primaries

The Broken Electoral System: 2018 Edition

This blog voices a lot of frustrations with the American electoral system, and with election season coming up, it’s worth talking about again. The United States is a republic, but voters tend to significantly overestimate the importance and impact of their votes.

To reiterate some of what I said in 2016, your vote in November is unlikely to matter. Most Congressional elections are not close. There may be uncertainty in other, less well polled elections for lower offices, but there’s also a much higher cost to finding out who the candidates are and what they stand for. I consider myself pretty interested in the political process as I write about it often. Nonetheless, I know almost nothing about my state representative and state senator. I can (and will) look them up, and see where they stood on votes, as I can with my Congressional representatives, but this will also require looking up which state votes were important to the topics I care about, something which I may not be able to find out easily and which I’m sure other people do not have the time to do. Moreover, it’s pretty common at the federal level for legislators to try and avoid going on the record and opt instead for voice votes, and I suspect similar incentives dominate at the state level.

If I can find good information on their voting record which reflecting beliefs I find objectionable, it is not clear that I can find information on their electoral opponents. Party affiliation does help, but not every candidate from a party holds all party positions.

Additionally, even close elections that you can find information on do not necessarily map well onto issues you care about. I care about promoting free trade, liberalizing immigration and/or worker visas, ending the war on drugs, and addressing issues in the criminal justice system. Many politicians only side with me on some issues but not others, yet I only have two options for any election that is actually competitive (and again, most are not).

Moreover, most politicians not only don’t share all my positions on important issues, they have really terrible positions on other issues that weren’t even on my radar. Now I have to worry about Republican politicians looking to deport immigrants through abusive crackdowns of civil liberties. I’m also now concerned about Democratic promises to vastly expand Medicare, already the largest entitlement in the federal budget and contributor to runaway healthcare spending. I freely admit that many people do not feel this way; they feel that the “progressive” or “conservative” positions pair well on a wide range of issues, and they can identify with many others who share an overlapping set of beliefs. In this view, the inability for libertarians to find someone who shares their core issues is a function of libertarians having bad or unpopular ideas and that’s why they have no support.

I disagree for several reasons: one is that many people do not vote at all. They may not think much about politics, or if they do, perhaps they realize, as is my thesis here, that there is very little benefit to voting. It seems quite plausible that they hold ideas that differ from party orthodoxy and don’t see a reason to vote when you can only choose between party orthodoxy. Another is that a plurality of registered voters do not have a party affiliation, something that has only been true in the last ~20 years or so. It’s also true that when surveyed, many Americans express rather moderate views on a variety of issues. Finally, it’s worth noting that there is obvious intra-party tension and factionalism. There are serious groups of Republicans who do not like Trump. There are libertarian critics like Justin Amash and Mark Sanford, neoconservatives like Lindsey Graham and John McCain, as well as just stalwart conservatives like everyone at National Review. It also seems to me that there is some strong disagreement in the Democratic Party between neoliberals and progressives, and so it seems absurd that the political system only allows two parties when there is so much diversity of opinion and no way to express it electorally.

Worse still, our current two-headed system promotes partisanship and tribal extremism instead of nuance. I know several people that, when pressed, don’t really believe that the government would do a great job if we had a Medicare-for-all system or had government paid college. Yet these same people feel that if they don’t embrace these left-wing ideas, their only alternative is to be a fan of Trump, whom they reasonably despise. I’ve also experienced the reverse: conservatives that didn’t like Trump, but clearly preferred his tax policy to Hillary Clinton’s and figured Trump might not be so bad. Many now are so concerned at what they perceive as a “Trump Derangement Syndrome” takeover of the Democratic Party, they have nowhere to go but to embrace Trump. If we had a system that promoted the creation of several different groups and smaller parties, we’d have a much easier time finding a diversity of opinions and ideas.

