Should we abandon plurality elections?

Last week, I wrote that increasingly major elections are won by pluralities – winners having the most votes – rather than majorities – winners having more than half the votes.

The column drew many thoughtful responses, which prompt further consideration of the problem of plurality winners.

The threshold question is whether we ought to require majority winners.  Is it right that a person might win a three-way election with 34 percent of the vote?  Is that the same problem as when a candidate fails to gain 50 percent, because of a fringe candidate who gets, say, three percent?

The most frequent answer is that both risks are acceptable.  Throughout American history, the system known as “first past the post” has been used.  With the use of single-member districts, this system promotes two candidate races.  People understand that voting for a third party candidate could amount to a vote for the winner. 

But there have always been some multi-candidate races, and people have accepted results when the winner did not receive a majority.  Because some people wish to make a statement with their votes, rather than picking a winner, there will always be multi-candidate races.

So most likely, nothing needs to be done.

Some comments suggest I got the intentions of the Founding Fathers wrong. 

In my view, the acceptance of plurality winners is probably not what the Founding Fathers intended.  In The Federalist, those arguing for the Constitution opposed the creation of “factions,” hoping instead for general accord.

But they had to admit that, if there were elections, there were likely to be two sides.  During the debate on the Constitution itself, there were already two organized and opposing groups – Federalists and Anti-Federalists – of almost equal strength.  

But I concede they saw multi-candidates races, for the First Congress, whatever their preferences. 

 

The presumption of two parties and two candidates has carried over until today.  For example, look at the composition of the Federal Election Commission with its equal representation of two parties. 

If people reject plurality winners and want only majority winners, the only way to do that is to have runoff elections with two candidates.

Ranked choice voting cannot produce that result, because voters may end up electing “everybody’s second choice,” even though that candidate received fewer first place votes than another candidate.

While ranked choice allows for an artificial runoff and costs less than running a real runoff, it lacks the character of a political campaign in which candidates try to convince voters, some of whom did not even participate the first time around, to support them.

In fact, ranked voting is much like a plurality election in which voters supporting weaker candidates do not seem to participate in the choice between the two front-runners.  In ranked voting, they are similarly simply deleted if they did not support one of the two front-runners.

As noted earlier, in the Portland ranked voting contest, 18 percent of the voters took no part in the ultimate choice.  Their votes were thrown away.

If we want those people to participate in the final choice, then a real runoff is necessary.

It seems clear that the discussion of making Maine the first state to use ranked voting for major elections is based on the last two gubernatorial elections.

The theory is that, if voters for Democrat Libby Mitchell in 2010 had been allowed to express a second choice, independent Eliot Cutler would have been elected.  Republican Paul LePage, the plurality winner, would have been defeated.

In 2014, if voters for Cutler had been given a second choice, they might have voted for him with a second choice for Democrat Mike Michaud with LePage the loser.  In fact, Cutler may have believed that, with that kind of voting, he would have finished second and won with Michaud’s second choice votes.

Cutler voters might have helped make that possible by refraining from casting second choice votes for anybody.

On the other hand, understanding he was sure to lose, Cutler could have thrown his support to Michaud.  Some Cutler voters reacted to his “long shot’ statement; perhaps more would have reacted to an outright withdrawal. 

Even if diehard Cutler supporters had declined to vote or voted for him on principle, they would have known they were no longer taking part in the real choice, and the winner would have had a majority of the voters trying to elect a governor.

Ranked choice voting is a poor substitute for real democracy.  If we decide we want only majority winners, they should be real winners of real elections.  Just because ranked voting costs less than a runoff is not good enough to abandon majority rule.

However, it’s doubtful we insist on majority winners.  Americans have always accepted plurality winners and are likely to continue to do so.

In addition to my weekly post based on my newspaper column, I add an occasional mid-week post on a current issue.

Should voters get a second chance in three-way elections?

In ten states this year, real multi-candidate races developed for U.S. senator or governor. 

The winner stood to be elected with less than a majority of the votes.  And, without the third candidate in the race, the first-place finisher might have lost.

That’s nothing new in Maine.  There were at least three serious candidates in nine of the past 10 elections for governor.  There were majority winners in only two of the 10. 

Three-way races for major office run against the grain of the American electoral system.  The Founding Fathers envisaged two candidates running with the winner gaining majority support.

In a system based on two parties, a third candidate often produces minority rule.  The average victor in races without a majority winner received less than 43 percent.  Independent Angus King won in 1994 with only 35 percent of the vote.

In such races, one of the candidates, driven by ego and momentum, can turn out to be nothing more than the spoiler, distorting the electoral outcome.

We have three-candidate races, because one of the major parties splits into factions or a candidate offers a non-partisan alternative.

With the chances of multi-candidate elections growing, especially because of splits in the GOP, the time may have come to find a new way to deal with multi-candidate races.  Three alternatives have emerged.

