Washington Post opinion piece on voting methods and Trump

[Clay Shentrup]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/after-trump-the-gop-may-need-a-better-voting-system/2016/05/10/203ca80c-16eb-11e6-924d-838753295f9a_story.html

Opinions

After Trump, the GOP may

need a better voting system

It should be obvious to all by now that Donald Trump knows nothing of what he speaks. His disastrous economic

ideas are but the latest in a litany of nonsensical proposals.

And still, his supporters — that Republican base so carefully nurtured by the very GOP operatives and politicians

who now find its members so distasteful — proclaim his supremacy with such bracing observations as “Well, at least

he’s got [spheres],” or “At least he speaks his mind,” or “At least he doesn’t suck up to anybody.”

These selections from the morning mail share a common element — “at least” — which seems apt enough, though

“the least” seems more to the point. Trump was the least of so many Republican candidates, including people who

offered governing experience, knowledge and even, in some cases, wisdom.

So why didn’t these superior candidates win, especially given Trump’s consistently low favorability ratings? Indeed,

both Trump and Hillary Clinton, presumptively speaking, would be the most disliked nominees at this stage of any

of the past 10 presidential cycles, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis.

Trump’s average “strongly unfavorable” rating of 53 percent — 16 points higher than Clinton’s — is at least

20 points higher than every other candidate’s rating since 1980.

Never mind the many elected Republican leaders who are distancing themselves from his candidacy. Not enough of

them, to be sure, which is disgraceful and surely will be noted by historians as cowardly. My own running list of

sycophants remains handy for the duration of their likely shortened political careers. Nearly half of voters say

they’re less likely to support candidates who have aligned themselves with Trump, according to Morning Consult, a

group that conducts weekly polls of 2,000 voters.

To answer my earlier question, the better candidates didn’t win because, obviously, so many of them siphoned votes

from stronger ones, giving Trump the lead and all-important momentum. Thus, the constant refrain from Trump

supporters that the “establishment” is ignoring the “will of the people” is true only to a point. Trump is the choice of

a plurality of the GOP but not of the majority — a distinction with a crucial difference.

By Kathleen Parker Opinion writer May 10 at 8:05 PM

At this stage, as the GOP convenes its circular firing squad composed of party leaders, operatives, hacks, flacks,

politicos — if you’ll pardon the redundancy — and, yes, certain media, they might better expend their energies

considering alternative voting methods that might have prevented Trump’s ascendancy and likely would prevent

future demagogues.

One of these methods, already used by a variety of professional organizations to elect officers, as well as by the

United Nations to elect the secretary general, uses an “approval” ballot by which voters rank all the candidates of

whom they approve rather than selecting just one. Far from new, this idea was suggested in 1770 by French

mathematician and astronomer Jean-Charles de Borda, who expressed concern that several similar candidates

would split the majority vote and allow a non-consensus candidate to win.

Voila.

Through election by order of merit, now known as the “Borda count,” each candidate was awarded a number of

votes equal to the number of candidates below him on each voter’s ballot. The candidate with the most votes won.

Fast-forward a couple of centuries to 1977, when New York University politics professor Steven J. Brams and

decision theorist Peter C. Fishburn devised “approval voting,” which is similar but even simpler. By their method,

voters would cast a vote for each candidate of whom they approve, in no particular order. The candidate with the

most votes would win.

Another ranking method, advanced recently in the New York Times by economists Eric Maskin and Amartya Sen,

was developed by 18th-century mathematician and political theorist Marquis de Condorcet. This process called for

ranking candidates in order of approval — or not ranking them at all, as an indication of disapproval. The candidate

with the highest approval ranking would win.

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Longtime voters might find such suggestions jarring, but a Trump nomination could be a rule-changer. He can brag

that he has won a couple dozen contests, but the reality is that another of the other primary candidates might have

beaten him if not for voters scattering their ballots among so many. This is to say, the majority of Republican voters

rejected Trump.

Had an approval system been in place, it’s conceivable that John Kasich could be accepting the nomination in July.

And Trump would be piling up approval ratings where he belongs — on reality TV.

[Kevin Baas]

I think a Condoret method would be best for this kind of situation.

But I don't accept the premise that a different candidate would win.  Trump personifies the Republican party and their propaganda arm of (Fox, talk radio etc) have been molding the republican base in that direction for decades.

[Neal McBurnett]

Thanks for catching this, Clay!

Sadly, there is just one comment I found that agrees with her premise that approval voting would help a lot.

Vote it up! I did :)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/after-trump-the-gop-may-need-a-better-voting-system/2016/05/10/203ca80c-16eb-11e6-924d-838753295f9a_story.html?commentID=washingtonpost.com/ECHO/item/54dae386-4a74-44d1-b34d-27d058aace04

rshetty23
5/10/2016 8:17 PM MDT
This is a great editorial! I wrote a somewhat similar op-ed in the Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rohit-shetty/trump-product-of-a-flawed_b_9773370.html

Approval voting (as opposed to plurality voting) would have avoided the whole Trump fiasco in the Republican primaries. It would also prevent any Trump-like candidates from emerging in the future. Approval voting involves voting for each candidate on the ballot who you approve of, rather than just the one who you most prefer. That way, the winner will be the candidate with the widest approval and greatest consensus among the voters. In the op-ed, we show this would not have been Trump.

Cheers,

Neal McBurnett http://neal.mcburnett.org/

On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 07:21:51PM -0700, Clay Shentrup wrote:
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/after-trump-the-gop-may-need-a-better-voting-system/2016/05/10/
> 203ca80c-16eb-11e6-924d-838753295f9a_story.html

[Warren D Smith]

Based on poll data, approval voting definitely would
have prevented Trump, and the two most-approved candidates are:
Kasich & Sanders.
Those two also appear to be the top two using both
score voting and median-based score-voting variants.

It is however not at all clear to me that Condorcet would
have prevented Trump, and also not clear that a Condorcet winner even
existed in the GOP race:
http://rangevoting.org/ReplyMS2016.html
If one did, it most likely was Rubio.

Depressingly, Plurality actually yielded the OPPOSITE finish
ordering to Score, in both the GOP (final 3)
and Dem (final 2) races. In other words, both parties went
with their worst choices, guaranteeing the USA is going to
lose.



--
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
"endorse" as 1st step)

[Ted Stern]

There were actually worse choices among the Democrats, before they dropped out.  Jim Webb, for example.

A more accurate statement might be that plurality chooses a suboptimal choice from each party.

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[Warren D Smith]

Yes; there was not a lot of polling about the ones who dropped out
quickly -- or if there was, then that polling was attackable since based on
early impressions.

But, anyhow, this page I wrote in July contains a lot of early polling:
http://www.rangevoting.org/Trump2015.html
As you can see at that time, plurality was saying the order
Trump, Walker, Bush, Rubio, Huckb, Carson, Paul, Cruz, Kasich...
and
Clinton, Sanders, Biden, Webb,...
which was not opposite to the order from, but still differed a lot from,
score- and approval voting polls. Trump was pretty near bottom with
approval then (still is) so nearly opposite in that sense.

And in October:
http://www.rangevoting.org/HuffPostOct2015.html