Have You Thought About How We Vote?

This recent presidential election left a lot of us angry. People on the left were angered by the nationalistic and allegedly racist rhetoric of the Trump administration, the administration’s supporters were angered by the rise of the social justice left and a wave of government expansion, and those in the center felt torn apart by two increasingly extreme parties. No matter which side you were on, this was a rough election.

But it’s not the first.

We used this exact same language to describe the 2016 election, just four short years ago. There were scandals, plenty of them, massive protests on both sides of the political spectrum, and two candidates that were deeply divisive. We also saw accusations of voter fraud in this election, but that too isn’t a first. The 1876 election featured political operatives working to throw out 19 electoral votes from three states, throwing the election to a partisan committee that gave the election to Rutherford B. Hayes. He was so controversial that he was commonly referred to as “Rutherfraud.” What about election meddling? In 1972, Nixon’s reelection campaign wiretapped and broke into DNC headquarters to collect information on his opponent, eventually leading to the Watergate scandal and his resignation two years later. If we are looking for examples of divided nations, look no further than the 1860 election, where the election of Abraham Lincoln was the tipping point that started the American Civil War, the bloodiest war in American history. We, as a nation, have seen all of this before, and every time it occurs we fight, we argue, and we demand change.

The history of American elections is oftentimes a history of political crises. What we, as a nation, fail to do is ask why. Why are we increasingly entrenched in political warfare? Why do our elections feel like shouting matches with no common ground? Why are our legislative institutions so incredibly gridlocked? An overwhelming majority of American citizens want a better, more unified political landscape, no matter what political beliefs they hold. And every election, we look to look to elect new politicians to solve the problem to no avail. Could we be looking in the wrong places to solve this issue? Is the problem not with the players in the game, but the game itself? Could it be that political polarization isn’t caused by those in office, but the election system that brought them into power?

How do we vote?

The overwhelming majority of elections in America follow the same logical formula: everyone chooses their favorite candidate out of a list, the votes are tallied, and the candidate with the most votes wins the election. Even the electoral college, with its convoluted and controversial rules, still follows this formula, just with the extra step of splitting votes by state. It seems fair. The candidate who receives the most support will receive the office they ran for. Because of this, this method, often called First Past the Post, or FPTP, isn’t questioned by much of America. Beneath its simple surface, however, lies potential issues that could make this system not as effective as it would first seem.

Imagine, for a moment, a race between two candidates for some office. We’ll call the candidates Purple and Green. Green has a solid majority of the votes, at 55%, while Purple lags behind, at 45%.

For the most part, the population supports Green’s policies. Because of this, an upstart candidate Blue decides to enter the race. He thinks that Green’s policies are good, but with a few adjustments could be even better. He enters the race, election day comes and goes, and he turns out to be pretty popular, collecting 15% of the vote. To both Green and Blue’s surprise, though, Purple wins the election. Because Blue’s policies were so similar to Green’s, his 15% came almost entirely from Green’s voters. As a result, Purple takes 45%, Green takes 40%, and Blue takes 15%.

People’s political preferences haven’t changed, but Blue’s entrance caused Purple to win. Is this a fair outcome?

Anyone alive during the 2000 election knows this scenario is not just a hypothetical, but a real phenomenon known as the spoiler effect, and many people believe it is a dangerous flaw in our election system. Even if you are still on the fence about this being a problem, it is undeniable that Blue voters will think twice about voting for Blue during the next election. This is known as strategic voting, and it presents problems not just in terms of hurting popular candidates, but also in terms of effective governance.

Let’s go back to our example. The next election is coming up, and Blue is choosing not to run, seeing what happened when he ran last time. Green has made some unpopular decisions in office, causing some moderate voters to become unhappy with him. A new candidate, Yellow, sees an opportunity to win by appealing to the moderate voters. She decides to enter the race. Here’s the question. A former Green voter is considering voting for Yellow but is afraid of Purple, with whom she strongly disagrees. Knowing that Purple is a threat and knowing what happened with Blue last election, should the voter vote for Yellow?

