Motion: The Two-Party System is Making America Ungovernable

This week's column at CAIVN takes a closer look at the Intelligence Squared debate on the two-party system.  Excerpt:

This week, National Public Radio and Bloomberg Television have begun airing the most recent Oxford-style debate sponsored by Intelligence Squared in which four well-known political commentators consider the proposition that “the two-party system is making America ungovernable." . . . Though the motion did not require Huffington and Brooks to argue in favor of an alternative to the two-party system, but rather only to prove its inadequacy, O’Rourke and Chafetz asked time and again: what is the alternative?  “Having lived in a country that has 14 parties [i.e. Israel],” said Chafetz at one point, “I can tell you that I didn’t find any that represented me.”  Neither Huffington nor Brooks, however, argued explicitly for a multiparty system, but instead called for modest reforms aimed at increasing political competition as well as voter participation, such as non-partisan primaries, ranked choice voting, and less restrictive ballot access laws.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the debate was the fact that it took place at all.  Mainstream political commentators do not often subject the two-party system to sustained criticism, and they are rarely forced to defend its very existence.  Indeed, the novelty of the debate was apparent in the obvious limitations of the arguments put forward on both sides of the issue.

Arianna Huffington asserted that the so-called spoiler problem associated with third party candidates can be overcome via the implementation of ranked choice voting, even though it has been demonstrated by advocates of approval voting that this is not in fact the case.  P.J. O’Rourke stated that the two-party system developed “organically” over the course of American history, completely disregarding the ways in which our political system has long been rigged by Democratic and Republican lawmakers at all levels of government to squash third party and Independent political competition.  Zev Chafetz absurdly claimed that “you can’t name an election that hasn’t had a third party candidate or more.” . . . .

NY Greens Make the Case for Proportional Representation and Instant Runoff Voting

The Green Party of New York has begun an effort to push for proportional representation in the Empire State, spearheaded by Howie Hawkins, former Green Party candidate for governor.  From the Green Party NY:

Howie Hawkins, the former Green Party candidate for Governor, urged Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo to make Public Campaign Financing and Proportional Representation the centerpieces of a broad ethics reform package that should be adopted during the first weeks of the legislative session.

“We need Public Campaign Financing to end the pay-to-play culture that dominates the State Capitol, as witnessed by the ongoing scandals with the State Comptroller’s office and pension funds. Now is the time to finally stop the sale of lawmakers to the highest bidder. And while we strongly support an independent Nonpartisan Redistricting Commission to end the partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts, we want that commission charged with drawing up multi-member districts to implement Proportional Representation, which is the electoral system in almost every democracy on this planet,” said Hawkins. . . .

The Green Party supports proportional representation for legislative bodies in order to fully represent the diversity of political views among the voters. Candidates of the various parties would be seated in the legislature in proportion to the percentage of the vote each party receives. “The single-member-district, winner-take-all system now in place entrenches a two-party system of one-party districts that over-represent the plurality and completely exclude all political minorities in every district. Very few of these districts are competitive. Most are controlled by the majority party. Votes for minority parties are seen as pointless and turnout is low. Under proportional representation, every vote counts toward electing representatives one favors and turnout is high,” Hawkins said.

For executive branch elections such as Governor and Attorney General, the Green Party supports Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) where voters would rank candidates in order of preference, and a candidate would have to have a majority rather than a mere plurality to be elected. If no candidate had a majority on the first round, the lowest ranked candidate would be eliminated and their votes re-allocated to the voter’s second choice. This process would continue until one candidate had a majority. IRV is used for elections in many US cities, including San Francisco and Oakland, California; Mineapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota; Memphis, Tennessee; and Portland, Maine.

Despite the known drawbacks of Instant Runoff Voting - see, for instance, this helpful post at Least of All Evils - IRV continues to be the favored proposal of many third party and independent advocates of voting reform, despite the clear advantages of approval and range voting over IRV and plurality.  Check out the Center for Range Voting.

