Considering Other Voting Methods

There are Many Considerations

In comparing different proposals for voting methods, what criteria do we use? The first impulse for most people seems to be “how would it affect me?” Would I find it easy or difficult to vote? Would I be comfortable about the decisions involved? How satisfied would I be with the change. Far from just being the first considerations that come to mind, these would often be the last considerations as well. From these considerations alone, most people will prefer to stay with what seems familiar.

These concerns are important but those who give the question a bit more thought might also consider how a voting system might affect the justice of an election. One might even consider the quality of information gathered by an election and whether or not the votes are tallied and the winner chosen in a fair way that actually reflects the desires of voters at large.

Even further removed from the immediate responses would be any consideration of whether adopting a proposed voting system would bring much change to our politics or our society. As important as such considerations may actually be, they are apt to be overlooked simply out of a mistaken belief that the voting method could not be particularly important or consequential. Such effects, if even pointed out may seem indirect and probably delayed. Unfortunately, as we have seen to happen with global warming, there is a tendency to ignore indirect consequences, especially if they are less than immediate.

The Two-party Duopoly Sure, but What Else is Wrong?

We saw in an earlier article that the two-party duopoly could be ended by adopting a different voting system. But pundits seem to put the two-party duopoly quite low on any list of concerns regarding our elections but more likely entirely missing from such a list. What is more likely on such a list is the high cost of running for office, Gerrymandering, the Electoral College and ballot access restrictions. The choice of voting system usually is missing from such discussions but if it does, the focus is apt to be limited to the the spoiler effect.

But what we should understand from this series of articles is that the choice of voting method is fundamental not only to the fairness of elections but to political culture. The wrong voting system can dramatically bias election outcomes to elect unpopular candidates. In turn, that turns voters cynical. Elections may have consequences but the choice of voting system can determine not just an election but serious implications for politics and culture.

Apologists for the two-party duopoly will argue that if somehow there were more than just two political parties then because no party could dominate and so could not force their preferred solution to problems. But recent experience is that with our two-party system Congress can easily become quite gridlocked and unable to act. In earlier days when party polarization was less intense, things could get done through true bipartisan cooperation; it is possible for parties to cooperate. With additional viable political parties, partisanship should diminish and there could grow more collegiality across parties. Without the perverse notion of “the (single) other side” to consider as the enemy there could again be the view that associates may sometimes different strong views on one issue but might well agree on many other issues. That is how things tend to work in the normal world outside of the political sphere so it should be possible to make it work even in Washington in the absence of the two-party duopoly.

The two-party system of today enforces an orthodoxy within each of the two dominant parties that forces together a variety of seemingly unrelated issues. Why should there be any linking of peoples attitudes on gun control, abortion, health care or environmental policy? But yet, in our two-party system all you need to know is party affiliation to predict not only someone's position on these very issues, but what television station they watch, what podcasts they listen to and what they read. It seems crazy, but that is our present day reality under the two-party duopoly.

In this still new series of articles, we have focused largely on the little noticed bias in favor of the largest parties that infects all of the most widely promoted voting systems. An important conclusion reached in these articles is that a voting system that is both evaluative and balanced will not only remove such bias, but make it very difficult and probably even impossible to perpetuate a two-party duopoly. Balanced Approval Voting (BAV) appears to be the simplest and, if only for that reason, the best example of a voting system with both of these important properties. Under this system a voter is asked to evaluate any or all of the candidates and indicate either support or opposition (or neither). The winner is the candidate having the greatest net support, defined as the number of supporting votes less the number of opposition votes received.

At this point, I feel compelled by experience to warn against interpreting BAV as an example of score voting. Arguably it may be, but that line of thinking, while in no way helpful, tends to be misleading (so if you don't know what score voting is, don't worry about it; that is actually a good thing). The score voting paradigm tempts false assumptions and draws one into potential logical pitfalls. At the root of these confusions is that score voting, as commonly defined, lacks the necessary detail to describe a real-world voting system. Moreover the traditional real-world implementations of score voting systems have become so familiar that, to people in the habit of thinking about score voting systems, they just seem right. But in fact those implementations differ in an important way from BAV. Those pitfalls aside, merely the differences in presentation between a BAV ballot and a score voting ballot could affect the way people vote.

BAV is called evaluative because the voter is not asked in any way to compare candidates against one another. Rather, a voter is merely asked to evaluate candidates individually, without regard to the other candidates. The system is called balanced because a voter can indicate opposition as easily as support and because each expression of opposition exactly counterbalances an expression of support for a given candidate. BAV describes the actual voting system is now successively used in Latvia.

Following Latvia's example, suppose BAV were adopted here. We should consider whether that would somehow affect the more easily recognized and widely discussed problems with our elections. For the most part, the benefits outlined in the topics below flow from the elimination of the two-party duopoly, but adopting an evaluative voting system that also is balanced appears to be surest way to achieve that. It seems to me unlikely that just one of these two characteristics could accomplish that goal though certainly the adoption of a balanced voting system or an evaluative voting system would would at least serve as an improvement over the plurality voting system that we now generally use.

