Make America (Proud to) Vote (Again?), #MAVA

Turnout is more than just a number. It shows our pride — or lack of it—in our democracy.

In democracies around the world, people are proud to be voters.

Proud voters from Fiji, Iraq, Barbados, and India. These are far from being perfect democracies, but sometimes (at least from a distance) it seems that at least their people are less jaded and cynical about voting, and that their systems are not as broken as U.S. democracy seems to be.

I found the pictures above on Google images; I don’t actually know those people. But I hope and imagine that they were proud in three ways:

I hope all of them were proud of their own part in the process of voting; proud of what their ballots said.

I hope that, when those elections were decided, at least two of them were proud that their ballot helped choose an option; proud of winning, if not completely, then at least partially.

I can see from their faces that all of them were proud of democracy itself, independent of their own part in it.

When people can be proud in these three ways, they will turn out to vote. And if turnout is a proxy for those kinds of pride, then the U.S. doesn’t look so hot:

Graph from Pew Research

That kind of below-average turnout means that what is supposed to be “majority rules”… isn’t. In 2016, the winning president of the United States got the votes of under 28% of the nation’s eligible voters. His main opponent got those of just under 29%. In the House of Representatives, just 38% of eligible voters supported their winning representative; and in the Senate, that number was 35%.

And really, the problem goes deeper than that. Even among those who voted, record numbers were dissatisfied with all their choices for president, and unhappy with the resulting congress. As fewer and fewer can take pride in voting, it’s not surprising that so few actually vote.

This is not going to be another article about how Clinton and Trump were both horrible candidates and how the Democratic and Republican parties are more out-of-touch than ever. You may believe that; you may not. If you do, I don’t have to convince you. But even if you don’t — even if you found a 2016 candidate to vote for with pride—I think you should agree that the dissatisfaction, lack of pride, low turnout is a problem in itself.

This is missing 2016, which is 60.2%. But then, almost 54% of those voted against the winner, so that’s not much to be proud of.

Democracy is about the wisdom of the crowd. And that should mean the wisdom of at least half, not of 28%.

Our democracy not only should make more people proud; it can.

For years, I’ve been active in the theory and practice of voting reform. I learned python in the late 90s in order to help build an FAQ about voting methods; I’m a board member for electology.org, a voting methods nonprofit; and I helped the World Science Fiction Society design and democratically adopt a new voting method for the Hugo awards. As an activist, I know how easy it is to convince people that the current system is broken, but how hard it is to convince them that fixing it is possible and worth caring about.

For me, it comes down to pride in democracy. That should be America’s legacy to all its citizens. Even if I disagree with you, I believe that you have a right to that pride.

How does our current voting method betray that pride? As I said, it’s an easy case to make. By restricting you to vote for just one candidate, the usual method — called “plurality” or “first past the post” (FPTP)—forces you to worry about wasting that vote by not casting it for one of the two frontrunners. Some ignore that worry, and simply vote for their true favorite; others heed the worry, and make sure to vote for a frontrunner, which usually means a major party candidate, even if they honestly prefer someone else. Then everybody yells at everyone else, and few can remain proud. And even some of the best potential candidates see the broken system and often prefer not to participate rather than risk causing a spoiled election.

Aside from bad feelings between those who should be allies, there are many other ways FPTP is damaging. It leads to zero-sum thinking, including a penchant for mudslinging; who cares if wallowing into that mud turns some voters against you, as long as you can make sure it turns more of them against your opponent. It’s one of the factors that encourages campaigns to be so money-driven, so that the winners are often the most sold out; if the voting method actively discourages voters from taking a second look at a candidate unless they’re already viable, it’s important to spend money early to look viable. It allows gerrymandering, where the normal process of voters picking their representatives is turned on its head. It prevents new ideas from getting a fair hearing, as the two parties complacently enjoy their cushy power duopoly.

Let’s take a closer look at how FPTP affects the three kinds of voter pride:

Pride in ballot. It’s often not safe to cast a ballot for the candidate you truly prefer the most. And it’s hard to be proud of casting a ballot that ignores your true preference in order to vote strategically. Meanwhile, there might be a candidate you’d like even better who isn’t even running because of FPTP’s spoiler problems.

It’s often not safe to cast a ballot for the candidate you truly prefer the most. And it’s hard to be proud of casting a ballot that ignores your true preference in order to vote strategically. Meanwhile, there might be a candidate you’d like even better who isn’t even running because of FPTP’s spoiler problems. Pride in winning. Of course, not every voter can win every election. But a good voting method would make sure that at least half of the voters prefer the winner, if not necessarily above all other candidates, then at least over their most plausible rival. Meanwhile, because of FPTP (“assisted” by the electoral college), we get a president who was chosen by just 46% of the people who voted, and who polls suggest was probably the one of the last choices for a majority.

