Since last Tuesday, there have been more than a few articles written clamoring that we need a third party to rescue this country from the terrible evils that the Republicans and Democrats are laying upon it. A third party, we're told, will really resonate with the voters; will unite them against the two "basically identical" major parties; will end corruption. There's only one problem: we already have a third party.
Actually, we have several "third" parties. The Libertarian party, if you add all the races together, got over one million votes for the House of Representatives this year. The Green party got more than twice that many for President just 12 years ago. And the Libertarian, Green, and Constitution parties have all run nation-wide Presidential tickets in every election since 1992. And that doesn't even count the literally dozens of smaller and regional parties.
Maybe you think there's a growing trend? That, yes, it's true that this has been going on for decades, but that's because it's building slowly, and now it's clear that the wave is about to crest, and a three-party utopia is on the horizon! Well... not so much. There have consistently been three or more new political parties founded in every decade of the nation's history since at least the 1840s, and some of them have done much better than any of the ones we have now. The only exception to this rule is the 1860s which, significantly, is the decade of the civil war and, related, the decade after the Republican party replaced the Whig party as one of America's two major-parties. (And by the way, the Republican party was never a third party.)
Third parties come, and third parties go; if they're lucky, they get to have some indirect influence on the debate by way of being a credible-enough spoiler threat. Occasionally (once a century or so) a major-party goes, and a new major-party forms to take its place—never (yet) an existing third-party. And that's the way it is, because third parties can't win this game.
Anyone who is whining that America needs a third party to "save" it then, is wrong for two reasons: we already have them, and they can't save us. We have a two-party political system because we have a two-party voting system, and if you don't like the former, you have to change the later.
Approval voting and score voting allow third parties a real chance to grow and actually win elections. That would, at the very least, facilitate a faster rate of change of who the two major parties are, and perhaps even lead to a long-term three (or more) party system. This would then speed the rate at which new issues, new ideas, and new ideals, are incorporated into our political discourse.
Consider that the Whig party collapsed because neither it nor the opposing Democratic party could discuss slavery, and that the Republican party's rise was because it could. Had this changeover not been artificially retarded by an inefficient voting system perhaps war could have been avoided. If war really is just the continuation of politics by other means, then a better voting system really is a matter of life and death. I ask you to give this a moments thought on this Veteran's Day.
"Approval voting and score voting allow third parties a real chance to grow and actually win elections."
ReplyDeletedlw: That's the theory at least...
dlw:My theory is that there will always be economies of scale involved with single-member elections, regardless of the options you give voters.
The issue is whether in real life enough limited info voters will do their homework to make AV or SV work the way Bayesian Regret analysis predicts.
DSH: That would, at the very least, facilitate a faster rate of change of who the two major parties are, and perhaps even lead to a long-term three (or more) party system. This would then speed the rate at which new issues, new ideas, and new ideals, are incorporated into our political discourse.
dlw: This is pretty much the same mantra I've been using... with a different punchline.
dlw
Doesn't this present a bit of a catch 22? If a superior voting system is what's really needed (and I agree), how do we implement such a system? The pols of the Dems and Repubs sure won't, so that only leaves a citizen's introduced ballot initiative, and there's nothing like that on a federal level (I believe in 22 states, including my own, California). That's probably where the organizing for electoral reform should go, IMO.
ReplyDeleteIt's too much to try to change fed'l election rules and you only get one shot at it.
ReplyDeleteThe secret is to figure out an election reform that'll tend to appeal or elicit less opposition from those in power and move us forward.
My Strategic Election Reform approach is to push for 3-seated state assembly elections not unlike were used in Illinois from 1870-1980 and that Barack Obama tried to bring back to Illinois in 2001. Such wd not take power from the two major parties, it wd prevent either of them from dominating a state's politics and change their incentives for the better.
But the question remains, how does one implement such reforms? Major parties may like the reform when they're in a weaker position (like the Dems in Maine with their IRV support), but once they're in power again, they'll disregard such reforms quickly.
