Home > The Verdict Is In: Our Voting System Is a Loser

The Verdict Is In: Our Voting System Is a Loser

by Open-Publishing - Monday 7 January 2008

Elections-Elected USA

Interview: An interview with author William Poundstone.

By Michael Mechanic January 2, 2007

It’s heartening to know, as primary season begins, that
ours may be the worst of all the voting systems in
common use. That’s the takeaway from Gaming the Vote:
Why Elections Aren’t Fair (and What We Can Do About It),
the latest of eleven books by William Poundstone, a
professional skeptic who studied physics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology before he began
pumping out nonfiction in 1982. The 52-year-old author
is particularly fascinated with how scientific ideas-
mathematics in this case-play out in everyday life. His
2005 book Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the
Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall
Street was hailed by the New York Times as perhaps "the
world’s first history book, gambling primer, mathematics
text, economics manual, personal finance guide and joke
book in a single volume."

Poundstone became interested in voting theory after
reading about Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, a 59-year-
old paradox wherein economist Kenneth Arrow, now a
professor emeritus at Stanford University, identified
what he perceived as a fundamental flaw in our
democracy: Put simply, he argued that devising a
perfectly fair voting system is mathematically
impossible.

Due out in February on Hill & Wang, Gaming the Vote
entertainingly probes the combative history of voting
over the past few centuries. It covers unusual
territory, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
author Charles Dodgson’s ( a.k.a. Lewis Carroll)
obsession with voting, the legacy of sleazy campaign
tactics spawned by GOP political consultant Lee Atwater,
and how the idiosyncrasies of our election system left
Louisiana voters to choose between a notoriously corrupt
liberal and a former Ku Klux Klan leader for governor
(the crook won). Mother Jones caught up with Poundstone
for a debriefing.

Mother Jones: Is there a way around Arrow’s
Impossibility Theorem?

William Poundstone: For decades, there was almost a kind
of despair among voting theorists of getting any better
system than we had. What’s interesting, though, is that
the impossibility theorem doesn’t apply to systems where
you score the candidates rather than rank them. With
scoring, you’re essentially filling out a report card-if
you think there are two candidates who deserve four
stars you can give them both four stars-whereas with
ranking you have to artificially give one a number one
and one a number two. That turns out to be crucial.

MJ: And yet plurality voting-where a person can vote for
only one candidate for a particular office-is the most
common system in use. What’s wrong with it?

WP: Whenever you have two candidates whose support
overlaps, that’s bad for both of those candidates, the
obvious example being Nader and Gore in 2000. So a
candidate can be a spoiler and cause the second most
popular candidate to win. This is something that’s been
appreciated at least going back to the 18th century, and
people have tried to devise different ways of dealing
with it, but for a very long time this was one of those
unsolvable problems.

MJ: Do you consider our plurality system to be
undemocratic?

WP: It’s certainly democratic. Anything that tries to
allow people to make a decision collectively would
qualify as democratic. I think, rather, it’s bad
technology. About 11 percent of the time we have a
spoiler and get the second most popular candidate, so we
really want to do better.

MJ: How does plurality voting play out in the primaries?

WP: It’s even worse in the primaries where you might
have three or more strong candidates. If someone likes
Huckabee and Romney, they can only vote for one, so
they’re basically getting penalized.

MJ: Can you name some other instances where a spoiler
has thrown the presidential election?

WP: The famous one was the 1912 election. You had
William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt each trying to
get the Republican nomination, and of course at that
time Roosevelt was maybe the most popular ex-president
ever. Taft was an incumbent and had an obvious lead, but
there was bad blood between them. When Roosevelt didn’t
get the Republican nomination, he ran on his own as the
Bull Moose candidate, and although the two collectively
got more than 50 percent of the vote, they split the
Republican vote and instead you had the Democrat Woodrow
Wilson winning.

MJ: How have political consultants exacerbated the
spoiler problem?

WP: Just in the past few years, they’ve started
promoting the campaigns of spoilers they think are going
to benefit their candidate. The Republicans were paying
for Nader signature drives in 2004, but since then it’s
become thoroughly bipartisan and you’ve had Democrats
paying for radio ads for Libertarian or anti-immigrant
spoilers and vice versa, so it has kind of become the
new technique.

They’ve learned that the spoiler effect can be
profitable, because it’s actually more cost effective in
many cases to divert some of your candidate’s money to a
spoiler candidate than buy additional ads for your
candidate.

MJ: If spoilers create such uncertainty, why don’t the
major parties support a method that eliminates the
problem?

