Victor Kaplan of NJ Reform Party speaks in favor of Score/Approval Voting
Clay Shentrup
The Crisis of Democracy and the Fairest Voting System of Them All: Approval Voting
by Vic Kaplan
Third party and Independent candidates have been battling Duverger’s Law for centuries. Simply stated, plurality election systems favor a two-party system. Thus, the current two-party system may be less a product of voter consensus, and more a reflection of the flaws inherent to our first-past-the-post voting method. Many advocates of reform support instant runoff voting, but there are other possibilities as well, such as approval voting and score voting.
Voters on both the left and the right remain dissatisfied with the current system, since both progressives and conservatives always get outvoted in Congress. The Congressional Progressive Caucus did not claim a majority of the Democratic members of the House even during the 2009-2010 years, when the Democrats held a 39 seat majority. So the fans of a single-payer healthcare system, not to mention peace and civil liberties supporters lacked the numbers to have any influence, and the still do. The same goes for spending cut supporters on the conservative side. The debt ceiling deal, for instance, does not contain an enforcement mechanism to enact cuts into law. Future Congresses have the option of simply ignoring them. The raising of the debt limit was a blow to the conservatives who opposed it.
It is no wonder that some of the deal’s opponents are leaving both the Republican and Democratic Parties. On the latter side, the proposed Social Security and Medicare cuts seem to have been the “last straw” among progressives who feel that the Democrats take their votes for granted, while throwing an occasional bone like the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal or the Afghanistan semi-withdrawal (in the end, the number of US troops in Afghanistan would still be twice the number of troops since Obama became President) to keep them in line. And of course, the “Republican Scare” helps, as well. Whether or not these tactics would continue to work in 2012 remains to be seen. The “wasted vote syndrome” still continues to influence voters. But if the voting system is to blame for the continuation of the two-party system, then what would a positive change look like?
Instant-runoff voting (IRV) has been in use in Australian elections, mayoral elections in London, and local races in San Francisco, Minneapolis and other cities for years. However, a nationwide referendum to approve IRV failed on May 5, 2011 in the UK. Under IRV, voters rank candidates in their order of preference (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. choice on the ballot). The candidate who finishes 3rd gets eliminated and his/her support then gets transferred to the top two candidates. Proponents of IRV, such as Fair Vote, argue that the system would eliminate the “spoiler” effect. Case closed? Let’s examine the 2009 mayoral election in Burlington, Vermont, where IRV was used.
| Candidate(Party) | 1st Rd | 2nd Rd | Final |
| Bob KISS(Progr) | 2585(29%) | 2981 | 4313 (wins) |
| Kurt WRIGHT(Repub) | 2951(33%) | 3294 | 4061 |
| Andy MONTROLL(Dem) | 2063(23%) | 2554 | |
| Dan SMITH(Indpt) | 1306(15%) | ||
| James SIMPSON(Green) | 35 (0.4%) | ||
| (Write-ins) | 36 (0.4%) |
At first it would appear that the election results were straightforward. Democrat Andy Montroll finished third and was eliminated from the contest. His supporters then favored Progressive Part candidate Bob Kiss over Kurt Wright, a Republican. So, Bob Kiss won. However, according to the paired table of voter preferences, Democrat Andy Montroll would have beaten Republican Kurt Wright by a 56% to 44% and Progressive Bob Kiss by a 54% to 46% majority.
| #Voters | Their Vote |
| 1332 | M>K>W |
| 767 | M>W>K |
| 455 | M |
| 2043 | K>M>W |
| 371 | K>W>M |
| 568 | K |
| 1513 | W>M>K |
| 495 | W>K>M |
| 1289 | W |
So despite the claims that IRV eliminates the spoiler effect, the “spoiler” in this IRV race was Republican Kurt Wright. His absence would have caused Democrat Andy Montroll, the “beats-all-winner” to be elected. The controversy over the election result caused the voters of Burlington, Vermont to repeal IRV in 2010.
Other bizarre twists under IRV include candidates who get “too many votes” and lose, so voters are then better off ranking the candidates that they support at the bottom. This is known as the paradox of non-monotonicity. The other weakness of IRV is that it cannot be tabulated with existing voting equipment. In addition, the precinct vote becomes impossible, as IRV necessitates a central tabulating location where all of the votes are to be counted. This leads to a prolonged counting of votes that stretches into days, as is the case in Australia.
In the end, the IRV system reinforces the two-party system. For example, in Australia, voters who don’t think that the Greens “can win” rank them accordingly. This creates a system that is not very different from our plurality first-past-the-post system. Last year, under IRV, the Greens won 12% of the vote in Australia, but only 1 seat out of 150 in the House of Representatives. They would have certainly faired much better under proportional representation.
But what if voters could vote for a candidate without worrying whether or not their candidates are electable? What if voters could vote for two or more candidates that they like? There is indeed such a system. It is called approval voting. In a replay of the 2000 presidential election under approval voting, voters could have approved both Nader and Gore, without worrying that a vote for Nader would “hurt” Gore. Since a voter can cast a vote of approval for as many candidates as he or she wishes, there are no “spoilers” by definition.
What would be the cost of changing to this system? Just to add the words “vote for 1 or more” to the ballot. This would be an improvement over our plurality system, for it would provide for more honest voting and support for alternative party and independent candidates would likely go up.
