It’s not true. The Republicans were never anything like any of the third parties we have now, because the Republicans were never on the outside looking in at the two-party system. Instead, one of the existing two major parties—the Whigs—collapsed due to an internal schism over the issue of slavery. Then, one of the factions met up and re-named themselves the Republicans. But the people involved were the same people, the same politicians! And a lot of them went straight from being elected Whigs to being elected Republicans!

(Although some of them, fed up with the squabbling, left a few years before the dramatic collapse, and had to be coaxed back later.)

That’s completely different then any group of out-of-power citizens trying to build an organization up from the ground floor to challenge the two near-indomitable incumbents. Remember, it is a two-party system. The only road to success for a third party (other than a fundamental voting system change such as approval voting or score voting) is for one of the two major parties to collapse; which has only ever happened in American history because of internal disagreements, never because of an assault from the outside… .

My point is that the politicians who ran as Republicans in 1854 were predominantly the same politicians who ran as Whigs in 1852 (the ones who continued to run as Whigs were predominantly in the south, as the Republicans were a decidedly northern party).

To those with lofty goals of getting a third party under plurality: Think Again.

Friedman has no clue what he’s talking about here.  He “knows” of groups trying to start up a third party?  The people can overcome a two party duopoly?  Give me a break.  There are an enormous number of reasons Friedman is wrong.  I’ll give you three.

1. Friedman Forgets Ballot Access

The US has an enormous number of restrictive ballot access laws to make it a pain in the ass just to get your name on the ticket.  Established republicans and democrats breeze on and get to their campaigning.  But independents and third parties have to collect enormous numbers of signatures.  Even then, they have to get double to triple the number because the duopoly parties challenge all those signatures for bullshit reasons (ex// signature is too sloppy, the person moved within the district, Jon instead of Jonathan, someone wrote on the wrong part of the form, so the whole form gets thrown out).

And everyone should get it out of their minds that less restrictive ballot access laws leads to a crowded ballot.  No one has this problem.  One can clearly balance between setting a fee too low versus requiring tens of thousands of signatures.  If no one else is on the ballot, it’s clearly too restrictive and democracy suffers from lack of competition.  See Grand Illusion, by Theresa Amato for more on this issue.

2. Friedman Gets Glossy on Duverger’s Law

Duverger’s Law explains that alternate parties have a tough time getting in when single-seat districts are used.  That’s because the threshold needed to get elected is high, and there’s a psychological barrier for fear of throwing away one’s vote.  Amazingly, Friedman talks about a third party revolution without ever mentioning proportional representation (PR) (ex// 25% libertarian voters; libertarians get 25% of the seats).  When you have large chambers you can use an open party-list system so you choose a party and then you select a candidate within that party. That’s the typical PR setup.

You can also separate large bodies into at-large PR districts of seats from 5-10.  This makes gerrymandering virtually impossible because PR systems set the threshold much lower to get elected and it’s harder to use those gerrymander tactics (ex// splitting groups or packing large groups).  Typical systems for this are the semi-proportional called cumulative voting.  This is when you have a number of votes equal to the number of seats and you can stack your votes on candidates.  This system is not uncommon in the US as a semi-PR system.

Another type of PR system with small districts is called Choice Voting or Single Transferable Vote.  You get to rank your candidates here so it’s more expressive.  This system deals well with overflow votes for a candidate and for minimizing wasted votes.  This system was used in many large US cities including New York and Cincinnati before racism and Red Scare tactics got it removed.  Party bosses were upset that they were being challenged and minorities were getting elected, so they pushed out propaganda campaigns.  See here for the story of PR in the US and here for the best book on PR systems.

You can compare a PR system with how we typically deal with such bodies.  We in the US either (1) take what should be an at-large body and instead put them in single-seat districts asking for gerrymandering and lack of representation, or (2) we use at-large districts but use multi-member plurality (MMP).  With MMP you get the number of votes equal to the number of candidates and you can’t stack votes on candidates.  This means a 51% majority block can determine ALL the seats and minorities get zero representation and showed up to vote for nothing.

3. Friedman Isn’t Up On His Single-Seat Voting Theory

Some positions are inherently single-seat like governor, mayor, and president.  You can’t use a PR system for that, so you’re stuck using a single-seat system.  But then we get a man named Kenneth Arrow knocking at our door telling us about his Impossibility Theorem.  His theorem tells you that no voting system can abide by a set of simple rules. 

But wait!  His theorem only applies to ranking systems, which includes plurality (our current inexpressive system of pick one and shut the hell up). It excludes an entire class of single-seat systems called a cardinal system. Two systems fall within this.  They are approval voting and range voting.  What do these systems have in common?  They are both the only systems to be immune from vote splitting and always allow the voter to be able to vote their honest favorite regardless of the standings in the election.

