First this great quote by Sollace in her first diary:
“The future doesn’t happen. We make it.”
And then the first of over 200 comments by Pirran:
I think the multi-party system is our best hope, but that requires structural changes to eliminate the wasted vote problem. The easiest, but less complete, version of change is ranked choice voting, which, providing it makes it through the current NYC mess, is starting to have a real chance.
Meanwhile, at Politico…
Even though last week’s fumble by the city Board of Elections — in which it released incorrect vote tallies before fixing the totals 24 hours later — was not specifically related to the ranked-choice system, the complex way of choosing candidates is drawing new scrutiny as New Yorkers are going on two weeks waiting to learn the identity of the city’s likely next mayor.
Today, at our Tell Them Tuesday Rally, a friend of mine admitted he actually read my latest Daily Kos diary. I was flattered—until he told me it was too long; so here I was strive to be as succinct as possible. Especially since my previous diaries about Three-Option Voting all bombed.
At lunch following our rally someone asked why in the world the results in New York’s Mayor race they still haven’t picked a winner. I had an answer. I said with Three-Option Voting, the results would have been known the night of the election. I then briefly explained T.O.V. (Three-Option Voting) and convinced anyone listening it was better. I wisely chose to refrain from mentioning at lunch that I came accidentally up with Three-Option Voting and realized TOV is good.
I was re-reading Gaming the Vote, an excellent book on different voting methods including Rank Voting. I hadn’t read the book in ten years but remembered three vital principles.
- Any of the proposed new systems is preferable to our current system of plurality voting—especially if there are more than two candidates.
- No system is perfect.
- Some of the new voting systems are better than others.
The author was saving the best for last, which included Rank Choice Voting and Approval Voting.
What happened was I “came up” with a new system because, 80% through the book, I couldn’t precisely remember the details of the two best systems in the book, and accidentally combined them together taking features of both.
Very simply, with Approval Voting you vote for all the candidates you approve of (+1). The rest of the candidates get no vote (0).
With Rank Voting (aka Rank Choice Voting) you rank all the candidates on the ballot from first to last, such as first choice, second choice, third choice, fourth choice, etc.
The problem with Approval Voting is that you only have two options; approve or not approve.
The problem with Rank Voting is that you can easily have too many options, such as what occurred on the New York ballot with twelve candidates. It is painstakingly difficult to differentiate between say 8th and 9th place. It also apparently is difficult and time-consuming to tabulate the results.
Three-Voting is identical to Rank voting, providing there are only two candidates. First choice, second choice, and third choice; could be expressed mathematically as +2, +1, 0; or +1, 0, -1. Although the math is the same for tabulating results, I think it is simple to remember +1 is for a candidate you approve of, 0 is for a candidate you are neutral about or is your second choice, and -1 is for a candidate you don’t approve of.
Yet Three-Option Voting works just as well no matter how many candidates are on the ballot. The difference is you still have only three options for each candidate. If five candidates are running, you could vote your approval of two of them by giving each of them +1; show your indifference for two others by giving each of them 0; and show your disdain for one candidate by giving him a vote of -1.
Moreover, you don’t have to be a mathematician to appreciate, that it would be easy to record all the results. A candidates total votes is simply his positive (+1) votes minus his negative votes (-1). For examples, see my previous articles, The Secret to Great Presidential Polling and Three-Option Voting—The Best Way to Vote.
You even have the option of voting just for one candidate, if you want. All you would have to do is give the candidate you want +1, and all the others -1. So why do we need Three-Option Voting? Very simply, because there may be times when a voter wants to make a second choice, in case his first choice doesn’t win.
This happened to about seven million people in the 2016 Presidential Election who voted for third-party candidates. Consider the four major candidates:
- Hillary Clinton
- Donald Trump
- Jill Stein
- Gary Johnson
After careful analysis of the election results in 2016, I concluded Donald Trump would not have won the Presidency as he would have failed to win both the popular vote and the electoral vote if we had Three-Option Voting. One thing that propelled Trump into the White House was that voters who voted for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson could not express who they wanted to be President, if their first choice didn’t get enough votes. Both Jill Stein and Gary Johnson’s policies were to the left of Hillary Clinton’s, and those who foolishly voted for either of them helped Trump, whose policies they abhorred, win. It seems highly likely that if the vast majority of these third-party candidates couldn’t get their first choice, Hillary Clinton, and not Donald Trump, would have been their second choice.
I remember personally pleading with those who said they were going to vote for Jill Stein, after Bernie Sanders was unable to win. I said they would only make it easier for Trump to win unless they voted directly for Hillary. They pooh-poohed my concerns saying Trump wasn’t going to win anyway, so why not vote for their first choice? Because our inadequate Plurality Voting System threw the election to Donald Trump; that’s why.
They voted the way our elections should be, instead of the way they actually are.
Yet it should not be foolish to vote for a third-party candidate. We limit democracy if we must always choose between two major parties. As several Kos commenters have noted, even those Republicans who want to break away from Trumpism are trapped in the two-party system, making it far more difficult to form a non-Trump Republican third-party.
Three-Option Voting may sound unfamiliar, but it is a simple as 1,2,3. Rank Voting is good, but Three-Option Voting would be even better. And we would already know who won in New York.