for the first time ever using proportional representation is that Portland City Council now actually looks like Portland. Historically, it’s been entirely center or center right sort of politicians who come from downtown sometimes with one token progressive. But now with this new proportional system, Portland has elected some business people who have careers in the professionalization of organizations and you have folks who identify as socialists. You have the youngest person ever elected to the Portland City Council under the age of 30. You have a longtime incumbent who is over the age of 60. You have more women on the city council than have ever been in the past. Usually there’s been two women at maximum of council, which was less than half of the old council size and now the city council is going to be half women. There are, of course, white men represented, but there’s also people of color. You have East Portland, which in all of Portland history has only ever elected two people to city council in this one election, they’ve elected three people. And so you’re seeing representation both ideologically where folks towards the right towards the center towards the left are all represented instead of just one group being represented, whichever group was the largest on election night. But you’re also seeing representation across geography, across age group, across home ownership and renting across gender. And you actually have a Portland city council that across the political spectrum, regardless of what it is that you personally think is most important, you probably now have an elected official who represents those interests. Whereas before the largest group of Portlanders would have someone like that but most Portlanders, many Portlanders, everyone else on the out group wouldn’t have someone who represents them. And Portland delivering on its promises as having the first example of a modern US city using proportional elections since the 1940s, and it working, it doing what it was supposed to do and what the advocates hoped and dreamed that it would, is really sort of inspiring and encouraging and we hope that other places around the country will look to Portland and see that Portland was an anomaly on election night. If something was different about Portland’s elections versus everywhere else in the country and want to dig into what that was and learn from it.

Stephan Kyburz: Cool. Yeah, I think that sounds like a great story and really a success case of bringing about electoral reform and this has just been the first election, right? So it always takes some time also for people to adjust to the new system and see what are really the options and the consequences of a new system used. At least in, for example, in Switzerland, it took a while until the kind of party landscape adjusted and that took like not just one election but several. And it’s great to see that in Portland, you already see effects. And yeah, I think that’s a great point, this success, to end the discussion. I know we could have talked a lot more about ranked choice voting. We didn’t go into the mechanisms, but you know, people find a lot of material on your website, More Equitable Democracy. I had a number of episodes on proportional representation in various countries especially but also in the US, like with Lee Drutman, with Jack Santucci. And so there is already a lot of material around for the mechanics of it. And yeah, it was really great to have you on the show. And I’d like to ask you if you have any book recommendations or any resources that you want to share with the audience.

Colin Cole: Well, two of the books, I was going to recommend we’ve kind of almost already plugged. So I want to give different ones, which for Tyranny of the Majority by Lani Guinier and then sounds like Breaking The Two Party Doom-Loop by Lee Drutman, something you’ve talked about before, which is they’re both great books and you should definitely check them out.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, with Lee Drutman, of course, the Two Party Doom-Loop, but I’m happy to recommend it again, of course.

Colin Cole: Another one and this book is a little expensive because its target audience is law students. But I think it’s actually really good. It’s called Rethinking US Election Law by Steven Mulroy. Steven Mulroy, he’s currently the district attorney in Shelby County, Tennessee, but he was a civil rights attorney at the United States Department of Justice for many years. And his book talks not just about winner-take-all and proportional systems, but also what’s wrong with the United States Senate? What’s wrong with our judicial system? What are changes that we could make within the constitution to the national level politics? He really dives into this stuff while making it approachable. It’s not just a bunch of legal and looking at code and statute. It’s very conversational, which I think is really rare for a law textbook. So even though it’s a little pricey because it’s a law textbook, I would recommend it, I think it’s great. And then another one I’d like to recommend, and this isn’t actually about electoral systems per se, but I think it drives home why, from a racial justice perspective, some of the systems of proportional representation that we’re talking about are so important. And it’s called the Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein. It really dives into the degree to which the United States government and local governments were not just complicit in the segregation of the United States, but actively encouraged it. And even though a lot of that was banned in the 1960s under the Civil Rights Act, how a lot of it continued for a long time. And it dives into how even though those practices are now illegal, a lot of the harms of inequitable systems persist for a long time. And a lot of the challenges faced by communities of color today can trace directly back to this system of discrimination that the government was responsible for throughout most US history, to the point where there are systemic real challenges that people of color are facing today and are going to face for another 20 or 30 years until we can find a way, or you know, longer, until we can find a way to grapple with the direct harm that we have perpetuated on these communities as a society. There’s this notion in civil court of damages of, if I break your window, I’m not just liable to replace your window, but I’m also liable to replace your floor, if your floor got damaged because rain came in through the window that I broke. That if you cause harm to another person, you are responsible for making them whole and rectifying, not just the harm that you caused directly, but the harm that resulted from your harm. And one thing that we can really see from this book by Richard Rothstein is that there is a lot of harm that the US government inflicted on people of color, particularly black Americans directly. But there’s even more harm that those communities continue to face today as a result of those policies. And I think it’s really important for us as a society to grapple with what those harms are so that we can start coming up with ways to redress those problems and to help make the communities whole that we have decimated.

Stephan Kyburz: Sounds super interesting. Fascinating and I’ll add that to the list of recommendations and I’m definitely gonna have a look at that too. So Colin Cole, thanks a lot for having taken the time to be on the Rules of the Game podcast. It was fun and super interesting.

Colin Cole: Yeah, talking about the Rules of the Game is definitely up my alley. So I was really stoked to be here and to dive into it with you. Thanks for having me.

Stephan Kyburz: Cool. Thank you. And I wish you all the best with your work and your organization, More Equitable Democracy, sending you lots of energy for your work.

Colin Cole: Thank you. We need it at this time and we appreciate it.

Outro:

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