[Welcome to DemocracySOS, a newsletter detailing the failings of America’s “winner take all” democracy, as well as proposed reforms and solutions. If you like this issue, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work. At $5 per month, it cost less than the price of a mug of coffee.]

In recent years, a number of alpha legacy media outlets have been bought -- and decapitated -- by some of the wealthiest men in America. These media outlets were once part of a vibrant news and information landscape, breaking investigative stories that have become part of the cultural fabric of America: Watergate, Pentagon Papers, Trump’s Hollywood Access tape, Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, the Edward Snowden exposé about NSA surveillance, exposing McCarthyism, Harvey Weinstein #MeToo coverage, all of these stories and more were launched by some of the prized media companies that are now being brought to heel by their wealthy “media plantation” owners.

Beyond the legacy media defenestration, as the news and information ecosystem has morphed with the rise of the so-called “social” media, the original dream of “internet liberation” has been replaced by the nightmare of surveillance capitalism, personal data grabs and privacy violations, and viral disinformation campaigns resulting in an increasingly toxic politics. Large chunks of the US media landscape have turned into a cesspool that violates long cherished norms of a free and responsible press. Not that the American media-scape ever fully lived up to the highest norms and ideals, but the “great free press” standard was crucial toward some measure of accountability, both at home and abroad.

Now that media standard is in freefall, and the downward slide has been abetted by a disturbing trend: the purchase of media flagships by wealthy American aristocrats. “Freedom of the press” is being rapidly replaced by “freedom of oligarchs to publish—or not—whatever they damn well please.”

The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, purchased Twitter, and has turned it into his personal vehicle for his own toxic brand of sneering insult politics. The world’s fifth richest man, Jeff Bezos from Amazon, bought one of America’s flagship newspapers, the Washington Post, and has gutted the newsroom, circumscribed the opinion section, and handcuffed its liberties to make political endorsements. The Post is dying in the full light of day, descending into a murky Bezos-ian darkness.

The world’s sixth richest man, Larry Ellison from Oracle, has financed his son’s purchase of Paramount, which includes CBS and 60 Minutes, and has put a conservative pundit with no broadcasting experience in charge of these media gems (it’s hardly a surprise that Stephen Colbert, one of Trump’s most popular critics, is having his show on CBS canceled). Ellison may also soon own Warner Brothers, which owns CNN. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a multibillionaire known as the “world’s richest doctor,” bought the Los Angeles Times in 2018 and has also gutted its newsroom, editorial department and stopped its political endorsements. Salesforce multi-multi billionaire CEO Marc Benioff purchased the iconic newsweekly TIME magazine in 2018.

Wealthy people have always owned the media and played an oversized role in the nation’s news and info transmission sphere. But this time seems different. These billionaire media owners are in an either explicit or tacit alliance with President Donald Trump. Mark Zuckerberg from Meta/Facebook/Instagram, Salesforce’s Benioff, and Google’s leaders also have decided it’s best to tap dance to the Trump tune. TikTok has gone from being a wholly Chinese-owned company to being part-owned by Trump ally-Larry Ellison.

The democratic world has not seen a media ecosystem in an allegedly democratic system of governance so shrink wrapped around a single powerful political figure like Donald Trump since Italy under media magnate Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi owned most of the private media in Italy, and then as prime minister controlled the public media as well. With his domination of the native media, the buffoonish Berlusconi perfected a campaigning method that consisted of sailing up and down the Italian coast in his private yacht, and pulling into ports where his TV stations covered his press conferences and beamed his perennially tanned face to Italians all over the country.

Italy has long been Europe’s poster child for a struggling, flat-footed democracy, and now the US is following in Italy’s footsteps. Truly, this is an alarming sign of further democratic erosion. Countries of this retrograde caliber have long been labelled as “banana republics,” but seldom have they been as militarily-armed and dangerous as Trump’s United Fortress of America. The US is falling off the cliff into a new level of dysfunction that is beyond bananas, it’s more like a Gorilla Republic.

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The Pyramid of Money

The role of privately financed campaigns in US elections has never been as simple as “money buys elections,” despite many bumper sticker slogans to the contrary. Certainly one can point to numerous examples of money’s corruption of the political process going back many years – the Keating Five, the Lincoln Bedroom, and Buddhist temples becoming the stuff of political legend – but there has always been a more complex reality operating in a more under-the-radar way.

Elections based on single-seat, winner-take-all districts, whether in the US Congress, state legislatures or city councils, results in an appalling lack of competition. And the amount of campaign funds raised and spent has little impact on that reality. The fact is, most legislative districts are partisan fiefdoms for one political party or another, and it’s not usually the result of either campaign spending or the other alleged culprit, gerrymandering abuses during the redistricting process.

No, the lack of competition is a direct byproduct of where people live, with Democrats dominating in cities, Republicans in rural areas and ex-urbs, and many suburbs acting as the battleground regions populated by swing districts that decide which major party wins control of legislatures. In over 90 percent of these “me against you” legislative districts -- at both federal and state levels -- it’s impossible for one side to win because there are simply too many of the other side’s partisan voters living in those districts. That’s why three-quarters of House districts are won by huge landslide margins. Partisan demographics have become destiny in most legislative districts.

Given the predictability of all these elections, that reality impacts other aspects of our representative democracy, including the role that private money plays in who gets elected. For example, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi represents the San Francisco district in which I lived for many years. As a heavily Democratic city, there is no chance that a Republican could ever beat Pelosi or any other Democrat in San Francisco. Pelosi won her 2024 election with 81% of the vote, she obviously did not need to spend a dime on her own reelection. That’s true also of GOP House speaker Mike Johnson, who won his 2024 race with 86% in his heavily GOP district in Louisiana. Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries won his race in a landslide of 75%, none of them needed to raise any money for their re-elections.

Nevertheless, the Big Money queens and kings like Pelosi, Johnson and Jeffries raised huge sums of money. When Pelosi was still Speaker in 2022, she raised over $25 million. Johnson as Speaker in 2024 raised nearly$20 million and Hakeem Jeffries as minority leader raised $24 million, even though they all won by huge landslide margins.

Why do they all raise so much money, one might ask, when they represent the safest of seats?

The answer: because they funnel the money into “soft money” activities to finance colleagues in the handful of hotly contested races. In the process, they buy themselves influence among their peers, as well as important party leadership positions, as their parties try to win legislative majorities.

