In all my discussions, I haven’t found many people who really like the two-party political system we have here in America. This is in spite of the fact that most people DO consider themselves a member of one of the parties in question. Most people won’t consider a 3rd-party candidate for fear of “throwing away” their vote, while at the same time candidates like Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel prove that there are plenty of diverse opinions even inside the current parties. However, thanks to the primary system most of those opinions will have no candidate come election night.
One idea often floated is preference voting: selecting your first, second, and third choice candidates. There are several problems with this, the biggest being that votes would need to be weighted and that the voting system would likely become too complicated for some voters.
My idea is a bit more simple. Instead of preference voting, why not allow multiple voting? Votes would be counted in the same way as they are today – with the winner determined by total number of votes. The only difference would be that when you mark your ballot, you are allowed to mark as many names as you wish to vote for.
Consider the following contrived – but not unheard of – example: an election between Mr. Green (with above average support), Mr. Dem, Mr. Repub and Mrs. Liber. In a normal election, the results might look something like the following:
Green: 15,000
Dem: 50,000
Repub: 55,000
Liber: 2,500
Green effectively hurt the cause of the overall left simply by running, yet was no where close to winning. Even so, in an election like this, you know that Dem picked up a substantial number of votes from people who would PREFER Green, but didn’t want to throw away their vote. Also, Green supporters would prefer Dem as a backup plan than losing to Repub.
Under my system, you could vote for Green AND Dem. or Repub AND Liber. Or if you’re a Centrist with a capital-C – vote Dem and Repub. Given the overall sentiment, the election under those rules may end up looking something like this:
Green: 32,000
Dem: 63,000
Repub: 55,500
Liber: 15,000
Results like this do two seemingly contradictory things: it protects the mainstream parties from spoilers in close elections, while at the same time giving 3rd-party candidates the ability to ACTUALLY compete. Instead of 2 parties attempting to consolidate every vote on one side of the idle to squeak out a victory, you’ll end up with 4 or 5 strong parties more accurately representing their various members.
February 20th, 2008 at 10:34 AM
Nice post. I got to your site cause I’ve started using Scruffy. But I noticed this link in the corner of the page.
I agree that if we could have 1st, 2nd, 3rd choices, Greens and Libertarians would make it to the political map. A couple of extra thoughts (among many):
I think a Green-Liberation merger/intersection (i.e. keep the intersection, ditch the non-matches) would be the political winner in America today. I think there is a 5% chance that could happen this year if Clinton gets the super-delegates to give her the Dem nomination even with Obama waxing her in the primaries. If that happens, I could see the Obama movement splitting off from the Dems, collecting the far left (Green) plus far right (Ron Paul) into a new party. of course, that’s unlikely. 95% chance Obama will just win.
We Americans don’t “do” ambiguity. We “do” zero-sum. It’s not just in politics. It’s everything. Look at sport MVPs, Oscars, etc. It makes no sense to pick only one guy to praise when it’s obvious multiple people contributed equally. But that’s our world. It’s different in Europe, Canada, and most other places. So back to politics, the only paths I see are: (a) Obama revolutionizes the Dems to bring them toward Green and Libertarian; or (b) Obama splits off from the Dems (in the 5% scenario above), dealing them a death blow (a la the Whigs in the 1800s), and creates a new political party out of the ashes that merges Green and Libertarian – bringing us back to two parties.