An ‘Indian-American’ Paradox: World’s Two Proudest Democracies are Also the Most Systematically Flawed

On the surface, it seems that an Indian American should by all means be proud of democracy. India has been the world’s most populous democracy since its modern inception, breaking a record for history’s largest democratic exercise every five years. On the other hand, the founding of the United States pioneered democracy in the modern era, growing from a rebellion against an oppressive regime to become the longest continuous democracy in history. As a simplified boast, we, as Indian Americans, might claim to be connected to the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s biggest democracy, being a small part of the relationship between two bastions of freedom in a world that seems to experience more tyranny and injustice everyday. 

Of course, this is an incredibly optimistic worldview, and from a more cynical perspective, these two nations seem to harbor as much, if not more injustice and attacks on freedom as anywhere else. This is perhaps a sign of the worldwide decline of the structure of democracy seen in its apparently strongest pillars. These pillars’ outer cracks are widely visible, as attacks on freedom and justice, but in this article I want to bring attention to the very material of these pillars, that may be just as likely to cause their crumble. That is to ask the question, how flawed are the systems of democracy our countries use?

I have to start by bringing up the fundamental difference in Indian and American systems of democracy. India has a parliamentary system, modeled after that of the United Kingdom, where leader of the Legislative branch becomes the head of the government, whereas America has a presidential system, with a separately elected leader of the Executive branch becomes head of state and government. These systems have their own pros and cons. Proponents of the parliamentary system might appreciate the Prime Minister’s accountability to the parliament, encouraging compromise and coalitions, while the presidential system has the advantage of bringing stability to the country’s top job, without parliamentary shenanigans causing snap elections and hung parliaments. Be that as it may, my argument is that despite the inherent flaws of the systems, these countries do not use them to their full potential as a democratic system. In other words there are other parliamentary and presidential countries that India and America can learn from respectively, no matter which of the two general systems is superior at its best. 

First-Past-The-Post

Let us start with the simplest flaw, perhaps the most famous one (at least in the United States — I will return to this point below), the first-past-the-post voting system. When a voter in India or mostof the United States casts a vote, all they are doing is picking one candidate for a given office. We get a number of how many times each candidate was picked, and the candidate with the highest number is declared the winner. This procedure, the first-past-the-post method, is the most obvious way to make a decision, but like many systems intuitively thought up by humans, it has many flaws and just as many viable alternatives. In first-past-the-post the fundamental flaw that causes most of its problems is that the highest number is chosen regardless of what percentage of the electorate contributed to that number. I found a perfect example of the problem with this in this year’s Indian election. The Indian National Congress won Punjab’s Firozpur constituency despite winning only 23.7% of the vote. In other words, more than 75% of the voters picked someone else — but each of those three fourths voted for a different party, meaning four parties got approximately a quarter of the vote. Another recent example, this one from America illustrates this well. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Donald Trump for president but only in swing states, when polls showed more than half of Kennedy’s supporters preferred Trump to Kamala Harris. Kennedy told his supporters to vote for Trump, to prevent the otherwise-Trump-voters from being defeated due to his candidacy. But those voters still preferred Kennedy presumably, which means the system forces them to vote for a candidate they don’t prefer, even if indirectly through Kennedy’s endorsement. 

This isn’t to say the INC won illegitimately, and absolutely not to point fingers at a certain party. As I will elaborate later, electoral reform is conflated all too often in both countries with bias against a certain party, when it is in fact targeted at the system itself. So what is the reform needed in this case? There are multiple, but the core antidote in all of them is voting in some way for multiple parties. The most popular voting system that incorporates this is called Ranked Choice Voting. In this system, a voter would rank every candidate from 1-5 if there were five candidates for example. If this system was applied to American swing states, Kennedy voters there could simply rank Trump as their second choice, or Harris if they preferred her, not wasting their vote and possibly causing their least favorite candidate to win (a regular occurrence with American third parties, as most of their voters tend to prefer the more ideologically similar major party as their second choice), nor failing to express support for the candidate they align with the most. The way votes are counted in this system is what solves the first problem, as a candidate cannot be elected without a majority of the vote. If no majority is produced,  the least popular candidate’s votes are transferred to the second choices of each of their voters. This continues with the least popular candidate being eliminated each time until a majority emerges. 