This is the Pyramid of Money, with each party’s kings and queens sitting at the top, at the apex of the pyramid. These party fat cats target the slush flow of money to the predictably tight races, hoping to win a majority of seats for their team. On the next tier of the pyramid are more of each party’s safe-seat incumbents, who also raise way more campaign slush than they need for their own reelections. They too help fund the re-election of colleagues in more competitive races, in exchange for committee chair and other plum assignments. And then the lobbyists, lawyers, allied political action committees and high roller donors fill out the lower levels of the pyramid, funneling money into its labyrinth, where it is directed by party leaders skilled in the dark art of overseeing this crooked yet well-oiled operation. They are all on the same team, each playing their role within the Pyramid.

The Pyramid allows the targeting of a handful of undecided swing voters in battleground districts and states, as party leaders ignore the vast majority of Americans who live in winner-take-all districts and states that are lopsided landslides for one party or another. Instead, they focus like a laser on the handful of undecided battleground districts and states. Make no mistake, this has been a dysfunctional form of democracy for as long as this 236-year-old experiment in representative government has existed. But it was better than basing governance on the divine right of kings, and more or less we have been trying to make it work, however imperfectly.

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Enter the centi-billionaires

But now a new factor is entering the game, based on the extreme concentration of wealth that in America today is as high or higher as during the Gilded Age of the late 19^th and early 20^th century.

A recent Substack column by economist Paul Krugman provides a blast of reality about how the extreme concentration of extreme wealth at the very top of the top of the billionaire pyramid is creating an oligarchy that not only is corrupting our politics, but (as Krugman puts it) is fomenting “a fundamental change in the way our society works.”

Krugman starts his analysis with a few numbers. First, the number of American billionaires has increased, as has the number of centi-billionaires – mega-billionaires with over $100 billion, an unprecedented level of wealth. Between 2010 and 2023, the number of billionaires increased by 85%, from 404 to 748. I find this to be a creepy statistic, as it reflects the further erosion of our New Deal society’s redistribution mechanisms, which in the past forced the wealthy to pay for their fair share of our common social safety net.

The damage from the metastasizing of so many billionaires could perhaps be contained if these billionaires were content to ride off into the sunset on their superyachts, or inside their space capsules into outer space. But unfortunately they are not.

Instead, as Krugman points out, “standard measures of political spending show an explosion of billionaire money seeking to influence American elections… the percentage of total contributions accounted for by billionaire money has skyrocketed” and he shows this chart:

That’s a lot of tall blue bars on the right and tiny little bite-sized bars on the left. The growth has been exponential, an explosion of political contributions by billionaires from 0.3% of total contributions in 2008 – the year Barack Obama got elected president – to 16.5% in 2024 – a 5400% increase. This huge campaign spending increase is what allowed Elon Musk and the creepy crypto moguls to be so frighteningly influential in the 2024 election.

As Krugman points out, some of the rise in billionaire spending can be explained by that alarming 85% growth in the number of US billionaires between 2010 and 2023, but only partially, since over that same time frame the billionaires’ share of political contributions rose by 1700 percent.

So the Pyramid of Money, long the operative model for how the octopus tentacles of money slither around in our winner-take-all political system, is itself being flooded by the tsunami of a centi-billionaire deluge. Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist, comes to a chilling conclusion:

“…an increase in oligarchic power far surpassing even what one might have expected given soaring wealth at the top. At this point it’s clear that we have experienced a fundamental change in the way our society works. Everything that is downstream of the American political system – federal and state governments, the courts, regulatory power, economic policy, health policy, media independence – and of course democracy itself – is under extreme threat from the tidal wave of billionaire influence.”

It’s more imperative than ever that “We, the People” enact the urgent democratic reforms necessary to transform our broken, antiquated institutions, many of which are rooted in the 18^th century. The changes we need include public financing of campaigns, proportional representation and ranked choice voting, universal voter registration, direct election of the president, more robust and better funded public broadcasting, and the reining in of surveillance (anti-)social media and its non-curated virality.

Without a fully robust representative democracy, we can expect more meltdowns in the months and years ahead. Upcoming elections for Congress (November 2026) and president (2028) will present recurring potential for nationally traumatic episodes, including stolen elections and fraud. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be rocky ride.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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[For this article, DemocracySOS welcomes back Alan Durning as a guest contributor. Alan is founder and executive director of Sightline Institute, which is an independent, nonprofit think tank providing leading original analysis on housing, democracy, and energy policy in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, British Columbia and beyond. This piece is excerpted from his Sightline article linked here, with a few minor modifications]

In 2024, Alaska Democrats were understandably incensed when Eric Hafner, a convict who had never lived in their state, ran for Alaska’s US House seat as a Democrat. State and federal law allowed Hafner to seek the office, and state law let him register with the party he preferred. The state Democratic Party, for its part, could do nothing. It had no way to disavow him or indicate on the ballot (inserted below in full) its endorsement of incumbent Representative Mary Peltola.

Come election day, Hafner got more than 3,500 first-choice votes from Alaskans who saw his name and party on the ballot. There was just one major problem: Hafner was in prison in New York, where he was serving 20 years. Presumably the Alaskans who voted for him had no idea that if elected, he would represent them from a New York jail cell.

Two years earlier, the Alaska state Republican Party was the one fuming. Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III, both registered Republicans and both on the top-four general election ballot, were feuding on the campaign trail, refusing to cross-endorse each other as co-partisans typically do in ranked choice elections. The state GOP endorsed Begich early and never endorsed Palin. In the general election, Palin and Begich split Republican votes, as expected, and given the animosity between them not enough of their voters cross-ranked the other candidate, pushing the election to Mary Peltola, who became the first Democrat in the seat in 49 years. (Two years later, with Palin out of the picture, Begich reclaimed the longtime Republican seat for the GOP.)

So both Republicans and Democrats in Alaska now have a beef with a minor flaw in their state’s ballot rules that lets candidates claim a party but doesn’t let parties claim candidates. Parties are not allowed to publicly designate on the ballot which candidate is the party’s chosen nominee. The same flaw fusses California and Washington, the two other states that use unified all-candidate primaries.

In short, any candidate in these three states can claim any party, potentially confusing voters as to who really represents their values. And political parties can do nothing to stop them.

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The fix: Let parties tag their endorsed candidates on ballots

The fix to this problem in all three states is easy: let parties indicate their endorsement of a candidate with two words: “Democratic [or Republican] Nominee.”