Unfortunately, our current system also takes issues that many people generally agree are bad and just ignores them. There are policy positions I would consider to be completely disqualifying for any public servant, such as approval of a vast warrantless domestic spying program costing tens of billions of dollars a year or the murder of children through drone strikes by the president with no authorization of war from Congress. Nonetheless, there is no point to disqualify candidates from my support due to these issues because they have been widely ignored by all candidates in the major parties. Complaining about the two party system is the classic archetype of the crazy libertarian going off the rails again, but I hope others are genuinely saddened that our electoral system doesn’t offer a way to utilize our vote to oppose the murder of children by our government.

And for non-competitive elections, there may be competitive primaries, which aren’t really great systems either, as I’ve discussed before. If the primary is deciding the eventual winner of the election, it doesn’t make sense that a plurality of voters of a single party should determine the winner of a general election seat in a primary election where 90% of possible voters didn’t vote at all. For example, in the notable dethroning of high ranking Democrat Joe Crowley in NY-14, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won with less than 16,000 votes, in a district where some 690,000 people live, presumably with some 300,000 possible voters. PredictIt currently gives the Democrat a ~85% chance to win, although the market isn’t very liquid.

In less democratic countries, there is overt voter fraud and intimidation. The United States doesn’t really have that problem. It nonetheless does have odd echoes of a “rigged” electoral system like one you would find in low-trust corrupt authoritarian countries with poor rule of law. For example, having one side consistently win a landslide, non-competitive election (like most congressional seats) seems like something you’d find in a “fake” democracy. Having a “competitive” election between two candidates you didn’t pick and you don’t know well which doesn’t allow you to express dissatisfaction with important government programs sounds like a “fake” democracy too.

I should admit that I don’t love the idea of hyper direct democracy either. Even if voters had a reason to learn about the political system, I’m unsure if they would promote good ideas. In all honesty, I probably side with political elites over average voters on a lot of issues. That doesn’t mean I believe there is no room for reform. I’ve discussed many different possible ways to improve our system, and in fact a few weeks ago I mentioned the important opportunity Approval Voting is getting this year. Yet none of those ideas will be seriously discussed this election season.

To summarize, our election system has a variety of important and fundamental flaws. Candidates are picked in nonrepresentative primaries, many elections are noncompetitive, voter information is scarce, while voter choices are limited to two candidates who do not represent the broader electorate’s views on many issues. Other important issues are just broadly ignored while the system promotes discord and extremism. Yet there will be a significant amount of discussion about how important it is to vote in November. With these flaws I’ve outlined, I apologize in advance if I’m unimpressed by such claims.

If you believe that you see a large difference in a particular race for office that you think might be competitive, that’s great, and feel free to vote. But don’t feel bad if you believe voting is a waste of time. Maybe you don’t like Trump, but you also wish all the Democratic candidates weren’t just talking about deficit busting economic policies with poor fiscal outlooks. That’s fine because there are ways to engage politically that are more important than voting. That includes addressing our broken electoral system and raising awareness about how this doesn’t have to be the way things operate; approval voting offers a real alternative that’s being attempted right now. It’s also worth mentioning that Congress’ decline in power relative to the President means that partisan politics is now more infectious; only one of a very few competing ideologies can control the White House and the immense power it has been ceded. Meanwhile, a powerful Congress is made up of hundreds of individuals, allowing for diversity of opinion, broad coalitions, and compromise. Congress should be taking back power it has ceded to the executive branch; I would hope readers would want to make this the major election talking point it should be, instead of the libertarian-rant-footnote it is now.

In conclusion, civic engagement is important; political awareness is vital to a thriving democracy. Nonetheless our electoral system is broken in such a way that voting is not the vital civic duty it is often claimed to be. If you are concerned about the partisanship that created Trump, if you feel like a world where facts don’t matter ought to be changed, then voting isn’t enough to change these trends. That does not mean there is nothing to be done; on the contrary, reforms are needed on a more fundamental level, including changes to our voting system, primary system, and party system. Discussing and promoting those ideas is the best way forward.

