Happy Emergency

The reelection of Senator Lisa Murkowski with 40% of the vote against Joe Miller and Scott McAdams is the first write-in victory for a senator since the 1954 election of Strom Thurmond. 

My questions to America are: Why wasn’t Mukowski on the ballot? There were 5 candidates on the ballot, why did Mukowski have to resort to convincing people to hand-write her name on that dubious blank line? And why is it ok to elect someone with only 40% of the vote?

The write-in victory in Alaska highlights two tragic flaws in American elections.

1) Parties can only endorse only 1 candidate

2) Voters are forced to pick only 1 candidate

Each of these problems have very simple solutions with modern technology, but we are using 18th century government in a 21th century world.

The Party Problem

Parties are bad. Bad for discourse and bad for democracy. The founding fathers knew this, it was one of the motivating factors for creating a republic. In The Federalist Papers, particularly # 10, Madison clearly elucidates the corrupting influence of political parties. It’s 9 pages long, if you haven’t read it, read it here after this post, at least the beginning, you owe it to your country. Unfortunately there were technological and logistical reasons that their imagination, and proposed solutions, were limited, thus we get: Elect the individual not the party. Sure, that helps some. Still, in practice political parties are little more than gangs, engendering us-and-them emotional conflict instead of reasoned discourse. 

Let’s bring the issue up to 20th century ingenuity standards: allow parties to endorse instead of nominate. Why have a primary to choose one nominee when the party could put them all on the general election ballot?  Too many candidates on the ballot, right? We’ll deal with that in a minute, any other problems? No. It would be great for parties – if we insist on keeping them – now they can show a greater diversity of ideas and not be forced to defend and justify the every opinion of a flawed candidate.

The 1 candidate tragedy

When you go to an ice cream shop and ask for a flavor, if they don’t have it you get to pick your next favorite, right? Elections work the same way in many parts of the world, and even in some states and cities in the US. 

The different voting systems go by various names, instant-runoff voting is one of the most common, but they are all considered preferential voting. I prefer the Condorcet method, but they are all vastly better than our current method.

The idea is simple but powerful: you prefer some candidates over others. With preference voting, you select candidates in order of preference, then the candidate preferred by the most people over the others is the winner. 

Our current system is called first-past-the-post. Whichever candidate gets the *most* votes wins. It is perfect in elections with 2 candidates; which do you prefer, A or B? However our constitution doesn’t actually limit the country to two political parties. In the Alaskan election we discussed at the top, there were 5 candiates on the ballot, plus Murkowski, equals 6 candidates. It’s possible then that the winner could get only 1/6 of the votes + 1, 16.7% of the vote. How would you feel if your senator was elected by only 16% of your state? In the case of Alaska yesterday, only 40% of the state supported Murkowski. Our current rules say that’s ok.

Republicans, remember Perot in 1992? Bush lost to Clinton because of him. Democrats, remember Ralph Nadar in 2000? Gore lost to Bush because of him. Who did we get mad at then? We got mad at the “3rd” party candidates, and vowed never to vote for them again. The failure wasn’t on the part of “spoiler” candidates who were being good citizens participating in democracy, the failure was on the part of the election system. 

With preferential voting, particularly the Condorcet method, you can never have a candidate elected with less that a majority of the voters supporting them.

Had we used preferential voting in the 2008 general election, you could have listed every primary candidate in your order of preference, without fear that you’d “throw away” your vote. If your first choice wasn’t very popular, then your 2nd choice would count, and so on. Maybe the national consensus candidate wouldn’t have been Obama, maybe it would have been McCain, or Biden, or Huckabee, or Richardson, or Ron Paul. 

Let’s stop “spoilers,” “strategic voting,” and settling for the lesser of two evils. There are more than 2 solutions to every problem, but when we insist on a binary, red/blue, us/them, left/right world, we’ll continue to have crappy candidates and political discourse as sport. We’re smarter than that, we just haven’t all realized it yet. Spread the word.