South African elections show the way toward racial fairness.

The tentative yet still heady triumph of democracy in South Africa is the culmination of a remarkable year for proportional representation (PR), that "other" voting system used by most of the democratic world. Globally (and even here in the United States), the past year has seen an astonishing array of countries, organizations, and individuals flocking to the PR standard, further isolating the few remaining nations--the United States included--that continue to use the winner-take-all system.

The first multiracial elections in South Africa were completed using party-list PR. The South Africans never even seriously considered the winner-take-all system because it was universally recognized that the success of their new democracy depended on the degree to which their government reflected the racial and political diversity of their society--never a strong point of winner-take-all systems.

In South Africa, the white minority comprises about 14 percent of the population, with blacks comprising 74 percent, "coloreds" 9 percent, and Asians 3 percent. By comparison, the situation in the United States is exactly reversed, with whites comprising 75 percent, blacks 12 percent, Hispanics 9 percent, Asians 3 percent, and Native Americans 1 percent. At times, the clash of race and politics in the United States approaches the intensity of South Africa; yet the United States continues to use a 200-year-old system that routinely denies representation to its racial and political minorities, unless one can draw a gerrymandered district around them--not always an easy task, and always a controversial one.

The South Africans were smart: they opted for a proportional-representation voting system in which the white minority will not be shut out. Nor will an effective vote be limited only to those who happen to live in the right district. This is because, with PR, legislative seats are weighted equally in multimember districts. For example, in a 10-seat district, each seat is worth about 10 percent of the at-large vote. If a party wins 40 percent, it gets four seats; 20 percent of the vote wins two seats; and if an independent candidate wins 10 percent, he or she would get a seat. Under proportional representation, therefore, a party or candidate need not come in first to win a seat. This means that racial minorities, as well as third, fourth, and more political parties, are significantly empowered in the electoral process.

Winner-take-all systems are notorious for being not very hospitable to third parties or to racial and political minorities. There have been over 1,000 third parties in the history of U.S. politics, but only one of these ever lasted--the Republican party. This is because votes going to a losing candidate are wasted, even if that candidate garners 49.9 percent of the vote. Voters sense this, and so they often don't vote for the candidate they like but, rather, for the one who stands the best chance of winning--the "lesser of two evils." The winner-take-all system leaves significant blocs of voters unrepresented and renders most political races noncompetitive. Increasingly, many voters don't even bother to vote, which is why the winner-take-all democracies are near the bottom of the list in terms of voter turnout. The United States is next to last in voter turnout, with only 55 percent of eligible voters participating in the 1992 presidential election and even less in off-year elections.

No wonder then that New Zealanders, after using the winner-take-all system for over 140 years, voted in a national referendum last November to scrap it in favor of the "mixed member" PR system popularized by Germany. Over the past year, Japan, Russia, Mexico, and Italy have also adopted a version of the German "mixed member" system, which combines single-member geographic districts like those used in the United States with party-list PR. Significantly, in the conversion from communism to democracy, all the countries of Eastern Europe (except Serbia and the Ukraine) adopted some form of PR. Currently, the only governments still using strict winner-take-all systems are Serbia, the Ukraine, Great Britain, the United States, France, Pakistan, Canada, and India. All of the other democracies in the world use some form of PR.

In the United States, the move toward proportional representation is gaining steam. Recent developments in voting-rights cases in North Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas have all pushed PR onto the center stage of national politics. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Shaw v. Reno, in July 1993 questioned the use of racially gerrymandered districts to ensure the election of minority representatives, opening the gates to a flood of lawsuits. (The Court threw out a majority black district that snakes for 160 miles across North Carolina, no wider than the interestate in places.) This means that many states and localities are now caught between a rock and a hard place: as a result of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and subsequent amendments in 1982, they have a mandate stating that their legislative bodies must be racially inclusive or they may be subject to a voting-rights lawsuit. But now, depending on how they draw their districts to satisfy that voting-rights mandate, they may find themselves subject to lawsuits by either dissatisfied white voters or by racial-minority voters who have been excluded from the gerrymander (thus pitting minority groups against each other).

