Katy Levinson argues that we should consider voting third party in the US presidential election if we live in safe states. But no matter how many people follow her advice, it won’t be enough to make a third party viable. Our voting system stacks the deck in favor of two parties, and to have a third or fourth, we would have to reform that system.

Most US voters would like a third major party:

Gallup poll showing that 60% of Americans want a third major party

You’d think that, with 60% support for the idea, it would be inevitable that one or more third parties would arise. But that doesn’t account for the effects of our voting system. We saw it in 2000; polls suggested that Nader was viewed favorably by 28% of voters, but only 2.7% actually voted for him. Perhaps the other 25% were afraid that if they voted Nader, they might allow the “greater evil” (that is, Bush or Gore, whichever they liked least) to win. And it turned out that such a fear was well-founded; Bush ended up winning the official Florida tally by just around 500 votes, such a tiny margin that if Nader had not been on the ballot, it is almost inevitable that Gore would have won. (There were of course a number of factors besides Nader that could have changed that outcome if they had been missing; but that’s a discussion for another time.)

The lesson is: in our current system, First Past the Post (FPTP), where you are only allowed to vote for one candidate, the game theory is clear. The rational strategy is that, if you think your vote has any chance of making a difference, to estimate which two candidates are going to be the frontrunners — historically, always the Republican and Democratic nominees—and vote for whichever one of those two you prefer. That makes two-party domination into a self-perpetuating duopoly. This is known as Duverger’s Law: any country using FPTP will tend to have just two viable parties in any given election (though which two parties are viable may vary in elections across different regions of the country).

And yes, this is a problem. Like a monopoly firm, the two parties become unaccountable to the custo— I mean, voters. It’s no coincidence that the average American’s satisfaction with Congress and with Comcast are comparable.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Voting systems like approval voting, where you can vote for as many candidates as you want, would break this “lesser evil” bind, and allow third parties to grow naturally, because if you think a third party is best, you’re always free to approve them, whether or not you think they can win. It still gives the same voting power to everyone: for every ballot that approves some candidates, you can imagine an equal and opposite ballot that approves only the others, and this balance in voting is preserved independent of which of the two approves more.

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Until we reform our voting system to use approval voting (or some other improved system; voting theorists have come up with many, and almost unanimously agree that FPTP is among the worst systems possible), simply voting for a third party won’t help it become viable. Yes, if you are careful to vote third party in safe states only, your vote won’t cause a disaster this year. But suppose you help a third party reach the 5% threshold to get public funding next cycle, or the 15% threshold to get into the debates. How is that helpful, if you’ll still be using FPTP in four years, so that the more votes the party gets, the more likely it is to be a spoiler?

And about that 5% funding threshold. The amount of funds a party gets for passing that threshold is 20 million dollars, times the vote fraction the party got, divided by the average vote fraction of the top two parties. At 5%, that’s about $0.35 per vote. Your vote is worth more than 35 cents. If you want a third party to be funded, give them a buck or two; don’t imagine that a vote that in the best of cases will give them a few dimes is really the way to level the playing field.

How can we get approval voting (or other voting reform) to happen? First off, we need to educate each other. It should be de rigeur that any time somebody mentions third parties, they lament the lack of approval voting that would be fair to them. Second, we need to organize; at electology.org, we’re on the job, and we’d welcome your help. And third, we need to push for reform at the municipal and state levels, where elections are governed. The presidential election is actually just a combination of 50 state elections (plus DC), so to fix that one, we’d need an interstate compact, with states representing at least half of the electoral votes signing on.

So yes. The two parties are in many ways broken, and it’s past time for new ideas and new voices. But if we want that to happen, we have to be strategic about it. Keep our current dysfunctional system, and it will never happen. Even if one of the current parties dies, another will replace it, and we’ll still be stuck with two options. But if we change the voting system, it will happen naturally. Let’s go!