Approval Voting in the News: Libertarian Candidate for Governor of Colorado, "We All Win by Implementing Approval Voting"

In recent weeks there seems to have been an uptick in discussion and advocacy of approval voting in both mainstream news sources and the political blogosphere:

• Late last month, Anthony Gottlieb profiled a number of alternative voting methods in an article for The New Yorker, comparing and contrasting them with plurality voting, and devoting a significant portion of the piece to a discussion of approval voting. The article sparked a number of interesting discussions in the blogosphere.

• Just a few days ago, in Vermont's Rutland Herald, reader Ed Weissman argued that the people of the United States would be better served by the major parties if approval voting were used in the primary election process.

• And, finally, the Libertarian candidate for governor of Colorado, Jaimes Brown, recently garnered positive coverage in a number of mainstream press outlets for his advocacy of approval voting.

Brown is the first candidate for any elected office whom I've heard advocate the implementation of approval voting in the United States. I contacted him via email last week to ask a few questions about approval voting and he kindly obliged. The entire interview can be read at Third Party and Independent Daily. An excerpt:

TPID: Do you have plans to continue this advocacy beyond the gubernatorial campaign? What is your advice to others who would like to see the implementation of approval voting?

Brown: Absolutely, it's not about me, it's about liberty. I find it offensive that the two parties have spoiled the whole system and they have the audacity to label anyone with a fresh approach as "spoilers"! My advice would be to continue to point out to all political parties, independents, and citizens that we all win by implementing approval voting. Democrats would have been better off with it in 2000, Republicans would be better off with it in the 2010 Colorado Governor election. The people are better off with it because we will get better representation. Isn't that what a Republic is all about?

For more information on approval voting, head over to Citizens for Approval Voting and the Center for Range Voting, and be sure to check out Least of All Evils, a highly informative blog devoted to approval and range voting.

Approval Voting and Proportional Representation

At Independent Political Report, Ross Levin relays a lengthy and informative article from The New Yorker by Anthony Gottlieb that provides a short history of voting methods and systems in the modern world. The piece compares and contrasts plurality, winner-take-all voting with proportional representation, instant-runoff voting and approval voting. An excerpt dealing with approval and range voting from the end of the article:

Range and approval voting deal neatly with the problem of vote-splitting: if a voter likes Nader best, and would rather have Gore than Bush, he or she can approve Nader and Gore but not Bush. Above all, their advocates say, both schemes give voters more options, and would elect the candidate with the most over-all support, rather than the one preferred by the largest minority. Both can be modified to deliver forms of proportional representation.

The fact that they escape Arrow’s proof, though, doesn’t mean that approval and range voting have no hidden kinks or paradoxes. Whether such ideas can work depends on how people use them. If enough people are carelessly generous with their approval votes, for example, there could be some nasty surprises. In an unlikely set of circumstances, the candidate who is the favorite of more than half the voters could lose. Parties in an approval election might spend less time attacking their opponents, in order to pick up positive ratings from rivals’ supporters, and critics worry that it would favor bland politicians who don’t stand for anything much. Defenders insist that such a strategy would backfire in subsequent elections, if not before, and the case of Ronald Reagan suggests that broad appeal and strong views aren’t mutually exclusive . . .

Mathematics can suggest what approaches are worth trying, but it can’t reveal what will suit a particular place, and best deliver what we want from a democratic voting system: to create a government that feels legitimate to people—to reconcile people to being governed, and give them reason to feel that, win or lose (especially lose), the game is fair. The novelty of range and approval voting in modern politics is so great that we can’t know how they’ll work out without running experiments.

While instant-runoff voting is likely the most well known alternative voting method, polities that have implemented it have already begun struggling with its limitations, thus underscoring the need for voting system experimentation at the state and local level. Dale Sheldon-Hess writes at Least of All Evils:

Dr. David Schultz . . . has posted his report for the Minneapolis Elections Department on the use of ranked choice voting [PDF] (more commonly known as instant runoff voting or IRV), as it was used in that city's recent elections. Schultz was (and apparently still is) a strong supporter of the use of IRV, having previously served as a board member for FairVote Minnesota, a fact he plainly states in his paper's Conflict of Interest heading. And this refreshing honesty continues throughout the document... which probably isn't good news for FairVote's or Dr. Schultz's objectives.