Of course, not every voter can win every election. But a good voting method would make sure that at least half of the voters prefer the winner, if not necessarily above all other candidates, then at least over their most plausible rival. Meanwhile, because of FPTP (“assisted” by the electoral college), we get a president who was chosen by just 46% of the people who voted, and who polls suggest was probably the one of the last choices for a majority. Pride in democracy. Yes, the U.S. is still the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. But if a majority of voters can’t have the other two kinds of pride, how can any of us have this kind?

We can do better. Here’s how.

There are different kinds of elections, and different voting methods to solve the problems we have with each. These days, everyone seems to want to talk about Trump, but I want to start out by describing a possible method for electing the House of Representatives and/or state legislatures. I want to start with this method because it shows how much is possible; how we can give almost all voters all three kinds of pride.

Yes: using the method I’m going to describe to you, almost everyone’s a winner, and not in some vacuous participation-trophy sense, but in a very concrete one. All voters could cast their vote for the candidate they most truly support; over 80% — probably over 90%—would see that vote help elect somebody they sympathize with; and that same portion would have as “their” representative somebody who would listen to them sincerely, not just as an irrelevant constituent whose vote they didn’t get and probably never will.

And the method achieves that, a basis of pride for all, without disrupting any of the (few, minor) good points of FPTP. Representatives would still have just as good a geographic spread; ballots would still be simple and voting would still be easy; and, in the transition, legitimately-popular incumbents would not be unseated for no good reason.

The method I’m talking about is called GOLD voting. It has 5 basic steps, each of which is specifically designed to increase turnout by allowing voters the kind of pride I’ve been talking about. Here they are, quickly; I’ll discuss each more below, explaining how they relate to pride.

Candidates rate each other and those ratings are made public. These ratings will be used to help find the best winners in step 4, while still keeping the voters’ task in step 2 simple. Voters choose a candidate and a vote transfer method. For the candidate, they can either put a check next to one of the candidates from their district (the same districts as in FPTP), or choose any valid candidate from outside their district (by bubbling in an error-safe code). For the transfer method, they have two options, with a sensible default: they can either trust their chosen candidate’s public ratings of others, or, if they don’t trust politicians, leave their vote to follow those of other voters from their same party. Pre-elimination of all but the strongest candidates from each district. This ensures that each district has a strong voice in choosing its primary representative, and helps prevent winners with only narrow-minded single-issue appeal. Winner selection of those candidates with enough votes. This involves eliminating the weakest candidates, and transferring votes from both eliminated candidates and those winning candidates who have more votes than they need. A transferred vote always goes to other candidates following the transfer method chosen by the voter who cast it. This process ensures that a supermajority of voters have a say in picking a winner; for instance, in a state with 9 representatives, at least 90% of voters would “win” a representative they sympathized with to some degree. Assign additional territory to winners so that even voters who voted against the winner from their local district are in the additional territory of a representative from the winning party that they sympathize with most.

That looks like a lot of steps, and so a lot of you are probably not sure you can trust this method to be both easy for voters and fair politically. But it is. As a voter, you’re only responsible for step 2; simply choose your favorite candidate, and either choose a transfer method or leave the default method for your choice of candidate. And as for whether you can trust that the other steps are fair… well, any proportional voting method has its complexities, but I hope I can convince you that every step above is well-justified.

Step 1: Candidates rate each other. This step ensures wise transfers in step 4, without requiring complicated ballots in step 2. Remember, if you don’t trust your chosen candidate to rate fairly, you can always choose to transfer your vote based on other voters, not on candidates. And if you do trust them, this step gives them real power to act as your representative in deciding how your vote will be transferred, even if they don’t end up winning a seat. This gives groups of voters, even those that aren’t big enough to elect their favorite candidate, an extra chance to proudly exercise their collective power.

Step 2: Vote. The ballot lists the candidates from your local district, so just choosing one of them is just as simple as under FPTP. But you also have the chance to pick any other candidate statewide. So you have a chance to vote for somebody from across the state who really speaks to you, whether it be because of their focus on an issue close to your heart, because of their charismatic ability to say what you’re thinking, or because of some aspect of their personal story that’s meaningful to you. This greater freedom to use your ballot to make a simple, proud statement will help raise turnout.

The other choice on your ballot is about how your vote will be transferred if your favorite doesn’t win. If your favorite ends up getting more than enough votes to win, the leftover portion of their votes will also get transferred in the same way. For voters who have researched and found the statewide candidate whom they most trust to represent them, the default is to extend that trust to the vote transfer process as well; so out-of-district votes use delegated transfer by default. For voters who just want to pick the local candidate from their preferred party, the assumption is that they care about party more than candidate, so the default is to transfer votes following other voters for your same party. For instance, if you use this option, and your favored candidate is eliminated, then when there are just two candidates from your party left who got 1000 and 2000 direct votes respectively, your vote would be split between those two in portions of 1/3 and 2/3. Of course, if you don’t like the default transfer method for your vote, you can always choose the other transfer method explicitly.