Electoral Reform Fantasies

It’s been a particularly divisive…month? year? presidency? Maybe you could even argue this last decade or so has been increasingly polarizing. Last election cycle specifically was unlike anything we’ve seen in the modern political era in terms of highly unpopular candidates running against each other, just look at the numbers:

Trump won with the lowest popular vote percentage of any president since Bill Clinton in 1992, when Ross Perot ran as a third party candidate getting 19% of the vote. In fact, Trump won the lowest percentage of any president in US history when no third party got more than 5% of the vote. Actually, we can go further; every case in which a US president was elected with less than Trump’s 46.1% had a third party getting over 8% of the vote that year. Except 2016.

Thus, we should first acknowledge that political frustration with political parties is nothing new in American politics. The only difference is that this time, there are no other parties to turn to.

This is a problem. Organizations acquire rules and absorb ideas over time. Sometimes those ideas are toxic to the organization, and it is out-competed. I’m mostly imagining the creative destruction of the market, but the same logic can apply to religions, non-profits, and political parties. However, the Republican and Democratic parties have constructed excellent barriers to entry, helped along by American electoral rules. Perhaps these barriers to entry have always existed, but they seem particularly effective at present.

I believe this lack of competition has resulted in two parties that are having difficulty providing a platform for new political ideas or approaches. Without competitive pressures, there is a lack of popular outlet and political advocacy, resulting in frustration. With only two political parties to work with, the idea of a political dichotomy seems inescapable, with every single culture battle melding together to become one gargantuan struggle between two fiercely divided tribes.

This is by no means the only problem we face: sluggish postindustrial economic growth, cost disease, shrinking populations, etc, are all issues. However, it’s quite possible our outdated political system may be stifling any solutions. Thus, I’d like to provide some ideas to fix the way we run our democracy.

Primaries

Presidential primaries seem to be the toughest to fix, but primaries themselves would become much less important with other reforms. Primaries today tend to favor more extremist candidates, while general elections (and, by definition, most people) favor more centrist ones.

One way to solve this is with an open primary, which some states have. California even has an “open blanket” primary, where the top two vote-getters in the primary are on the ballot in the general election, regardless of party. Of course, California does not use such a system for president (Donald Trump would have likely not been on the ballot if they had). There are drawbacks here, as theoretically several centrist candidates could split the “centrist” vote and leave two extremists running in the general election.

One possible way to help improve the presidential primaries might be to rotate the order in which states are the “first” primary. Iowa has often been the first state, but New Hampshire actually has a law that it must be the first presidential primary by a week (Iowa has caucuses, so New Hampshire has decided those don’t count). New Hampshire isn’t a great bellwether: going back to 1980, in election years where a candidate won a competitive primary and then won the presidency (i.e. not 2012, 2004, 1996, 1984 when a sitting president was re-elected), New Hampshire got Donald Trump in 2016, George H. W. Bush in 1988, and Ronald Reagan in 1980. It wrongly selected Hillary Clinton over Obama in 2008, John McCain over George W. Bush in 2000, and Paul Tsongas over Bill Clinton in 1992.

Iowa isn’t any better. It selected Obama in 2008 and George W. Bush in 2000. And it wrongly selected Ted Cruz over Donald Trump in 2016, Tom Harkin over Bill Clinton in 1992 (Harkin was from Iowa, but Paul Tsongas came in second, not Clinton), Bob Dole over George H. W. Bush in 1988, and George H. W. Bush over Reagan in 1980.

So in our first two primary states over the last 30+ years are 3/6 and 2/6 respectively when picking a president from a competitive field. Not great.

There’s some merit to simply holding a national primary all at once. The argument against it is that this may bias the primary system against discovering good lesser known candidates who can campaign in small states more easily than a national stage. However, there’s no evidence indicating such a system of candidate discovery functions with the small states at present. Maybe we need other states that better represent a microcosm of the country. Maybe such states don’t exist.

Ballot Access

Did you wonder why there wasn’t a well-known centrist Republican candidate running as a third party in the race last year? It seemed to be the perfect storm. A significant minority of Republicans were not a fan of the party’s nominee; the party’s previous nominee had called out Trump in an aggressive speech earlier in the year, and the Democrats had nominated a fairly progressive, well known candidate that most conservatives disliked.