ReplyDeletewe gotta push for similar reforms in multiple states over an extended period of time and figure out who'd benefit and get the majority of voters in favor of or not in opposition to the reform and willing to either push for an initiative or vote-strategically in relevant state-level elections based on whether the politicians will commit to supporting the reform.
ReplyDeletedlw
Ok I'd agree there, especially with the initiative approach.
ReplyDeleteWhere it's possible that is the easier way to go forward...
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking it'd be good to put together an online petition written for Barack Obama that asks him to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to push for 3-seated state assembly elections again. This wd at least get more attention for the idea...
Then, it'd be good to get FairVote and other electoral reform orgs to get on board with the idea and we could start to grass/net roots push for it in a number of states.
If you know of anybody that'd be willing to write/host a petition to president Obama, let me know...
My email is
w e t z e l l d at g m a i l dot com.
dlw
I'm not so sure how well a "petition" would work, especially if it were online...
ReplyDeleteIt wouldn't have to "work" to "work". We could do it online first and then pay for it be in newspapers...
ReplyDeleteOr maybe we'd need to start with the newspapers to garner attention first. The name of the game is to get the ball rolling...
dlw
Ah, well sure, if the name of the game is national recognition. However, I don't think all the pieces of organized effort simply fall from above just with national recognition.
ReplyDeleteWell, if enuf folks get attracted to the idea from the nat'l recognition then it'd be easy to get state movements going and to get the electoral reform institutions at least talking about the idea...
ReplyDeleteIt's not for every state, California needs stronger medicine than just 3-seated state assembly elections to make a difference. Plus, they might want to simply work with improving their "top two primary" by using an alternative to first-(two)-past-the-post for the first round...
I'm open to brainstorming other ideas that start first at a local level. I have a contact in MI that knew that an initiative was in the works there in this coming year and wanted to get the use of 3-seated state assembly elections added to it.
That'd be a way to get the ball rolling...
dlw
I don't think focusing on the federal level is the right place to start.
ReplyDeleteStart local, build successes, use them to provide evidence for the next locale over. Get a few in state, and then go for state offices.
This is FairVote's plan for instant runoff voting, and they've been able to gain traction in several places. Unfortunately for them, IRV has proven to not be particularly effective, and many locales have voted the measure out just a few years later (Aspen, CO; Burlington, VT).
But no one--in recent US history at least--has tried approval or score voting yet. If it's as effective as simulations suggest (and as I hope) it is, then it should hold on much better than IRV has, and the success will snowball into further success.
The Libertarian party in Colorado is making some inroads with approval. I hope they find some success; success I hope to build on in my city and state.
another approach wd be to first push Approval Voting's use in the first stage of an IRV...
ReplyDeleteThis wd allow you to coopt much of the marketing work done by FairVote and improve upon IRV.
One cd also point to examples where Approval Voting has been tried and then discontinued so I wouldn't hold out the cases where IRV was first tried and then discontinued as the smoking gun for why IRV isn't effective enough.
dlw
Hi Dale, I'd agree, one shouldn't start on the federal level. I was more curious though, what is the vehicle (or tactic, whatever) that can be used to actually implement such reforms? The only thing I can think of is through ballot initiative. And to be fair, that's not a possibility in all jurisdictions. (though certainly should be utilized where it is allowed)
ReplyDeleteAhh; I see.
ReplyDeleteI don't know the answer. But how does any local law get changed, absent ballot-initiatives? Get to know your local representative, and convince them to bring it forward.
And yes, one or two groups--I believe you're referring to Dartmouth's Alumni association and the IEEE--used to use approval, and stopped. In its defense, the character of those reversals was very different then, say, the character of the reversals in Aspen and Burlington.
With IEEE, the reversal was done by committee, not a general vote, and in general the winner of the elections was agreed upon by consensus well ahead of the official vote; so the committee felt approval "wasn't really being used." I think it's a silly reason to get rid of it, but whatever.
At Dartmouth, it was reversed for what I think is an even more foolish reason: 3 candidates were provided by the Alumni Council, but other candidates could be put forward by petition. Which sounds fine to me, but:
"When the alumni electorate fails to take advantage of the approval voting process, the three required Alumni Council candidates tend to split the majority vote, giving petition candidates an advantage."