In March of 2011, the New Hampshire House voted against approval voting. At the same time, approval voting is used by the state Libertarian parties in Colorado and Texas, and to select the Secretary General of the UN.
To keep the current system in place would be to resign oneself to the current two-party system, where there are always two major parties. If an alternative party or candidate gain sufficient strength, their slogans get adopted or co-opted by one or both major parties. This happened to Ross Perot, as the 1994 Republican Contract With America was based on Perot’s United We Stand platform. Hence Richard Hofstadter’s famous quote: “third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die.” This may be true, but their impact is not to be underestimated.
Most of the things we take for granted when it comes to social reform, came as a result of alternative parties, whether it is the Income Tax or Social Security. What other changes might have occurred, had voters not faced the “wasted vote syndrome” in our FPTP voting system? Perhaps approval or score voting would create multi-party coalitions. Imagine a voting block of select Democrats and Republicans, as well as most Constitutionalists, Greens, Libertarians, and Reformers voting against NAFTA, CAFTA, GATT, the Patriot Act and war funding in Congress. With approval voting, this would be a very real possibility.
Vic Kaplan is a supporter of the Reform Party of New Jersey.
Bruce Gilson
I don't see where score voting is mentioned at all in the quoted article, only approval. So your subject line is not quite right.
Clay Shentrup
I don't see where score voting is mentioned at all in the quoted article, only approval. So your subject line is not quite right.
Clay Shentrup
Right on proportional representation, wrong on approval voting
Viic, you're right that third parties should focus on the plurality-wins-all voting system. It's an outrage against basic notions of fairnress in representative democracy.
You're also right that proportional voting (PR) is urgently needed. Rrunoffs, instant runoff, approval voting and score voting remain winner-take-all systems. To varying degrees they eliminate spoiler concerns, but they don't allow 20% of votes to earn one of five seats. Until we have such a system, third parties will rarely win fair representation. See the new series of "super district" maps we're doing at fairvote.org for all states for US House to show how proportional voting can work
But you're egregiously wrong in your critique of instant runoff voting in comparison to approval voting. They're both winner-take-all system, but IRV is a proven system that even right now is upholding voter choice in the Irish presidential race (vote this month) and large, multi-candidate races in cities like San Francisco (CA), Portland (ME), Telluride (MN) and St. Paul (MN).
Meanwhile, approval voting is unproven -- and indeed the limited uses of it suggest it fails in operation, just as critics would expect because of the overwhelmingly dominant problem that you can't indicate support for a second choice without that vote counting equally with your first choice. Seewww.approvalvoting.blogspot for more.
Examples of where you get it wrong include:
1. You suggest that voters in the IRV races for house in Australia are abandoning their sincere first choices. There is jo evidence of this. You can compare vote totals for the Greens in races for the house elected by IRV and senate elected by PR, for example. Greens in Australia understandably want PR for the house. But they do NOT want to replace IRV with something like approval voting and certainly not plurality voting.
2. You don't understand the Burlington election and reason for repeal. IRV was not repealed because Montroll (3rd place finisher in 1st round) didn't win. It was repealed because the winner Kiss got emboiled in a scandal after the election and because Wright (1st place finisher in 1st round) didn't win. Wright had nearly won with IRV (48% in final round), and mobilzed a kind of "recall Kiss", Tea Paryt-type energy taht focused on IRV as its outlet -- and quite strategically put in a plurality-type system where Wright )who is now running for mayor, unsurprisingly) can win outright if he gets just 40% of the first round vote. Montroll and most fellow Democrats endorsed keeping IRV.
One way to see this if Wright had won - -and he almost did win -- there is not a remote chance that IRV would have been repealed. But if Condorcet voting has been in place and Kiss had won after finishing 2nd or 3rd in first choice, that Condorcet system would have been repealed even faster than IRV,.
But what you utterly fail to understand is that with approval voting, Wright would have won despite being the Condorcet loser among the top three candidates. Anyone familiar with Burlington poltics knows that most voters there really want their side to win and don't much like the other two parties. Progressives and Democrats have a very uneasy relationship, and getting them to cast equally weighted votes for each other is MUCH harder than getting them to rank the other side second witth IRV. Similarly, those Republicans and Democrats who ranked Kiss third wouldn have had a lot of trouble casting equally weighted votes for each other.
So there would have been massive bullet voting, lots of finger-pointing about tactical voting and a likely Wright winner. It's __extremely__ unlikely that Montroll could have come back from so far down to win.
So folks like you who bash IRV -- a winner-take-all reform that actually can be persuasive to policymakers - and instead promote a winner-take-all reform that in fact isn't such a hot idea and has no record of success are doing an extreme disservice to ther reform cause. You essentially just act is defenders of the unforgivable status quo.
At the very least, do something for proportoinal voting. New Jersey has two-seat assembly distrists. Get out there this fall and suggest that your system be changed toa German-styled mixed member system, with one seat per district and the remaining seats added in to reflect the overall party vote. Or suggest that adjoining two-seat districts be combined into 4-seat distritcs, using a proportional voting system where 21% of the vote would win a seat.
But stop the intercine fighting against IRV in favor of vaporware. It's not doing anything except defend the status quo.
Warren Smith
Clay Shentrup
Richie's claim Wright would have won with approval voting -- made in tones of the utmost confidence as usual -- contradicts the data, also as usual,