In approval voting, you vote for all the candidates you like.  Most votes wins.  That’s it.  This one is super easy and far more expressive than plurality.

In range voting, you rate all the candidates on a scale (say 1-10).  And the candidate with the highest rating wins.  Blanks are generally treated as the lowest score, though there are variations using a quorum rule.  This is the most expressive form of voting ever invented.  The downside is there’s a bit more information to enter and it’s slightly more complicated than plurality.  On the upside it’s much easier and more accurate than poor alternatives like instant runoff voting.

You can learn more about single-seat systems by visiting RangeVoting.org or reading Gaming the Vote.

In summary, Friedman had no idea what he was talking about.  But third parties in the US is not completely quixotic.  Sane ballot access laws, PR systems, and using a single-seat method as simple as approval voting will get you there.  History tells us the best way to accomplish this kind of reform is through ballot initiatives.  And we can’t forget—voting systems influence not only the outcome, but also the behavior of the election itself.  That is, it influences who gets heard and the issues that are talked about.  It’s a lot easier to ignore other views when there’s no competition and people are afraid of wasting their vote.  And that’s exactly our system with awful plurality.

(Source: politiblog)

Matt Gonzalez has graciously used his blog to host an essay from the folks at the Center for Range Voting/Election Science Foundation. For those that aren’t familiar with Matt Gonzalez, here’s a background: Matt was the head of the Board of Supervisors in San Fransisco as a member of the Green Party. He also ran for mayor of San Fransisco as a Green. Despite being outspent 5-1 and having the likes of Al Gore come to rally for his opponent, Matt was within 6% of the runoff winner, Gavin Newsome. Matt was also the VP running mate of presidential candidate Ralph Nader in 2008.

Below is the essay:

by Andrew Jennings, Clay Shentrup, Warren D. Smith

Progressive thinkers on all sides of the political spectrum often wonder why the United States seems incapable of escaping a two-party political system. Is it a result of an extreme demographic situation, an urban and a rural America so large and obstinate that they are incapable of cooperation? Does it somehow come from the unique American spirit, a tradition steeped in individualism and adventure? Are the third parties being silently stifled because of their opposition to our incessant march toward rule by large corporations? The answer, in fact, may be so simple that it is right at our fingertips at least once a year. Every time we vote, in fact.

Fifty years ago, French sociologist Maurice Duverger observed that the plurality voting method tends to favor a two-party system, whereas “the double ballot majority system [a.k.a. “top-two runoff”] and proportional representation tend to multipartism.” Observations in the social sciences are never absolute, but this tendency for plurality voting to maintain two-party domination is so reliable that it has become known as Duverger’s Law.

Plurality voting (a.k.a. “first past the post”), by far the most common system in the United States, is where each voter votes for one candidate and the candidate with the most votes wins, even if he receives fewer than 50% of the votes. Top-two runoff (a.k.a. “TTR” or “delayed runoff”) is just like plurality voting, except that if no candidate receives a majority of the votes, then a subsequent election is held between the top two finishers.

Few would expect the way we count our votes to be the primary factor determining the layout of our political landscape, but the evidence is overwhelming. Beyond the empirical trends to which Duverger referred, mathematical analysis of these voting methods suggests a causal relationship. For instance, a plurality voter who prefers a Green Party candidate will often take the tactical route, casting an insincere vote for the Democrat in order to prevent the Republican from winning. This costs the voter very little, since a minor party candidate is by definition unlikely to win anyway. It seems clear that such tactics keep us locked in a two-party system.

A top-two runoff system differs considerably. To echo Duverger, most of the approximately 30 countries which use this system have escaped two-party domination, even in single-seat non-proportional elections. And as with plurality voting, analysis of the runoff system strongly suggests that this is not a coincidence, but in fact a result of voter psychology and the different tactical incentives at play. For instance, voters in the runoff have no incentive to cast an insincere vote, as there are only two choices. And once the options are narrowed down to two candidates, voters often have a better chance to get to know an otherwise unknown challenger. These factors may largely explain how Green Party candidate Matt Gonzales was able to come within striking distance of Democrat Gavin Newsom for mayor of San Francisco in 2003 (the margin was less than 6%) despite being outspent five to one, and despite Newsom’s being endorsed by a host of powerful beltway politicians.

Opinions vary as to the relative merits of TTR versus other systems, and the above is not meant as an endorsement of TTR per se. Rather, it is a testament to the extent to which the voting method determines the party composition of a government. It seems clear that if we want to escape the two-party stranglehold, we must adopt a different voting method; specifically one which is not known to also maintain two-party domination.

Many of the modern efforts for voting reform promote an alternative form of runoff, called instant runoff voting (“IRV”), which allows voters to rank the candidates and appears to offer us a way out of our electoral difficulties. Unfortunately, communities and scholars are discovering that the hope IRV offers us for escaping our two-party system is only illusory.

