Our voting body has a lot of inertia. Somehow, the Democrats and the Republicans got established as the de facto primary parties. The notion that a third-party vote is “wasted” keeps these two parties in power; no party can get votes until there is sufficient confidence that they can win, but of course no party will get that kind of confidence if nobody votes for them. A classic catch 22. I refuse to be a part of this problem and so I vote for third parties, but the thing that gets me about this problem is that it actually does have a sort of logic to it. On some level, it does make some sense to restrict yourself to the two primary parties. And that is the fundamental problem with first-past-the-post (plurality) voting — that depending on how you look at it, it can make sense to vote for a candidate who is not your ideal choice. (I am talking mainly about the presidential election.)
There are a lot of proposed fixes to this problem, namely alternative voting methods. Condorcet, approval, and instant-runoff voting are all way better than our current system. Plurality voting is arguably the worst voting method, and how our system has worked for so long using it is beyond me. The nice thing about our electoral system is that it does not require any nation-wide initiative to implement these systems — states are free to adopt a better system and use it to determine how their electoral votes get spent. A nation-wide initiative would probably never get enough steam to be seriously considered, whereas it’s entirely conceivable that more progressive states could make the switch in the next few years.
The only problem that I see with this (and in my opinion it is a rather large problem) is that no matter how the states determine how they spend their electoral votes, the electoral vote is itself a plurality vote, and it will suffer from the same problems as the state votes. For example: Let’s say Massachusetts decides to use instant-runoff voting. During the next presidential election, people in Massachusetts feel safe in voting for their favorite third party candidate knowing that if he doesn’t take the state, their vote will default to the Democratic candidate. With this new voter confidence, that third party candidate gets enough votes and takes Massachusetts — hooray! In the electoral vote however, the Republican candidate wins barely enough votes and becomes president. Everyone in Massachusetts bitterly suffers under four years of Republican rule, knowing in the back of their minds that if they had voted Democrat, their electoral votes would have swung the election and they would have a Democratic president instead of a Republican one. They will not make this mistake in the next election. Essentially, while changing the state-wide voting system is definitely a step in the right direction, it is only a piece of the ideal solution.
One fix to the previous situation is to use fusion voting, where multiple parties can support the same candidate. In this system, third parties can gain popular confidence without “hurting” the primary parties until hopefully they gain enough confidence that they could win an election. Another benefit to this system is that it provides additional information to your vote — you can vote for the same candidate in multiple ways, and the party that you choose to go through lets the candidate know what you care about.
Another potential fix to the electoral problem that I thought of in a sleepless stupor last night, which as far as I know isn’t being considered at all, is to change the voting method for electoral votes. If plurality voting is a bad system, why use it anywhere? A seemingly quick fix would be to change the electoral college to use an approval voting system. If the Democrats take Massachusetts, let them cast their full 12 electoral votes toward the Democratic candidate. But if 10% of the state voted for the Green party, why not let them cast another 1 vote for the Green candidate? One consideration is whether a state would want to cast votes for both primary parties. Certainly, if swing states did this, they would no longer be as important in the election, and these states would have no incentive to do so, as they would receive less attention during campaigns. The elimination of “swing states” would be arguably good for the country as a whole, but even if each state only cast votes for one primary party and then as many third parties as they wanted, that would be much better than the current system.
Alternatively, states could use a ranking system such as condorcet voting. Whichever party gets the most votes, the state ranks that candidate first. The party with the second most votes gets ranked second, etc. This method would perhaps require less judgement on behalf of the electoral body, and would likely eliminate the question of how to vote for both of the primary parties.
If we enacted all these three changes: state voting method, electoral voting method, and fusion voting, I think our system would be pretty damn good. Luckily, these changes all together are only really necessary for the presidential election, since the electoral college problem isn’t present for the senate/house elections, for example — and simply implementing a state-wide condorcet vote would likely be an acceptable fix for that. As always, feedback/criticism is encouraged.
I totally agree and have long been a proponent of proportional electoral college votes.
But I didn’t quite understand what you meant by the ranking talk near the end. What did you mean?
And just a quick nitpick — the president/vice president votes are majority votes, not plurality ones. In the case of no majority, the top three are voted on in the House.
I meant that the electoral college could use a system such as condorcet voting or instant runoff voting in which a voter would typically rank all the possible candidates from most to least favorite, except the “voter” in this case would be the electoral body and each state would have as many votes as electoral seats.
Ah, I see. Which would require like an amendment or something? I’d dig it. Ugh… So many better ways to do it than we do.
