thrive and attract exactly as many voters as they actually represent the beliefs
of, because you have no fear of losing your vote to a “spoiler” if your second
or third choice is a mainstream candidate. This reduces apathy. Primary
elections become completely unnecessary: a party can run all its candidates at
once and the strongest of the group will get almost all of that party’s votes in
the final count. Elections in general will be driven more by people’s
preferences on issues than by loyalty to parties. We could well see more
candidates running as independents and being elected. The election season
could be significantly shortened. No voter would be frozen out of the
pre-selection process within a party because of variations in state laws. The
House of Representatives or other mechanism for resolving the lack of a true
majority has no possible role except in a rare case where the vote is split so
deeply that even people’s third and fourth choices don’t produce a winner.
This is pretty much impossible where ideological camps are divided into Left
and Right; it might happen if we had Left, Right, Up, and Down factions all
incompatible with the other three, but that’s hardly likely to happen.
Disadvantages: the ballot itself would be more complicated. The counting
process would have to be modernized and made a good deal more
sophisticated and reliable. (But then, the 2000 election makes it clear that we
have to replace a lot of bad voting equipment already.) We would probably
need voting machines that have good preventive interlocks to reduce mistakes
that would invalidate ballots, or there would be a lot more such mistakes
made by voters. (Again, this probably needs doing anyway.) In any
jurisdiction where we don’t have such modernization, the counting process
would be prolonged and tedious. There would always be a tradeoff to make
between having the voters make more secondary choices (fifth best, sixth
best, and so on) which would improve certainty when there are lots of
candidates, vs. limiting the number of secondary choices in order to reduce
the data processing burden on vote counters. (And if we ask for more
secondary choices, a lot of voters probably won’t make them; they’ll vote for
the two or three they like and cast no votes for the others.) A disadvantage
that has been claimed for this system is that there are obscure strategies by
which clever enough voters can actually hurt a candidate’s changes by giving
him a higher vote, but I don’t think this would apply if people were ranking
only their top few choices. It also tends to generate a lot of backroom
horse-trading between various factions over who they will endorse as second
choices, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. But as with a pure
popular vote, one big disadvantage is that this undoes the weighting by states
that the electoral college has, which means small states probably won’t pass
it.
PREFERENTIAL POPULAR VOTE POINT-COUNT (THE BORDA
SYSTEM). This is a variation of preferential voting in which, if there are
(say) six preferential rankings on each ballot, a candidate gets six points for
being picked first, five for being picked second, and so on. The candidate
picked last gets one point. The winner is the one with the highest total point
count.
Advantages: like preferential voting only with considerably faster and simpler
counting procedures.
Disadvantages: unfortunately, this system gives voters a considerable
incentive to rank candidates who are threats to their first choice much lower
than they would deserve based on the issues. For instance, if voters for one
mainstream party candidate want to make sure their man beats the other
candidate from the same party, they would rank the other guy lower than the
opposition party candidates. If enough voters act this way, fringe candidates
with no true mandate end up getting greatly inflated vote totals and could
conceivably even win.
WEIGHTED PREFERENTIAL POPULAR VOTE. We could make the
preferential system compatible with the electoral college’s protection of
smaller states by giving each state a weighting factor to multiply its vote
totals by, as in the weighted popular vote system. Or we could toss
winner-take-all fake vote blocks by state into the mix, though I figure this
would make an awkward and ugly fit with a preferential system.
Advantages: all those of preferential voting, plus protection of small states as
under the existing system, and therefore much better likelihood of being
approved.
Disadvantages: overtly spelling out in law that one person’s vote counts for
more than another’s is bound to get people irked. State winner-take-all blocks,
on the other hand, introduce a non-preferential element, and increase the
chances that the majority winner is not selected correctly according to
people’s real rankings of the choices. As with any preferential system, the
ballot and the counting are more complex and therefore would have to be
more computerized than they are now.
PREFERENTIAL ELECTORAL VOTE. This is an attempt to introduce
the advantages of the preferential method into the electoral college. The
voters in each state would cast preferential ballots. The state would award its
electoral votes according to the first choice vote count. If nobody got a
majority of the electoral college, the votes of losing candidates would be
transferred to those voters’ secondary choices, and the electoral vote would be
recomputed. Electoral votes would have to be awarded proportionally by each
state, not by winner-take-all, because if winner-take-all was used, the
preferential part would quite likely never get to operate. With a variation of
this scheme — have each state use a preferential system to select its electoral
votes, instead of using the second place votes only when there is no electoral
majority — you could implement this system without a constitutional
amendment. Even the first version might just possibly be able to be
shoehorned into the space allowed by the present constitution, if the Supreme
Court would allow each state to make its final choice of electors based on
vote totals announced by the other states.
Advantages: retains most of the benefits of a preferential system with less
disruption of the status quo, and probably less contention over the state
weighting issue. Proportional electoral voting does not create the high risk of
there being no majority winner as it would in a non-preferential system, if
you use the stronger version that probably requires an amendment.
Disadvantages: basically, this is at best not much more than an inaccurate
way of doing weighted preferential popular votes; the electoral college
apparatus is pretty much just nonfunctional window dressing. Or, if this is
implemented in the toned-down form without an amendment, states might
want to award their electoral votes winner-take-all, which would re-introduce
a lot of inaccuracy into the process.