Here’s the original ballot from the 2024 Alaska election, zoomed in on the US House race:

And here it is, with nominees indicated (highlighting only to draw your attention):

Party IDs serve as important shorthand for voters

North Americans hate political parties (often including their own), and anti-party sentiment has been prevalent since the Progressive movement more than a hundred years ago. But political scientists concur that for all their disrepute, political parties are the essential intermediaries of democracies everywhere. They aggregate like-minded voters, assemble coalitions that can win, mediate disputes among coalition factions, articulate visions and platforms, and serve as shorthand identifiers — branding — on the ballot for time-strapped or poorly informed voters. Indeed, party identification is so valuable that in its absence, many voters lean on unreliable markers such as gender or surname to try to guess which candidate is right for them.

Giving parties space to claim their nominees on ballots in Alaska, California or Washington would not change the states’ election system in fundamental ways, but it would provide voters with more reliable information.

Research confirms party IDs help voters

Research by political scientist Cheryl Boudreau and her colleagues at the University of California, Davis, shows that informing voters of candidates’ party endorsements helps them correctly identify candidates whom they agree with. In an experiment with voters in a nonpartisan mayoral election in which political parties had made endorsements, informing voters of candidates’ party endorsements let voters find their best-matched candidate 59 percent of the time, compared to 53 percent of the time when they don’t know the parties’ endorsements. And that improvement came not with putting the party labels on the ballot but with a mailing sent to voters. A six-point gain in voters’ alignment is modest, but in close races it could be decisive.

Alaska already sends more information to voters than most states do. The state’s Division of Elections prints and mails official voters’ guides to all. These guides feature candidates’ statements and often include the endorsements they have won from party organizations and well-known interest groups. The same research by Boudreau and her colleagues shows that voters’ guides boost voters’ success at choosing aligned candidates to 61 percent, a further improvement beyond the effect of party nominations alone.

Alaska voters’ guides help inform primary voters about party nominations. Adding those nominations to the ballots would do even more, especially since people often misplace their voters’ pamphlets by the time they’re ready to vote.

And parties can better serve and gather their voters

This reform would also let parties guide their voters more confidently toward the candidates they have endorsed. This increment of extra influence for parties would attract more people to participate in caucuses and conventions, somewhat counteracting the current trend toward party domination by the most extreme ideological factions.

In Washington, for example, the Republican Party’s nomination has become so unimportant to candidates that the leading Republican running for governor did not bother to show up to the GOP convention in 2024. The right wing–packed state convention nominated Semi Bird, an extreme partisan from central Washington, for governor.

Meanwhile, the Republican dominating polls at the time (and who later cruised through the primary with almost three times Bird’s votes) was former US Representative Dave Reichert. Reichert knew the convention would be packed with extreme right wing activists unrepresentative of the party’s rank-and-file voters. He also knew that the party’s nomination would not matter since it would appear nowhere on the ballot. He was right.

If parties’ nominations did appear on the ballot, it might matter enough to election outcomes that mainstream candidates such as Reichert and their pragmatic supporters would organize to retake control of the parties’ apparatuses. In other words, giving parties a little more say might help them course-correct back to their mainstream majorities.

Ready legislative language to make the tweak

The multi-party coalitions that run each chamber in the Alaska legislature have shown no appetite for repealing the state’s top-four elections since their adoption in 2020. Indeed, a majority of members seem satisfied with the new system. They might, however, be open to improving it, which they could do with some legislative language from Oregon. California and Washington could do the same.

In Oregon, former Governor Ted Kulongoski and a multipartisan coalition recently filed a ballot measure for 2026 to adopt unified all candidate primaries. Regardless of whether the measure succeeds, it offers model legal language for allowing parties to claim their candidates. Further, it specifies that candidates may list on voters’ ballots only their verified official party endorsements.

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Another way to boost political parties

In a previous article for DemocracySOS, I proposed another way to boost the relevance of political parties and their all-important role: by raising signature requirements and/or filing fees for candidates. Not only would that result in voters enjoying adequate electoral choice without having to sift through non-serious pretender candidates, it also would provide a modest boost to political parties.

By imposing a reasonable barrier to entry, filing fees or signature requirements like Washington’s (one percent of the relevant office’s salary or the equivalent number of signatures) encourage would-be candidates to do their homework before committing to a race. Contenders may, for example, then begin the arduous process of consulting with party leaders and organizations, courting constituency groups, and wooing prospective supporters.

A fee or signature increase may also give parties a little leverage over who represents them on the ballot. They can offer to pay the fees for the candidates they nominate; at party conventions, they can inexpensively gather signatures to qualify their candidates. At present, America’s parties are weak. Their popularity is almost entirely in the negative; their voters hate the other party more than they love their own. Rebuilding parties is a long-term project—and ultimately, we need more of them elected by multi-seat proportional representation—but strengthening them ought to be an ancillary objective in other election upgrades.

Party-labeled ballots (only two words per candidate) are a modest adjustment. They better inform voters about candidates’ positions. They might yield healthier, less polarized, and more pragmatic parties. And they would allow parties to stop triflers serving time in distant prisons from hijacking American elections.

Alan Durning is founder and executive director of Sightline Institute.

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[For this article, DemocracySOS welcomes back Alan Durning as a guest contributor. Alan is founder and executive director of Sightline Institute, which is an independent, nonprofit think tank providing leading original analysis on housing, democracy, and energy policy in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, British Columbia and beyond. This piece is excerpted from his longer article linked here.]

Sometimes too much of a good thing can become a bad thing. As a case in point, consider Alaska’s 2022 inaugural election in which it switched from closed partisan primaries to a top four primary. In top-four, voters choose four finalists and then pick among them in a ranked choice voting general election in November. Excitement about the new electoral system drew greater participation, encouraging more candidates to believe they could compete. Consequently, in Alaska’s race for its lone seat in the US House of Representatives, which had no incumbent, voters were confronted by a contest that was overloaded with 48 candidates. The state’s new electoral system presented voters with a long and crowded ballot as daunting as The Cheesecake Factory’s menu.

The other factor that inspired a bumper crop of candidates was the low filing fee of just $100. For just one Benjamin Franklin, you could get your name on every ballot and in every voters’ guide in the state and—who knows?—maybe your candidacy would catch fire. But most of those candidates did not catch even a spark. Few of them raised money or ran actual campaigns, and just one-fifth of candidates cracked 2 percent of the vote. At the bottom of the pack, some 19 candidates won fewer than 100 votes each.