First on the chopping block is the claim that IRV increases turnout . . . We also find that the well-advertised claim of decreased election costs turned out to not be true . . . But my "favorite" part of the report is the section on Spoiled Ballots and Voter Error. Schultz begins by assuring us that "[T]he worst fears were not realized." By which he means IRV only quadrupled the ballot-spoilage rate, from 1.0% to 4.1%. . . . The true measure of an electoral system's quality is how well it can handle highly-contested and close-to-call elections. The predominant examples suggests that IRV would handle such elections poorly; but the Minneapolis data provides no real information for or against that proposition.

Read the whole thing. Dale is, of course, a strong supporter of approval voting and range voting; he's also has recently been involved in an on-going debate with David L. Wetzell, an advocate of strategic election reform and "American Proportional Representation." David sums up his position in the debate at A New Kind of Third Party. I don't know if David is acquainted with
Pete Healey of the Proportional Representation Party, but if not, they should consider getting in contact. In comments to the above-mentioned post at IPR, Pete wrote:

“One size fits all” [voting systems] is a poor guide. Our concept for New York isn’t a complete abolition of single-member districts and isn’t fully proportional (at least at first). It’s a transitional system that would have the state legislature elected half from single-member districts and half by party-line proportional vote. Each voter enters the booth with two votes, one for his/her local rep and the other for the party he/she wishes to represent him/her in the legislature.

CO: Libertarian Candidate for Governor Advocates Approval Voting

From The Denver Daily News:

There’s at least one gubernatorial candidate happy to see Tom Tancredo enter the race for governor as a third-party candidate, and we’re not talking about Democratic candidate John Hickenlooper. Libertarian candidate Jaimes Brown welcomes Tancredo into the race “with open arms.” . . .

Brown believes Tancredo’s run is further evidence that the nation’s two-party system is broken, and he uses the event to advocate for a system known as approval voting. In an approval voting system, voters are allowed to vote for multiple candidates. The candidate with the most votes wins. Advocates say the system cuts back on “cheap elections.” They say the two-party system forces voters to simply vote down their party line, ignoring third-party candidates that may be more attractive to them, but that don’t get the vote because voters don’t believe they have a chance of winning. The system especially comes in handy during primaries, say advocates.

Many voters vote for the primary candidate with the most money, or the most establishment backing because they feel that will position the candidate to better defeat the other party come the general election. But Brown says the approval voting system puts an end to all of this. “I get that all the time that you’ve got to vote for someone that’s going to win. Well, shouldn’t you vote for who you want to win, not for someone who you’ve already pre-determined as being the only possibility?” said Brown.

“If you were falling into this trap of the Libertarian is going to take votes from the Republican, you might also vote for the Republican. But a lot of people don’t want to vote for the Republican, they want to vote for a Libertarian, or a Constitution, or even a Green for that matter.”

If any AV/RV supporters want to write in to the paper to give them props or provide more details on the voting method, be sure to head over to the Denver Daily News contact page, which has an embedded contact form. You might also be interested in learning more about Libertarian candidate for governor of Colorado Jaimes Brown as well.

A Plea for Electoral Sanity: Approval Voting and Proportional Representation

At As It Ought To Be, Broken Ladder posts an article by Andrew Jennings, Clay Shentrup and Warren D. Smith entitled: "Duopoly Must Go: An Appeal for Score Voting." The piece provides some background on Duverger's Law, and how plurality voting tends to result in a two-party system (which, as we see in so many states, itself tends to devolve into a one-party state), and then goes on to compare this system with the top-two runoff and instant runoff voting:

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.

The authors see some of the most outspoken advocacy in favor of IRV as part of a larger strategy geared toward the implementation of proportional representation:

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.