POPULAR APPROVAL VOTE. This is a new addition to the list — a
system I had not heard of when I wrote the first version of this document.
Approval voting consists of giving a “yes” vote for every candidate that you
can stand, and a “no” vote for all those you can’t. In essence, you can vote for
as few or as many of the candidates as you wish. It’s like preferential voting
except without a hierarchy of individual ranking. The winner is the candidate
with the most total “yes” votes. State weighting could be applied, or not, the
same as with preferential popular voting, with about the same consequences.
Advantages: the same advantages as the preferential system, and it’s simpler,
imposing no extra difficulties with counting or requiring new fancy voting
machinery. Split vote problems are eliminated, primaries and two-party
constraints are eliminated, everybody can vote for who they really like best,
and the one who is most broadly acceptable wins.
Disadvantages: unlike the preferential system, this one does not distinguish a
ringing mandate from bare tolerance. It gives less of a mandate on issues than
a preferential system does. One can’t help but suspect that winning candidates
will tend to be bland mediocrities… though in practice I suppose this system
will probably elect the same person that a preferential vote would. Still,
voters would probably be happier and feel more engaged if they could
indicate which candidate they really like vs. which they find merely
acceptable. Because of this, any really partisan voter might feel motivated to
vote “no” for all candidates but one, just to make their preference clear,
thereby increasing the likelihood that the winner would have no majority. In
short, it’s difficult to come up with anything very solid as a disadvantage for
this system… all I’ve got here is either subjective, speculative, or just a minor
nit.
APPROVAL BASED ELECTORAL VOTE. This is another one that
could be implemented without an amendment. The electoral votes of each
state would go to whoever got the most approval votes in that state, or could
be split proportionally among candidates according to their approval vote
totals.
Advantages: similar to those of the non-amendment version of the
preferential electoral vote. Voters would get to vote for who they really liked,
and there would be no need for primaries and no obstacles to third parties.
Disadvantages: Without an amendment, proportional assignment of electoral
votes would leave considerable risk of nobody winning an electoral vote
majority. You could have ten candidates with handfuls of electoral votes
apiece. Winner-take-all assignment of states’ votes would perpetuate errors
and distortions of the outcome, without fully eliminating that risk. A pure
approval vote always has a winner, but combining the results of separate
approval votes by state no longer has this advantage. This could send third
party candidates back to the ghetto of being “spoilers” once they become
strong enough to win a few states. A preferential system, if imposed in the
more sweeping way that would require an amendment, could eliminate this
problem even if the electoral college is still used; an approval system cannot
do so.
In conclusion, I think it’s obvious that I would strongly prefer either some
kind of preferential system or a popular approval vote. Any other leaves the
majority of the current shortcomings unresolved. I think a lot more voters
would end up happy with the way they were voting, and we’d have far less
apathy. I think my preference of the systems listed here would be a pure
preferential popular vote, or maybe a weighted one (though of course as a
Californian I can hardly embrace weighting wholeheartedly).
I think the data processing challenges that a preferential system would bring
are entirely manageable, even if voters end up casting many ranking votes.
Each precinct would, instead of submitting a total for each candidate, submit
a table listing votes for each permutation of preference order. The amount of
data would be much larger than what is needed today, but would still be
manageably sized — a paper printout of it could fit into a manila folder if the
voters rank the top eight candidates. (It gets more like milk-crate sized if we
allow nine or ten rankings.) Once such tables are combined at a county or
state level, the translation of secondary votes could proceed without any
further reexamination of the ballots. But if a precinct has inadequate data
processing gear to produce and transmit these large result tables, they’d be
forced to repeatedly recount all the ballots as losing candidates are eliminated
one by one. The burden could be minimized if voters only mark their top two
or three or four choices, but this slightly increases the likelihood of the
winner not showing a true majority.
One person objected that if we had a constitutional amendment describing
such a system, it would be as big as the rest of the constitution. I think it
could be described in general terms in about the amount of text that the
twelfth amendment uses, with the details being left up to congress. Another
common objection seems to be that voters would be annoyed and confused
by such a complex system. But as far as I have been able to learn, when the
system has been tried on a small scale by a few U.S. cities such as
Cambridge MA, people are usually pleased with it.
I also think that almost any of the above would be better than the existing
system.
If none of these national reforms gets accomplished, one positive step I’d like
to work toward is to get the state of California (where I live) to allocate its
electoral votes proportionally. Having such an enormous block of votes be
awarded winner-take-all is just far too unfair both to other states, and to the
millions of voters on the losing side within the state. It is, I believe, a major
contributor to voter apathy. Some may say that this would, at present, be to
the advantage of the Republicans, but in many other times it would have
helped the Democrats, so I think the idea can be considered on its merits for
the long term in a nonpartisan way. The fact that the state is genuinely split
between left and right and is not dominated over the long term by either party
(as are New York and Texas, the other two most populous states) also means
that such a reform has a real chance of being passed. No state where the party
in power always gains by winner-take-all would want such a change. Unless
maybe, just possibly, you could persuade the New York democrats and the
Texas republicans to make a trade, since the effect of both doing it together
might come out pretty much neutral. But California is the place to start.