Guest post by Mike Franzé,
STAR Voting California Chapter Leader
It may be difficult to look out on our country these days. There’s so much hatred, fear, and division that the future seems pretty grim.
A recent study from Pew Research found that despite being increasingly interested in the election, only 49% of voters were happy with last year’s presidential candidates. In 2016 satisfaction with the candidates themselves was near the lowest in decades, and roughly 90% of Biden and Trump supporters believed that victory for the other candidate would lead to “lasting harm” to the United States. The only thing we seem to agree on lately is how polarized we are.
Many blame social media, the mainstream media, identity politics, or foreign interference for the increase in polarization, but while they may accelerate it, I believe the real driver is our "choose-one-only" plurality voting and primary system. Luckily, we have something new called STAR voting that can help cure polarization and begin healing our democracy.
Political Parties and Polarization
I think of political parties like gravitational fields, the larger they are the stronger their pull and the further their reach. If you’re near one you might find yourself drawn in. There’s nothing wrong with this by itself. Like minded people can accomplish great things when they come together. The issue comes when that party becomes so large, and when its pull becomes so strong, that when it moves, you move with it. At this point your party begins to determine your political beliefs rather than the other way around.
In a healthy society we would have multiple parties scattered across the political spectrum. If your beliefs change or you become dissatisfied with the party, with enough energy, you can escape into orbit looking for an alternative. Or if your party changes over time you don’t have to be dragged along with it.
In the USA, instead of having multiple parties, we have two large political parties that are very far apart ideologically and making a jump would require too much energy. Some might be able to escape orbit and make the journey, but most will be unable to break free of their original party. This is because our voting system punishes voters for voting third party and rewards candidates for being more polarizing. Plurality voting forces us into a two party system and partisan primaries create even more polarized candidates, disenchanting many in the middle, and forcing the parties even further apart.
This isn’t anything new, many have believed for years that we need multiple parties. The difference now is that we have a clear solution for how to get there.
Plurality Voting and The Partisan Pizza Party
In the plurality voting system used in the United States voters cast their vote for a single candidate and the candidate with the most votes wins. While this sounds like the obvious democratic system it actually drives us towards a polarized two party system.
Imagine you are tasked with organizing a series of office parties and you need to decide which kind of pizza to order. For reasons that only exist in metaphors you can only choose one type of pizza. You decide to use a democratic system and allow your coworkers to vote.
For the first office party everyone votes for their favorite pizza including pepperoni, sausage, meat lover’s, cheese, veggie, mushroom, vegan, and pineapple. Meat lover’s ends up being the winner with 35% of the votes, however, most of your coworkers are not happy with the results. 65% didn’t vote for meat lover’s and a large number voted for a pizza that was quite far away in the pizza spectrum.
For the second office party the voters remember how unhappy they were with the last pizza and decide to vote strategically. The mushroom, vegan, and pineapple voters back the veggie pizza and in response the pepperoni and sausage voters back the meat lover’s. The result is a narrow victory for veggie. A majority of the voters are no longer voting honestly for their favorite pizza and instead voting against their least favorite pizza.
For the third office party the pepperoni voters, unhappy that they lost in the previous election, decide to run as a 3rd party hoping to appeal to the more moderate voters. As a result the meat lover’s and pepperoni split their vote and veggie wins again, but this time with less than 50% of the vote.
Does this sound familiar? In only two elections voters have fallen into a two party system and by the third election voters have learned that voting 3rd party backfires. Voters have learned that they must vote strategically against their least favorite candidate and that third parties will spoil the election. Campaigns turn negative trying to scare swing voters into voting for their candidate, and we begin to demonize each other and the entire situation can be traced back to the fact that voters couldn't express their preferences and could only vote for a single candidate.
In the real world we have learned to just go with cheese pizza. It might not be everyone’s first choice, but most people will be satisfied with it. Unfortunately in real elections we don’t know who the cheese pizza candidate is. We need a new voting system that can determine which candidate would best represent the will of the people.
Partisan Primaries
When we throw partisan primaries into the mix the amount of strategic voting increases drastically. Because primaries use the same voting system as general elections, we end up with the same hyper-polarization within each party that we see between the major parties. We saw it with Bernie and Hillary and with Trump and, well, not Trump. Primary voters find themselves thinking about which primary candidate is most likely to win against the primary candidate they dislike the most.
Then they’re faced with the electability question. On top of the strategic voting for the party nomination they need to consider which candidate is most likely to win in the general election against the opposing party’s candidate they dislike. As a result voters are forced to make very difficult choices rather than simply voting for their preferred candidate. Often the more polarizing candidate wins, causing the party to shift further from the center.