The piece concludes, as promised in the title, with an appeal for support of score voting, or a simplified variant thereof, namely, approval voting:

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. . . .

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. . . . In election theory parlance, we say that score voting passes the Favorite Betrayal Criterion. . . .

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.

On a related, but tangential, note, a reader recently sent me a link to the Proportional Representation Party. From their "about" page:

Proportional Representation IS modern democracy. The PR Party is an organization founded in 2007 to promote the concepts of proportional representation in New York and the entire US. Most modern democracies in the world today use some form of PR to elect their local and national legislatures and we in this country ought to be doing the same. The time has come to replace the old fashioned two-party-winner-take-all politics that characterizes US politics, and PR provides a modern all-inclusive method of doing it.

Strategic Election Reform, American Proportional Representation and the Debate on IRV vs. RV

I'm going to take some time to follow up on reader suggestions made in comments over the last week or so. In a comment here last week, reader DLW relayed a link to an article at TPM on Strategic Election Reform, which led to another on American Proportional Representation, both written by David L Wetzell. On strategic election reform, Wetzell writes:

(SER) advocates for simple rule changes for state legislative elections. The basic idea behind SER is to use both winner-doesn't-take-all and winner-take-all elections, so as to bring together the best of the two types of elections. . . .

Just as the US Constitution prescribed two very different ways of electing congressmen and senators, Strategic election reform proposes that we use different election rules to elect our state representatives and our state senators. First, let us have state districts, and let there be three state representatives and one state senator per state-district. Then, we propose the use of American Proportional Representation to elect the three state representatives in each district. Then, for state senate elections, we propose a new hybrid winner-take-all election system, Top Three IRV. Thus, we would use a winner-take-all election for the state senate and a winner-doesn't-take-all election for the state house of representatives. . . .

American Proportional Representation is unapologetically biased in favor of smaller parties. Top Three IRV, like all winner-take-all election rules, is biased in favor of larger parties. When we use both rules for the two separate branches, their biases will tend to cancel each other out.

In the second article, Wetzell explains what he means by 'American Proportional Representation':

American Proportional Representation (AmPR) is a simple election rule. It is designed for use in state house of representative elections, as a part of Strategic Election Reform. It is a way to adapt Proportional Representation (PR) for the US. It is "American" because it works just like most US elections work, except there would usually be three winners. Like most US elections, with AmPR, there would be multiple parties with one candidate each and voters would vote for the candidate they support the most. The difference is that there would be three seats contested and the three seats would be distributed among the parties/candidates based on their percentages of the vote. The rule is to match as close as possible the percentage of the seats a party wins with the percentage of the vote their candidate received.

Independents and third party activists should be vocal supporters of these sorts of reforms. Over the last year or two, however, I have come to side with advocates of range and approval voting in their critique of both plurality voting and IRV, but I'm still working through my thoughts on the politics of the issue, which is somewhat embarrassing, as I've been meaning to write a guest post on the issue for Dale Sheldon at Least of All Evils for some time now. Coincidentally or not, over the last few days at Least of All Evils, DLW has been engaged in a detailed discussion and debate on the merits of IRV vs. range voting with Dale and commenter Broken Ladder, which is well worth a read.

Independent Voters and the Crisis of Democracy that is Democratic-Republican Party Government

For Pennsylvania's The Morning Call, Christopher Borick reports on the results of a poll surveying attitudes of the state's independent voters:

According to the commonwealth's secretary of state, there are about half a million residents of the Keystone State who have registered to vote as independents. Because state election laws prohibit independents from voting in party primaries, the percentage of independents in the state is low in comparison with many other states . . .

The president's diminished standing among Pennsylvania independents has not translated to support for the work being done by Republicans in Congress . . . Simply put, the commonwealth's independent voters do like much of what they see happening in the nation's capital . . .

With all the dissatisfaction and conflicted views regarding the two major parties, it is understandable that a solid majority of the state's independent voters maintain the view that a third party is needed to represent the American people. But even as these voters seek something different, there is a hesitancy to throw their support to third party or independent candidates for fear that their votes would lead to their ''least favorite'' candidates winning elections.

