By Mary A. Dempsey
As the country emerges from a one of the most politically charged elections of our time, we take a deep dive into Professor Spencer Overton’s Multiracial Democracy Project—dedicated to protecting voting rights for all.
Spencer Overton, the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor of Law, traveled to Ireland in June to learn first-hand about the voting system that went into place in 1998 under the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement. While there, Overton met Gerry Lynch, a man whose family had lived through the three decades of political violence the Irish refer to as The Troubles.
The Irishman talked about how his mother had carried bombs for the Irish Republican Army when she was a young teen. His father had been imprisoned for his political activity. Then the man raised a question: What do you do when you have a country full of armed people and a political system they don’t trust?
The man wasn’t referring to Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. He was talking about the United States today. What you do with a country that has an increasingly diverse population, a dramatically polarized political system, and rising anti-democratic tendencies? How do you manage identity politics, including white nationalism, as well as election deniers, extreme gerrymandering, and high court rulings that erode voting rights? What if many people no longer trust government or feel they have a voice, including in decisions on issues over which they disagree?
Those are among the questions the Multiracial Democracy Project, which Overton directs, seeks to answer. As its first step, the project has begun looking at alternative election systems with an eye on race.
"Right now, research shows that race is the most significant demographic factor in voting behavior,” Overton said. "It is more significant than gender, education, class, or marital status. Religion is up there, but race is still more important. And I’m not simply talking about the differences between Black voters and white voters. There is also a big gap between the voting behavior of white voters on one hand, and the voting patterns of Asian American and Latino voters on the other.”
Democracy reform groups have lobbied for voting-system changes such as proportional representation, ranked-choice voting, open primaries, final four primaries, and fusion voting. However, Overton said this advocacy has come without a complete understanding of how those reforms might affect communities of color. Even more, voting rights organizations do not have the resources to undertake that investigation.
"We’re at a juncture where some people feel cultural anxiety. How can we facilitate power sharing and deal with the issue of polarization… without promoting assimilation and mandating that everyone just has to tone it down and blend in?” Overton asked. “If we think of ourselves as founders of a large diverse democracy, what are the systems we should set up to both facilitate power sharing and accommodate our differences?”
Overton said the country’s founders thought little about racially polarized voting when they drafted the Constitution and set up the federal government. At the time, laws limited citizenship to “free white persons” and most states limited or would later limit voting to white males. Political factions took the form of merchants vs. farmers or advocates of strong federal government vs. believers in states’ rights. Today, the electorate’s fast-changing ethnic and racial composition—produced through federal laws restricting racial discrimination in voting rights and immigration laws—has brought forward very different divisions.
The Multiracial Democracy Project has been designed as a bridge to connect academics, policymakers, civil rights groups, the tech industry, election reformers, voting rights communities, and funders. Through research, analysis, conferences, policy advocacy, and public education, the project hopes to inform the nation’s transition to a well-functioning democracy that represents its increasingly diverse population.
The initiative examining election systems and alternative election reforms is the project’s first focus, but right behind it is a separate initiative that will examine how artificial intelligence (AI) can influence the democratic process.
"Both these projects are premised on the notion that this work needs to be done, but other universities are not doing it,” Overton said.
The Multicultural Democracy Project’s overall goal is ambitious: a pluralistic democracy in which there is respect for different cultures and identities.
"Our goal is not simply conquest and assimilation. It’s not just about saying you have to accept my norms and plug yourself into this preexisting tableau,” Overton explained. “To me, it’s unfair to say that folks who are in areas that are largely white can’t have an identity, and that they have to be muted. At the same time, however, we don’t want to stoke xenophobia and white supremacy.
"We’ve got to both acknowledge and respect the centrality of cultural, religious, gender, and other identities to Americans, while also acknowledging the challenges of polarization and devising systems to manage it and allow people to build new coalitions to collectively address our most pressing challenges,” he continued, acknowledging that the task is made more difficult by politicians who stoke resentment and division to acquire political power.
Overton traveled to Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland this summer while elections were underway to examine whether their single-transferable voting systems held lessons for the much larger, much more demographically diverse United States. In Ireland, non-citizen immigrants are also allowed to vote in local elections, a system now in place for local elections in Washington, DC.
Overton is also studying Alaska’s election reforms that went into place in 2022, including Ranked Choice Voting that allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference. Alaska’s groundbreaking Final Four Voting system combines top four nonpartisan primaries with instant runoff general elections. But he cautioned that voting systems that bring fairer representation for one racial or ethnic group may not work for other racial or ethnic groups.
And there is the question of how any election reform system will accommodate future demographic shifts.
"Should it be winner-take-all, for whoever has a plurality? Is it whoever gets 50 percent plus one? Is there some way we can have diverse communities share power?” Overton asked. "The question is what are the implications of different election systems for a diverse America?”
“Is there some way we can have diverse communities share power? The question is what are the implications of different election systems for a diverse America?”
Spencer Overton
Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor of Law
Over the next three years, the Multiracial Democracy Project and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School will partner with as many as 15 national voting rights and voter mobilization organizations that serve communities of color. The collaboration will examine the implications of alternative election methods, commission research, and work with voting rights and voter mobilization organizations to identify which reforms best ensure representation for communities of color.
Overton already organized panels on multiracial democracy at the 2023 annual meetings of the Association of American Law Schools and the Association of Black Foundation Executives. He has also discussed election reform at events organized by the University of Virginia, Emory Law School, UCLA School of Law, Shepard Broad College of Law at Nova Southeastern University, and several summits focused on the resilience of democracies. In September, he spoke at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.
Overton, one of the country’s leading election law scholars, first joined GW Law in 2002, then left to work in the Obama administration. He also led the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, America’s Black think tank, for several years. He returned to GW last year to launch the Multiracial Democracy Project, citing Dean Dayna Bowen Matthew’s leadership as the draw.
"She has this vision of a law school focused on action, on Washington, DC, and on solving real problems that matter for the future of the country. I told her about my vision for this project, and she was excited about it,” he said. “I had other options that I had been considering, but her vision was important to me in terms of the kind of work I wanted to do. Doing academic work is important to me, but I also want the ideas to have an impact.”
Grants from Civic (Re)Solve, Crankstart, Democracy Fund, Open Society Foundations, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Protect Democracy, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Unite America, and Wellspring Philanthropic Fund provided the seed funding for the launch of the Multiracial Democracy Project.
All eyes may be on the immediacy of the upcoming US elections, but Overton said the Multiracial Democracy Project is playing the long game.
"Whatever happens in November, we’re still going to have people not feeling connected to the people governing them,” he said. "The Multiracial Democracy Project is not focused on the next election cycle. We’re focused on the long-term democracy, the next 10 years, the next 20 years."