Texas Libertarians and Greens Use Approval Voting

A quick news item from Texas. Last week, both the Libertarian Party of Texas and the Green Party of Texas made use of approval voting at their state conventions. The Libertarians used it to vote for their US Senate candidate, while the Greens voted to use approval voting in all internal elections, both for officers and for candidate selection, and including requiring its use by county-level parties (no link available yet, but I will update this story if I get one.) These state-level minor parties join the Libertarian Party of Colorado in the use of approval voting, which they first endorsed in 2010.

This is a great step forward for voting reform advocacy. Every large group of people is hesitant to be the first to try out a new idea, but these brave steps—start with the primaries!—will, I suspect, continue to provide evidence for the effectiveness of better voting methods. I'm especially excited by the Green Party of Texas move, as many state-level Green parties (particularly California's) have advocated for instant runoff voting, which would not be nearly as effective as approval voting in helping minor parties get elected.

One Person, One Vote, Many Methods

Just a few years ago, there was a federal case brought in California against the use of instant runoff voting (IRV), claiming its use was unconstitutional. Unless this is your first day here, you know I'm not a fan of IRV, so you may be surprised that I was happy when IRV was found to be perfectly acceptable. That's because the argument used against IRV was that it violated the principle of "one person, one vote" based on the fact that an IRV ballot can indicate support for more than one candidate. If this argument had been successful, then the only allowable voting method would be plurality.

The irony is, "one person, one vote" doesn't have anything to say about the definition of either "person" or "vote", but rather speaks to equality. In the US, the slogan is most-closely tied with requiring states to re-draw their congressional districts to keep those districts roughly equipopulous. The goal of that being for each voter's ballot to have as much influence on determining the membership of the House as every other's.

You surely know that we've expanded the definition of "person" many times in this nation's history. You have to be a US citizen and white and male and a property owner and pay a poll-tax and not be a felon and 25 years old and 18 years old. Every time, there were people who insisted we had to cling to the old definition, and in many cases, they were able to delay these improvements for years at the state level, before the federal government stepped in. But you may not know that a similar version of this story has happened with the definition of "vote".

Bully!

In 1912, former President Teddy Roosevelt, convinced that the Republican party—and current president Howard Taft in particular—had strayed from its values, decided to run for the office again. Unable to wrest the Republican nomination from Taft, Roosevelt ran his own ticket, creating the "Bull Moose" or "Progressive" party. Roosevelt and Taft split the vote, leaving Democrat Woodrow Wilson the winner—the first Democrat to do so in 20 years—with just 41.8% of the vote. Roosevelt would eventually return to the Republican party, but his strong showing on a third-party ticket inspired other third-party hopefuls, while also highlighting the shortcomings of the electoral system with respect to third parties. Coming at the height of the progressive era, Roosevelt's loss preceded a raft of experimentation in election methods, particularly in the upper midwest.

One method which caught on in several states was Bucklin voting. Bucklin uses a ranked ballot. At first, only the first-ranks are counted. If this does not result in a majority decision, than every voter's second-ranked choice is added to the totals, and so on, until a winner is found. You may notice similarities to instant runoff voting (in the repeated rounds and the search for a majority winner) and also to approval voting (in that a simple sum is used to determine the winner and that a single voter's ballot can count toward more than one candidate at a time); indeed, some have referred to Bucklin as "approval runoff".

Bucklin voting was used in an April, 1915 judicial election in Duluth Minnesota, and W. H. Smallwood was certified the winner. However, a voter in that election, John Brown, Jr., contested the election, on the grounds that, in the first-round results, William L. Windom had the most votes. Brown was essentially arguing that, according to the Minnesota state constitution, plurality was the only legal election method. And Brown won the case! Smallwood was removed from office, Windom was appointed in his place, and Bucklin voting became illegal across the state.

Bucklin voting was quite popular among voters, but not always with the organizers of major parties. In San Francisco, the first nail in the coffin for Bucklin voting, was when its use led to an upset in which the candidate initially in third place became the eventual winner. The fact that this candidate was "affiliated with the Socialist party" was used as an argument to eliminate the method, not only in San Francisco, but in in other cities as well.

In all cases, the rhetoric of the anti-Bucklin crowd insisted that our forefathers had never intended for a "vote" to be anything other than the selection of a single choice; that "election" had always meant to them, "plurality election", and that it should mean the same to us. But history shows us this isn't so. Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson corresponded with the Marquis de Condorcet, the French intellectual for whom the Condorcet method is named, and were so excited about his work that they sent copies of his writings to others of America's founding fathers. These two, at least, would have been disappointed to hear that such experimentations of democracy were cut short.

Rexamination

As World War I ran its course, and led into the 20s, the progressive era lost steam. It wouldn't be until the civil rights era that the issue of "one person, one vote" would again be looked at in detail. And while that era rightly focused on the definition of "person", the judicial opinions that came out of it would greatly clarify that the intent of the phrase was, indeed, on equal consideration, not a description of ballot design. However, since that time there has not been the same sort of urgency to experiment with voting methods... until perhaps now. Regrettably, much of that effort has been expended on instant runoff voting, which is notably less well-performing than Bucklin (and neither performs as well as approval or score voting). But regardless of that, I applaud these decisions finding that non-plurality methods are permissible.

