Improved method of voting

[dtotire]

This a letter written to Bruce Bartlett on another forum. I thought it offered an interesting suggestion on how to improve the voting system.

Dear Mr. Barlett,

I enjoyed hear your interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air.”

You said that you were very surprised that a public debate did not begin soon after the 2004 election, once President Bush’s reelection was not at risk, about the future direction of the Republican Party, and that it is a mystery to you why more people aren’t saying publicly the things that you are saying now.

I think that the reason for this is something that you hardly hear anyone talk about – our system of voting.

With our current voting system, you simply vote for either Kerry or Bush, taking the last election as an example. If you do not like either candidate, you can either vote for a third party candidate and risk splitting the vote and allowing the candidate you hate the most to win, or you do not vote at all.

This either-or situation not only affects the way people vote, but it has a dramatic effect on the campaigns and discussions that precede elections. I believe that the reason for the lack of widespread open discussion among Republicans about the topics discussed in your book is because Republicans fear that airing these views may inspire another Ross Perot-like third party candidate, despite the fact that Ross Perot was in fact successful at bringing attention to overspending in government. I believe that Republicans fear this because Ross Perot is believed by some to be responsible for Bill Clinton winning two elections with less than a majority of the vote.

Note the perversity of this situation: people who agree with your viewpoints dread the emergence of a candidate that shares those viewpoints. And not only do they discourage those candidates from running, they discourage discussions of those views even four years before an election because it may lead to such a candidacy.

If we were to use a voting system that allows us to indicate our favorite candidate and our second choice candidate on the same ballot, I believe the discussion would be wide open. Under that system, used in Ireland and Australia for centuries and called Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), if your favorite candidate turns out to be a long shot, your vote goes to your next choice. Under this system, the winner would need the support of a majority (more than 50%) of the voters.

With IRV, a candidate may emerge whose views are aligned with yours, and you would feel free to vote for that candidate if you wish, even if they have only modest support, because you could still state your preference for Bush over Kerry. Republicans could freely and openly discuss the merits of Bush as a conservative without the fear that they are helping to elect a Democrat. I feel that with this system, we would also have better quality candidates and thus more accountable elected officials on both sides because they would have to face the very real threat of challengers if they betray their party’s values.

IRV is used by the Utah Republican party to elect its party leaders, and in the capitol, the Republican Party used a type of IRV for electing its House majority leader, John Boehner. Many cities are adopting IRV to elect their local officials. You can find more information about IRV at www.fairvote.org.

I hope you will consider the impact of our voting system on the discussions surrounding your book and on the exchange of ideas in this country in general.
Posted by: Amy Hill at February 23, 2006 01:39 Permalink

[Land Shark]

1. The current voting selection system does NOT ALLOW:

1. You to vote your conscience, necessarily, (without being a spoiler) unless your conscience lines up just left of center or fairly far right, the typical positions of mainstream Dems and Reps
2. The "winner take all" system encourages unethical behavior, because the final vote that takes you into the majority of 50% (or plurality, in the case of multi-candidate races) is INTENSELY valuable relative to other votes. 49.9% gets you nothing but the loser label.
3. Put another way, the present system is one of guaranteed disenfranchisement or rather guaranteed nonrepresentation of up to 49.9% of the electorate, or even more than that in multi-candidate races.
4. when people vote for parties, it leads to much more discussion of ideas and real political debate because the focus shifts away from the horse race to the platforms as a whole and which one makes the most sense.

[dcfirefighter]

2. Several Methods of various optimality

I personally thing that the Condorcet method in general, and the Ranked-Pairs method specifically, is better than IRV - though they all have the benefit of ranked voting.

The main reason I like the RP method is because in the case of:
499 voters ranking canditates A, B, C
3 voters ranking candidates B, C, A and
498 voters ranking candidates C, B, A;
No candidate has a majority, RP picks Candidate B - who was ranked 2nd by 99.7% of the voters, and first by the other 0.3%, indicating broad support.
IRV would pick candidate C, who was ranked first by 49.8%, and second by 0.3%, indicating slightly support by a very slight majority.