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The unfortunate consequence of a broken election system that discourages greater choice is that it can result in the election of individuals who don’t best represent the will of the voters. Politico is reporting that Democrats are banking on conservative third-party candidates on the ballot to help them win plurality victories.
With just six days left until Election Day, a key component of the Democratic strategy to hold the House is becoming clear: In more than a dozen close races, Democrats are encouraging and advancing little-known, conservative third-party candidates in an attempt to fracture the Republican vote enough to eke out narrow victories.
Behind-the-scenes collaboration between local Democratic officials and tea party activists in a handful of isolated races has already been reported—just last week, in suburban Pennsylvania’s open 7th District, Democratic nominee Bryan Lentz finally admitted his campaign’s role in helping a tea party candidate get on the November ballot after months of avoiding the question.
But the divide-and-conquer strategy has become more widespread—and coordinated—through television ads, robo-calls and mailers in recent weeks as races have tightened and it’s become more apparent that just a few percentage points could end up swinging the outcome in many races.
The strategy of “promoting a spoiler” has been employed by both major parties for years. Earlier this year, it came was revealed that Republicans were trying to help the Green Party get on the ballot in Texas for the same reason. And while not part of a plan, Charlie Crist’s independent candidacy is splitting the center-left vote in Florida, likely allowing Republicans an easy victory in the Senate race.
This unfortunate, but effective, strategy is going to continue as long as we use our flawed “first past the post” election system for most offices. If we followed other democracies in adopting instant runoff voting (also known as alternative voting or ranked choice voting), this type of underhanded game would disappear. Instant runoff voting allows voters to select a second and third choice their vote will go to if their first choice gets too few votes.
A system of instant runoff voting would eliminate the incentive for a major party to help put “spoiler” candidates on the ballot. Even more importantly, it would increase diversity in our elections by allowing voters to freely vote for the minor candidate that best reflects their views without the fear that they are helping to elect their least favorite candidate.
41 Comments
IRV helps to prevent spoilers but it doesn’t help good candidates get elected.
France has a runoff system (not IRV) and look what that got them–Sarkozy and his huge pension cut.
A British study showed that 2/3rds of voters can’t grasp the concept of IRV. We should just return to a nation of philosopher kings.
non runoff voting gave ups George Bush. I don’t get your point.
Guess it beats actually doing something.
Sometimes I think this election is all about showing just how bat shit insane the candidates are that biz can get elected. And so may shit choices that it essentially says just like you can’t impact elected officials – you can’t even get decent (or sane, or pro citizen) candidates.
This strategy really works well for money interests backing multiple horses with buckets of cash. Also for games in the primary.
Its disgusting.
Maybe after the are done screwing the country over we can have campaign finance reform… ooops can’t since the media and elections have been captured.
I guess that means only after they collapse the country…and at that point they will still have all the money.
In Australia we have had preferential voting, as we call it since the 19th century as well as various forms of proportional representation in our upper houses. This has produced stable and diverse one party majorities, long term coalitions and fostered the development of new political parties – not all of them good mind you. Neverthless it promotes democracy and diversity of choice.
In the recent federal election the Greens party one its first lower house seat in melbourne polling 36% of the primary vote despite the Labour party polling 38%. The Liberal party (ironically conservative) polled 18% as well as other minor parties 8%. When preferences were distributed from the Liberals and other minor parties the Greens won 55% to the Labor parties 45% of the two candidate preferred vote! Truly a victory for progressive politics and diverse democracy.
Orlando Sentinel reporting that GOP kicking the shit out of Dems in early voting. They have “never outperformed Democrats in early voting.” When absentees are included 1.1 million Floridians have voted so far. 52% Republican. 34% Democratic. The lesson? Democrats need to move to the right and cut spending more, of course.
I don’t get how this works.
This stems from the problem that instant runoff voting without ranked choice (or voters who understand how to use ranked choice) doesn’t solve much of anything.