If you thought about this as I did, it seems like a bad idea. As much as the voter doesn’t like Green anymore, Purple is worse. If the voter votes for Yellow, she risks throwing the election to Purple, just like Blue did. As such, it is in her best interest to ignore her honest opinion and vote for Green. When this strategic voting happens on a large scale, it means that Green doesn’t necessarily have to listen to his voters as much as he should. So long as he knows he is less unpopular among his base than Purple is, he is free to do what he wants in office. He can use fear tactics to scare voters into voting for him out of fear for Purple and make promises about his platform that he doesn’t plan to follow through with. The voting base isn’t stupid. They know what’s going on, but because of the nature of the voting system, they have no choice but to reelect him anyway. If this all sounds eerily familiar to you, that’s not surprising. We see these tactics everywhere in politics, across parties, across issues, and across history. We blame these symptoms on individuals, but in reality, our voting system allows politicians to ignore us, regardless of who’s in charge.

The FPTP system not only locks in two parties and enables bad politicians, but it also could affect how we think about and interact with politics. When a voter reaches the ballot box, they come to the ballot box with a myriad of opinions about varied issues. Take a moment and consider all the various issues that you, personally, hold complicated beliefs about. However, when you get to the voting booth you must choose one candidate to represent your entire set of beliefs. Because of the issues we just discussed, you often only have two viable choices to represent your beliefs. This presents a problem because in order to change someone’s mind in a way that matters at the voting booth, you have to change their mind all the way from left to right, or vice versa. Think about that. You, as an individual, may be willing to listen and change your mind about some issues, but changing your mind to the complete other side is if not impossible, extremely difficult. You may even agree with many of the other side’s views, but because of how our voting system is structured, your nuanced beliefs can’t be expressed come voting time. This reality permeates our political discussion and cripples debate as a way to reach compromise. After all, there is no reasonable hope of persuading the majority of the population to change their vote. Without meaningful debate, nuance is lost and polarization becomes much harder to fight.

How else could we vote?

There are many alternative voting systems, and just about all of them have traits that are better than FPTP. The most commonly proposed alternative to FPTP is ranked-choice voting or RCV. To understand how this system works, let’s return to our first election, with Purple, Green, and the spoiler Blue. The election comes and goes, but this time the election is run with ranked-choice voting. Under this system, voters will rank their candidates instead of voting for just one of them. This means a Green voter would now vote 1. Green, 2. Blue, and 3. Purple. The result is the same this time around, with 45% for Purple, 40% for Green, and 15% for Blue.

Under this system, however, we don’t stop here. Since Blue got the least amount of votes, he is eliminated. His votes then go to the voter’s second choice. For Blue voters, they almost all put down Green as their second choice, with 14% of the votes going to Green and only 1% going to Purple. The new totals are 46% for Purple and 54% for Green. Because Green has over 50% of the vote, he wins the election.

This result is arguably a lot better than FPTP for several reasons. The system is much more likely to guarantee a winner with over 50% of the vote, creating a broader support base. It also eliminates FPTP’s spoiler effect, since third party votes will be transferred to bigger parties as they are eliminated. In addition to the effects involving the election itself, RCV also makes political debate more meaningful. You, as an individual, most likely wouldn’t be willing to change who your first choice vote goes to but may be more open to a change of second or third choice. This allows debate to influence the result of the election, an important upgrade. RCV isn’t perfect, however. Because of the round-by-round elimination, there can be issues where popular centrist candidates can be “squeezed out” by more extreme candidates, not taking enough first-place votes to avoid elimination in the first round despite being well-liked by all. Despite these issues, RCV is definitely an improvement, and it seems like a strong step in decreasing our polarization.

Is this good enough?

Let’s look at our final results in our mock election again. 46% Purple and 54% Green. This is better than our FPTP election, but it brings up an interesting question. Who is representing the 46% of Purple voters? After all, Green won with his current policies, so when Purple voters come to him he doesn’t have a reason to change his ways. As such, there is a strong argument to be made that they have no one vouching for them in elected office. What about Blue voters? They’d like to be represented as well, but even with RCV, they still need to flip a large portion of the first-place votes in order to have a shot at winning, which as we discussed earlier, is nearly impossible. As such, they don’t receive the representation they want either. What about centrist voters, voting for Green to avoid Purple taking office? Are they really represented by Green? These questions get at the root problem with a winner take all system that neither FPTP nor RCV addresses: It’s nearly impossible for one representative to represent a diverse group of people. The goal of democracy is for an elected official to represent the will of the people, but by only electing one individual, large groups of people are left out of the democratic process, no matter how fair the election system is.