This is but a single popular alternative voting system, and there are many which are arguably even better than this one. Analysis of voting systems is ultimately twofold, being both mathematical and sociopolitical, and while other voting systems have their own pros and cons that are useful to be aware of when considering electoral reform, I won’t be elaborating on them because the flaws in each of them are ultimately mathematical, with many ranked-choice-based systems being proven to be fundamentally undemocratic to some extent by Arrow’s impossibility theorem. There are also many simple explanations of these systems published online by other proponents of electoral reform. This brings me to another reason I will not be covering them, which is that this article is a case study into two countries which have stubbornly avoided adopting these systems, and is meant to analyze their lack of usage of these systems more than the variations in countries that do use “better” systems. In order for either America or India to identify and adopt a better system, we have to acknowledge that we can do so much better than the status quo in the first place, and of course that other countries are doing it better than us, which is the intention of this article.

Winner-Take-All

Before this however, there is a second major problem that should be covered, pertinent to the most important elections in both countries. While we already covered the process of a single candidate’s election, how do these elections determine the outcome of the legislature itself, where decisions are actually made? This problem would usually apply specifically to legislative elections, but due to the unusual U.S. presidential system, this problem affects both legislative and executive elections for the head of government in America, as it does to India’s legislative election which ends up determining the head of government. 

Even if the result of the presidency or prime ministership will inherently be unsatisfactory to a large portion of the electorate, at least the legislature should be a space where all voters theoretically have some representation. However, we see this seemingly basic ideal fall apart when we realize each constituency or district elects only one member of the legislature. Even if a majority was needed for a win, at worst, that would still result in the opinions of almost half a region being thrown out. A candidate winning by a hair’s breadth and by a landslide would be treated identically, with that candidate representing the whole district and the other candidate or candidates getting nothing — hence this system’s name, winner-take-all. 

The first-past-the-post and winner-take-all are both exceedingly rare in today’s world, with alternatives used around the world in every continent, the holdouts mostly being former British colonies.

Consider that first-past-the-post means a majority isn’t even necessary for a win, and that India in particular has many constituencies with numerous parties in close competition, case in point the aforementioned Firozpur which produced a winner with less than a quarter of the vote, and it seems obvious that this is a system unfit for a modern multiparty democracy. 

As for the American presidential system’s vulnerability to this flaw, the electoral college, for all its controversies, should be universally condemned at least for this. The electoral college system in which the final vote lies in the states’ electors representing the winner of each state, and not the people directly, causes the votes of Democrats in Republican strongholds and Republicans in Democrat bastions to go to waste. Not only that, but many Democrats and Republicans living in their own safe states may as well consider abstaining from voting, since their vote would only contribute symbolic support to their party’s essentially predestined win, just as supporters of the rival party would only show symbolic rejection of their state’s favorite. 

While casting a vote of symbolic support is far better than abstaining from voting, this mindset condenses and crams an entire nation’s democratic exercise into the decisions of a few demographics in a few so-called swing states which are rewarded generously by candidates and other politicians at the cost of other states just because they happen to have an equal number of Democrats and Republicans, completely defeating the purpose of protecting small states so often cited by Electoral College supporters in favor of protecting whichever states have become equally divided due to various circumstances of the era of a given election.

Finally coming to the answer to this problem, which is any type of proportional system. These systems occupy a large spectrum ranging from those most similar to the current system and more radical reforms involving less ties between a candidate and their region, as well as the voter and the candidate. These ultimately arise, again, from various mathematical formulas combined with other voting procedures such as ranked choice voting producing a few popular systems. Again, I won’t go into the mathematical formulas that produce these, but the bottom line is that a proportional system would make every vote play a part in the result, making every voter’s voice heard and every vote worth earning for a candidate. 

No matter if your vote is part of a large majority, or a small minority, it’s contributing to some amount of representation proportional to the amount of votes for the same candidate. As mentioned, there are some versions that would eliminate voting for a candidate entirely, with voters choosing a party and the party choosing their own candidates from a list, while others would eliminate regional constituencies, going by national proportions. Of course, there are other versions in between, and some which are fairly similar to the familiar systems in India and America of regional districts and voting for individual candidates, which would be easier to adapt to from our current norms. But this just brings up a fundamental question, the one this entire article has been leading up to, why haven’t we done any of this already?