Bmull’s argument is best applied not to Sarkozy but to his predecessor, Jacques Chirac. From Wikipedia:
Jospin was the Socialist incumbent, and had been favored to win — and would have, had all the lefties in France voted for him. Instead, a large number frittered away their vote on various joke parties, thus denying him the plurality and setting up a choice between the conservative Chirac and the out-and-out Nazi Le Pen.
More on how runoff voting without ranked choice can be gamed is found here.
4 reasons not to vote this November. http://brighton-towne.blogspot.com/2010/10/4-reasons-not-to-vote-in-november-2010.html
Actually it’s my opinion that the two major parties, though adversaries, don’t mind covering for one another. They view themselves as the anointed ruling caste and everybody else as upstarts and usurpers.
As for Florida’s Senatorial race, what you say is true but Meek is also a lame candidate and Crist is hugely popular there. I don’t think it would be as effective a strategy if Meek was a decent candidate. Scott Brown won in Massachusetts against a lame candidate and it’s way more liberal than Florida.
Garbage in, garbage out:
what if our failure to fix our government makes us complicit in the murder of brown children by JDAM?
Electoral reform is a life and death issue.
Fixed it for ya.
Germany has proportional representation and it got them the unpopular and increasingly odious Angela Merkel:
Any system can produce terrible leaders, especially when the media and politicians appeal to fear and bigotry. By your reasoning, IRV is terrible because of Sarkozy (even though you admit that France doesn’t use IRV), proportional representation must be terrible because of leaders like Merkel and Silvio Berlusconi, and FPTP is truly awful because of George Bush and David Cameron. Maybe we should just get rid of democracy altogether and go back to being ruled by nobles.
The quote about Angel Merkel in my comment above comes from this article in the Guardian. For some reason, Edit didn’t work – it told me right off that time had expired.
how does instant runoff work? how instant is instant? the top 2 vote getters face each other in a few weeks?
You rank your choices 1,2,3,4. If no one first choice gets 50% than they drop the lowest candidate and divide their votes among those voters second choice until one candidates gets a majority.
You only vote once and the results come basically as quickly as they do now.
The first sentence of the article says it all.
KO just finished a rant in an effort to convince me to hold my nose and vote for the individuals who don’t represent my interests. Of course the argument was the same fear-mongering we’ve seen for quite a while. “Vote for Dems because the tbaggers are batshit crazies!”. Well, yes the tbaggers are batshit nuts, but the Dems are batshit corporate sellouts.
Basically, when I look dispassionately and objectively at my options for voting on Tuesday, I do not see the end of the world coming because some tbaggers get elected.
Tbaggers who run for public office are exactly like other politicians. They are the same lying scumbags as most other people who run for office. The difference between tbaggers and other politicians is in the words they use in order to get votes. Dems talk about justice, opportunity, equality. Repubs talk about guns, gays, and god. Tbaggers talk about secret muslims, nazis, birth certificates, Mexicans, and “Negroes”.
Once elected, a tbagger politician will be the same rotten money-grubber as the other rotten money-grubbers of the past.
So as I said- Not the end of the world. I survived 8 years of Bush. I can survive two years of batshit crazy. And who knows…maybe two years will be enough to make some folks look up from their ipads long enough to give a shit about their neighbors.
Disclaimer: Where I live, ALL the candidates are nuts. I can close my eyes and pick at random…even the democrats are such blue dogs that there is little difference between them and the repubs. I recognize that this situation makes it easier for me to be an armchair quarterback.
lame = Corporate owned ?
There’s a difference between top-two run-offs, as they use in Washington State and for presidential elections in France, and IRV, which is the same as ranked choice voting and used in Australia.
Also, a top-two runoff got the incumbent mayor of Seattle ousted and replaced by a progressive environmentalist. A partisan system would have likely left the incumbent in place because he was an Democrat and it’s near impossible to oust even unpopular incumbents in primaries, unless you have either lots of money or a nationwide grassroots campaign attacking the incumbent.
