You want to build the tallest, most beautiful house of cards in the world. But all you have to build on is a short, squat table that's falling apart. You decide you won't stand for this any longer. You want to go big.
You effortlessly pluck off the four barely-attached legs of your table, stack them on top of one another end-to-end, and place the tabletop on the highest leg, gloriously towering in the air.
For a moment, you have a higher surface on which to build a tall, beautiful house of cards. And then, quite obviously... you don't. It all comes crashing down, and once again you have a crappy pseudo-table piled on your kitchen floor.
Why didn't this work? It was taller, it was made from the same raw materials, and it had the same basic idea -- put a tabletop on some legs so it's elevated. Shoulda been fine!
Clearly, it didn't work because it's not stable. Gravity pulled the thing down, and it inevitably fell back to its original position (or a crappy version of it, anyway).
A pole is not a table, for any reasonable definition of either. They are Different Things. This is not a mere problem of engineering -- no combination of nails, screws, etc., can take four (spindly) legs and a tabletop and make a pole-table that will stand taller than the original product for any functional length of time. All you can do, if you believe yours is the only table-wood available, is refurbish the current mess so it doesn't break so easily.
Building a pole that is taller and better is not improbable. It is not a matter of *convincing* your unimaginative, table-raised house-of-cards buddies that it is superior. It is effectively impossible. It will not work.
If you want a better, taller table, you need to build one.
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| "See? We just needed to eliminate the Superdelegates. It's fixed!" (photo from Hubush) |
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This is why we can't have
For federal elections in the United States, we have a first-past-the-post (FPTP), winner-take-all, non-transferable voting system. In this system, you only get to vote for one person for each position; if you vote for your favorite and they lose, you don't get to vote again; and the person with the most votes wins. (That is, the first to gain a plurality -- hence, first-past-the-post.) In this system, there is no prize for second place, and there is equally no prize for third, fourth, or fifth place. Everyone casts their vote at once, so everybody has to vote bearing in mind what they believe everybody else will do. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but I am being *very specific* about what we have, because it's far from the only way we could do things. (Psst -- there is a craft and hardware store down the street that sells wood for tables. We will pay it a visit in a moment.)
In the classic example, if there are three candidates, Alice, Bob, and Chuck, and 60% of people think both Alice and Bob are far better than Chuck, but fail to agree on which is the "most" better, we get Chuck. (This is literally what happened in the Republican Primary.) Most of the time voters understand this, and eventually have to form an agreement between Alice and Bob to get the best chance of beating Chuck. This means voters, in order to avoid electing somebody a majority do not want, have to essentially "lie" about their first choice. But the more candidates there are, the more likely it is things will go very sideways, because coordinating mass action in that competitive an environment is really hard. A majority of Republican primary voters preferred every other candidate to Trump, but didn't get their act together in time to boot him out. Now we find ourselves here.
Why does this usually boil down to the lesser of *two* evils? Simple -- as the GOP Primary proved, this situation is very unstable. Every vote is "stolen" from some other candidate, i.e. that voter's second-choice candidate. The more votes a (long-shot) candidate gets, then unless they steal votes equally from every other candidate, they're hurting one competitor and helping another -- and moreover, for most voters, the candidate getting most screwed is the (viable) one with the most similar views to their own!
This is called the "spoiler" effect, or more recently, the "Nader" effect. So, two political parties inevitably emerge and jockey to win by 51-49, or thereabouts, and third parties aren't really sustainable. As soon as there is a third party that's really, really good, it will immediately murder both itself and its closest ideological competitor in the election (thus ensuring the catastrophic short-term failure of its policy goals), and then next time around, maybe become the new "second" top-tier party. We will once again be left with two "evils" to choose from -- they may be slightly rearranged, but there will be two of them. That is all that can ever happen.
As our pole-table would tell us, gravity is a b**ch.
Now let's just take a trip down to the hardware store and see what other kinds of tables there are.
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Very briefly, there are perhaps three top contenders for Vastly Superior Table Design, all of which would absolutely crush the crappy status quo. They are:
- Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV). (Also sometimes called Alternative Voting, as in the linked video, or Instant Runoff, as in the FairVote link on the GOP primary.) List candidates in order of preference. If your top choice receives the fewest #1 votes, they're eliminated, and your second choice becomes your new first choice. "New" votes are tallied; repeat until somebody wins.
- Range Voting. Rate candidates on a scale of 1-10, highest average score wins. ("Yelp/IMDB-style")
- Approval Voting. Thumbs up or down for each candidate, most-approved wins. ("Rotten Tomatoes-style")
See how easy that was? See how obviously better they all are, because you don't have to "lie" about your top choice to keep your vote from being wasted?!? Oy.
