Thursday, March 31, 2016

Preventing primary disasters

Forget who the candidates are for a moment. Everything that can be said about them has been said. (Some things bear repeating, but I'll leave that to others.) I'd like to focus on how we got to where we are, and how we can avoid such messes in the future.

Right now the leading Republican candidate has 48% of the delegates and 37% of the votes. At this point, no matter who wins, the party nominee will be someone that two thirds of Republicans voted against.

This is bad policy from every possible perspective. On the level of principles, it's just undemocratic. On a strategic level, it depresses voter turnout in the general, because most Republican voters will feel robbed. Justifiably so!

This has nothing to do with who the candidates are; we could see the same outcome with an entirely different set of candidates. It has everything to do with the systems the state parties have put in place.

There are two problems that need to be addressed. First, how delegates are allocated.

Ohio and Florida are absolutely crucial in the general election. The Republican party winning the White House is largely contingent on voter turnout in these two states. But both primaries are winner-take-all, and in both, the state was won by someone with less than half the votes. Over half of Republican voters in Ohio and Florida have been stripped of any voice in selecting their nominee. In South Carolina, that number is closer to two thirds.

Pretend you're one of the voters whose vote was thrown out by this system. Are you more likely to show up in November? Or less?

States using semi-proportional systems also contribute to the problem. In Alabama, a candidate with 21% of the vote got 13 delegates; a candidate with 19% of the vote got one delegate. In what universe is this giving each voter anything like equal weight? Winner-take-all is a huge problem, but winner-take-more isn't the solution.

The state parties should all adopt straight proportional allocation of delegates. This would at least minimize the disparity between popular vote and delegate count, and give all Republican voters an equal voice.

But this doesn't solve the more fundamental problem: a candidate with a third of the vote would still be winning. The reason for this comes down to two words every candidacy dreads: vote splitting.

The way we cast votes in this country breaks if there are more than two candidates. We all know how this works: where one candidate running alone might win easily, if there's a similar candidate on the ballot, they split votes between them, and the least popular candidate ends up winning. That's why we have exactly two major parties, both of whom dread a strong third-party run. That's how HW Bush lost to Clinton, and how W Bush won over Gore. And that's why there have been constant calls during this primary season for candidates to drop out early.

If there are more than two candidates, everything goes to hell.

This is directly caused by the way we cast votes. There are two or three or ten candidates on the ballot; you vote for one, and by extension, against all the others. This system is sometimes called plurality voting, or first-past-the-post voting. I like to call it by a more direct name: pick-one voting. Sure, there are other methods of voting. But this is America, and that's just how we do things here, right?

Well, no.

Pick-one voting is nowhere in the US Constitution. It's nowhere in any state constitution or law I've ever seen. None of our founders ever sat down and wrote, "Out of all the possible voting systems, pick-one is best, and here's why." Nobody decided to use pick-one voting. We vote this way because we always have. Because of it, we end up selecting a standard-bearer who commands a solid minority base, but who the majority can not support.

This is no way to run any organization. But the state parties can fix it.

There are many other voting systems out there. A few cities use instant-runoff. Others will extol the virtues of the Condorcet methods, or range voting, and they have valid points. But for real-world elections, the best system by a mile is approval voting, because it's simplest to understand, and trivial to implement. No money need be spent; it requires no new voting machines, because all machines already support it. Votes can be counted exactly as they are now. It's even simpler than pick-one, hard as that may be to imagine!

The only difference with approval voting is that the voter now marks every candidate they approve of. Your vote is now a "yes" or a "no" to every candidate, instead of being forced to vote "no" on all but one. Want to cast a vote for "anybody but him/her"? You can do that! Want to vote for a non-establishment candidate, but you don't care which one? Not a problem! And since every voter gets to vote "yes" or "no" on every candidate, every voter still gets an equal voice.

This primary season has been a disaster for the Republican party. No matter who wins, the party is more divided than at any time in living memory. Think how this primary election would have gone under approval voting. We could have started with the same candidates, but instead of ending up with three that represent three disparate wings of the party, we would have ended up with one who the whole party could support.

I have no idea at all who that would have been. But this I know with all certainty: the Republican party would have come out stronger and more unified.

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