The surplus of candidates in that Alaska race created a crowded ballot that was confusing for some voters. It’s not the easiest election to administer for election officials either. Take a look at the 48-candidate ballot, including 16 GOP candidates, 6 Democrats, 12 Nonpartisan, 10 Undeclared, 2 Libertarian, 1 Alaska Independent Party and 1 American Independent Party:

Ak 2022 Spec Primary Ballot

99.2KB ∙ PDF file

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With a $100 filing fee as the major requirement for entering the race, some perennial candidates file the paperwork and pay the low fee as a cheap way to advertise their name and even their business. In Washington state, one man legally changed his name to “Mike the Mover” and it appeared on millions of ballots and voters’ pamphlets.

So this Alaska House election was flooded with candidates, and the inaugural campaign using ranked choice voting with a top four primary tried voters’ patience with teeming lists of candidates, many of them narcissistic dreamers with no support from key constituencies and no chance of winning.

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…followed by Portland

A similar pattern happened in Portland, Oregon, in its maiden election using proportional ranked choice voting. As in Alaska, the new system generated excitement and encouraged participation, making more candidates believe they could compete. But the fact that securing a spot on the ballot cost a mere $75 for council or $100 for mayor -- less than a tank of gas for a Ford F-150 -- amplified the gold rush spirit. Some 118 candidates surged into municipal contests. City Council Districts 3 and 4 each had 30 candidates for their three seats. At some of the candidate debates, each candidate got speaking time measured in seconds. Such crowded races make voting a morass and campaigning like a scene of Black Friday shopping mayhem.

Like in Alaska, Portland voters ignored most candidates. In District 4, only 11 voters picked L. Christopher Regis. He had enough support to field a kickball team in one of Portland’s adult co-ed leagues but fell 11,251 votes short of winning a council seat. Regis was not alone. In Districts 3 and 4 combined, only a quarter of candidates crossed the 2 percent threshold. Most of the also-rans did not actually run a real campaign. They just made the process of voting feel like scrolling through the dross on Netflix.

Low filing fees for open seats elsewhere have also attracted swollen fields of candidates. In 2003, for example, a special election recalled the sitting governor of California, Gray Davis, and voters’ plurality winner of a pick-one election on the same ballot became his successor. More than 100 candidates paid the modest fee to be listed on that ballot. With so many candidates and voters splitting their votes among an overstocked menu, it was impossible for a solid majority of voters to come together around a single candidate. Celebrity actor Arnold Schwarzenegger was able to win with 48.6% of the vote because he had the most name recognition.

Too much of a good thing. So what’s the solution? It is to charge a fair price of admission: to make it a little bit more difficult for an individual to become a candidate, as a way of weeding out posers and pretenders. There are two ways to do this: 1) many jurisdictions already require that candidates must gather a certain number of signatures on a petition from registered voters who agree to nominate that candidate, with the number of signatures being high enough that it discourages fly-by-night candidates who have no real support; or 2) require candidates to pay a high enough filing fee that it discourages candidates who don’t have sufficient support among community donors; or 3) a combination of both.

Filing for office in Montana and Washington, for instance, costs enough to make you think twice. In Washington, a candidate pays 1 percent of the position’s annual salary. To run for governor in 2024, for example, a campaign would have paid $2,042.

This policy means that whereas filing to run for city council in Portland costs only $75 (plus $300 if you want to publish a statement in the voters’ pamphlet), it costs $1,446 in Seattle (voters’ guide statement included). No wonder Portland’s recent campaign season was like a Friday night queue at Voodoo Donuts.

In the case of Alaska’s race for US Representative, meanwhile, the disparity with Montana is even more jarring. Each of the 48 candidates in Alaska in 2022 had to come up with only $100. Compare that with Montana, where the fee to run for Congress is $1,740—more than 17 times as much.

Academic research testifies to the efficacy of ballot-qualification barriers that are more than symbolic. Even requiring a modest fee, such as Montana or Washington’s, or an equivalent batch of signatures, can filter pretenders out of a field. Minneapolis raised its filing fee in 2014 from $20 to $500 after switching to ranked choice voting and enduring a 35-candidate race for an open mayoral seat. After $500 fees were implemented, the next field was less than half as large, at 15 candidates—still large, providing ample choice for voters from serious candidates, but no longer bogged down by those looking to spice up their humdrum lives with a quixotic campaign.

Download: Sightline’s datasheet of filing fees and signature requirements

Montana and Washington show these solutions in action

To some, substantial filing fees seem plutocratic, favoring the rich and well connected. These critics prefer requiring candidates to demonstrate support by submitting signatures from local voters.

Fair enough. That’s a good alternative. Still, the fact is that in many jurisdictions, if you don’t want to pay the fee, you have the option of collecting a set number of signatures instead. In Washington, you can submit the same number of signatures from registered voters as dollars in the fee: in place of $2,042 for governor, you can collect signatures from 2,042 registered Washington voters.

Are Montana and Washington’s fees too high? Do they squelch democracy and suppress choice? Not at all. For serious candidates who intend to compete, these fees are trifling. In contested races, candidates will have to raise hundreds of times more money. Washington governor Bob Ferguson raised more than $14 million for his 2024 campaign; the $2,042 filing fee was penny ante.

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No more laundry lists

Alaska’s top-four election model and Portland’s proportional ranked choice voting model are gold standards for a better democracy. Replicating them elsewhere would lessen many of America’s political shortcomings, from gridlock to polarization, from gerrymandering to presidential authoritarianism. To win replication, though, Alaska and Portland need to function better by no longer attracting 48 candidates for US Representative or 30 for city council.

Before replication will gain speed, fixing some of the small flaws in these model election systems is essential. Matching Montana’s and Washington’s filing fees is a first step toward that end.

Commendably, Portland election officials recently have expressed interest in raising the city’s filing fees, and the City is requesting comments on a proposal to raise them to $250 for council and $500 for mayor (you can comment here). Though not enough, the move would be a win for voters, serious candidates, and election officials. The only ones who would lose would be the political dabblers who want their names on the ballot without having to work for it.

Alan Durning is founder and executive director of Sightline Institute.

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[Dear readers: DemocracySOS survives through reader support. Here is a link to our $5/month subscription page. Can you toss a few coins into the hat? Thank you.]

Democratic leaders are rightfully assailing President Donald Trump over his many anti-democratic transgressions. But sometimes they really should look in the mirror. Because on many occasions, Democrats have had a chance to improve and open up our democracy, and make it work better for regular people, but more often than not they have refused to do so. With a toxic form of “minority rule” now allowing Trump and his MAGA Republican faction to wage near-total power, often contrary to the actual “will of the people,” one would think the Democrats might see it to their advantage to unlock the box of “more democracy.” But unfortunately no, as they have demonstrated on too many occasions.