WP: I think they’re just so used to the current system.
The people in politics have a certain skill set that’s
geared to this. They’ve even discovered how in some
cases they can make use of it, so there isn’t quite as
much motivation for [change], unless there would be an
overwhelming popular outcry that this is something we
want, and there hasn’t really been that.

MJ: What does the Constitution say about how we elect
people?

WP: It’s kind of funny. When we first wrote the
Constitution there’d been a lot of thought in
revolutionary France about what’s the best way to vote,
and they basically discovered the spoiler effect and a
lot of these problems Arrow was addressing. And because
of that, the founders really didn’t guarantee anyone the
right to vote for president or Congress or anything in
the Constitution. The democracy we have now is kind of a
retrofit.

MJ: Which alternative methods have been tried in the
U.S.?

WP: Instant runoff voting has been used in San
Francisco, Minneapolis, and they’re phasing it in in the
state of North Carolina. That’s where you rank the
candidates and if your first choice is someone who is
not one of the front-runners, your vote is basically
transferred to the more preferable of those two front-
runners. Everyone gets to honestly say who they really
like, but your vote also counts where it really needs to
count-in the crucial matchup.

MJ: Briefly summarize the pros and cons of the various
voting methods you cover in your book. Let’s start with
our current system.

WP: Plurality voting is the simplest system possible
because each person casts one vote for one candidate, so
it’s very easy to count votes and so forth. The con, the
one thing on which all the experts basically agree, is
that plurality is the least fair of all the systems.

MJ: How about Borda?

WP: The first modern system invented to try and better
plurality voting was the Borda count, invented in 18th-
century France by a guy named Jean-Charles de Borda.
Unfortunately, it’s very easily manipulated. It’s used
in sports a lot-for determining the Heisman Trophy, the
most valuable player-where they basically take a poll or
a ballot of sportswriters to find the best players.
Unfortunately, if you have a player you like and rank
him high, you might want to rank his rival at the very
bottom of your list to penalize that rival. In fact,
there’ve been scandals in sports where they do that.
Borda basically said, "My system is intended for honest
men," and people weren’t entirely honest.

MJ: Condorcet?

WP: Condorcet was Borda’s great rival. He had a system
where you rank the candidates, but the idea is that
whichever candidate can beat all the other candidates in
two-way races should be the winner. The main problem is
sometimes you don’t have a candidate who beats everyone
else. You can actually have a very weird situation where
candidate A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A. It is
also possible to manipulate.

MJ: Is approval voting a good way to go?

WP: It’s very simple. It basically uses the same ballot
we have now except, if you want, you can vote for more
than one candidate, and whichever one gets the most
votes tends to win. I’m not sure there’s any real known
disadvantage. Approval is actually used in the U.N. for
voting on the secretary general, and it was used in
Renaissance Venice for 500 years and apparently it
worked pretty well there.

MJ: What about instant runoff?

WP: The voters rank the candidates based on how much
they like them. It works quite well as long as you have
what we might call a typical American election, where
there’s a Republican and a Democrat and you’re sure one
of those two is going to win. The problem is when you
have three or more strong candidates as you would in the
race for a party’s nomination, then it’s subject to some
of the same vote-splitting effects as the plurality
vote.

MJ: You seem to favor the emerging system of range
voting.

WP: Range voting is the newest in the sense of people
being aware of it and promoting it: If you’re rating a
video on YouTube you give it one to five stars, and they
take that information and show you the average score of
all the people who bother to rate it. We use it with a
report card. The valedictorian of a school is the winner
of a range vote by the teachers for each of their
classes. In the Olympics, they hold up those cards to
rate someone’s performance-that’s another example.
People are pretty familiar with the idea. Nobody has
given a convincing argument that there’s anything
seriously wrong with it-the one thing you sometimes hear
is it’s complicated, but that’s about it.

MJ: In 2000, mathematician Warren Smith published a
study where he ran simulations to determine which of the
common voting methods gave the most satisfactory, or
least regrettable, outcome for the greatest number of
voters. He found that range voting was the most fair..

WP: That one paper has convinced a lot of people that we
ought to be taking range voting pretty seriously.

MJ: How did the other methods rank?

WP: The second best was approval voting, which is the
short-form version of range voting. Instead of rating
someone on one to five stars, or one to ten, you
basically have two ratings-thumbs down and thumbs up-and
it’s almost as good. Next is the Borda count, although
this particular simulation doesn’t factor in that
there’s an incentive to manipulate the vote, so I
wouldn’t rate that as too great an endorsement-Condorcet
voting is a little better. Then you get into instant
runoff and then plurality voting, which is the worst of
all these systems.

MJ: What if we had adopted range voting in 2000 or 2004?