Louisiana?
Exactly.
Good on You…All these so called progressive programs have been big time Dem infomercials.Trying to scare ya into voting for corporate Dems.
I stopped watching KO & Maddow sometime ago…It’s been distraction TV nothing in their programming addresses the reality of what ordinary Americans are facing today,FORECLOSURE & UNEMPLOYMENT.
Regardless ,If the GOP gets the majority,you can expect the same…more corporate friendly legislation ordinary Americans be damned.
thanks Jon. I’ve only followed foreign elction results = winners. I knew the process was different, of course, but never really got into details. would definitely benefit from that here. smalller parties, not so well-funded, could get into the mix for real.
My argument isn’t that IRV is bad because it doesn’t prevent bad leaders.
My argument is that it isn’t any better than the current system at getting good leaders elected (and for reasons that are too esoteric to get into here it may be worse).
IRV would have prevented Bush from winning in 2000. (So would abolishing the electoral college or counting the votes properly.)
However IRV could also result in a lot more GOP wins in a year in which a conservative third party was performing well. For example if Harry Reid manages to eke out a victory in Nevada it will probably be because of Scott Ashjian’s faux Tea Party candidacy.
Harry Reid being re-elected……well that would guarantee that the next 6-8 yrs will look like the last 10yrs.Gooosh!I hope not even if we are saddled with the crazy lady from Nevada.
The counter-intuitive result is even more striking in Denison where the independent (and former Green) Andrew Wilkie won the seat, even though he got only 21.3% of first preferences compared to 35.8% for the Labor candidate (ABC News). The reason Wilke ended up winning is that a majority of voters in the district wanted anybody but Labor. Once the votes were reallocated based on preferences, 51.2% of the voters preferred Andrew Wilkie to the Labor candidate.
FWIW, here are the Melbourne results that indego refers to.
For the 1975 mayoral election, the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan used this system. At the time, the Human Rights Party was a viable third party and actually elected a member of City Council from the student ward where I lived at the time.
In the first round, Mayor Jim Stephenson (R) got 49 percent, Al Wheeler (D) got 40 percent. However, when the HRP votes were redistributed, Wheeler won by just over 100 votes, becoming the city’s first African-American mayor.
The city’s political establishment put a proposal to repeal IRV on the 1976 municipal ballot, and the proposal passed. End of experiment.
Well, there is a bit of feedback loop here. Because there’s no IRV, many voters don’t want to “waste” their vote on the Green party candidate (or for that matter, Libertarian or Tea Party). However were there an IRV system, the Green party would suddenly pick up a chunk of votes since progressives could mark the Democratic candidate as their secondary choice. Likewise, right-wing minor parties will also pick up support from conservatives. Who knows how it would shake out, but if it puts more parties and more points of view before the voters, then I think its for the good in terms of public policy.
I’m torn between whether an Instant Runoff or a Washington State “top 2″ nonpartisan ballot wold be the better reform.
Jon,
Once you have the midterms behind you (its kind of sick you’re tracking 101 races, I’m impressed you can keep all that polling data straight), you should get into the legislative drafting business. You have a better grasp of the moving parts of election reform (ditto healthcare reform) than anybody else I know. You should outline your idea of the ideal election reform bill (or a bill for HCR counter-reform, a second stimulus package or whatever). Maybe ask for reader input, maybe not. :o)
Once you have the bill’s subissues and their respective reforms defined in a (as McKinsey consultants say) mutually exclusive, collective exhaustive way, you could ask the staff of a friendly Member to frame it as a bill in the proper legislative language. Who knows, maybe you can pin down an “audit the Fed” issue that both Democratic and Republican backbenchers can agree on. The point is, If there’s a specific bill that Members can be asked by your readers (i.e. their constituents) to co-sponsor and vote for, it creates a litmus test that makes it tougher for them to rhetorically agree with constituents only to substantively agree with lobbyists. Anyway, that’s what Wayne Wheeler would would you to do. :o)
To that end, Al Sheahan (a founder of US Basic Income Guarantee) wrote an interesting article (Word document) about working with Congressman Bob Filner a few years ago to draft a bill (Tax Cut for The Rest of Act of Us Act of 2006) to replace the Bush tax cuts with a negative income tax (it was a good bill, but didn’t go anywhere). The “sausage making” details are pretty interesting.