Better at the State Level?

Many pro-third-party and pro-independent voters resign themselves to the difficulty of winning a federal congressional seat. There are, after all, just two, assuming you count Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, who lost a reelection primary after three successful bids as a member of the Democratic party before deciding to go it alone. A strict count might only include Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who never once ran for office as a member of either of the major parties. Counting both men, out of the 535 House and Senate members that's only about 0.37%. Meanwhile, there are 7,442 state legislators currently serving in the 50 state legislatures. Some believe that at the state level, since it's a smaller and less rancorous market, third-party and independent candidates can have more success.

So, out of those 7,442 seats, how many do you think are not currently filled by Republicans or Democrats? Write your guess down before reading on.

Did You Write it Down?

Good. Now, if state legislatures had about the same percentage as the US congress, we could expect about 27 or 28 independent and third-party members. The truth? It's actually a little bit lower than that. There are, according to Wikipedia, just 24 such legislators. And about half of them are independent more in the Lieberman sense than in the Sanders sense.

Consider members like Harri Smith of the Alabama Senate, who lost a Republican primary and endorsed the Democrat. She was expelled from the Republican party for doing so, and ran as an independent in the subsequent election, in which the Democratic party did not field a candidate; Smith won. Or New York Assembly member Fred Thiele, who was originally elected to his seat as a Republican in 1995. After a decade and a half of reelections, Thiele joined the Independence Party of New York in 2009, and held on to his seat. Or you can find a hybrid version of those two stories in what Kent Williams did. Elected to the Tennessee House in 2006 and 2008 as a Republican, in his second term he was elected speaker—via the unanimous votes of the Democratic members of the body, and a lone Republican vote from himself. Promptly expelled from the Republicans, he decided to make his own party.

These politicians, like Lieberman, seem more opportunistic than truly independent. But there are some independent state legislators about whom, like Sanders, there is no such doubt. And like Sanders, most of them are in the state of Vermont. In fact, of the 24 legislators, ten of them are from that one small state. That's over 40% of the non-Democrat non-Republican state legislators in the country, from a state with just 0.2% of the nation's population. Of the ten, three list themselves as independents, while the other seven are members of the Vermont Progressive Party, making it the only third party with a substantial (>2%) presence in any state legislature.

Progressive Success

Why has Vermont's Progressive party been so successful? Not because of an advanced voting method; despite the party's support for instant runoff voting (which doesn't even help third parties) the Vermont legislature is elected by plurality, just like the other 49 states. We get an interesting piece of information by looking at the state wide voter totals. Despite taking 3.89% of the legislative seats, the party only received 2.96% of the votes. It's very unusual for a third party's seat-percentage to over-perform its vote-percentage like that, and it happens because, as they say on their website, "We pick the races we enter strategically." Sometimes this means a fusion ticket with the Democrats, or sometimes it means that there's enough political space to the left of the Democrats for the party to succeed on its own. This is possible because parts of the state have a significantly-more than 2:1 voter preference imbalance between the Democrats and the Republicans, leading to the unlikely situation where two left-wing candidates can run without concern of splitting the vote, effectively making the Republican party the "third party" in those elections.

But other states have pockets with similar imbalances, and other states allow fusion tickets, so make no mistake: the Vermont Progressive party's success isn't based strictly on those elements of their voting environment. They're doing something right.

Answer:

Third party and independent legislators are no more common, overall, in state legislatures than in the national legislature. But an astounding number can be found in Vermont. Third party supporters may want to take a close look at what the Progressive party is doing there, and try to emulate it.

Declaration of Independence (of Irrelvant Alternatives)

You're finishing up a nice dinner, when the waiter lets you know about their dessert options. They have apple pie (A), and blueberry pie (B). You order a nice hot slice of all-American apple pie. A minute or two goes by, and the waiter returns. "I forgot," he says, "to mention that we also have cherry pie" (C). You consider it a moment and decide, "In that case, I'll have the blueberry."

Just Dessert

Ridiculous, isn't it? If you think A is the best out of A and B, then there's no logical reason you would think that B is the best out of A, B, and C. But what if pies are parties, and you are the American voting public? Official results don't collect voter's full preferences on candidates, but (please, hold off on your Gore/Nader (or Bush/Perot) comments for a bit, thank you!) there's no shortage of people claiming that this new third option, even though they didn't win, changed the outcome. (Keep holding it.) What we're talking about is usually called the spoiler effect, or more broadly and academically, a failure of the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA).