WP: It’s pretty clear Gore would have won Florida and
New Hampshire, so Gore would have been the president.
Bush’s victory over Kerry in most of the states was less
than the Nader effect, so you still would have had a
Bush victory.

MJ: How might it have affected the congressional races?

WP: Libertarian spoiler Stan Jones was basically
responsible for Democrat Jon Tester winning the Senate
seat in Montana. That was the 51st Senate seat, so you
can say this Libertarian spoiler was responsible for
giving Democrats control of the Senate in 2006. If an
extraterrestrial came to Earth and asked me to explain
our political system, it would be tough to justify both
our president and control of the Senate. They’re each
kind of the opposite party that they should be.

MJ: Why should we trust a voting method most widely used
by the website Hot or Not?

WP: Hot or Not uses range voting but they invented it
entirely independently, which actually isn’t so unusual.
Founder James Hong explained that the reason they
adopted this is they wanted it to be as simple as
possible to look at these two pictures and decide which
of them was hot or sexy or whatever. One of the ideas
was that you would be asked to say which one you prefer,
but often that was difficult if you saw two people who
looked about equally hot. Another possibility is you’d
look at one picture and decide hot or not, and that,
too, could be very difficult-if someone was in the
middle, people wouldn’t know what to do. But with the
range-voting thing you just move this cursor wherever it
feels right; if someone’s about a seven, you just move
your cursor over to seven and click. And they did
studies and found the range-voting idea was actually the
fastest and easiest of the various solutions.

MJ: If range voting is superior, why hasn’t it been used
in a real election?

WP: People didn’t really have the idea this is something
we should be trying in elections until 2000 and Smith’s
study. So it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

MJ: Of the alternatives, instant-runoff voting has the
most momentum, and yet it’s flawed. Who’s pushing it,
and why not range voting instead?

WP: The main organization is FairVote, founded by an
activist named Rob Richie in 1992. They’re involved in a
lot of voting reforms-a direct popular vote for
president, security of electronic voting, proportional
representation-but one of the things they’ve done very
successfully is instant-runoff voting. When they
started, no one was talking about range voting, so they
kind of got locked into this, I think. Richie doesn’t
seem to believe range voting would be practical-I’m not
terribly impressed with his arguments against it. But he
has done a lot of good just in getting people aware
there are other ways to vote. And he has been successful
in getting IRV, which is definitely an improvement on
what we’ve got now. I would like to see a few
communities try range voting and see how that plays out,
and get more of an idea of how both of these work in
modern campaigns.

MJ: Have any politicians stepped up and said we should
try this?

WP: Not range voting. They certainly have for instant-
runoff voting; Barack Obama and John McCain have both
endorsed IRV, and Howard Dean as well.

MJ: Which method most benefits the small parties?

WP: Anything that addresses the spoiler effect. The
Greens and Libertarians would probably get many more
first-place votes or high scores than they do now. I
think that would have the effect of legitimizing them
and making it a little easier for them to raise money.
Once you legitimize them, there would start to be
elections in some areas of the country where they would
be able to win a few races.

MJ: Are some of these systems a no-go simply because
they will confuse voters, or because they’d be too
difficult to implement or sell to the public?

WP: Either you have a ranked ballot or a report card,
scoring-type ballot, and I think both of those are
really pretty easy. If they get complicated, it’s in how
you count the ballots. Some are more complicated than
others, but that’s for the vote counters-the public
doesn’t have to worry too much about that.

MJ: But couldn’t a more-complicated method create all
sorts of havoc after an election? We have enough
problems with our current system, where it’s supposed to
be easy to count.

WP: There is a concern about IRV in that, unlike all of
the other systems, you have to transmit all the votes to
a central repository-you can’t count them at the
precinct level the way the other systems can. Some
people are concerned about that. My own feeling is that
it’s more a question of what is fairest and what you can
actually sell to the public.

We’re still in a situation where the people in politics
really don’t understand the various systems-it would
almost have to be that the public would start having an
outcry saying we want this, that, or the other thing.
And that’s where FairVote has made a very useful
contribution to the conversation, because they’ve
managed to get people in some cities quite interested in
the spoiler effect and what we can do to change it.

MJ: Do you think America will ever scrap plurality for
something better?

WP: In a generation or two I think it is very possible.

MJ: You’d think 2000 would have been the wellspring of
such a movement.

WP: I spoke with [New York University political
scientist] Steve Brams, who is one of the co-inventors
of approval voting, and that’s basically what he said.
He figured if 2000 didn’t get people interested in
changing our voting system, what would? And he just kind
of shrugged.

Michael Mechanic is a senior editor at Mother Jones.

http://www.motherjones.com/intervie...