PR has been proposed as a race-neutral method of remedying minority-vote dilution, one which has the added benefit of circumventing the controversial and partisan process of drawing district lines. Ironically, these developments have brought back into the limelight Lani Guinier, the Clinton administration's rejected nominee to head the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Guinier is widely recognized as the foremost proponent in the United States of alternative voting schemes like proportional representation.

"I think this debate is going to take root," said Guinier in a recent interview with the New York Times, "because I think many Americans, not just racial minorities, feel alienated from politicians who ostensibly represent them. For a premier democracy, our level of {voter} participation is an embarrassment. Some may say that reflects contentment with the status quo. I think it represents ... rational behavior by voters who realize their votes don't count."

Still, the parameters of the debate in the United States remain quite limited at this point. Few are seriously discussing the adoption of, for instance, the type of PR that has been successfully used to elect the city council of Cambridge, Massachusetts, since 1941. Called preference voting, it is a more proportional form of nonpartisan voting than Guinier's preferred cumulative voting. With cumulative voting, voters get as many votes as there are candidates running and may give multiple votes to their favorite candidates. With preference voting, voters rank candidates in their order of preference, and candidates win by reaching the threshold of votes established for each seat. Surplus votes above the threshold are transferred to the next preference on voters' lists, so very few votes are wasted. Besides the Cambridge city council, preference voting is also used to elect the national governments for the Republic of Ireland, Malta, and the Australian upper chamber. Until the 1950s, preference voting was used by 22 U.S. cities to elect their local governments--including New York, Cincinnati, and boulder, Colorado--but the system eventually fell victim to a McCarthyite and racist backlash because it resulted in the election of a handful of blacks and Communist Party members. As a result, the history of proportional representation in this country is largely a buried one. Try going to your local library and checking out a book on the subject--most of the available resources are 20 years old or more and are written for an academic audience. In 1993, Columbia University Press published New Choices, Real Voices by Douglas Amy, the first layperson's resource on PR to appear in the United States in over 30 years.

The recent global popularity of the German "mixed member" system suggests some interesting possibilities for U.S. voters. The German system's combination of U.S.-style geographic districts with a party-list PR system that elects political parties in proportion to their share of the popular vote would be very familiar to U.S. voters. Voters have two votes in the German system: one for their district representative (just like U.S. voters have now) and one for their desired party. This system has allowed the Green Party to become a potent force in German politics; the Greens have never won any district seats, but they usually win seats in the proportional vote and, in the upcoming elections, are projected to win the third highest number of seats in the national Bundestag. This form of PR--as well as any of the other various forms--could easily be adopted in the United States at state and federal levels without constitutional amendments, merely by changing applicable laws.

Indeed, grass-roots efforts are springing up to bring about such changes. The Center for Voting and Democracy was established in 1992 to educate citizens about alternatives to the winner-take-all system. The CVD's efforts have spawned local organizations--like Citizens for Proportional Representation in Washington state, the Fair Ballot Alliance in Massachusetts, and other local groups in Minnesota, Arizona, northern California, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C.--that are busily educating, lobbying, and otherwise spreading the gospeal about PR. A Michigan group, People Achieving Legislative Power, has launched an initiative drive to change their state government to a unicameral legislature elected by PR. Seattle proponents are readying a voters' initiative to change their city council elections to Cambridge's preference-voting system, and Cincinnati voters narrowly rejected such an initiative in 1991. The task of conversion is daunting, PR advocates say, but they are optimistic that the logic and fairness of PR--particularly when applied to the current confusion swirling around voter-rights cases and racially gerrymandered districts--will win out over time.

The United States has one of the world's oldest--and some say most old-fashioned--democracies. Proponents of PR argue that the United States needs a voting system suitable for the twenty-first century, not the eighteenth. A twenty-first century voting system must be able to accommodate a multiracial, multipartisan society; it must allow a wider range of choices than just Democrat and Republican. The South Africans recognized this and gave themselves the gift of a modern multiparty democracy. Proponents of PR are hoping that the United States will wake up and follow suit. Otherwise, they say, racial tensions in the United States will continue to worsen, in no small part as a result of the inherent exclusivity of its winner-take-all voting system.

For more information about proportional representation, contact the Center for Voting and Democracy at 6905 Fifth Street NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC 20012, [phone].