In the absence of 100%-completely-non-controversial data, it's easy enough to construct a plausible example to showcase the theory:

• 30%: A > (all others)
• 45%: B > (all others)
• 25%: C > A > B

If only A and B run, A wins 55% to 45%. But if A, B, and C run, then by plurality voting rules, the winner changes to B. We can vary the percentages pretty widely (we can even throw in in some C > B > A voters) but it doesn't vary the results: C doesn't win, but they do change the winner.

This isn't C's fault. Maybe C was making a statement. Maybe A should have dropped out of the race. Maybe C's voters valued their honest vote over the practicality of supporting a "lesser evil." (Okay, now you may comment.) All of these could be true, or none of them could be true, but the fault lies not in our candidates or our voters, but in the way we have agreed to count our elections. We have decided to use a voting system which fails the independence of irrelevant alternatives. And IIA means spoilers, which means "the lesser of two evils" is an effective voter strategy, which means we will have a two-party system. In other word, not only will C lose, but C will always be feared by voters of potentially causing the election of the worst candidate.

Declare Your Independence

This is not a new revelation; this is a problem we've been aware of, and trying to fix, for at least a few hundred years. But, in 1951, Kenneth Arrow proved--on his way to a Nobel prize--that no (single-winner) voting system can pass IIA if it is both deterministic and based on ranked-order ballots. That leaves us with precisely three options.

• One, accept failure of IIA (which means we accept our two-party system.)
• Two, allow a random component in our elections (not a popular plan.)
• Three, don't use ranked-order ballots.

I chose option three. And if you're the sort who likes 3rd options when you go to vote, then option three is the most important political stance you can take. Because we cannot even fairly consider more than two options--we cannot even rationally think about cherry pie--without it.

Declare your independence from irrelevant alternatives! Support approval voting and other third-party supporting voting systems.

A Third Party? We Already Have One (Or Thirty)

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.

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

I have a game for you. Get one hundred things--pennies, toothpicks, whatever--and set them up in a line, from left to right. This is our voting populace in simplified, one-dimensional form. Each "voter" has just one simple rule to decide how to vote: vote for whichever one candidate stands closest to them (yes, we're using plurality voting; and if there's a tie for closest, each gets a half vote). Now, grab another thing--a pencil, a button, it doesn't matter--and place it on the line, between two voters, so that 17 voters are to the left of it. This new thing is one of our "candidates", Libram McLeftyson. Nearly five out of six voters think he's too liberal. Grab another candidate, and place it, mirror-like, so that 17 voters are to the right of it, and in equal measure to her competitor, nearly five out of six voters think Constance O'Righterly is too conservative.

Now, here's how you win the game: place a third candidate between any two voters (except right on top of one of the existing candidates) such that they win the election. Go on, try it; I'll wait while you count your things.

Give up yet? You should, because the challenge is impossible. No matter where you put your third candidate, it is impossible to make it so they win; even putting them right in the center won't do it. As an added bonus, you'll find that whichever of the other two candidates you put them closer to, also loses. And if I move them from inside the 17 marks to precisely the 25 marks, you can't even come in second. I can even put them at the 49 marks, practically next to each other, and there's still nowhere you can go where you can win.

More and more Americans are agitating for a "third party", most without even realizing that there are already dozens of active third parties to choose from. But they don't win. They can't win. And this is without even acknowledging the effects of tactical voting, this is with honest voters! In this simulation, the only ones voting for the big-two are the ones who honestly believe them to be the uniquely best option available.

The existence of a multitude of third parties hasn't change this. Screaming that we need even more third parties won't change this. You cannot win this game. The only way you can win, is if you change the rules.

And the rules that would give third parties a chance to win are approval voting and score voting.

Laws Limiting Third-Parties Are an Effect, Not a Cause

Funny story out of Massachusetts. As you're hopefully aware, a special election is soon to be held to fill the seat of the late Ted Kennedy. The party primaries are over, and ballot-access forms have been filed, leaving three contenders. But just the other day, the Boston Globe came out with an opinion piece saying that one of those three should be shut out of the debates.

Obviously, I think that's a travesty of democracy that, after jumping through all the hoops it takes to get on the ballot as a third party, that anyone thinks that not enough was done to keep the rabble out. And most of the candidates agree; two-thirds, to be exact: the third-party candidate and the one who disagrees with everything the third-party candidate stands for.

Aww; how nice of a politician to stand up for the rights of someone who she doesn't even agree with. But allow me to be a bit cynical for just a moment. (Pause for laughter.) She's only doing it because it helps her. The third party candidate leans right, and is therefore more likely to draw away her opponent's otherwise-Republican voters rather than her own otherwise-Democratic voters. And she knows it; I'm fully certain that if the third ballot-qualified candidate were a member of the Green party, she'd be singing the opposite tune, and so would her opponent.

But let's look at this from the other side: spoilers suck. If I'm the Republican in this race, knowing that Massachusetts leans left, I'm going to need all the help I can get. But more importantly, if I really think most of the voters prefer me over the Democrat, then the voters stand to be harmed by the third-party candidate as well. A spoiled election means the wrong candidate gets elected, so how do you prevent that from happening?

