True Majority: Taking the Game Theory Out of Democracy

Guess what?  I’ve written two posts and dashboard still invites me to write my “first blog post”.

Experimenting with the mechanics of blog posting with WP.  What will dashboard look like when I post this?

In 1824, the United States had its only presidential election in which there was no majority in the electoral college.  The constitution did not accept the idea of giving the office to the person with the most votes; i.e, it rejected the idea that with 3 candidates, candidate A could get 35%, candidate B could get 33% and candidate C could get 32%, and the election would simply to go Candidate A.  What if candidates B and C stood for similar principals, but the believers in those principals couldn’t make up their minds whether B or C were the best to implement them?  What if 35% of the voters liked candidate A’s principals, while 65% abhorred them? Now suppose that of the 65%, 33% thought B was the best choice, and and 80% of these thought C the 2nd best choice, and 32% preferred C best of all, but of these 32%, 75% thought B the 2nd best choice.

In a ranked choice election system, with more than 2 candidates, the candidate with the fewest votes is out of the running, while those who voted for that candidate are not treated as having voted for their second choice.

         * * * Work out the math * * *

Candidate B would be a strong winner in this case.  Intuitively, it seems to me that if 65% of the electorate favored either B or C, and their principals were very similar and very different from those of A, B would be much more representative of the desires of the people than A.

 

A little more history, because, why not?

In 1824, there were four candidates running for president, all of whom identified as Democratic Republicans, or the “Party of Jefferson”.  In the first 20 years under the constitution, that party and the Federalist party made up the first two-party system.  During the War of 1812, a convention was held mostly or solely of Federalists, to decide whether New England should secede from the Union.  They did not choose to secede, but the Federalist Party was finished, from that point on.  This lead to the so called “era of good feelings” because technically, there was only one party, but should an era of good feelings end in a four way presidential election?

The state of Maine, after an experience similar to the example I gave, actually instituted ranked choice voting.  Everything I read about it convinces me that Instant Runoff, or Ranked Choice Voting would be an effective way, and the only way that could act quickly enough, to bring U.S. elections back to some level of sanity, and end this era of jerking back and forth between extremes.  I am not ready to make the case, but if you want to see the case made, you can go to FairVote.org, the main organization promoting it, or go to Youtube and search for “Ranked Choice Voting”.  The benefits seem to include

1. Elections more about what candidates would do, rather than dirt on the other candidate.
2. Higher turnout, even in off-year primaries, which should mean less emphasis on “turning out the base” and more on issues that the electorate is trying to understand and decide about.
3. Less chance, I believe, of the least desired candidate being elected.

I would like to be able to say something more profound and convincing, but have been writing partial drafts and trying to get to that point for too long.  What I hope for is that some like minded, or simply intrigued people will respond, leading to some discussion in the comments.  I am only interested in reasoned responses, and not in name-calling regardless of what side it comes from.

A little more history because, why not?

In case you have ever heard that the founding fathers spoke of the U.S. only as a “republic”, and they abhorred the word “democracy”, the truth is that “democracy” and “republicanism” were about equally alarming to the Federalists, and their opposition found both labels acceptable.  There was a time when “democracy” meant that a vote was conducted to decide every issue, which only worked in Greek city-states, while our own system came to be called a “representative democracy” because we elected representatives to do the actual voting on actual issues.