So the choice of transfer method is a way to express either pride in candidate or pride in party. For some people right now it might be hard to imagine wanting to express either, given how degraded they see both candidates and parties under FPTP. But with freedom for better candidates to run without spoiling the election, and with a viable path for new parties to grow (and thus also for voters to hold existing parties accountable and make them less complacent), I think that could change.

Step 3: pre-eliminate candidates without enough local support. In most cases, this step would eliminate all but the top two candidates in each district, based on local votes alone. But in some cases this could leave more or less than 2 in a district; more, if a 3rd-place candidate locally got exceptionally many votes from out of the district while still having decent support locally, or if the top 2 in the district have less than 50% of the vote combined; and fewer, if the second-place candidate in a district has fewer than half of the local votes of the first-place.

The point of this pre-elimination is twofold. First, it ensures a winner has a real connection to the district they’re running in, so that no district has a purely “carpetbagger” (or “helicopter”) representative. (Note that step 5 also helps resolve this problem, in a different way.) And second, it ensures that a candidate can’t get a seat by appealing only to a small, diffuse minority, such as a peculiar single-issue constituency spread across the state. Such appeal can help you win; but only if you also have enough mainstream and/or localized appeal to be among the strongest in your district.

In terms of pride, this rule ensures that a significant population will be proud of their local representative. It also is structured so that a local majority (over 50%) will never see all the local candidates they all like be eliminated.

4. Winner selection. This step works basically like Single Transferable Vote (STV), a well-known proportional representation method. Candidates who accumulate a “quota” of votes get a seat, where a “quota” is defined so that less than one quota will be ignored. (If you were electing just a single winner, this would be the same as requiring a majority to win; the quota is just over 50%, so that under 50% are ignored. With 9 candidates, the quota is just over 10%, so that over 9*10%=90% win and under 10% are ignored.)

This is the most complicated step of the process, proceeding in several rounds. In each round, either the strongest candidate wins if possible, or if not, the weakest candidate is eliminated; in either case, any portion of votes that isn’t used up as part of a winning quota is transferred. When a candidate wins in a district, the other candidates from that district are eliminated, to ensure 1 winner per district. Explaining all the ins and outs of this procedure is not simple, but the basic idea is well-understood, and experts trust the outcome to be proportional overall. Also, unlike regular STV, GOLD makes it easy for each precinct to publish its full results, so that anybody can check that the procedure was carried out correctly.

The upshot is that the winners will have several good characteristics that voters can be proud of:

They’ll meaningfully represent all but a small minority of voters. (It’s impossible to always get this unrepresented fraction down to zero, just as in a single-winner election a majority is the best you can do and it’s impossible to ensure that the winner will satisfy a supermajority.)

There will be one per district. This means the reform could be done on a state-by-state basis, without needing to change the 1967 federal statute that requires single-member districts. It also is a relief to incumbents, who can trust that, given the same voting behaviors, GOLD voting will get the same results as FPTP except when a change is necessary to ensure proportionality. In other words, if an incumbent is legitimately popular and if their party is not getting more than its fair share of seats under FPTP, then GOLD will not unseat them for no reason.

Step 5: assign extra territory. Once step 4 is over, all the winners are already chosen, so from the perspective of simply making laws, the process is done. But this step ensures that even voters who did not get a representative they like in their own district have one from a nearby distric twho will listen to them. So if you’re a Republican and a Democrat won your district, or vice versa, your party will still assign your district as “extra territory” to one of its winning representatives. That way, essentially everybody will have a sympathetic lawmaker to whom they can bring their concerns. It’s hard to be proud of a local representative you oppose, and much easier with a nearby rep who you helped elect.

All that glitters…

GOLD is a proportional representation (PR) voting method designed around maximizing turnout by maximizing voter pride. But it’s a relatively new proposal (less than a year old, as I write this), so it’s understandable that some people are still skeptical. That’s OK. There are other proportional methods, most of which would be far better than FPTP, and any of which would resolve the problem of gerrymandering.

This article isn’t about gerrymandering, but GOLD and other PR methods would all decisively solve that problem.

Here are a couple:

STV, single transferable vote, is a method that involves voters ranking candidates in order of preference. Like all PR methods, this resolves the issue of gerrymandering and reduces wasted votes to a small minority. But ballots can be far more complex than under GOLD, and parties can splinter into single-issue candidates.

MMP, mixed member proportional. This elects some candidates from districts, and then others based on party to balance the proportions. Again, this is a PR method so it resolves gerrymandering, and the ballots are approximately as simple as GOLD. But voters don’t have the freedom to vote across district lines for the candidate they like the best, so it would probably boost turnout less, and leave parties less accountable to their voters.

Either of the above options, as well as others such as “open list”, would be a huge improvement over FPTP. But I think that GOLD would beat either of them for increasing turnout.

In the end, turnout comes down to pride in democracy. I hope I’ve convinced you that GOLD is a workable proposal, and worth looking at further.

(This article is already long enough, but I’d be happy to discuss paths for adoption in the comments. And if you’re excited about promoting voting method reform, check out electology.org, a smart nonprofit on these issues.)