While most of you reading this column voted this month, most of the people you see walking down the street did not.
Blaming voter apathy, however, may not be the answer. It’s like blaming the bumps for the measles – it’s a symptom not the cause.
Instead, consider this: The United Sates has one of the lowest rates of voter turnout in the free world. Is it just coincidence, that they are also one of the last advanced democracies to use a winner take all system of voting?
In a winner take all system, everyone votes, and whoever gets the most votes wins. While it sounds perfectly fair, it is not.
Too often, under winner take all, the winning candidate is an outlier that most of the voters did not want – the perfect example – the primary nomination of Donald Trump.
Let’s say there are eight people running for the school board’s one open position. There has been rampant juvenile crime on the busses lately, so Tommy Terrible, the candidate who wants to ban school busses, has convinced about 15 percent of the voters (mostly those who already take their kids to school) to support him. The other 85 percent, however, hate this idea. So he has no chance of winning – right?
Wrong.
If the seven remaining candidates divide the opposition votes, with no individual getting more than 15 percent, Terrible wins the election. He is now on the school board even though 85 percent voted against him.
After a few elections like this, voters will start voting strategically. This means they vote only for the candidate closest to their view that also has the best chance of winning. It is called the spoiler effect. They don’t vote their first choice, or even their second – they only vote to keep Tommy Terrible out of office.
If this sounds familiar, it should. How often do we hear complaints of how there are no good candidates with a chance of winning. Yet we vote anyway – it’s our duty. Many just give up.
As people continue to vote strategically, the smaller parties drop out rather than spend money in futile efforts, leading eventually to a two party system. That is where we are today. The two parties will change control periodically, but third parties have no chance, and most voters feel they have no real say in government.
We call it voter apathy and blame it on lazy voters.
Negative campaigning grows when the purpose of campaigns is as much about scaring the public off the competition as it is satisfying your base. Major parties like the spoiler effect. It makes them less answerable to small interests as long as they can scare those interests away from the opposition.
A simple change in our voting system could go far to fix these problems.
Instant runoff voting (IRV) is one method several states are trying.
IRV, allows voters to number each candidate on the ballot by preference. In an election for a single office, only the number one preference on each ballot is counted in the first round. If, in that first round, a candidate gets more than 50 percent of the votes, he or she wins the election.
However, if no one gets 50 percent, the two bottom candidates are dropped, and the ballots recounted. The ballots that had originally numbered a dropped candidate as their first choice, are now re-allocated to count as a vote for whomever they selected as their second choice. The process continues until one candidate reaches the 50 percent mark and wins the election. No one has to visit the polls more than once, and the winner is always the one that the most voters actually chose.
Voters, seeing that their vote really matters, vote again.
Parties must stop alienating small groups so that they will choose them as their second or third choice. Because they can no longer depend on demonizing large swaths of the population, negative campaigning decreases.
Major parties must work harder to lock in voters – so changes in voting systems are difficult to get past the party dominated legislatures – kind of like re-districting reform.
Regardless, fourteen major cities in the U.S. already use Instant Runoff Voting. And Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), another alternative system that claims it can beat Gerrymandering, is used at some level in more than 30 states – including some party elections in Virginia.
As is so often the case, grass roots efforts started the ball rolling.
Perhaps the two major parties might consider IRV or RCV for their next presidential primary.
A new voting system is not the only fix needed to help solve voter apathy. Fixing Gerrymandering would also help, as would finding more innovative and convenient ways to vote.
But that’s a discussion for another time.
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Punchbowl Shelter
Sad… I wonder if anything will change for the better in my lifetime… However, i am thankful I still live in the greatest ciuntry on earth.
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This is actually changing now. Main is trying this out statewide and other states are looking at it. Thanks for the comment.
Hugh
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