I agree that our voting system is a loser. We’re still in a situation where the people in politics really don’t understand the various systems—it would almost have to be that the public would start having an outcry saying we want this, that, or the other thing. And that’s where FairVote has made a very useful contribution to the conversation, because they’ve managed to get people in some cities quite interested in the spoiler effect and what we can do to change it.
Do you think America will ever scrap plurality for something better?
You’d think 2000 would have been the wellspring of such a movement.
Kenneth Arrow, now a professor emeritus at Stanford University, identified what he perceived as a fundamental flaw in our democracy: Put simply, he argued that devising a perfectly fair voting system is mathematically impossible.
For decades, there was almost a kind of despair among voting theorists of getting any better system than we had. What’s interesting, though, is that the impossibility theorem doesn’t apply to systems where you score the candidates rather than rank them. With scoring, you’re essentially filling out a report card—if you think there are two candidates who deserve four stars you can give them both four stars—whereas with ranking you have to artificially give one a number one and one a number two. That turns out to be crucial.
What does the Constitution say about how we elect people?
It’s kind of funny. When we first wrote the Constitution there’d been a lot of thought in revolutionary France about what’s the best way to vote, and they basically discovered the spoiler effect and a lot of these problems Arrow was addressing. And because of that, the founders really didn’t guarantee anyone the right to vote for president or Congress or anything in the Constitution. The democracy we have now is kind of a retrofit
Briefly summarizing the pros and cons of the various voting methods, let’s start with our current system.
Plurality voting is the simplest system possible because each person casts one vote for one candidate, so it’s very easy to count votes and so forth. The con, the one thing on which all the experts basically agree, is that plurality is the least fair of all the systems.
Briefly summarizing the pros and cons of the various voting methods, let’s start with our current system.
Plurality voting is the simplest system possible because each person casts one vote for one candidate, so it’s very easy to count votes and so forth. The con, the one thing on which all the experts basically agree, is that plurality is the least fair of all the systems.
How about Borda?
The first modern system invented to try and better plurality voting was the Borda count, invented in 18th-century France by a guy named Jean-Charles de Borda. Unfortunately, it’s very easily manipulated.Borda basically said, “My system is intended for honest men,” and people weren’t entirely honest.
Condorcet?
Condorcet was Borda’s great rival. He had a system where you rank the candidates, but the idea is that whichever candidate can beat all the other candidates in two-way races should be the winner. The main problem is sometimes you don’t have a candidate who beats everyone else. You can actually have a very weird situation where candidate A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A. It is also possible to manipulate.
approval voting a good way to go?
It’s very simple. It basically uses the same ballot we have now except, if you want, you can vote for more than one candidate, and whichever one gets the most votes tends to win. I’m not sure there’s any real known disadvantage.
What about instant runoff?
The voters rank the candidates based on how much they like them. It works quite well as long as you have what we might call a typical American election, where there’s a Republican and a Democrat and you’re sure one of those two is going to win. The problem is when you have three or more strong candidates as you would in the race for a party’s nomination, then it’s subject to some of the same vote-splitting effects as the plurality vote.
The emerging system of range voting.
Range voting is the newest in the sense of people being aware of it and promoting it: If you’re rating a video on YouTube you give it one to five stars, and they take that information and show you the average score of all the people who bother to rate it. We use it with a report card. The valedictorian of a school is the winner of a range vote by the teachers for each of their classes. In the Olympics, they hold up those cards to rate someone’s performance—that’s another example. People are pretty familiar with the idea. Nobody has given a convincing argument that there’s anything seriously wrong with it—the one thing you sometimes hear is it’s complicated, but that’s about it.
In 2000, mathematician Warren Smith published a study where he ran simulations to determine which of the common voting methods gave the most satisfactory, or least regrettable, outcome for the greatest number of voters. He found that range voting was the most fair.
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That one paper has convinced a lot of people that we ought to be taking range voting pretty seriously.
How did the other methods rank?
The second best was approval voting, which is the short-form version of range voting. Instead of rating someone on one to five stars, or one to ten, you basically have two ratings—thumbs down and thumbs up—and it’s almost as good. Next is the Borda count, although this particular simulation doesn’t factor in that there’s an incentive to manipulate the vote, so I wouldn’t rate that as too great an endorsement—Condorcet voting is a little better. Then you get into instant runoff and then plurality voting, which is the worst of all these systems.
Which method most benefits the small parties?
Anything that addresses the spoiler effect. The Greens and Libertarians would probably get many more first-place votes or high scores than they do now. I think that would have the effect of legitimizing them and making it a little easier for them to raise money. Once you legitimize them, there would start to be elections in some areas of the country where they would be able to win a few races.
We’re still in a situation where the people in politics really don’t understand the various systems—it would almost have to be that the public would start having an outcry saying we want this, that, or the other thing.