The first is to do nothing in the belief that, even with its drawbacks, the system functions well enough.  Most states do that. 

Or one candidate, facing the possibility of being no more than a spoiler, even inadvertently, can drop out.

In this year’s Kansas U.S. Senate race, the Democrat withdrew to avoid splitting the vote against the Republican incumbent.  The Democrat also pulled out of the Alaska governor’s race, leaving it to a moderate Republican and his conservative GOP opponent. 

But the Kansas and Alaska cases are unusual, making the chances of three dropping down to two unlikely as a pattern.

The preferred alternative, used in 11 states, is the runoff election.  The two top vote getters face each other in a second election a few weeks later.  That ensures a majority winner, who will have won a real head-to-head election contest.

Runoffs, even where possible, are relatively rare.  Perhaps voters, aware of the possibility, cast their ballots for one of the obvious front-runners.  This year’s sole runoff will be in the Louisiana U.S. Senate race.

The third alternative is called ranked voting.  Voters can designate their second choices.  The votes are recounted many times, and each recount eliminates the lowest vote getter and redistributes second-choice votes from that candidate to other candidates.

A popular second choice could defeat a candidate who had more first-place votes in the actual vote.

No state uses that system, but a few municipalities, including Portland, Maine, use it in races that are likely to have several candidates, not just three.

In Portland’s 2011 election, it took 15 rounds of recounts to come up with a mayor, the candidate who had led from the first count. 

In the final recount, 18 percent of the votes did not count at all.  In other words, for there to be a winner, almost one-fifth of the voters had to be eliminated.  In a runoff, their votes could have changed the outcome.

Used in Minneapolis in 2012, the mayor’s race was won after 33 recounts by the same person who had been the winner on the first count. 

Ranked voting may help in races with many candidates, but in congressional and governors elections, it might encourage even more candidates and further splintering.

Ranked voting is difficult to understand and can be gamed.  Voters are not required to place all candidates in rank order, so supporters of “everybody’s second choice” can themselves provide no second choice.  That’s called “bullet voting,” and democracy may be the victim.

The resulting mathematical games can end up far from majority-rule democracy.  In fact, the winner will be a candidate who did not have majority voter support, just as happens today.

The main merit of ranked voting is that it costs less than runoffs.  You pay less, but you get less.  Runoffs allow voters to deal anew with a changed political situation.  And runoffs, unlike ranked voting, are easy to understand, because they are simple democracy.

Ranked voting sounds appealing.  It can work when there are so many candidates the vote is badly split.  In three-candidates races, it cheats voters of a real choice.

Real democracy is worth the extra cost of a runoff.

Democrats give, Republicans take the 2014 elections

The great issue in this year’s election was the role of government – federal and state.

The Republicans clearly took the election, though it’s more likely the Democrats lost it than the GOP won it.

To compare their performance in office and their campaigns through an analogy to the recently ended baseball season, the Democrats played “small ball” and had lousy pitching, allowing the Republicans to blast the ball out of the park.

The Democratic strategy has been to try to make all gubernatorial and congressional elections into contests about locally important issues – small ball.  Meanwhile, the GOP has made all of these races part of a national campaign about government itself, and it has scored with this strategy in the last three congressional elections.

The bad pitching results from the lack of a sense of strong leadership coming from the White House or the U.S. Senate, where the Democrats had a comfortable majority.

President Obama could claim credit for a new health insurance program that has already cut the ranks of the uninsured by about one-quarter.  He could claim some responsibility for the economic recovery, taking place while Europe remains in recession and China’s growth lags.

He failed to do either, giving the Republicans an open opportunity to attack his signature health insurance program and his efforts to stimulate the economy.

President Theodore Roosevelt called the presidency a “bully pulpit” from which the nation’s leader could project strength and self-confidence in promoting his policies.  “No drama Obama” has chosen to ignore the opportunity to project that kind of leadership.

The failure of the Democratic president to make a strong case for his policies nationally left the field wide open for the GOP to build its own case.  Faced with his own party asking him to stay in Washington rather than campaigning in the field, Obama failed to use the White House platform to promote his policies.   

While some critics may question the Republican use of uniform “talking points,” they seem to be effective.  The clear Republican position against big government, tying it to Obama and repeating it continuously, filled a void left by the president.   

For many voters, the lack of strong presidential leadership must have been seen as a major contributor to gridlock.  All the Democrats could do was block the GOP agenda coming from the House of Representatives and leave it to Obama to assert debatable executive authority.

Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, did not help the cause.  He, too, played small ball by blocking debate on GOP amendments that might have embarrassed the Democrats.  That’s the major reason why the GOP resorted to the record-breaking use of the filibuster to block bills.

Reid also refused to make any compromises with Republicans when Obamacare was passed, giving them a clear shot to oppose it.