Finally, in districts that are considered “safe” where the electability question is not a concern, candidates are rewarded for going further from the center to secure their party’s nomination. Because the opposing party has a small chance of winning, the district is left with a winner that is polarizing and doesn’t represent them.
Breaking this pattern requires empowering voters to express a more nuanced opinion. After all, the world is not black and white. In order to find consensus we need to be able to honestly express who our favorite is, but we also need to empower and incentivize voters to show their preference order between candidates and convey which ones they would be okay with if it comes down to it.
In our society the choose one only voting method seems unshakeable, but there are actually a number of more expressive voting methods out there, and some have the power to deliver much more representative results.
What is STAR Voting
STAR stands for Score-Then-Automatic-Runoff, and that’s exactly how it works. In a STAR election voters score each candidate from 0 (least preferred) to 5 (most preferred). The two candidates with the highest total scores advance to the runoff and the candidate each voter gave the higher score to gets their vote. So, if the finalists are cheese and meat lover’s and you gave cheese a 3 and meat lover’s a 1, your vote would go to cheese. Even though you gave a 5 to veggie, you still got to express your preferences in the runoff.
In STAR elections it's safe to vote your conscience without worrying about voting strategically or spoiler candidates. Whether or not your favorite can win your vote goes to the finalist you prefer.
Where STAR Voting Can Be Used
Single Winner General Elections
STAR is perfect for single winner elections, district based local elections, statewide elections like the senate, and even nationwide elections like the presidential election.
What if Georgia had instead used STAR Voting? Georgia could have skipped the primary altogether because they wouldn’t have had to worry about vote splitting, and voters could have scored all the candidates according to their preferences. This would have saved their state a lot of money, ensured the most representative results possible, and gotten the results instantly instead of waiting months for a whole separate runoff election.
Multi-winner Elections
In some cases, including multi-member districts, multi-winner elections make the most sense. In that case, STAR Voting can be used to determine the first winner and then the process is repeated to find the second winner, and so on, until all of the seats are filled.
Partisan and Nonpartisan Primaries
STAR Voting is adaptable, and there are a few ways that the system can be used for primaries. STAR Voting is accurate with many candidates in the race, and it finds majority preferred winners when they exist, so in many situations primaries can be skipped all together.
For partisan primaries, STAR Voting would allow voters to honestly support the candidates that best represent them. For nonpartisan or jungle primaries multi-winner STAR voting could advance the top 5 candidates, which could allow major parties with multiple factions to have more than one candidate advance, bringing more diversity to the general election pool, rather than just advancing candidates that represent the extremes of each party. Imagine, for example, a general election that included Bernie, Hillary, Trump, and Rubio (plus third party candidates) where voters could honestly score all of them. STAR Voting would then find the two candidates with the most support overall, and then would elect the one who was preferred by the majority.
Multi-winner Proportional Representation Elections
In Proportional STAR for a multi-winner election, ballots are tallied with the goal of selecting winners that are proportionally representative of the voters. To return to our pizza metaphor, if we could order 4 types of pizza and 25% of your coworkers highly prefer vegan, proportional representation would ensure that one of those pizzas would be vegan.
How Can STAR Voting Help Fight Polarization
The main reason why STAR Voting would fight polarization is that voters who don’t identify with either of the two major parties would be able to honestly vote their preferences. Moderate or third party candidates would suddenly be viable, assuming they did a good job at representing the voters, and familiar concepts like wasting your vote, or voting lesser evil would become things of the past.
Another reason is that it gives voters who closely identify with a political party an out.
With STAR Voting we could have multiple viable parties from across the political spectrum. Going back to the gravitational field analogy, voters who are dissatisfied with their party would be able to make it into orbit and the jump to a nearby party would be much less risky. Voters could support the candidates they like, regardless of party, and when people's political beliefs change, they would have the freedom to seek out new candidates who are on the same page.
Lastly, we could get rid of partisan primaries and political parties could run more than one candidate. Voters could express their preferences without worrying about which one is likely to win the primary, which one you don’t want to win the primary, or which one is most likely to win in the general election. They can simply score all the candidates according to their preferences.
With STAR Voting we can start voting for candidates we want instead of voting against candidates we hate.
How Do We Get STAR Voting?
There are currently 3 ballot initiatives and a statewide legislative bill, HB 3250 for STAR Voting underway in Oregon and a number of municipalities are considering a change to STAR as part of the regular charter review processes. Backed by the Equal Vote Coalition, chapters in California, North Carolina, New York, and Texas are gearing up to tackle local and statewide initiatives.
Momentum surrounding voting reform is at an all time high, and STAR Voting presents an elegant solution that truly delivers.