Term Lengths Proportional to the Vote Percentage.

A silly idea worth considering: what if a politician’s term of office was scaled by the percentage of the vote they received? Setting aside issues for the presidency and electoral college for the moment, consider a random House seat. Two years would be the maximum, but only in uncontested seats with no write-ins does anybody get every vote. In most districts under the current system, it’s a two-person race (or nearly enough) which would give winners of close contests a half-term.

If we adopted this, we would hold a general election followed by a number of by-elections as seats became vacant. If each of those only received a portion of the remaining term, it would create a version of Zeno’s Paradox, so to avoid that (and for cases where the vote was too fragmented among candidates) we would need to set some minimum portion of the term. Six months would do for the House. Whether it would be the same for the Senate or different would be up for debate.

One caveat to setting a minimum: it would also set the smallest portion of a term one could lose. So for the House, at six months, it would be 25 percent. If you won the general election by 75 percent, you would get the whole term. At that point, you might go with something like:

1. Winning with less than 50 percent gets a quarter-term.
2. With more than 50 percent gets a half-term.
3. With more than 75 percent gets a full term.

The kernel of the idea is whether the pressure point of winning, but only getting so much time for a close win, would encourage politicians to broaden their support. It might. It might instead become too common that many seats would only get half-terms, and that would be the expectation. The year would be good enough, and trying for more would be a fool’s errand.

In the Senate where terms run six years, a mere three years would be a significant reduction. It seems reasonable to expect that the pressure would be greater there, to win at least four or five years, requiring a bit more strength in voting. But the term length might give you more flexibility in creating a schedule there:

1. Winning less than 25 percent gets a one year term.
2. Winning up to 50 percent gets a two year term.
3. Winning over 50 percent gets a three year term.
4. Winning over 60 percent gets a four year term.
5. Winning over 70 percent gets a five year term.
6. Winning over 80 percent gets a full term.

What other changes could be expected? For one, it might be an automatic qualification that the incumbent is included for the by-election, assuming they weren’t disqualified or resigning. For another, in the House districts gerrymandering might take on a very different form: time-based gerrymandering. Some seats might be carved out to try to maximize term length, while still trying to balance that against winning as many seats as possible. It might also bring new parties and more third-party candidates to try to draw votes away from the winner in hopes of limiting their term.

Regardless of third-parties, we could expect no uncontested races. Even in very safe districts, shaving off a couple months of terms would be possible, so they would all have contenders.

What of the presidency? While technically feasible, the chaos of frequent transitions would reshape it. Assuming the percentage of a term would be based on electoral votes, it would probably have a moderating effect similar to what I assume for legislative races. There are other hairy issues to solve, like how it would interact with term limits.

Taken as-is, a president-elect would have to set priorities based on the time in their term, much more than they currently do. Assuming that there would mostly by-elections, including for president, their partisans in Congress could fluctuate a lot more over whatever time they have, so they would likely have to focus on smaller changes to more things, not having the time or support for big sweeping changes.

We won’t adopt this system. But it should still be a goal of most officeholders to get more than the minimum votes to win their seat. Through compromise, trying to find better and broader ways to accomplish political goals, lots of politicians could see more approval. Instead, they tend to focus on simply appeasing some limited majority and dismiss the rest.

We tend to see the same dismissal by pundits who like to pretend a victory is something greater, that everyone who voted the other way doesn’t count. These anti-democratic sentiments speak to the poverty of those who hold them up as ideals. While no policy or election can please everyone, we can do better.