India and America V the World

I was in India during this year’s Indian election, and am now in the United States in the lead up to this country’s election, and I have seen the fundamental enthusiasm for democracy in both countries. As mentioned earlier, first-past-the-post and winner-take-all are both exceedingly rare in today’s world, with alternatives used around the world in every continent, the holdouts mostly being former British colonies. We are not just behind the times, but behind the rest of the world. Being diverse and unique countries, both India and America may have many disagreements with the rest of the world on many issues, in addition to internal matters, but for being so proud of democracy at least in theory, can’t we at least improve the structure of our democracy? Surely it isn’t too complicated of a change for two major democracies when so many countries have already gone through it. But looking back at the statement that India and America are unique and diverse, we may find a reason for our avoidance of reform in this. 

As mentioned, many reforms against first-past-the-post and winner-take-all involve more radical changes, namely eliminating regional districts. Being federal nations, or at least semi-federal in India’s case, regional authority is deeply entrenched in our politics, so these reforms may seem daunting if not undesirable. Take the electoral college, which despite the undeniable flaws of its current state, is defended by its proponents mainly for protecting the small states, which as explained previously is not actually what occurs currently. However the electoral college’s theory of giving each state a certain number of final votes is not mutually exclusive with a proportional system, as these votes can be allocated based on the proportion of votes in each state, putting to use all votes in each state. Although I think the electoral college should be abolished as a whole,  this shows that even while preserving it, other reforms can be applied. However, a far greater, and more sinister barrier exists. 

The United States’ electoral college once again illustrates this well, although I am not arguing for its complete abolishment in this article. Support for and opposition to the electoral college largely falls along party lines, with Republicans for it and Democrats against it. While this is justified by each party with various philosophical reasons, it’s easy to see that the actual reason each party supports their side of the argument is that it helps them get power. Republicans have only won the national popular vote once after the 1988 election, but have had three presidential terms since then, so the electoral college increasingly becomes vital for Republicans to win the presidency. Meanwhile Democrats could have won these elections if it was the popular vote that counted. Despite the moral pros and cons of both sides that they may cite, it’s clear the parties really pick the side that benefits them. As an example of how this can produce hypocrisy on the issue, Trump tweeted on election night 2012 that the electoral college was a disaster for democracy, since Barack Obama had won the electoral college decisively while the popular vote would have given him a smaller victory. 

Now imagine if the system in place benefited both major parties, and we discover a major reason first-past-the-post and winner-take-all still exist. Not only does it keep minor parties away from power, but why would elected officials bother changing a system that keeps them in power?

I will conclude by bringing up both the biggest barrier preventing reform as well as some reasons to be hopeful about it happening. This barrier is ignorance. The intuitive nature of the current system, the apparent irrelevance of the issue, and intentional sidelining of it by politicians, causes the flaws in our system to go unnoticed. This is one area where the United States has made some progress, despite still being far behind the rest of the world. There are many United States politicians who do support reform, many U.S. organizations working for its adoption, and other media advocating for it. In India, articles supporting it are few and far between. 

The Wikipedia page for election reform in India lists many issues but only a single sentence about proportional representation. Crucially, the issue is almost completely ignored by Indian politicians. The only action concerning reform I could find was a 2017 Rajya Sabha meeting about proportional representation where first-past-the-post was also brought up. Knowledge about a problem among the people and leaders is the first step that needs to be taken, which is why I am writing this article. As for progress that has been made, Alaska and Maine already use ranked choice voting, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and the District of Columbia are all voting for it in the 2024 general election. All of the four states voting on it are far larger than Alaska and Maine, meaning a victory in any of them would be a major breakthrough for ranked choice voting in the nation. My hope is this could be a possible pathway to more awareness about reform in India, as Indian Americans in U.S. states using the system become familiar and the rise of alternative systems in the U.S. is covered in India. With more knowledge about different ways to vote, there are more opportunities for actual change. India and America are two thriving democracies, but while we perceive attacks on the system, we don’t realize the flaws embedded in the core of our democracy, that can and have been fixed elsewhere, which could end up causing a disaster completely undetected if not addressed.

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Varenya J. is a high school student in California interested in geography, linguistics, history, and politics.