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Lani Guinier's Oscar Fever

Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2001, at 6:57 PM ET

The Center for Voting and Democracy, a nonprofit group chaired by John Anderson and based in Takoma Park, Md., has come up with an ingenious gimmick to promote its campaign against winner-take-all elections. Like many left-leaning organizations, the Center prefers proportional representation because it empowers minorities. Under proportional representation, rather than pick one winner, voters pick several, allowing individuals who lack a plurality to nonetheless gain office. In a city council election, for instance, rather than divide the city into individual districts and select the winners based on who gets the most votes in each, you can have a citywide vote and designate as winners however many of the top vote-getters you need to fill the available seats. Lani Guinier is probably the most famous advocate of proportional voting; click here to read her recent Nation article on the subject. (The cumulative-voting scheme Guinier promoted a decade ago, which got her branded a "quota queen" by Clint Bolick when Bill Clinton nominated her to be assistant attorney general for civil rights, is a complicated variant of proportional representation, one she doesn't discuss much anymore.)

Proportional representation isn't pie in the sky; it's used in many government jurisdictions, in the U.S. and elsewhere, and also by many private organizations. Among the latter, the Center for Voting and Democracy cleverly points out, is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences when it selects Oscar nominees, as it will do Feb. 13.

Years ago, the Academy asked the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse (now PricewaterhouseCoopers) to figure out how it should select Oscar nominees. Price Waterhouse chose proportional representation. (Click here for PricewaterhouseCoopers' official history of its association with the Oscars and here for its regrettably sketchy description of how the balloting works.) According to Dan Johnson-Weinberger, who heads up the Center for Voting and Democracy's new Hollywood office, Price Waterhouse came up with the same variant on proportional representation now employed by the Irish Parliament, the Australian Senate, and the city council of Cambridge, Mass.

Here's how it works. In January, the Academy's 5,500 members receive Oscar ballots. Members vote in their occupational category or categories (actors for other actors, directors for other directors, set decorators for other set decorators, etc.) for up to five winners, designated in descending order. Anybody who gets support of 20 percent of the voters automatically becomes a nominee. (The 20 percent figure is approximate; click here if you want a fuller explanation.) The same rules apply in the balloting for Best Picture nominees, but in this instance everyone gets to vote.

According to Johnson-Weinberger, the Oscar nomination process encourages much more diversity than those for the Tonys, the Grammys, or the Emmys. If you belong to a "political minority within the academy, which might like art films," this strengthens your hand. Of course, not all Academy minorities are this enlightened. Judging from past balloting, there's a distinct Academy minority that believes that anybody playing a streetwalker with a heart of gold automatically deserves to be nominated for Best Supporting Actress. This group has exaggerated sway, too. More urgently, isn't any system that can select for Best Picture a mawkish piece of trash like Driving Miss Daisy fundamentally flawed? Johnson-Weinberger has an answer to that: Although the nominees are chosen by proportional voting, the winners are chosen by a "first past the post" system of the sort the Center for Voting and Democracy really doesn't care for. (In instances where only one candidate can be designated the winner, the Center prefers a runoff when no candidate wins a majority. The Academy doesn't do this.) "My guess is Driving Miss Daisy did not win a majority of votes," Johnson-Weinberger explains. "There was probably a George W. Bush-type plurality winner." He means, of course, that Bush won a plurality in enough states to win the Electoral College; based on the nationwide popular vote, the plurality winner was Al Gore. In any event, Chatterbox likes thinking of George W. Bush as the Driving Miss Daisy of American presidents.

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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Reader Comments From the Fray:


[Note from the Fray Editor: We don't often accuse the Chatterbox Fray of being too serious, and we appreciated these two posts, but really, come on Fray people--we were expecting a few good movie jokes, some matching of films to presidents (is Clinton the Wonder Boys President? The film certainly deserves Oscars), some claims that the Oscars were better-run than the Florida election system, some representation of marginal posters' views (It's not too late, we'll be checking again).]


Guinier's decade-old proposed voting scheme is, in reality, centuries old. It relates to the work of John Stuart Mill--one of, or possibly the best, of minds to address governmental matters. The multiple vote/proportional approach has some complexities, but it is far superior to the inane gerrymandering that has taken place to deal with minority representation. The gerrymandering is arbitrary and totally without a logical system.

--Don Barnhill

(To reply, click here.)


The author lauds proportional representation but I am unclear where he proposes it (I took the presidential election part to be a joke since we are only electing one president at a time). Proportional representation has the basic affect of spreading power to smaller groups or parties. It is used extensively in parliamentary systems. It changes the nature of a two party system to a multi party system. The result tends to be more representation of fringe groups (both an advantage and a disadvantage).

If you did it at say the House level you would have a few Naderites, Libertarians, Buchananites, etc. This would probably provide for more colorful debates and likely a little more gridlock as well. On the other hand, marginal groups would feel more represented by the system and views would include a wider range than they do now.

On balance I think I am against proportional representation at the Federal level (although local and State is fine). This is not because I am against more representation of marginal groups but because I believe our system in that respect works reasonably well, and I further suspect that large scale experimentation in the basic form of our Government is likely to have a great deal of unintended side effects. These unintended side effects would be worth the risk if our system was fundamentally failing in some respect, but in truth I do not see that as the case.

This author seems to be in favor of a variety of really fundamental changes to the nature of the United States Government (looking back over a number of articles). As thought exercises, I enjoy them. On a practical level, the bar for the need for fundamental changes needs to be set very high. Don't fix what isn't broken.

--Michael Murray

(To reply, or to follow a good thread, click here.)

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