Well, it turns out there was one, Evan McMullin, but he was only on the ballot in 11 states, accounting for 84 possible electoral votes. Why? Because it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to get onto the ballot in most states. The Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson was the only third party candidate on the ballot in all 50 states. In fact, he was the first third party nominee to be on all 50 ballots since 1996. Johnson did better than previous Libertarian Party candidates, and so the LP will not have to spend as much money for ballot access in the coming cycle…yet they are still looking to raise $130,000 this year just for ballot access costs.

This needs to change. There can be no serious competition to the current parties without fixing the ballot access problem.

Take a look at the Wikipedia article on the topic for a good overview. One problem is that major political parties are often exempted from ballot access requirements entirely. Other times, parties that get over a certain percentage of the vote are not required to gather signatures. The signatures are often rejected, so in reality the signature requirements are really 20-30% higher than actually stated. Ohio is an interesting example, as it requires a candidate to file in March, before they are actually nominated at their party’s convention. To get around this, the LP of Ohio filed a placeholder candidate in 2016, and then changed it to Gary Johnson later in the year. Of course, he had to file as an independent candidate since Ohio’s independent requirements are much less burdensome than trying to get the Libertarian Party be recognized as a state political party.

A possible solution would be to at least even the playing field by having a federal law forcing all qualification rules to apply to all parties running for federal office, including the Republican and Democratic parties. This would require them to waste resources on gathering signatures as well. Of course, the major parties could handle large numbers of signatures more easily since they have more resources available, but it still might be difficult enough to push them to reduce the total number of signatures to more practical levels.

More direct reductions in the ballot access requirements would be great as well, but perhaps not as directives from the federal government for the sake of federalism. Of course, none of this will happen, as there are no third party members in office at the national level, and thus no interest in reforming third party access at the state level.

House of Representatives – Single Transferable Vote

This one is totally crazy I know. It would definitely require a change in law, as it’s currently against the rules to have more than one representative from a district. However, I don’t suspect it would be unconstitutional, as each state creates their own districts and runs their own elections.

An STV system is unambiguously better than our current system. Single Transferable Vote is a voting system where you rank several candidates in a multi-member district. The candidates that reach a threshold of support (something like 33% for a three seat district, 25% for a four seat district, etc) are elected. If not enough candidates reach the threshold, unpopular candidates are eliminated with voters’ next choices receiving their votes instead, until all seats are filled. This helps achieve a proportional representation while maintaining local legislators. Currently all Representatives are elected in single member plurality elections, also known as First Past The Post (FPTP). For an easily digestible explanation of STV, watch CGP Grey’s video on the system.

STV systems do well when there are many seats available in a single district. Ireland has used as many as six seats in a single district, Tasmania has used as many as seven. Given the US population of 320 million, the average congressman represents over 700,000 people, with the median being even higher. However, many Americans live in cities much larger than 700,000, and so there are many cities that could support single citywide districts with five or ten congressional seats filled by STV. These could much better reflect the diverse viewpoints of those living in cities. Of course, cities wouldn’t be the only ones who benefit from this, as gerrymandering can also be done to disenfranchise rural voters depending on who’s drawing the boundaries.

Gerrymandering is itself much harder with STV multi-member districts. This itself is an indication that an STV system is better than what we have now. Even if STV is poorly implemented with districts that only have three or four seats, it would be a vast improvement in representation and political competition than what we have today.

This reform is certainly the most important reform for third parties. I don’t think third parties will solve all our problems; other countries have plenty of third parties with little to show. But it’s certainly a necessary step in providing alternatives to the duopoly people are obviously very sick of. Moreover, even if third parties aren’t super successful, the threat of competition will force the two major parties to react. We need a diversity of opinions and new ideas, and without third parties, everything has to be filtered through a party system with vested interests and previous baggage.

President – Approval Voting

The electoral college system is supposed to select a candidate from a wide range of possible candidates, with the college of electors itself imagined as acting as a bulwark against the excesses of democracy. This didn’t really pan out the way the founders of the United States might have hoped. Instead, several elections have resulted in presidents being elected despite other candidates actually receiving a plurality of the popular vote.