Like TTR, IRV doesn’t fix the spoiler problem: a bloc of voters may get a worse result by supporting their sincere favorite candidate. For instance, in the 2009 mayoral election in Burlington, Vermont, a group of voters who preferred Republican over Democrat over Progressive could have gotten the Democrat instead of the Progressive by insincerely top-ranking the Democrat instead of the Republican. It may seem strange to think of the GOP candidate as the spoiler, but the ballot data shows that a majority of voters in left-leaning Burlington would have taken the Progressive or the Democrat over the Republican in a runoff election, making the GOP more akin to a third party in this particular circumstance — albeit a strong third party.

And therein lies the rub. See, most voters picture runoffs in the context of weak third parties. The thinking goes that if you prefer, say, Green over Democrat over Republican, then you can safely support the Green. If the Green doesn’t make it to the runoff, then your support will simply go to the Democrat. But that is only the first phase of a third party’s growth. Next imagine that the Green Party, freed from the fear of “wasted votes”, grows to encompass more and more of the electorate until it can outlast the Democrats and make it to the runoff. Finally, imagine a third phase in which the Greens have grown enough to not only defeat the Democrats, but to win against the Republicans in the runoff. This third phase represents the greatest hopes for those who see IRV as a way to end the stifling two-party stranglehold on government.

But this rosy picture starts to darken the moment we take account of two crucial factors. First, it must be noted that each of these three phases is generally a prerequisite for the next. This is explained concisely as follows: as a third party grows, it will become powerful enough to defeat its most similar major party before it will become powerful enough to defeat both major parties. Second, the middle phase is effectively a barrier to the third. It is precisely the scenario experienced in Burlington. In this phase, the Greens defeat their most similar opponent, only to lose in the runoff. For Greens who prefer the Democrat to the Republican, the announced ballot totals will make clear to them that their honesty caused them to get the Republican instead of the Democrat. If even a mere 10% of them decide to cast a tactical vote for the Democrat in the next election, then even a prodigious 10% increase in their popularity by that time will be completely nullified. More realistically, their popularity would increase by less than 10%, in which case the tactical behavior would bring them down faster than they could increase their membership.

Many IRV proponents have argued that such strategy is infeasible and/or inadvisable, since it is likely to “backfire”. We address this theoretical argument in detail elsewhere, but for now let’s put aside contentious theorizing, and turn our attention to empirical reality. Australia has used instant runoff voting since 1918, and is two-party dominated in their single-seat elections, such as in the House of Representatives. And that’s in spite of the fact that several seats in their Senate are occupied by third parties such as the Greens, due to the Senate’s use of a proportional system called single transferable vote (“STV”). The same trend has been observed with IRV elsewhere, such as the Irish presidency (a near monopoly despite being mostly ceremonial), and in Malta and Fiji (before it was a dictatorship). And it is interesting that San Francisco supervisor Ross Mirkarimi (who helped found the California Green Party) switched from Green to Democrat in early 2010, despite the fact San Francisco now uses IRV, instead of the delayed runoff system it used when Matt Gonzalez made his impressive mayoral bid.

Of all these examples, Australia may be the most pertinent. We noted that their Senate uses STV, while their House uses IRV. STV is a multiwinner proportional system, and it so happens that IRV is actually the single-winner form of STV, so both systems use the same ranked ballot. Thus it is not too surprising that many American election activists see the adoption of IRV as a crucial “stepping stone” to proportional representation via the adoption of STV. IRV gets voters accustomed to ranking the candidates, and puts the basic machinery in place to tabulate those ranked ballots in the specific manner that STV entails. Even IRV proponents who are aware of its tendency for duopoly often support it for this very reason; they want proportional representation. In fact FairVote, the organization most often associated with the push for IRV, was founded in 1992 as “Citizens for Proportional Representation” (and later the “Center for Voting and Democracy”), and it seems that behind the scenes, their pursuit of IRV is a long-term play for proportional representation in America.

The stepping stone strategy might actually make sense were it not for the USA’s rigid impediments to proportional representation, which was made illegal at the federal level via a 1967 law which outlawed multi-member districts. In 1996, congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (who later ran as the Green Party candidate for US President) wrote, but failed to pass, bill HR 2545, which would have overridden that previous 1967 law. She re-introduced a similar bill, HR 1189, in 2001. It failed again. Then she tried again with HR 2690 in 2005. It failed yet again.