In other words, Pennsylvania's independent voters are held hostage by the Democratic-Republican two-party system and the ideology that sustains it. But this particular poll raising an interesting possibility: with the widespread recognition that that the Democratic and Republican Parties represent a set of twin evils, are we not approaching a situation in which the logic of strategic voting simply breaks down? Strategic voters do not cast an affirmative vote for their favorite candidate, but rather choose the 'lesser of two evils' from the duopoly parties in a defensive vote against the major party candidate they dislike more. This is also known as 'favorite betrayal' – a phenomenon that could be neutralized simply by the implementation of approval or range voting.

Consider a simple example of such betrayal. There are four candidates in a given race: a Republican, a Democrat, a Green and a Libertarian. An individual whose views are best represented by the Green Party candidate in a given election will instead vote for the Democrat in a strategic maneuver against the Republican. Similarly, an individual whose views are best represented by the Libertarian Party candidate will instead vote for the Republican in a strategic maneuver against the Democrat. However, when such voters realize that voting Democrat or Republican is not an adequate defense against Democratic-Republican Party government, they often simply do not vote rather than vote for the candidate who best represents their views and interests. The reproduction of the two-party state and duopoly system of government hinges upon a crisis of democracy.

Getting Past First Past the Post: Instant Runoff vs. Range Voting and Approval Voting

At Attack of the Machine Elves, Maikeru's excellent series of posts on voting reform continues today with an article on alternatives to plurality voting. Maikeru has argued we need to "get past first past the post":

If there's one thing that many pro-reform advocates seem to agree on, it's that the voting regime we're using right now isn't working. Currently in America, the vast majority of elections are decided using the first-past-the-post voting method, in which each person is given one vote and the candidate that receives the most votes is declared the winner. . . . The shortcomings of the first-past-the-post system are numerous and glaring. In the case of plurality voting, an election can in extreme cases be won by a candidate who falls far short of a majority and of achieving the mandate that goes with it. . . . This often leads to tactical voting-- . . . rather than voting for the candidate that best reflects their political beliefs, most voters who don't prefer one of the two major-party candidates nonetheless hold their noses and vote for what they perceive as the lesser of two evils. . . . Another often-cited deficiency of the first-past-the-post voting system is that it tends to result in a large number of "wasted" votes, or votes that are cast for either losing candidates or for winning candidates beyond the threshold needed for victory. . . . Another criticism leveled against first-past-the-post voting is that it tends to encourage gerrymandering due to the relatively high number of "wasted" votes the system produces. . . . .

Today, Maikeru compares instant runoff voting with range voting and approval voting, which is essentially a simplified variant of range voting. Maikeru writes:

in addition to first-past-the-post voting there are two other major categories of voting methods that are used within single-winner systems: preferential voting methods, in which people are allowed to vote for multiple candidates and do so by ranking them in order of preference; and range voting methods, in which people are also allowed to vote for multiple candidates but are not required to rank them against one another. Over the last couple days, I've been discussing the various types of preferential voting methods and have offered the observation that instant-runoff voting seems clearly superior to first-past-the-post in terms of efficiency, providing for a runoff in cases where no candidate receives a majority of the vote while avoiding the expense and hassle of holding a separate second round of runoff voting, as well as in terms of providing for a more open and representative political system. . . . Today I conclude my look at the various voting systems with a focus on range and approval voting, which offer the most intriguing reform alternatives to IRV.

Read the whole thing. In the end, Maikeru comes down on the side of approval voting:

Ultimately, I think that any of the three voting systems discussed in depth here is better than first-past-the-post voting and would reflect a significant improvement over the status quo. But taking into consideration how easy it would be to implement these systems, to administer them once they are in place, and what kind of results they would produce, approval voting appears to be the best option available for reform advocates to get behind in attempting to promote change within the context of the single-winner system that predominates in this country.