It's popular to claim that ballot-access laws, and debate access, and media coverage are all a cause of poor performance by third parties. But it's the opposite that's true: it's the strong performances by third parties that inspire these things. Not strong enough to win the election, but strong enough to spoil it. From a certain point of view, these things exist to protect the voters, because unless a third-party is strong enough to win the election, then their presence is a hindrance to the will of the majority.

Before you start screaming: yes, this logic ignores lots of other very important factors. But from this limited view point, it is an entirely rational responses to the damaging effects of third-party candidacies. And as long as we insist on using voting methods which are known to be prone to spoilers, methods which we know have two-party dominance as the only long-term equilibrium, then these sort of short-sited "solutions" are going to be something that we will constantly be fighting against (or for, depending).

The long-term solution is spoiler-free election methods; something that can fairly tease out the real majority-will in a three-way contest. Plurality doesn't do it. Score and approval voting do.

If you find yourself screaming at ballot-access laws, or yelling about third-party candidates being shut out of debates, or crying over a close election that was spoiled by a third-party, (I'm looking at you, Theresa Amato) place the blame where it belongs: on our foolish voting system. And then, commit yourself to changing it.

Get This Party Started: Part V

History of American Political Parties: I - II - III - IV - V - Future

What It Is, Ain't Exactly Clear

As I've been hinting at since part one, there's still some debate over how many party systems we've gone through. Historians pretty much agree on when the first four ended (all the times we've already covered), but by some accounts the fifth is either still on going, while others say it ended in the late 1960s. The argument against is that there wasn't a significant, rapid shift in the composition of congress, which had marked every other transition. The argument in favor is that there was; it wasn't a large net change nationally, but it was, regionally, almost a complete reversal.

Since their inception on the cusp of third party system, the Republican party had enjoyed its greatest support in the north, and overwhelming support from African-Americans; conversely, the Democratic party had been able to rely on the "solid south" for many years. But there had been signs that this certainty wasn't quite so certain after all, going back as early as 1948, when Harry Truman backed the civl rights platform of northern Democratic leaders. This prompted several dozen southerners to walk out of the convention, whereupon they founded the Dixiecrat party, and nominated Strom Thurmond for president. Truman won the election narrowly over Thomas Dewey, while Thurmond took four southern states.

During Truman's administration, he found his policy objectives blocked by the so-called Conservative Coalition, consisting of a majority of Republicans and a large minority of the conservative southern Democrats who had favored Thurmond. In 1960, during the nail-bitingly close election between civil-rights supporter and Democrat John F. Kennedy, and Republican candidate Richard Nixon (who distanced himself entirely from the issue) fifteen electors in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, refusing to vote for either of the major candidates, voted for Harry Byrd, who had not at any point announced himself as a candidate, but who was a strong segregationist and conservative Democrat.

But 1964, perhaps, was the true turning point. Lyndon Johnson, who had assumed the presidency upon Kennedy's assassination, was all-but assured the party nomination. Still, he had to weather surprisingly strong primary challenges from segregationist Democrat George Wallace, and narrowly avoided a messy convention fight over civil rights brought on by competing Mississippi delegations. Meanwhile, for the Republicans, Nixon had been a strong bridge between the moderate wing of the party, which was predominantly based in the north and led by Nelson Rockafeller, and the conservative wing, which was led by Barry Goldwater and quickly growing—and incidentally picking up segregationist former Democrats—in the south. But Nixon refused to run, and in a highly fractured vote, Goldwater took the nomination. On July 2nd, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, allegedly saying "We have lost the south for a generation." But in exchange, the Democrats gained the votes of most African-Americans and turned many northern Republicans into swing voters.

A month and a half after the bill's signing, on September 16th, Strom Thurmond switched parties; other segregationist Democrats followed. Goldwater lost the election terribly, but more importantly, compare the 1956 electoral map and the 1964 electoral map: in just eight years, just two presidential election cycles, had almost completely reversed the map. Even though congress didn't show any great change in party split, the regions from which they drew their greatest support had changed completely. I would count that as being as significant, if not more significant, than when the debate over silver brought about the the fourth party system.

So what does this mean for today's third parties? Unfortunately, not much. At least, not much that's helpful. Wallace would make a third-party run in 1968, running on a pro-segregation platform and taking the old south, but a resurgent Nixon would win that election. As in the transition to the fourth and fifth party systems, the two existing parties had managed to hold on, lithely jumping on new issues when necessary and adroitly absorbing and swapping large swaths of various voter demographics as they became disillusioned with the alternative. The two have exchanged the white house and control of the chambers of congress with increasing regularity since, while third parties continue to fail to find a foothold. But the strange bedfellows that make up each of the parties are perhaps a chink in the armor; one that may lead us to a seventh party system! A possibility that we will discuss in the next installment.

Finally: The Future!