For example, Democrats in “trifecta” blue states (in which they control both legislative houses and the governor’s mansion) for many years refused to enact “automatic voter registration.” The norm in established democracies around the world has long been to register all voters automatically when they reach the age of eligibility. There are no forms to fill out, eligible voters are simply assigned a unique identifier, like a Social Security number, which follows them for life. The governments take responsibility for achieving 100 percent registration. Myself and Rob Richie at FairVote, later joined by the Brennan Center, Demos, Common Cause and others, began calling in the late 1990s for AVR as the right and fair thing to do for our representative democracy. Anywhere from 25% to 30% of eligible voters are unregistered from year-to-year, and that group is composed disproportionally of racial minorities, the poor and young people. Those voters, when registered, are the most reliably Democratic in the country.

Despite AVR being both the right and fair thing to do, and also a reform that advantages Democrats, for years the Democrats did not prioritize enacting AVR. Even in the 12 to 15 trifecta states that Democrats controlled, they sat on their hands. In private conversations, we would say to Democrats, “Hey, these are your kind of voters. Doing the right and fair thing would actually help you as a party. Duh!” (OK, we left off the “duh” part).

In recent years, most of the Democratic trifecta states have passed some kind of a watered-down AVR, but not until after years of dithering and excuses. And they didn’t do it soon enough to help Hilary Clinton defeat Donald Trump in 2016 because they were too timid to try something innovative.

Public financing of campaigns? No-show Democrats

The same with public financing of campaigns. I have never understood why, in those states in which Democrats have monopoly trifecta power, they don’t democratize campaign funding and greatly reduce the power of private money in campaigns. The two most powerful ways to do that would be to create a robust public financing system to fund candidates’ campaigns combined with free media time for candidates. Most established democracies in the world deploy both of these pro-democracy features, so the excuse that “it’s too expensive” or “too complicated” ring hollow. Kamala Harris’s $1.5 billion spent notwithstanding, Democrats have a harder time competing with Republicans, wealthy donors and conservative Super PACs in the money chase game across the thousands of races at state and federal levels. So enacting public financing for campaigns and free media would help Democrats, and would also be immediately beneficial toward overturning one of the most significant factors that prevents good candidates from diverse communities having a chance to run competitively and win.

Public financing could be paid for in ways that don’t hit the public purse too hard: fees charged to political consultants and PACs, sin taxes, and contributions from citizens via tax rebates. Requiring television and radio broadcasters -- which receive the public’s airwaves for free -- to provide free media time has always been a popular idea. Public financing of campaigns is a crucial tool to ensure that voters have enough information about the candidates to make good choices. It improves the quality of debate as well as voter decision-making. Under the current money regime, American voters only hear from the candidates who have raised the most money. This disadvantages Democrats, yet the timid Dems have done next to nothing to enact public financing of campaigns or free media for the many races around the country. This is another missed opportunity.

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Anti-democratic Democrats

Another all-too-typical example of Democrats’ short attention span for advantageous democratic reform is playing out right now in Massachusetts. After a lot of hard work by political reform advocates, led by Ranked Choice Boston and Voter Choice Massachusetts, in mid-May the Boston city council passed a measure to adopt ranked choice voting, and a couple of weeks later Mayor Michelle Wu signed off on it. Boston is one of the nation's oldest cities with a storied history going back to colonial times, so this was a major victory for RCV proponents. Right?

Not necessarily, because it comes with a catch. Massachusetts, which has long been dominated by a Democratic Party machine (Democrats currently have a whopping 133-25 majority in the House and 35-5 majority in the Senate), has a “pre-emption rule” that before a political process change like RCV can go into effect at the local level, the state legislature and the governor both must sign off on a “home rule petition” that grants permission to the local jurisdiction. Only then can the city or town hold a popular referendum on whether to use RCV. In California and other states, charter cities have the power to decide democratic process issues like the electoral system on their own without interference from state government. But not in the Bay State.

So the overweening state Democrats can force even a major city like Boston to get on its knees and beg and plead for its home rule petition. Keep in mind, Boston voters have already voted strongly in favor of RCV before. In 2020, a ballot measure to implement RCV statewide in Massachusetts failed to pass, but 62% of Boston voters supported the measure. So the Democrats are really shoving it in the face of Bostonians, including the mayor and city council, arrogantly telling them: “You Boston voters are too stupid to be allowed to have a say over your own electoral future.”

But that’s not all. At this point, seven other Bay State cities and towns (Amherst, Northampton, Concord, Lexington, Arlington, Acton and Brookline) have passed home rule petitions seeking to use RCV to elect their local offices. Some of them passed referendums with over 70% of the vote. But the Democrats in the state legislature are just sitting on these requests as well. No good reasons have been offered for why the top-down leadership is ignoring all these local governments and their voters’ desire to explore another way of voting. Sound familiar? This is the type of authoritarian Trump tactics that are being used to wreck the federal government.

Good Democrats, bad Democrats

Not all Massachusetts Democratic legislators agree with their party leadership. State Senator Becca Rausch has said, quite sensibly, “Ranked choice voting is easy to do. If my kids can do it, the voters can do it also.” In fact, on the Voter Choice Massachusetts website, it lists the Democratic Party leaders who say they support RCV. It looks like a Who’s Who of Massachusetts Democratic Party politics, including Governor Maura Healy, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, US Senators Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey, six of Massachusetts members of the US House, even former Republican Governor William Weld. So what’s the holdup?

The Massachusetts legislature is effectively ruled by the Speaker of the state House of Representatives like it’s his own personal fiefdom. Some Dem leaders have expressed vague concerns over unintended consequences and unforeseen impacts. The latest excuse is that, after Boston election officials made a mistake in a recent election, Secretary of the Commonwealth Bill Galvin has put the city under the oversight of a receiver until 2026. Apparently this situation is being cited by the House leadership for why it is not granting permission to Boston to allow its voters to decide the RCV issue.

But then what’s the Democrats’ excuse for preventing the other seven cities? One has a general sense that the Democratic legislative leadership will find a reason for any Massachusetts city that dares to try to improve its local democracy. Political machines, whether Democratic or Trumpian (or both, see “Trump’s Democrats”), don’t like improvements in democracy that they aren’t sure how to manipulate, and that could threaten their own power.

Keep in mind, Cambridge, Massachusetts has been using RCV (the proportional variety) since 1942. The city of Easthampton MA approved RCV in a referendum in 2019 and had its first use in 2021. Easthampton’s home rule petition was approved by the Massachusetts legislature and governor in 2019, notably pushed through before the current speaker took up his leadership residency. And unlike the pending home rule petitions, that one went through the committee on municipalities rather than the joint committee on elections.

