As Barack Obama said during that Democratic National Convention speech that made him a… As Barack Obama said during that Democratic National Convention speech that made him a national star, a part of this country’s genius is its political process in which “our votes will be counted — or at least, most of the time.”

His passing reference to Florida in 2000 poked fun at a rare historical failure of our democratic system, but there is much to be explored about the nature of our democracy outside of Floridian aberrations.

Ours is certainly a democratic system, but democracy should be judged by more than whether or not votes are counted. It should be assessed with attention to the choices it offers its constituency and the representation of its social composition.

And in this regard, our democracy is deeply flawed.

As any political science major will tell you, governing is a choice between efficiency and representation. A dictatorship is the most effective form of rule, as it faces no opposition, much like a single-party democracy in which people vote for a closed ballot.

In essence, then, our two-party system has the most restrictive form of choice. The majority-wins format eliminates the minority from representation, even if that minority comprises 49 percent of the vote. Worse yet, it purges all challengers, preventing third parties from long-term success and limiting them to the role of refocusing the two major parties on particular issues, only to promptly evaporate into thin air afterward.

This absence of competition has had the effect of encouraging Republicans and Democrats alike to run toward the middle, obscuring actual platforms to appear moderate and appeal to the masses. Apathy has thus been promoted via the impression that the differences between the two are negligible when, in reality, they are vast.

The issue of representation is even more distressing. Black people compose roughly 14 percent of this country. But Barack Obama is only the fifth black senator ever and the only one at this time. Similarly, women have held a senator’s seat 33 times to date and are currently holding 14, a shameful all-time high. Other minorities are even more grossly underrepresented. In effect, what has been introduced is a rotating oligarchy, exacerbated by the nepotism present in U.S. politics.

If George Bush were George Doe, he would not have sniffed political success, to say nothing of the White House. And consider this: If Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination in 2008, it will become possible that more than a quarter century of the U.S. presidency will have been ruled by two partisan families: the Clintons and the Bushes. As it stands, such has already been the case for 20 years, an indictment of our democracy — and yes, George P. Bush waits in the wings.

The problem does not surround the presidency alone. Seventeen senators have familial relations in the lobby business, and to account for all the state and federal public officials with family ties in politics would require no less than a series of books. In this way, nepotism has effectively supplanted term limits, as evidenced when Alaskan Governor Frank Murkowski appointed his daughter to his vacated Senate seat in 2002.

Our two-party democracy may have been the model of the 1700s. Today, it is outdated, as illustrated by our decision to give Afghanistan and Iraq systems with more plurality than our own. A representative system that assigned seats according to the percentage of votes gained would create a multitude of parties with platforms attractive to political minorities.

It would add to our policy discussion and give a voice and proper representation to significant interests that do not constitute a majority but deserve due consideration. A vote for Nader would be just that, instead of being a vote against Al Gore or John Kerry.

Voter turnout would rise, particularly among minorities who have the most to gain, and most importantly, the Democratic and Republican parties would have to abandon their middle-of-the-road politics. Instead, they’d have to vie for votes by revealing their true platforms or run the risk of losing their respective bases. Building coalitions would increase bureaucracy, but such is the nature of a successful democracy: representation over efficiency.

Of course, such changes must be the will of the only people who have nothing to gain: those already in control. Governments in power tend to want to retain power, and so we will have our Bush-versus-Kennedy, Republican-versus-Democrat, less-than-representative democracy in place while our leadership oscillates between two partisan axes of nepotism and mind-numbing vote counts confirm an absence of alternatives and representation.

Carl Schmitt warned that decisions for the whole would be made by the majority of those in the majority — a minority. E-mail Pedja at pej3@pitt.edu.