Get This Party Started: Part IV

History of American Political Parties: I - II - III - IV - V - Future

One Roosevelt, Red Roosevelt

Before we get to the next big switch, at little aside about a failed attempt to shift the two-party system: Teddy Roosevelt and his Progressive party. Having ascended to the presidency due to William McKinley's assassination, and then having won the 1904 election, he felt the honorable thing to do (and TR considered himself to be a paragon of honor) was to count that as his two terms and, as was tradition (but not, at the time, law), follow in Washington's footsteps by not seeking a third term. William Howard Taft took the nomination, and was easily elected.

But then the trouble started. Roosevelt found Taft to be unacceptable in office, and pressed for the party nomination in 1912. But he was rebuked by Taft's supporters; humiliated and unwilling to compromise, Roosevelt and his supporters walked out, and formed their own party, the Progressive or Bull Moose party. The new party seemed to survive solely by Roosevelt's force of personality, and had little if any appeal for staunch Democrats, and none for any Taft-supporting Republicans. At this point, Republicans were enjoying a rather solid and comfortable 55/45 or better advantage in Presidential elections; but the Progressives split the party almost completely down the middle. The final popular vote totals were 27.4% for Roosevelt and 23.2% for Taft; a total of more than 50%, but individually, both lost to the Democrats and Woodrow Wilson's 41.8%, and by an absolute landslide in the electoral college: 88 for Roosevelt, to 8 for Taft, to 435 for Wilson.

Roosevelt apparently learned his lesson though; in 1916, when the Progressive party nominated him again, he declined, and endorsed the Republican candidate; Wilson won reelection, but only narrowly. But Roosevelt's contrition placated his party well enough that he was the front runner for the 1920 nomination; cut short only by a quick but fatal illness.

The lesson from this aside should be obvious: if all you do is split your party, you'll both lose. Neither the Republicans nor the Progressives got any appreciable support from Democratic voters. To succeed, a third party needs to divide, and then build from the pieces, a coalition from both (or as we saw in part I, the only) existing major parties. And it's not enough to build "in the middle", as Roosevelt tried; you have to be completely outside the axis of partisan identification.

Two Roosevelt, Blue Roosevelt

On to today's transition, from the fourth party system to the fifth. Economic recessions had helped usher in the previous realignment, by instigating the Populist party and the silver faction of the Democrats. And economics would play in a big way for this one as well. Yes, we're talking about the Great Depression. But there's not a whole lot to say. When the stock market crashed in 1929, Herbert Hoover insisted that he and the Republicans had it under control; but three years later, not many believed him. Instead, the put their trust in Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Teddy's 5th cousin.)

So, there's that option: hope that unbelievable economic devastation will be wrought upon the nation, and that you'll be there to pick up the pieces. Not a particularly uplifting or proactive strategy (at least I hope no one would try to cause such a thing), but one that we've seen can work.

It's also important to note that this shift didn't involve the rise of any new party (not even an analog to the aborted Populist party), only a drastic shift in support from one major party (which had dominated national politics for decades) to the other. Third parties did enjoy a startling increase in support after the crash, but not enough to even act as spoilers. Was it because of the homogenizing effect of modern communications, making what would have been strong regional third-party movements into a more diffuse national movement? Was it FDR himself, something about him that drew would-be third-party supporters to the Democrats? Or perhaps we had simply become more savvy about the inevitability of a two-party system under our spoiler-prone voting system?

Whatever it was, like the voters Bryan had brought (and driven from) the Democrats at the turn of the century, the voters FDR brought also stuck around; the New Deal Coalition, were reliable not just for FDR, but for Democrats in many elections to follow, up until the late 1960s; which may (or may not have, depending which historians you ask) have represented another realignment of the party system. But we'll discuss that next time.

Part V...

Get This Party Started: Part III

History of American Political Parties: I - II - III - IV - V - Future

One is Silver and the Other's Gold

Compared to the dramatic backdrop of civil war that carried America from the second party system to the third, the transistion from the third to the fourth seems mundane and almost alien (except maybe to some Libertarians); but the effect it had on US politics is no less imporant. It was about coinage; specifically, about moving the US from a currency based around gold as a standard, to one using silver. As with the concerns of slavery in the previous transistion, both major parties were internally split on the issue. But in the 1890s, mid-western silver miners (mostly Republicans), as well farmers who saw inflation as a way out of recession-caused debts (mostly Democrats), finding no outlet for their political aims, began building a coalition, which quickly grew into the Populist party. In 1892, the Populist nominated James Weaver for president... and promply spoiled the election for the Republicans, allowing Grover Cleveland's unprecedented (and unrepeated) non-consecutive presidential terms. (In addition to the 22 electoral votes Weaver won outright, he may have tipped the balance in states worth an additional 69 of the 444 available electoral votes.)