Excuses over unintended consequences are especially puzzling since RCV is being used successfully in dozens of cities, from a megalopolis like New York City to midsize cities like San Francisco, Minneapolis and Portland (both in Oregon and Maine). It’s also used at the state level in Maine and Alaska. It’s probably the most studied reform in modern history, with dozens of research papers and academic studies (though some of those studies are of dubious quality). New York City has used it for three elections now, and in the recent June elections, an exit poll found that:

• 96% of NYC voters say their ballot was simple to complete, including at least 94% of each major racial group.

• 76% say they want to keep or expand RCV to other elections, with only 17% saying RCV should not be used for municipal elections.

• 81% say they understand RCV extremely or very well, with another 16% saying they understand it somewhat well. Only 3% said they do not understand it well.

This poll confirmed that New York voters of all demographics took advantage of RCV. In fact, it has not been widely reported that, since RCV was first used in New York City’s 2021 elections, the number of women-of-color elected to the city council has increased from only a handful out of 51 seats to 26 -- yes, New York has a majority women-of-color city council. And the number of women overall has reached 31 out of 51 (61%). The city council for America’s largest and most dynamic city is one of the most racially and gender diverse in the country.

So Massachusetts Dems, what are you afraid of?

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Dum Dum Dems in Washington DC oppose RCV

One of the most egregious examples of Democrats being on the wrong side of history took place recently in Washington DC. The local Democratic Party there fought hard to keep Initiative 83, a ballot measure for RCV, from getting on the ballot by filing a lawsuit. Once the court threw out the lawsuit, the Democrats tried to prevent Initiative 83 from passing. Once it was passed overwhelmingly by the public with 73% of the vote, including supermajority wins in all eight council wards, the Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser tried to torpedo RCV by leaving funding for its implementation out of her proposed budget, the will of nearly three-quarters of voters be damned. Finally the Democratic-dominated city council came to its senses and voted 8-4 to fund implementation of RCV for the next election.

In Minnesota, a few Dem holdouts kill reform

Democratic Governor Tim Walz in Minnesota signed legislation in 2023 that authorized a task force to study using RCV statewide, and in 2024 signed the Minnesota Voting Rights Act, which authorizes proportional RCV as a remedy for voting rights violations. Democratic state lawmakers have introduced pro-RCV bills several times. One bill would have simply allowed certain classifications of local governments to use RCV. But in a closely divided state legislature, a few Democratic holdouts crossed party lines and voted against the RCV measure, causing it to lose by two votes. Another bill that would have implemented RCV for state and federal elections in Minnesota never made it to the floor in either Democratic-controlled chamber.

These are just a few examples out of many in which the timid Democrats have failed to pass and oftentimes even fought against different reforms that would have resulted in fair and better elections, and would have empowered many of the voters that Democrats claim to stand up for. Besides the current 15 trifecta blue states, 12 states have two legislative houses split between Democrats and the GOP. In the past, some Republicans have been willing to support automatic voter registration in return for support of a voter ID (see the Carter-Baker commission proposals). In today’s climate of maximum mistrust, Democrats and civil rights leaders have been understandably fighting to stop GOP attempts to enact voter ID laws. But if those voter IDs were coupled with a unique identifier for every eligible voter, they could be used to implement automatic voter registration. By doing this Democrats would enfranchise millions of minorities, poor people and youth -- far more than the number who would not vote due to a voter ID requirement. This has the makings of a grand bargain that both Democrats and Republicans could get behind, and it’s what most established democracies around the world already do.

Come on Democrats, what are you waiting for?

Democrats like to talk a big game about making the political system fairer, but they mostly only say that when they’re criticizing Donald Trump and previous Republican leaders. Even when the Democrats had a federal trifecta under both Obama and Biden, they sat on their hands and failed to enact any number of political reforms that not only would have been the fair and right thing to do, and better for our country, but would actually have been advantageous for them in their electoral combat against the Republicans.

Certainly there are some great individual Democratic legislators and leaders. I have had the pleasure of working with many of them. But I also have had numerous experiences during the legislative process in which those good and admirable Democratic legislators were stymied by the Democratic duds and do-nothings. I have had personal experience with Democratic leaders, including California governors Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown, vetoing and killing pro-democracy legislation for shallow reasons that made no sense and seemed to reflect that they considered how to empower “we, the people” for all of about two minutes. I have long expected that from Republicans, most of whom have always opposed making our political system more democratic. But when the Democrats do it too, you realize that many of them, especially in the leadership, are also afraid of “the people” they purport to speak on behalf of.

There is plenty of legislative low-hanging fruit that trifecta blue state Democrats could pass, well before the 2026 midterm elections. The best of these proposals would become models for the federal level, in case the mummified Congress ever arises out of the quicksand into which it is sinking. In the blue states, the only obstacle stopping the pro-democracy Democrats is – not Donald Trump, Elon Musk or Fox News – but the anti-democratic Democrats.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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When I was the architect of the ballot measure campaign for proportional representation in San Francisco, followed a few years later by a campaign for ranked choice voting, in both campaigns I had to figure out how to get a city of nearly a million people to vote for a new democratic reform that most had never heard of. I had to convince numerous political organizations and media outlets that had deep investment in San Francisco politics to take a leap of faith on this new and untried (to them) method. The pathway to victory, which we eventually found, was in no way clear or straightforward.

Think about the four losing RCV campaigns in 2024 in Nevada, Colorado, Oregon and Idaho. The proponents had to convince populations of anywhere from 2 million to 6 million, spread across vast geographies, to vote for a ranked ballot method that most people in those states had never used. The vast majority of people who actually vote care enough about the elections process that if they are confused about a proposed ballot measure, they will usually vote “no.” So as an election reformer, your challenge is to make a majority of voters comfortable enough with your reform that they vote for your proposed change and agree to reject the status quo.

Given this situation of “information uncertainty,” political incumbents, party leaders and those opposed to change have a fairly easy task to stop reform -- simply confuse the voters enough for them to reject the proposal. I remember for the San Francisco campaign for RCV, our opponents, mostly the usual mix of political consultants and downtown business interests opposed to change, spent gobs of money to kill Proposition A. They outspent us about 10-1 with negative TV and radio ads and they mailed tens of thousands of citywide mailers, attempting to slander our efforts. One mailer showed a photo of a National Organization for Women march and said, “If Proposition A passes, women’s representation will suffer.” Just one problem – the local chapter of NOW actually had endorsed our measure, as had national woman’s leaders like Patricia Ireland and Ellie Smeal whose photos were featured on their attack mailer.