(from http://thedartmouth.com/2009/04/03/opinion/verbum/)
Gibberish. Petition-nominated candidates, in general at least, need all the "unfair advantages" they can get. Furthermore, part of the fix involved reducing the number of council nominees to 2.
Only 2 officially-supported choices. Rules to make it harder for "outsider" candidates to succeed. If that's the opposite of approval, than I WANT APPROVAL!
Another theory on the IEEE angle:
ReplyDeletehttp://rangevoting.org/FeerstTheory.html
Well, at the very least, it give's pause to relying too much on rational voter theories to determine the best election rule.
ReplyDeleteWhen 3-seated state assembly elections were adopted in Illinois, it lasted for 110 years and was only ended by a huge onslaught of deceptive propaganda timed to take advantage of widespread anti-incumbency sentiment.
3-seated state assembly elections in IL kept either of the two major parties from dominating the state's politics and helped more minorities get elected. I think that the longstanding stalemate between the two major parties in Illinois let third parties have a better chance to gain ground in other surrounding states like Wisconsin and Minnesota that are economically (and thereby could have easily been politically) dependent on Chicago/Illinois.
Most studies of change in electoral rules have noted that to be successful you gotta propose changes that those effectively in power are willing to live with. Thus, you gotta be more practical than idealistic when it comes to electoral reform. This is why I focus more on leveling the playing field between the two major parties and making them both hew more to the true political center than trying to make the system fair for all parties. I fear that pure approval voting is more about the latter...
dlw
I think it'd be possible to seriously improve upon a local electoral system without using any rankings or approval voting.
ReplyDeleteLet's say we have a city like Minneapolis with 13 city council members and one mayor then we could use of 1-seated and 3-seated Hare LR elections if we'd only break up the city into 4 super-wards. We could use the latest census results and two straight lines, one north-south and the other east-west. Then there'd be three city council members per super-ward and one at-large rep. The at-large rep wd normally go to the dominant major party, which would either have a plurality or a weak majority in the city council. The mayor, and any other city-wide single-seated offices, would be elected in one or two stages. If the candidate wins 50% of the vote in the general election then (s)he'd win. If (s)he won less than 50% then the election would go to the newly-elected city council. The 3 top vote-getters would then have to give a short speech to the city council members and the general public. The 13 city council members would then vote until one of the three finalists wins a majority of their.
Voila, no rankings and no approval votes, but you'd have 4 competitive city-council elections instead of 13 noncompetitive elections and the bar would be raised for the mayoral and other elections without the expense of a runoff election.
dlw
One cd define a Social Welfare slash Bayesian Regret function aggregated somehow over the Mayoral and City Council elections (with more weight given to the Mayoral election or to the winning coalition in city hall) and see how well this would do compared with other voting arrangements. It'd help though if we endogenized the decision to vote, based on the GOTV efforts of the candidates and the perception that one's vote might make a difference. It'd also help if the decision to evaluate additional candidates by voters were also treated as endogenous. If they don't do their homework on the entire field of candidates then we can't presume that their (approval or ranked) votes across the field would truly reflect what their proper valuation should be.
ReplyDeletedlw
I like the ending note regarding the Civil War. I'd always thought that was a product of the voting system.
ReplyDeleteThanks, James!
ReplyDeleteLincoln is of course well-respected now but people don't remember that, when he first was elected president, he got a lower percentage of the popular vote than Walter Mondale, who is the textbook example of a landslide loss.
I don't think the election _caused_ the war, but the voting system and the two then-major political parties certainly didn't help alleviate the growing divided in the nation.
The divergent economic systems between the North and South was bound to cause serious conflicts, regardless of the election rules used...
ReplyDeleteBut I wonder how much different our history might have been if the "Abolitionist-like" progressive movement for electoral reform that established the use of 3-seated state assembly elections in 1870 had set more reasonable goals and been sustained.
If it had reached other states and led to more innovations in the rules used in other elections, the US's democracy would have been more robust against set-backs like the McCarthy witch-hunts in the fifties and the Cultural Wars since the 70s...
dlw
dlw