But the story doesn't end there. In 1896, pro-silver Democrats seized control of the party, denounced Cleveland, and successfully nominated William Jennings Bryan, who delived his famous "Cross of Gold" speach; the Populist party jumped on the opportunity and nominated him for their candidate as well. But what was more surprising was that the Silver Republican party, who had split from the Republicans over the silver issue, also supported Bryan. Meanwhile the gold faction of the Democrats, dejected over the result of the convention, nominated their own candidate, although he received practically no votes; instead, many gold Democrats voted for Republican candidate William McKinley. The end result was that many Republicans ended up voting for the Democratic ticket, and many Democrats voted for the Republican ticket, all over currency.

Bryan and his silverites lost, and even the silver issue itself fell by the wayside as economic prosperity returned. But the new coalitions formed in the leadup to the election lingered on, and solidified the supports of both parties. This would lead to decades of almost completely uninterrupted Republican rule.

So we see the same strategy repeated from before: Pick an issue ignored by the major parties, and run on it. The important lesson here is, it doesn't always work, at least not necessarily like you planned. Even though a major party picked up the issue, they lost the election, and the movement died out. Slavery had been an important issue in America since before the Constitution was written; maybe the gold standard just isn't something that captures the hearts and minds of voters, or maybe Bryan only picked up the silver issue to gain votes? Either way, pick your issue, and your allies, carefully.

Part IV...

Get This Party Started: Part II

History of American Political Parties: I - II - III - IV - V - Future

Choosing Not To Choose

When we left off, the Democratic and Whig parties were the components of the second party system. The two were nearly-equally popular in all parts of the country; north, south, and the newly-forming west. And so, both had to take care not to take sides in any regional conflicts, as that could cost them an election. Only one problem: the most important issue in the country, the focus of every debate and every headline, pitted north against south. Slavery. Neither party would take a stance on the issue. Democrats in the north were opposed, by needed the assistance of the slavery-dependent farm-owning Democrats in the south to win elections, and the story was similar for the Whigs. Everyone in America had a strong view on the issue, but with the axis of party alignment completely skew to it, it seemed a resolution on the issue would be impossible. The Whigs cracked first. Arguments over their party nomination in 1852 (and their subsequent loss in the election) shattered the party. Early in 1854, former Whigs began meeting as newly-minted Republican, Know-Nothing, and other party members.

In 1856, it was the Democrats chance for a nomination fight, settling on northerner-with-southern-sympathies, James Buchanan. That sympathy (and a southern running mate) was enough to defeat the clearly north-favoring Republican (as well as the border state Know-Nothing) candidate. As president, Buchanan's refusal to act or even speak out decisively about the rising calls for secession turned the whole nation against him, and in 1860, the Democratic party broke in half over the nomination of his replacement. The southern faction walked out, held their own convention, and nominated Buchanan's vice-president, John Breckinridge. The northern faction proceeded alone, and nominated Stephen Douglas, although many members left to join with the Republican party instead. A few border and western states, desperate to avoid war, combined the Know-Nothings with the few remaining (and still unaligned) former Whigs to create the short-lived Constitutional Union party, and nominated John Bell. The Republicans settled on a former Whig congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln.

The election was brutally close. Republican's didn't even bother to get on the ballot in 9 southern states. In three of the states Lincoln won—California, New York, and Oregon—he received less than half of the popular vote; in California, he received less than one third. Had he lost New York—where his margin of victory was less than seven and a half percent—then no candidate would have had the required electoral vote majority and the election would have been decided in the House. All told, Lincoln received a smaller percentage of the popular vote—39.8%—than Walter Mondale did in his 1980 landslide loss to Ronald Reagan.

Before Lincoln could even be sworn in, the Civil War had begun. When it was over, the Republican and Democratic parties would be the two to emerge from the ashes, nominally the same two parties we have today; although a lot has changed between then and now.

So, what do we learn from this? Another way to disrupt the two-party system is to find an issue both major parties are split over, so strongly that you can cause nomination fights in both in rapid succession. Then, while the parties fracture you can promote one of the pieces as your new third party, building it on a coalition from both parties that support your issue. Abusing the weaknesses of plurality election with more than two strong candidates, as well as the specifics of electoral rules, you can game the system just enough to slip your unpopular candidate in to office. But watch out for war. This is painful lesson on the inevitable, almost predictably periodic failures of a two-party system. The important issues were ignored in order to secure electoral victories, and they were ignored because they fell outside the domain that served to originally define the existing major parties. A new party was necessary in order to address the issue, but the two-party system held back its emergence, until it burst forth, violently.

On to Part III!

Get This Party Started: Part I

History of American Political Parties: I - II - III - IV - V - Future

Back in June, Bill Maher was railing about the lack of options in the voting both, hyperbolically pointing out that "We don't need a third party, we need a first party." (Exaggeration aside, what he meant was we desperately need third parties.) He then went on to describe his ideal platform and driving principles for such a third party. Oh, if only such a thing as he desired existed! The thing is, what he described does exist. But Maher's complaint echoes often. Everyone seems to be asking, "Why doesn't someone start a third party that matches my goals?" And the answer, when one if given, is often the same: "Someone has."