But if the Green Party candidate does by chance pick up more votes than the Democrat, then the Democrat’s votes will redistribute between Greens and Republicans and might cause the Republican to win.
http://minguo.info/election_methods/irv
Well, like some losing politician or another put it “The people have spoke, the bastards”. :o)
Even if it were desirable (and I don’t think it is), there’s no electoral reform that will automatically, in every race, benefit the establishment Democratic candidate. A fair election system doesn’t mean your guy always wins.
Besides, any Democrat running in a district where he polls behind the Green party is probably too conservative for that district anyway. Any Republican running there who’s even competitive is probably (but, of course, not certainly) going to be more like Michael Castle in his ideology than Jim DeMint. Finally, don’t forget that right-wing minor parties could just as easily swing solid Republican seats to Democrats by exactly the same dynamic.
That’s true.
This would only happen if the Democrats got fewer votes than both the Greens and the Republicans. So the scenario you are positing is that the Greens and the Republicans are the two major parties, and the Democrats are a third party. To live in such a world…
To answer your question, if the majority of voters in a district preferred the Republicans to whatever party was the most popular progressive (or pseudo-progressive) party in that district, then it would make sense that the Republicans should win that seat. Democracy in action.
In the recent elections in Australia, I don’t think this ever happened. As far as I’m aware, every time the Green or independent was one of the last two candidates left standing (after other candidates were eliminated and their votes reassigned), the Green or independent ended up winning the seat.
The AEC has links to the results for the 2010 federal elections in Australia. If you want to test your theoretical scenarios against real life, you have plenty of data to work with.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find the Kossacks cheering this on. The same people who fly into an unhinged spittle-flecked rage at the very mention of the Green Party.
After all, IOKIYAD.
First, those noting that better voting structures than ours around the globe still have a tendency to to produce specious leadership are absolutely correct. It’s a failure in the fundamental structure of empowering someone else to be your political voice with exceptionally weak accountability and recourse. You wouldn’t sign over your power of attorney to a complete stranger, yet you’re required to do essentially that ever couple of years when you hand off your political interests to some random surrogate to enact the laws that will govern you.
Secondly, whenever someone tells you that the Tea Partiers are completely nuts, and should be avoided at all cost. It is helpful to point out that our Democrat President and Democrat Congress have willingly violated the sovereignty of a foreign nuclear power by expanding their war across it’s borders with impunity. THAT is completely crazy.
I’d like to know if there are any concerted campaigns going on to implement runoff voting at the local and state levels. Until we start actually putting this stuff into practice, we’re just flapping our gums.
Georgia has a 50% rule for all races, if no candidate wins a majority, the top two face off in a runoff several weeks after the general. The trouble with a post-general runoff is that turnout falls through the floor, so its a different electorate than who voted in the general. The advantage of an instant runoff is that since its, well, instant, there’s no dropoff in turnout.
I forgot to add, its a pity that Florida uses plurality vote instead of a 50% rule. If it had that, as long as Crist and Meek could keep Rubio under 50% (a poll I saw today has it Rubio 42%, Crist 35%, Meek 15%), Crist would easily win in the runoff, oh well.
Geee…. maybe Obama can work on that after the midterms. It’s the only chance that corporatist balless wonder has of winning a 2nd term and of the Dems, progressive/liberal ones, at least, have of getting back into office.
Well… one can always dream.