The High Costs of Running for Office

It is common knowledge that running for office is expensive (and beyond the reach of all but the most wealthy citizens). That perception keeps many people from even considering a run for office. But should elections so expensive?

It takes money to hire support staff and consultants of course and travel expenses alone can be intimidating. But by far the largest costs surely come from the extraordinarily high charges by big-media. Often this expensive advertising is negative, aimed at undermining the opponent more than promoting the candidate who buys it. But absent the two-party duopoly there would be no single opponent to attack. If instead there were many opponents, would it be practical or even useful to blanket all of them with negative ads? Using BAV might negative ads even become counterproductive, generating votes against the candidate considered guilty of running them?

Moreover, with the disappearance of the two-party duopoly, issues on which those two parties agree might finally be addressed by Congress. A politically more diverse Congress might, for example, require corporate media to make a reasonable amount of time available, free of charge charge for each candidate to present their qualifications and goals to the voters.

Gerrymandering

With the adoption of BAV we can expect the dominance of the two existing parties to diminish as smaller parties and independent candidates take their place. Having many viable candidates would make Gerrymandering much more challenging and probably much less effective. And attempts to pursue this particular approach to undermining democracy could easily turn counterproductive. At a minimum it would require considerable time to invent some clever new way to game the more complex situation presented by not having perhaps many viable opponents.

The Electoral College

The intrusion of the Electoral College in our presidential elections introduces the danger of outcomes that offend democracy; we have experienced this very problem several times in recent years. But the Electoral College is a double-edged blade. It also serves as the mechanism that isolates elections from federal control. State control of elections is what makes it possible for us to experiment with alternative voting systems. If the Supreme Court were given an excuse to put elections under the control of Congress it is hard to imagine experimentation with alternative voting systems ever being possible.

But the Electoral College affects only the general election for the executive branch. This peculiar institution has nothing to do with state, local, Senate or Congressional elections. And importantly the Electoral College puts no constraints on primary elections, an arena where an improved voting system would be especially beneficial.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is an initiative by a number of states, not to eliminate the Electoral College but to make the part it plays in our election merely a formality that would elect the candidate the people at large prefer. And importantly, with this approach there is no need to jeopardize state control of elections. Unfortunately, should this initiative pass, there is another problem that would introduce an impediment to the adoption of a better voting system. This is a worrisome technical difficulty with this approach, but the initiative is a promising answer to a serious problem and there are ways to deal with the technical difficulties.

These are long-term concerns, however. If BAV is to be adopted in the U.S.A., it will surely come about gradually, one state at a time, but initially it will probably not include presidential elections (though it could and probably should include presidential primaries).

Ballot Access

Minor party candidates complain about the great difficulty of getting their names on the ballot. One might well wonder why there are such barriers in a democracy. Were these barriers erected by politicians only to protect themselves from competition? No doubt that was a consideration, but more likely they preferred a different argument, namely that the plurality voting system just cannot sensibly accommodate more than two candidates (and how else could one possibly vote?). The problem is the spoiler effect which comes about because voters are asked to choose just a single candidate.

An evaluative voting system cleanly avoids the spoiler effect by simply eliminating any need for voters to make such a choice. Ranked voting is often promoted as another way to avoid this spoiler problem but ironically it asks voters to make not just one but in fact many such choices – choose which is first, then which is second and so on. There is some irony that such an approach could even work (to any degree). But in any event there are many other serious problems that afflict ranked voting.

While adopting BAV is itself no guarantee that ballot access will be made easier, adopting BAV and relaxing ballot access are reforms that share the same motivation of giving voters more power and more choices of candidates. It would seem only natural that a movement able to force adoption of BAV would at the same time insist that ballot access be relaxed.

Other Electoral Corruption

Vote suppression takes a great many forms. Voters are removed from voting rolls without even informing the voter, for example. Or police are called to polling stations, perhaps to maintain order but probably also to intimidate voters. Voters may be notified that if they show up to the polls they could be fined or arrested for one reason or another. And then there are various forms of discarding legal ballots or altering the count of votes. There is also the tactic of causing long lines, even at the inaccessible polling stations.

But for any of these actions to be effective, the instigators must predict with at least some degree of accuracy how particular voters will vote. The two-party duopoly makes that fairly easy, especially when voters have to declare which of two parties they are in. But with BAV there is no need for a voter to register with any party. A voter may support several parties while opposing several other. Determining which voters to suppress would be made much more difficult by adoption of BAV and there is reason to hope that as a result, such anti-democratic tactics would naturally come to an end. On the other side of the coin, with a voting system like BAV that puts more power in the hands of voters and a political class more concerned with voter opinions, these kinds of abuses might finally be placed under control.