How can we fix this?

With a presidential election, this problem is tough to solve. There can only be one president, so any presidential election is going to leave a portion of the nation unhappy. For congressional and local elections, however, there is a solution. Elect more than one person to office. Use ranked-choice voting, but combine multiple districts to create elections where three or more representatives are elected. To understand the ramifications of this idea, let’s return to our example again, where Blue, Green, and Purple are running for three seats.

There are more seats open, so two more candidates run: Yellow, a centrist candidate, and Orange, who lies somewhere between Yellow and Purple. The votes come in, and the spread of votes lies like this: Purple 30%, Orange 5%, Yellow 15%, Blue 15%, and Green 35%.

First, Green has 2% more votes than he needs, called spillover votes. These extra votes are distributed to the voters’ second choices. This is done so that extra votes aren’t “wasted” on a popular candidate. Half of his voters put Yellow as their second choice and half put Blue, so Yellow gets 1%, Blue gets 1%, and Green is elected to the first seat.

The totals are now Purple 30%, Orange 5%, Yellow 16%, and Blue 16%. Orange, as the last-place candidate, is eliminated, and his votes are split 60–40 for Purple and Yellow.

The totals become Purple 33%, Yellow 18%, and Blue 16%. Purple is elected second. Yellow is looking a bit like a pencil, but has gained enough votes to avoid elimination, and as such Blue is next to go. His voters almost universally wanted Green, but he has already been elected. Their third choice was Yellow, which puts Yellow at 34% and into office.

Look at this result and consider how well the people are now represented. Green and Purple voters both made up large portions of the population, so they got a representative in office. Orange and Blue voters didn’t win, but they can turn to Purple and Green respectively to represent their beliefs. Finally, Yellow has a broad base of support across the political spectrum and acts as a balancing third party that would never exist under our current system. This result isn’t a perfect representation of the population, but it’s hard to argue it’s not a better result. The benefits don’t end there. Under our old system, Blue would have had to gain 20–25% of first-place votes to win. Under this system, however, Blue can take the third seat by gaining 15% of the second-place vote from Green voters, or 1% of the first-place vote from Yellow or Orange voters. All of those are difficult, but they are far less difficult than in the FPTP election. Not only does this help make campaigning and debate more meaningful, but it also forces candidates to be more sensitive to voter’s interests. If Yellow makes a decision that angers Orange voters, they may change their second-place vote to Purple and cost Yellow the election. Green has more leeway since he has a larger voter base, but if he moves far enough to the extremes, voters have a viable alternative in Blue, as compared to being out of luck in our old system. This system isn’t perfect, but it is much, much more likely to create a result that represents more people, facilitates more debate, and leaves the voters happier with the outcome.

At this point, two major questions remain about this system: First, could this ever be implemented in the US? Second, how much does this actually matter? We will get to the second question shortly, but the answer to the first that making this change is actually easier than it first seems. Elections are run at the state and local level, which means that change doesn’t involve persuading a nation, but rather making a smaller change in your local area. That allows voting reform to occur in small steps, with individual counties flipping over to the new system, building support until it is applied at a state level. The FairVote organization has been championing this voting reform since 1992, and it has played a role in helping get systems like this implemented in local elections across the country. Unlike many idealistic political reforms, there is a possible, albeit difficult, path to change. To answer the second question, let’s return to our example election one last time. We used colors for the candidates, but we could have put any individual in any of these elections and had the same result. All the negative issues we talked about earlier, the spoiler effect, the negative campaigning, the meaninglessness of debate, happen regardless of politicians and the voters. Think about that. This is a systemic issue, and systemic issues can’t be solved by individual solutions. There’s a reason that our calls for political unity and bipartisanship fall on deaf ears. They aren’t solutions to the real problem. If we want to make America better for all of us, we need to look at politics not as just a group of politicians making decisions, but as a system that guides our nation in certain directions. Right now, our system is guiding us away from unity and compromise almost all of us want, but we can fix it. We can make America a fundamentally better place, guide ourselves towards unity, and create the change we want to see. All we have to do is think about, reflect on, and change how we vote.