For instance, most people—even those clamoring for "a new third party"—don't even realize how many candidates there were for president in 2008. Sure, everyone knows about Obama and McCain. But there were four other candidates who were on the ballot in enough states that they could potentially get the necessary 270 electoral votes to win. There were eight more who were on the ballot in at least one state. And there are dozens more parties in the country that didn't nominate a presidential candidate last election, but have recently nominated candidates for other offices. The problem, therefore, is not simply a lack of choices.

Bill Maher knows the Green party exists. But he also knows that they don't matter. It's a two-party system, and when people are railing how "someone" should just make a new party, what they really are crying out for is a change in the two-party system. The way I see it, there are two ways to meet that goal: the one I advocate for is a spoiler-free election method, which I believe would, by avoiding Duverger's Law, cause and end to a two-party dominated system. The other? History.

A Brief History of Political Parties in the United States

To know where you're going, first you have to know where you've been. Since the 1960s, political history in the US has been examined through a framework called the "party system", numbering periods of stability, separated by short spans of realignment. In other words, the times when the two parties at the forefront of American politics changed. There have been at least five such stable periods. There is debate to whether we are still in the fifth or are now in the sixth; or perhaps we are in an unstable realignment period, in which case the lessons to be learned are all-the-more valuable. (The following are chock-full of Wikipedia links, and I encourage you to read up on aspect which you find particularly interesting.)

First Cabinet Fight through Nomination Failure

The first party system, which solidified early in George Washington's first term from disagreements between Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, ended when, after twelve years of one party rule (Hamilton's Federalist party having become irrelevant after the War of 1812), the Democratic-Republican party split over a failure to settle on a single nominee for president in 1824, and so four candidates split the electoral vote. One faction, backing Andrew Jackson (who had led the popular vote and the electoral vote, but lost the election (if you thought Democrats were pissy about Al Gore, you ain't seen nothin')), became the Democratic party (from which the modern Democratic party draws its lineage). The other faction, backing John Quincy Adams and made up of many former members of the Federalist party and some long-time D-R members who opposed Jackson for their own reasons, became the National Republican Party (no relation to the modern party), which shortly reorganized as the Whig party.

So that's one way to shift the two-party system that's been shown to work; take an existing major party in wide-spread popular decline, resign to 12 years of defeat, during which you infiltrate the opposition, then use parliamentary shenanigans to exacerbate "intra"-party resentment, and be re-born with a slightly new direction. This also perfectly highlights one of the big drivers of the two-party systems: when there are more than two strong candidates, vote-splitting leads to unexpected (and unpopular) results.

More to Come in Part II!

Let's Talk

First, let me say that I still get absolutely thrilled whenever I get comments; I've only been at this for a few months, and I've been really squeamish about publicizing it. I got one comment though in response to my last post about how IRV fails to fix the spoiler problem or grant success to third parties. And it really got me thinking. So let's talk:

IRV has elected Progressive Bob Kiss as the mayor of Burlington, VT and Ross Mirkarimi, a Green, to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. While score/range voting is a worthy system, third parties in this country have enough problems with credibility without trying to advocate for a voting system that has never been used anywhere in the world.
--Anonymous

I Owe It All to IRV?

This comment bring up two points, and they're both worth responding to. The first is the assertion that IRV does fix the spoiler problem and allow third parties to succeed, as evidenced by Bob Kiss of the Vermont Progressive Party winning the election. I have three responses to that. One, if that's true, than plurality voting also fixes the spoiler problem, because plurality elected Bernie Sanders mayor of Burlington, VT in 1981 when he was the Progressive candidate. Obviously, that's ludicrous; if plurality was immune to spoilers, none of us would be wasting our time trying to fix the problem. No, the truth is, that Burlington (and San Francisco as well) is something of an exception in American politics, in that it has a very strong "third" party that is already capable of winning elections. But IRV has virtually nothing to do with their success.

My second response to this first point is a bit more flippant, but makes the same point: in Burlington, the Republicans are the third party; something that I went into more detail with in the too-long post I referred to in the previous post. (Mental note: maybe I should try to turn Burlington's Republicans on to score voting. Or would that be overly antagonistic?)

Third, and more substantive, if IRV were actually any help to third parties, then you would expect a country that has used IRV for years, like Australia, to actually have some in their legislature. But of the 150 Australian legislators, currently every last one is a member of one of two parties. (Technically, the Liberal party and the National party are different, but the two have been in a tight coalition since 1922, and are currently working on a merger plan that has already succeeded in the state of Queensland. In the minds of virtually every Australian, they are a single party. Furthermore, the three "independent" representatives were all, at one time, members of the National party, before leaving over intra-party disagreements; a situation very similar to "independent" US Senator Joseph Lieberman's position with the Democratic party.) And let's not forget senator Bernie Sanders; the same Progressive who won a plurality election to become mayor of Burlington also won a plurality election to become a senator from Vermont; by this logic, plurality is better for third parties than IRV!

But It's Doing Nothing Right Now!