Our opponents had no shame. They were willing to do and say anything to stir up F-U-D -- Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. That's what political reformers are up against.

Given these obstacles to passing reform, what is a viable strategy for winning proportional representation or ranked choice voting ballot measures? Here is an outline of a strategy for achieving success in targeted states or cities.

The “problem-solution” playbook

The first rule of thumb is that successful political reform is “opportunity driven” – you have to identify the problem you are trying to solve, for which you have the unique solution. This “problem-solution” framework is indispensable.

For example, in the San Francisco campaign, single-winner RCV solved a real problem: getting rid of a second “delayed runoff” election that took place in December after the November general election. By using a single “instant runoff” election in November, voters could rank their ballots and have more choice, and that in turn would get rid of spoiler dynamics, reduce negative campaigning, and save candidates as well as taxpayers the funds needed to pay for an unnecessary second election. Since December was a terrible time of the year for an election, and voter turnout usually plummeted from the November election by as much as 40%, getting rid of the December delayed runoff resulted in much higher voter turnout as well.

Given all its positives, RCV was able to win the usual support from progressive leaders, organizations and voters, but because there was a significant taxpayer savings by abolishing a second election, it also won support from fiscal moderates and conservatives who are usually more skeptical about reform. An electoral change that offered something for progressives, moderates and conservatives was a winning combination. We identified the problem, and we had the unique solution to that problem. Victory was ours.

This “problem-solution” playbook was used successfully in a number of other cities. In some places, the two election cycle was a primary election in June or March, followed by the November general election. The logic for reform was still substantially the same – “one election, instead of two.” This formula led to many victories, starting with the first victory in San Francisco in 2002, for which I ran the campaign.

Applying this lesson to proportional representation reform

While this lesson is based on single-winner RCV, it is instructive also for passing proportional representation. The question that PR advocates will have to grapple with in every city or state is: what is the “problem” being solved by the implementation of PR for which you have the unique “solution”?

The answer is undoubtedly related to important democratic values like better representation (including for partisan, geographic and racial minorities), more voter choice, higher voter turnout, possibly less toxic partisanship, improved campaign debate (with fewer “winner take all” incentives), and more. However in my experience, here’s another dilemma: first, these “good government/better democracy” values don’t always resonate deeply with either political leaders or the broad electorate. Compared to the impact of the economy or other direct impacts on personal lives, these democratic values are often second-tier concerns.

Second, elected incumbents and Democratic and GOP party leaders are likely to fight against a reform that will create more electoral competition for them, or that will change the rules that elect individual incumbents. When it comes to incumbents, “You dance with them that brung you.”

So here are strategies that I would recommend considering to overcome those obstacles:

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1) A high-profile bipartisan commission within targeted states or cities. New Zealand and South Africa successfully transitioned from “winner take all” elections to PR as a result of high-profile commissions. In the UK, the Lord Jenkins commission resulted in a mixed member PR system on the ballot (though it failed to pass). In the US, Illinois had a high-profile commission that recommended Illinois return to the use of a semi-PR method known as cumulative voting (which Illinois had used for 110 years until 1980). At the local level, San Francisco put PR on the ballot in 1996 following a recommendation of a charter commission, as did Portland OR in 2022.

A high profile commission becomes a vehicle around which to organize and mobilize supporters, and build support among some political elites. It's also an easier “ask” of a legislator or governor to establish such a commission, rather than asking them to vote to directly put PR on the ballot. It allows for public hearings which are a vehicle for making the case for the “problem” and the “solution,” and to raise visibility in the media. This strategy can be pursued at the city or state level. It could even be pursued at the federal level. New York City and Portland set good examples by empowering their charter commissions to put the issue directly on the ballot, preventing self-interested city council incumbents from killing reform.

2) Build support among individual elected officials to put it on the ballot. While this strategy is not as shielded from incumbent self-interest, it worked recently in Oregon, where a Democratic-controlled legislature voted to put RCV on the statewide ballot. Important caveat: the Speaker of the House was strongly in favor of RCV because a trusted RCV advocate built a relationship with him and was able to leverage that relationship to gain support for putting it on the ballot. This strategy has worked in numerous cities, including in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Oakland and elsewhere where the city councils were convinced by advocates to put it on the ballot.

Usually the process starts with an individual legislator who decides she/he wants to champion the reform, and that legislator becomes instrumental in lining up votes from their council colleagues. That champion also becomes a focal point for grassroots mobilization efforts by RCV or PR advocates. For some legislators, the winning argument will be as simple as “Let the voters decide.” After all, incumbents have a built-in conflict of interest since the election rules affect their own re-elections. But without a legislative champion, it’s going to be hard for the reform to get much traction. This route also acts as a vehicle for building support among political elites, which will be necessary to win; and also as a vehicle for mobilizing supporters and visibility in the media.

3) For state victories, secure some city adoptions first. Before Maine adopted statewide RCV, its largest city of Portland began using RCV to elect its mayor. Maine probably would not have implemented statewide RCV without securing Portland first. A similar path could be pursued for passing either statewide RCV or PR in other states. On DemocracySOS, I previously wrote an article (link here) for how to organize campaigns to win Party List PR in any of several cities that have partisan elections. Of the 30 most populous cities in the US, eight of them have partisan elections, including New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Houston, Indianapolis, Charlotte and Louisville. New York City is larger than 38 states, Houston is larger than 14 states, Philadelphia is larger than 10 states. So wins for PR in any of these cities would be a significant step forward. And campaigns in those cities might be easier to get one’s arms around, and would likely cost less money, than in states of similar size or greater. This would be a favorable way to introduce Americans to PR democracy and then scale it to the state level. Following a few election cycles using this method at the local level, and then when combined with #1 or #2 above, there is a real chance of building momentum toward statewide PR.

4) Incubator/Accelerator to assess viability of campaigns. After developing sensible, data-driven criteria for which cities or states are the likeliest targets (more on that below), an incubator program that invites lead organizations in those states to apply to be selected as a targeted campaign could provide a valuable structure for organizing this project. Each organization would make the case in their application for why it is the best prospect. The selected organizations or states would be given seed money, as well as organizing, research and educational support by well-established reform organizations, to launch their campaigns.