And they're not just pipe dreams, either. RCV is furthest along: it's already used for elections in many American cities, is on the ballot *this November* to be used for some state elections, and has been used in Australia... since 1918.
(For more information, go to FairVote.org RIGHT NOW. Or just browse the Wikipedia page.)
(For more information, go to FairVote.org RIGHT NOW. Or just browse the Wikipedia page.)
Let's just pick a table and build it. There are trade-offs for each, but we can't lose by switching from the pile of splinters we have now.
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In my next post, I'll provide a little more gory detail for the interested. If you only read this one and leave saying, "It's not only useless, but BAD, to vote third-party in federal races until we change how we vote, and that could *realistically* occur in the near future if I take action!" then I have accomplished my goal. If you want to be the cool kid who already has a position staked out on which Vastly Superior Table we should switch to, so you can tell your kids you were a hipster voter, then by all means stay tuned.
PS -- thanks to my awesome science friends Tory, Erin, and Jess for putting me up to this post. It's been a long time coming, but I wouldn't have gotten around to it if not for them!
PPS -- exceptions:
- This doesn't necessarily apply in local, and some state, elections.
- Voting 3p at the federal level in a non-swing state might be fine, but just remember that you're relying on the strategic voting of others: if everybody who wanted to vote like you scratched the itch, you'd all screw each other over.
- If you are absolutely, positively against everything either major party stands for, I get where you're coming from. But you are still reducing your "electoral" voice by not picking. Either way, you actually stand to benefit the MOST by advocating for electoral reforms, because you would plausibly get real representation for the first time. Make some noise!
On go, the primary player in each starts the race by rolling a tire around the cones or stationary things and comes back with the tire. 4th Of July Decorations
ReplyDeleteI'm confused by the severity with which you qualify your concession in that last bullet point. Wouldn't the same logic apply to anyone who was dissatisfied in equal proportion with both major parties? I don't see the necessity for disagreeing with every single point in both platforms.
ReplyDeleteAnyway you don't speak to this here, but your main thesis seems to be flatly contradicted by the historical record. A third party has in fact come to power roughly ever two to three generations in this country since national political parties began, if you consider the radical party changes in the 1960s to be an equivalent type of change. How do you reconcile these actual facts with your claim that a third party coming to power is not just improbable but impossible?
I'm not sure it really affects your conclusion much, because something like RCV is the cure whether it's actually impossible or just "too improbable for the public good". But personally I would suggest that people can advocate for RCV *and* vote third party if they're so inclined.
Hey m, thanks for the comment!
ReplyDeleteI see what you mean regarding equal dissatisfaction. In my own experience, I encounter a lot more 3p voters who are passionately disaffected (in a horseshoe-theory kind of way) than who are engaged but genuinely indifferent. Perhaps that is more common than what I'm used to seeing: I would be curious what portion of 3p voters fall into the disaffected vs indifferent categories!
My point -- and that of the whole post, really -- was tailored to those disaffected people who believe the only way to reform US politics is to refuse the major parties either in protest or in the hopes that others will do the same. I think they're barking up the wrong tree, and they'd do better to put their energy into barking up the right one (though sure, whether or not they vote 3p, I certainly still think supporting RCV will help).
I concede that 2p-indifferent 3p voters might not really be contributing to a spoiler effect and structural dysfunction, at least not in the way disaffected folks who otherwise have actual leanings are. But if they're even 51-49, I submit they can probably add more useful information to the aggregate political signal by voting strategically. (I think this point is debatable, though -- feel free to tell me why I'm wrong!)
I appreciate your points about the historical record, but I take a different view. There's lots of evidence that for a big chunk of modern American history, parties were less polarized, less ideological, and more transactional due to overlapping issue sets (including stronger local constituency self-interest), coalitions, and voter bases. Things changed for a host of reasons, many of which were nobody's fault so much as just historical trends -- could elaborate if you wish. As a consequence I think most of the events to which you refer, *especially* the party changes from the Southern Strategy, are better understood as 2p turf wars in which the parties rotate and collapse along political dimensions that had been in tension, resolving along more natural lines, than as 3p victories.
But even taking that into account, the data still shows the status quo is more clearly bimodal than it's ever been.
I would say that is essentially what has happened in recent populist electoral victories as well: the macroeconomic and moral political divisions of the 90's have been rotating back towards somewhat '70's-esque cosmopolitan globalist vs populist nationalist, and the GOP primary was about deciding which fight to pick. It was infiltration and realignment of a major party, but not a 3p victory. The political consequences may be similar, but crucially, the strategic math for a voter is the same.
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ReplyDelete