This leads us to believe that PR will be federally unobtainable in the USA as long as we are two-party dominated (a Congress dominated by two parties will continue to block anti-duopoly legislation such as McKinney’s). We therefore believe that proponents of PR must find a single-winner voting method which doesn’t maintain duopoly, as a prerequisite to PR. As has been noted, ordinary top-two runoffs fit that description, but they have their own problems, both in terms of voter turnout and the cost and fatigue associated with extra elections. And they can still leave voters justifiably fearful of supporting candidates they sincerely prefer to the apparent frontrunners, in the first round. (As a reminder, voters have no incentive to be insincere in the runoff.)

There are other voting systems that work with a ranked ballot and have several advantages over instant runoff voting (e.g. Condorcet methods), but even more exciting is a simpler class of voting systems discovered in the past few decades, based on an entirely different paradigm: ratings rather than rankings. These systems let each voter consider each candidate separately and assign to each a score or grade.

In his 2008 book Gaming the Vote, author William Poundstone (an MIT physics grad) suggests a voting method called range voting (a.k.a. score voting), in which voters rate the candidates on a scale such as 0-10 or 1-5. When the scale is reduced to 0-1, we effectively have approval voting, which is identical to plurality voting except that there is no limit on the number of candidates a voter may support. A third method, the Majority Judgement, asks the voters to use a few natural-language terms (Excellent/Good/Acceptable/Unacceptable, for example) to grade the candidates and chooses the winner by finding the candidate who was given the highest grade by a majority of voters (the median grade).

Score voting has historically been overlooked, based on the assumption that it would succumb to pervasive tactical exaggeration. But that view was debunked back in 2000, when a Princeton math Ph.D. named Warren D. Smith performed an extensive set of computer calculations which showed the system working extremely well, even with high rates of tactical voting. This is based on an objective “economic” indicator of voter satisfaction with (or “representativeness of”) election outcomes, called Bayesian regret.

This can be understood if we think for a moment about a voter whose preferences are Nader=10, Gore=6, Bush=0. If this voter is sincere, he casts those very scores. But if he is a tactical voter, like those who voted for Gore instead of Nader under plurality voting, how should he vote under score voting? For starters he wants to give Gore a 10, and Bush a 0, to maintain the tactical advantage he sought under plurality voting. But he can additionally give a 10 to Nader, and any other candidates he prefers to both frontrunners, with no fear of negative consequences. (In election theory parlance, we say that score voting passes the Favorite Betrayal Criterion.) Whereas you will recall that with IRV, tactically placing the Democrat in first place absolutely requires a Green voter to place the Green lower than first place. But with score voting, giving Gore a maximum score in no way prevents a voter from still giving Nader a maximum score too. So third parties face no artificial barrier to growth, as they do with IRV.

A simple way to think of it is that a tactical score voter should support the same candidate as he would with a plurality ballot, and then also support all the candidates he likes better. This means that the appearance of being “unelectable” need not become a self-fulfilling prophecy, like with plurality, IRV, and so many other methods. If it turns out that enough voters prefer a minor party or independent candidate to the presumed frontrunners, then he can actually win, even if the voters are highly tactical! Empirical evidence strongly suggests election outcomes will then be vastly more representative of the actual relative support for the candidates.

We believe this has enormous consequences, beyond the obvious opportunity to escape from two-party domination. For instance, the inordinate importance of cash in elections is largely a product of the need to prove electability. Consider exit polling from 2000 in which 90% of Nader supporters claimed to have voted for someone other than Nader. This shows that the number of votes Nader could have received by convincing voters he could be elected (e.g. by having an enormous campaign “warchest” and/or getting the nomination of a major party) was nine times as large as the number of votes he won by trying his best to convince voters he should be elected. Also consider that in the 2008 US presidential election, Mitt Romney spent large amounts of cash from his personal fortune to bus in voters to straw polls with no legal consequence whatsoever, apparently in order to be seen early on as a frontrunner, so as not to be abandoned by tactical voters, who fear wasting their vote on candidates who can’t win.

These may seem like anecdotes, but their prevalance amounts to something greater. Money matters far too much in today’s political process. And efforts to curb that with typical campaign finance reform are inherently unstable, as cheaters will be more likely to win elections, and then just make their cheating retroactively legal, and/or intimidate government officials who dare to try to prosecute them. We believe it may be more effective to try to reduce the inherent importance of cash, than to wage a potentially futile battle to level the playing field. With score and approval voting, a candidate need not prove his electability in order to earn your vote.

In summary, we would be wise to realize that the lack of alternative choices in American politics is unlikely to be repaired without changing to a better voting system, and that instant runoff voting is probably not the answer. We should give serious consideration to voting systems based on ratings, where voters can evaluate each candidate independently, and never fear giving their full support to the candidates they prefer to the frontrunners. While it’s impossible to predict exactly how these systems will play out in practice, the theory and a great deal of empirical evidence make them seem promising, and it’s clear that the systems we have now are not working and it’s time to look outside the box for a voting system that will truly support smaller parties and encourage alternative ideas in our political discourse.