Again, we are stuck choosing the lesser of two evils. How did we end up here?

I’d like to explain how the way we vote is inherently unequal and leads to misrepresentation of America as a whole. First we’ll give some data. Next, we’ll ask what we really want from an election and how to get it. Then we’ll discuss vote splitting. Or just watch Mark Frohnmayer explain it in 5 minutes: youtube/equal-vote.

(This won’t be about whether the candidates are representative of the party, and it won’t be about election fraud.)

Favorability

Polling companies are professionals at determining population preferences and they have picked a system that allows a voter to express an opinion on every candidate. (If our election system allows us to only express an opinion on one candidate, how well can it produce a result that reflects voter preferences?)

Pollsters asked all Americans, “Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of this candidate?” The % of favorable opinion is also known as the approval rating.

Sanders had the most support from all Americans. That includes Democrats and Republicans. It was a slow start. In general, people didn’t know about Sanders back in Jan 2015, and they didn’t know about Kasich either. Time passed, and people decided they could support Sanders and Kasich. The other candidates seemed to be better liked as people got to know them, except Clinton. Others had surges of support. Carson had a bump around October last year.

I’d like to draw attention to the question of favorability. This kind of question is a very democratic one. It asks *all* Americans about *all* the candidates.

CGP Grey explains: youtube/easy-voting

This is not what we do in the primaries. It is not what we do in the general election. Those are the polls that count. You could say that the Republicans and the Democrats shouldn’t worry about including each other. You might say it worked for Republicans (but see part 2 below), and it worked for Democrats, but I say it didn’t work for the country as a whole. Partisanship has become worse in the past decade. The primaries make partisanship worse. They split the country into two. And then we wonder why we have so much trouble putting the halves back together.

Why do we have primaries? Let’s get to the basics.

Equality

What is the purpose of an election? To choose our representatives.

The most basic requirement of an election is that our votes should carry equal weight. Say I cast a vote. Then if you want to, you should be able to counter-balance my vote. Balance is the test of equality.

For example, say we choose between two people. I vote one. You vote for the other. We exactly balance each other. We are equal.

But if there are three candidates, there is a problem. To quote Mark Frohnmayer, “Because we’re limited to one choice, every time there are more than two candidates, the more similar ones split supporters’ votes.”

So people who like more than one candidate have less power and are told to not waste their vote. (Also you could argue they end up voting for the lesser evil with the most money. So politicians need money and only represent special interests.)

And we don’t get the representation we deserve.

Also, why don’t we have viable 3rd parties? To quote Mark Frohenmayer again,

“Independents without big backing don’t even get a fair count. Instead they’re villified for participating because as they become more successful, their mere presence on the ballot risks spoiling the outcome in electing the greater evil. It’s actually this limit of one choice, the spoiler-effect-inequality, that leads directly to our one-dimensional two-party dominated political system.” youtube/equal-vote

Next, let’s see some evidence of how vote splitting affected the Republican primary.

Vote Splitting

Complete Republican Primary

The Republican primary was crowded.

There seemed to be some decent candidates. A typical approval rating for a candidate was 30%. But instead of showing near 30% support, candidates were stuck around 5%. Vote splitting was a major problem because Republican voters were only allowed to state their first choice.

In this type of voting, there is a strategy. The reason there is a strategy is that people will want to vote so that the guy they hate doesn’t win, but they only get one choice, and they can’t just say on the ballot that they don’t like that one guy.

Skew

Notice that most of the candidates are pushed to single digit poll numbers. This is unfair. Although they don’t have as much support as the top candidates, they really do have more support than the single digits.

See the difference in shape? Notice that approval votes are mostly on the high end. First-rank votes are mostly on the low end. It is a perfect example of skewness. That means we have a nice term for how the support for a candidate is exaggerated. First-rank voting *skews* the vote counts to exaggerate the lead.

The 5 best candidates are all about even in support. But vote-splitting exaggerates this 4% difference to a 36% lead!

Vote splitting is very real. That’s how we got here. How do we get out?

Approval Voting

Look again at the chart at the beginning. It asks all Americans, “Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of this candidate?”.

This question is better than asking voters for their first-ranked candidate. Again, first-rank voting only lets us say something about one candidate! What about the others? They have support, but the election doesn’t show it.

Importantly, it passes the equality test. Say I like a candidate. Then, if you wanted to, you can counter-balance my vote by not liking the candidate. And you could do that for every candidate I like. Our votes would carry equal weight. We would be equal.

Mark Frohenmayer pushed for this in Oregon in 2014. He got halfway. There is now an open primary in California, Washington, and Louisiana so that the votes of *all* Americans are counted. But we still need to ask Americans about *all* the candidates. See Mark’s TED talk: youtube/equal-vote.

We need to use approval voting to decide who is president. In other countries, politics is divided along ethnic lines, and political partisanship is even worse. We can end political partisanship. We can make decisions without leaving out half of the country. There are things we can *all* agree on.

(Mark Frohnmayer’s equalvote.co/this-is-not-the-status-quo)

(Another great group electology.org/videos)

(Also, it can be argued that in terms of electoral fairness, almost any other voting system in use or consideration worldwide is better than what the US has.)

Recap of Presidential Election Polls

Look at how different approval ratings and first-rank votes are!

Notice that even though Democrats voted for Clinton, it was Sanders who really was liked by the most Americans. If we didn’t have separate primaries, Sanders could have won.

The Republican primary was crowded and the vote was split. Trump was anti-establishment and … one of a kind. There were many establishment candidates that split their support, so Trump got the early lead. Also, Kasich was a little late, but you could argue that once he gained more media coverage, he got more support than Trump or Cruz.

We will see in the next post how first-rank voting (AKA “one choice plurality”) and vote-splitting skewed the Senate races in California and Louisiana.

Next: Skewed Elections for US Senate

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