The commentator's second point is that, even if IRV isn't helpful at fixing the spoiler/two-party problem, it's still a better idea than anything else out there because it's actually being used already. This is, one, foolish, and two, a bit disingenuous. It's foolish to put all of this effort into making a huge change, knowing that it doesn't actually fix the problem. Besides being a clear waste of effort, it creates a hostile environment for any future real improvements; once an electorate has been bitten by a false "fix-all" solution like IRV, they become much more shy about trying some other solution. Many locales that try IRV find themselves slipping back into the even-worse world of plurality; North Carolina, for instance, has a pilot program that is facing some strong motions this week to go back.

Besides, the truth is score voting has been used for a very long time, and is a system people are already quite familiar with: from Olympic judging, to movie and restaurant reviews, to Hot or Not. We use it every day; we just haven't used it to democratically elect our leaders. At least, not recently. But the two longest-running democratic governments in world history did. For 500 hundred years, Sparta used a (loud and very analog) score voting method for all their elections, and for another 500 years, Venice used a three-valued (+1, -1, 0) score voting method. IRV, on the other hand, was first used in 1893. Call me in three or four centuries.

The Real Winner

But really, it's not important which idea is older, or was used for longer. Even clearly showing that IRV can't completely fix the spoiler problem doesn't show that it's, overall, no good. Taken alone, each of these arguments can be brushed off as simple anecdotes, and we want data (and the plural of anecdote is not data!) Spoilers are bad, because it means a lot of people get something they strongly don't want; two-party domination is bad, because it restricts voter's choices to "the least of two evils" and we often don't want either. But how bad? Which is worse? How often is it a problem? Warren Smith's insight was to try to side-step all the anecdotes, and directly measure "how bad"; that's the idea behind Bayesian regret. And even he was honestly surprised at just how overwhelming the data was.

Now, maybe the simulation is flawed. But maybe it's not. But it's certainly compelling enough to suggest that score voting would be something worth trying. Meanwhile, everything CRV has said would happen with IRV, has happened, including spoilers and continual failure for third party candidates. So again, I would urge you: if you're supporting IRV because of spoilers, or because of third parties, you should STOP supporting IRV. Other options do a better job of fixing the issues you care about.

But if you're still not convinced, I'm game to continue the debate, so keep the comments coming!

FairVote's Flash

As I mentioned, off handily, in an earlier (and far-too-long) post, FairVote has a not-too-shabby video showing off how instant runoff voting "fixes" the spoiler problem.

At the start of the video, we're presented with two candidates, A and B, and shown the results of the election between them: seven for A, eight for B; a narrow win for B.

Then, the plot thickens, and a new candidate, C, who agrees on most issues with B, is introduced. Three of B's voters, and one of A's, decide they prefer C, and we are shown the TERRIBLE TRAGEDY of how C's presence caused A to win instead of B, a clear SUBVERSION OF THE DEMOCRATIC ORDER. And I agree; that's terrible. Adding a candidate who is not a winner themself should never change who the winner of the election is. Academically, this is called independence of irrelevant alternatives, or colloquially, the spoiler effect.

"Luckily" (according to the video), instant runoff voting saves the day, because it eliminates C, and redistributes their votes back to A and B, and the victory returns to it's proper place, with B.

But I have a question for FairVote.

What if C was just a bit more popular, and managed to convince just one more of B's supporter's to vote for them?

Now, B, having the fewest first-place votes, is the candidate who is eliminated. And, depending on B's voter's second-choices (which we don't ever see in video) either C or A may win. If two or more of the four prefer A over C, then A wins. Which is the same SUBVERSION OF THE DEMOCRATIC ORDER which instant runoff voting was supposed to guarantee never happened again; an "irrelevant alternative" changed the outcome of the election. That should never happen!

IRV's advocates are trying to popularize a false notion (or maybe they're just trying to deal with their cognitive dissonance) that there's some magic cutoff for "significance", beyond which a candidate doesn't count as a spoiler. But if it quacks like a duck, then it's a duck. I believe they may be confused because they (and all of us) are most familiar with plurality voting, and under plurality third parties virtually never get more than about 15% of the vote. There's a good reason for that value; it's that the difference between the Republican candidate and the Democratic candidate in any election is virtually never more than about 15% of the vote. Third parties tend to grow, until they get big enough that they spoil an election, and then they're destroyed in a terrible backlash (Nader has yet to recover from Gore's loss; come to think of it, neither has Ross Perot from Bush I's). The only thing IRV changes is what that cutoff-limit is; it goes from about 15% to closer to 30%. But don't let them trick you: it's still there, waiting for a fatted third-party to grow large enough to sacrifice itself upon its altar, and SUBVERT THE DEMOCRATIC ORDER by spoiling an election.

If you're an IRV advocate because you want to eliminate the spoiler effect, or because you want third-parties to have an actual chance of wining elections, then you should STOP being an IRV advocate. There are other voting methods that better achieve your ends. Score voting actually does completely eliminate the spoiler effect, which means third-parties have a real chance to win.