Those were:

1824, when Andrew Jackson won 41% of the vote in a split election that was thrown to the House of Representatives since no one had an electoral college majority. The House picked John Quincy Adams, who lost in 1828 to Andrew Jackson. This one is less concerning because there was no clear majority, so while Jackson didn’t like it, the system “worked”.
1876, when Samuel Tilden handily won an outright majority of the popular vote, and probably won the electoral college, but a “bipartisan” commission gave 15 “disputed” electoral votes to Rutherford Hayes instead. I’m still bitter.
1888, when sitting President Grover Cleveland won a close popular vote victory, but lost in the electoral college to Benjamin Harrison. Cleveland would win the rematch (both popular vote and electoral college) in 1892.
2000, when Al Gore won a plurality of the vote, but lost Florida by a few hundred votes, and so George W. Bush became president.
2016, when Hillary Clinton won a plurality of the popular vote, but Donald Trump won the electoral college.

If we set aside 1824, which I think is reasonable, we have 4 elections out of 58 total in American history in which the electoral college has selected against the popular vote winner, despite only two major candidates in those elections. This is an error rate of 6.9%.

But how to fix this? There have been several times when the electoral college was helpful in sorting out a multi-candidate election. In 1860, Lincoln won a plurality with only 39.8% of the vote, but the electoral college gave him a majority. From a voting system perspective, this may not be seen as a victory, as Lincoln’s election was so divisive, it precipitated southern secession. However, in 1912, Woodrow Wilson won the electoral college with only 41.8% of the vote in a three way race. 1968 and 1992 may also be considered elections where the electoral college helped establish a winner when the plurality winner only had vote totals in the low 40s.

Moreover, any debate about the electoral college, especially after this most recent election must necessarily have political implications. Nonetheless, I believe I have a system that is strictly better than our current system, preserving any usefulness it has. The proposal is as follows.

Ballots for president will ask two questions, one asking the voter to select all candidates which they will be ok with being president (approval voting) and one asking voters to select their single favorite candidate (first past the post/ our current voting system).

The president will be chosen based on who receives the highest percentage in the approval voting ballots, as long as the percent total is above a threshold. Here I’m recommending 55%. In the case of no candidate receiving above 55% of the vote, the system simply defaults back to the electoral college system using the second, first past the post / favorite candidate vote.

I suspect this would encourage much more positive campaigns, as candidates try to attract as many voters as possible rather than scare voters away from voting from their opponents. It would also make third party campaigns much more useful, as there is less strategic voting with approval voting. If a popular centrist party had a candidate with broad appeal across the spectrum, they could get votes without causing right or left wing voters to fear their votes are “wasted”. Moreover any candidate that wins the approval vote would have a strong mandate with a super-majority of voters supporting them. This is what the electoral college was supposed to bring us, a wide base of support for the president, but this system will guarantee it outright.

In the worst case scenario, if I am wrong about these predictions, the system is simply what we have right now, today. There is no way for it to do worse than our current system since it’s fall back is our current system. In this way, it is also conservative and gradual in its reform, in ways other voting systems are not.

Conclusion

These reforms are likely long shots, but I think it’s undeniable that our current system of government is deeply flawed. These are just my current best ideas, so if you read this and have some voting systems that you think would be more politically palatable or mathematically accurate, be sure to let me know on Twitter, Reddit, or email.

Leave a comment on the official reddit thread.

Picture Credit: Vote here, vote aqui. Erik Hersman. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Election 2016: Little To Look Forward To

In November, The Economist wrote “If the Republican campaign is to return to normality, it will do so in South Carolina” due to the state’s ability to filter out the unserious candidates. We are now a month out from the South Carolina primary, and a lot could still happen, but if you’re one of the people who think the government should do less spying on citizens, less intervening in the market, and less mindless spending on the DoD procurement program, you’re in a for bad time: Trump is at 49% chance of winning, Cruz 18%, and Rubio 13%.

Continue reading Election 2016: Little To Look Forward To