Aside from leadership on domestic issues, most Americans want a president who can project their country’s power in the world.  Americans believe the United States has a mission to lead and set the example.  But Obama’s style has left many people with a sense that the United States is losing its influence.

At the state level, the races for governor showed that GOP candidates gained benefit from adopting their party’s position on the size of government.  The unified party message worked.

The largely unchallenged ideological strength of their position helped candidates for governor appear as self-confident instruments of change.  Democrats seemed unable to do much more than promise business as usual and a greater role for government.

Look at Maine GOP Gov. Paul LePage.  Despite being forecast only to be able to retain his core support and unable to add to it in his second campaign, he won a three-way race in which he almost gained an outright majority.

LePage came across as strong and outspoken, responding to the electorate’s desire for leadership.  The Ebola controversy gave him an unexpected opportunity to use the governorship to speak to the public’s concerns.  His use of television, paid and free, was generally good. 

Do this year’s elections mean that change will sweep the country now that the Republicans dominate government?  Will the president accept parts of their program?

The congressional GOP is held in low public esteem, so if it uses its House and Senate majorities to find areas of common ground with Obama, it could get credit for reducing gridlock.  But it will be tempting for the Republicans to block Obama and try make the case for a GOP president in 2016.

The presidential campaign begins now.

Campaign winners: big money, conservatives, women

Whatever the outcome of next week’s elections, some political trends emerge.

They include the role of big money’s television buys, the status of conservatism and the role of women.

How do many, if not most, people decide how they’ll vote?  Chances are good that it’s not based on candidates’ policy proposals or their debate performance.

Debates have become so numerous and predictable that many people ignore them.  When they were more unusual and a slip of the lip could influence opinion, they mattered more. 

Traditional campaign elements remain important.  Candidates’ party affiliations matter, of course, but they are rarely mentioned.  And identifying supporters and getting them to the polls must be done, now aided by software more than canvassing. 

But what matters most is television.  Short spots do not have to be accurate, and sheer repetition, made possible by huge financial resources, helps get messages, true or not, into viewers’ minds. Campaigns will set spending records thanks major donors’ television spots.

We hear increasingly about the growing roles of big political donors.  They can funnel money on short notice to favored campaigns, mainly to buy television time.  In other words, all of us can experience the influence of big money on American politics.

In this year’s campaign, it looks like the Republican TV spots outshine the Democrats’ commercials.

Have you ever seen a Democratic spot pushing the virtues of Obamacare?  The GOP has been able to make the president and his program a target, and the Democrats have been unwilling to promote the program.

TV spots on their key program were missing in the two previous congressional elections.  This year the unpopularity of Obamacare, thanks to the drumbeat of GOP opposition, spread to Obama himself, who has campaigned little rather than promoting his programs.

Thanks to their better TV spots and traditional mid-term slippage in support for the president’s party, the outlook must encourage the GOP.

Accordingly, the result in this year’s elections is likely to show a continued slide of the Congress toward the conservatives.  The Democrats would be considered winners if they held onto their Senate majority, a feat considered impossible by many pundits.  In other words, not losing would constitute winning.

But even both houses of Congress coming under GOP control could give a false impression. 

When the dust settles, it will also be important to look at how many voters supported each party across the entire country.  That will ignore gerrymandered congressional districts, which mainly favor the Republicans, whatever the total popular vote.

The people will probably remain closely divided in their political views.  The seemingly clear conservative dominance in Congress is likely to diverge from the closer total popular vote.

That’s why the GOP, even enjoying new congressional power, will face the challenge of increasing its appeal to somewhat less conservative voters if it hopes to take the presidency in 2016 and thus gain complete political control in Washington.

Instead of seeking the outright repeal of Obamacare or blocking all Obama judicial appointments, a Republican Congress could take smaller bites into Democratic programs, perhaps making it difficult for the president to veto them.

It also means that the congressional Democrats will need to increase their party’s appeal to less liberal voters.  They could end up supporting some of the spending reductions the Republicans want. Whether a GOP Senate could overcome Democratic filibusters and produce veto-proof majorities depends on just how much toward moderation it would move.

Meanwhile, a quieter and less ideological change in the American political scene may continue in next week’s elections.

If every woman running for a U.S. Senate seat now occupied by a man won her election and all female incumbents held their seats, the Senate would have 28 women out of its 100 members.

That would be a new record, surpassing the current 20 women.  After the 2000 elections, there were 10 female senators and ten years before that, only two.

Of course, not all female candidates will win, because some are running as long shots against entrenched incumbents.  As many as four women now in the Senate could lose their elections to male candidates.  Still, a new record may be set as the trend continues.

Maine could end up with three of its four congressional slots filled by women.  In the Senate race, incumbent GOP Sen. Susan Collins faces Democrat Shenna Bellows.  The First District should be held by Democrat Chellie Pingree, and if Democrat Emily Cain defeats Republican Bruce Poliquin in the Second District, she would be the third Maine woman in the next Congress.