5) Single subject rule. An important reason why the Alaska ballot measure in 2024 for a RCV/Top 4 open primary succeeded was that it was combined with a popular campaign finance reform measure to reign in “dark money” expenditures. This was only possible because, unlike most other states, Alaska does not require ballot measures to be restricted to a “single subject.” The winning campaign highlighted the dark money feature, not the RCV or Top 4 components of the ballot measure. This suggests a strategy for passing PR or RCV in which other states are identified that do not have a single subject rule. A PR ballot initiative could be combined with a “dark money” or some other campaign finance component that would prove to be popular with voters. But that should be done in combination with some of the other four methods listed above.

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What are the criteria for state or city selection?

A related important question that any successful strategy needs to think through is figuring out which states or cities to prioritize. It’s a darn big country out there, and reform advocates need to pick and choose which are the hottest prospects for reform. Another way to ask that is: what “problem-solution” criteria will be used for establishing reform targets? Will it be a state with a history of low plurality winners? Or a state with “wrong winner” elections, in which the party receiving fewer votes at the statewide level nonetheless won a majority of seats? Will it be a city with a two-round election cycle (primary followed by November general, or November general followed by a runoff), and “one election, not two” will be a winning formula? Or a city with poor racial minority representation, or plurality at-large elections with poor geographic distribution of elected officials?

Will it be a state where there are a lot of independent voters and dissatisfaction with their exclusion from party primaries? Or frustration around the monopoly politics of one-party domination? Or widespread public frustration with a legislature perceived as “out of touch” with elite incumbents? Could any of those criteria be combined in a state that does not have a “single subject” rule?

Figuring out the specific criteria for prioritizing reform targets is crucial. And as much as possible, that process should be data-driven, with metrics developed for maximizing the best chances of success.

Popular education

In my various campaigns, developing the right metrics for identifying “the problem” and advancing “the solution” required research and drafting policy analysis and reports, and popular education materials as a way of establishing a factual basis for the problem and solution. My teams and I authored numerous policy reports and studies that made the case for reform, as well as opeds, blog posts and letters to the editor in popular forums. That wealth of data-driven public education was the foundation for building cross-partisan coalitions across a range of demographics, and of currying support from elites and engaged citizens.

Draft your legislation early

The initial impulse understandably will be to keep the educational effort fairly simple and basic without getting into details about PR or RCV. But at some point, if your effort is going to turn into an actual ballot measure, the details will need to be figured out. I have written many statutes and charter amendments for PR and RCV, and generally the process of doing this really focuses the effort. It is a crucial part of the process, because until you have drafted your legislation with all the details and bells and whistles, you really do not know how much your various audiences/constituencies actually support your effort.

I have found that many leaders and organizations will say they agree with the generic proposal, but not until you add the specific details do you learn what they really think. That’s when you find out what their real concerns are, which allows you to try and address those concerns before it’s on the ballot in order to forge a “unity proposal” in which significant constituencies have buy-in. This was another mistake made by the RCV proponents of the failing state ballot measure in Colorado, Nevada and Oregon in 2024.

Each one of the political reform efforts that I and my staff worked on, across many different states and cities, was like a puzzle that needed to be solved: what is the winning rationale for passing reform in each place? How do we frame the criteria conversations that are key to the “problem-solution” formulation?

What not to do

Those are a few of the Do’s, here are some of the Don’ts. Do not find a billionaire to write a big fat check that throws PR or RCV on the statewide ballot without first checking some of the others boxes listed above. That’s what RCV proponents did in 2024, and it ended up being the worst year in modern RCV history. Proponents grew impatient and tried to take shortcuts. I’m sure it must have been tempting, even dizzily intoxicating, to have large donors like Rupert Murdoch’s son and daughter-in-law and a wealthy former healthcare CEO offering to write big checks. RCV advocates spent close to $110 million in 2024 on all of the RCV-related statewide ballot measures in seven states. That was an unprecedented amount of money for the RCV movement, those are the types of fundraising numbers you expect to see in a highly competitive US Senate race.

And yet it all ended very badly, and now RCV is in recovery mode. Hopefully those who pushed that broken strategy have learned their lesson. Helicoptering in with suitcases of money but without much grassroots support, or without first establishing a charter commission, or winning in some city adoptions first, or building up much elite support and media support, is just a bad way to do political reform.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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Germany is about to vote in a national election on February 23, with many of the same issues playing out there that thundered in the US presidential and congressional elections last November – high prices, pressures from immigration and the rise of populist extremists.

But a key difference between the German and US elections is the electoral system and the parliamentary structure of government. In Germany, its proportional representation (PR) system fosters multi-party representation, with anywhere from 4 to 8 viable parties campaigning to win seats in the Bundestag. While German democracy is a colorful peacock of partisan diversity, in the US we are stuck with the same old humdrum two-toned turkey, as Democrats and Republicans ineptly oversee the only wealthy nation in the world that has still not figured out how to provide healthcare to all of its citizens.

There’s no question that, generally speaking, nations that use PR electoral systems tend to do a better job of providing for its people and fostering a higher quality of life, as documented by numerous political scientists such as Arend Lijphart and G. Bingham Powell. PR democracies are far more representative of the diverse political perspectives in society, and therefore are more reflective of a society-wide consensus that has not been possible in the US.

But that doesn’t mean that proportional representation methods are perfect, or don’t have some of their own peculiarities. One of those is about to play out in the German elections.

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The “wasted vote” problem with some PR methods

The governing center-left Social Democratic Party is about to be unseated by the center-right Christian Democratic Party for all the reasons Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump, plus a few more. So the question is not who will be the next chancellor and lead the government in Germany’s parliamentary system, but rather which parties will govern in coalition with the Christian Democrats. Depending on a shift of only one or two percentage points for several of the smaller parties, the coalition could look very different.

In Germany’s “mixed member” proportional system (called MMP for short), a political party needs to win 5% of the popular vote in the multi-seat districts in order to “cross the threshold” and be awarded its fair share of the 630 seats in the Bundestag (also, a party can enter parliament by winning three of the single-seat district seats that are elected, along with the List PR seats, in Germany’s mixed system). Generally in PR democracies, a party that wins 10%, 18% or 26% of the popular votes wins 10%, 18% or 26% of the parliamentary seats, whereas in the US "winner take all" system, such a low percentage of the popular vote usually wins nothing.

Three of the smaller German political parties, the Free Democratic Party, Die Linke (the Left Party) and the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), are hovering right around the 5% level and in danger of getting shut out of parliament. The first two parties are long-standing players on the German landscape, and have been winning seats in the Bundestag for decades. BSW is a new party led by a well-known leader of Die Linke, Sahra Wagenknecht, who splintered off and formed her own party (which is much easier to do in a PR system than in the US-style “winner take all” system).

If all three of these parties fail to cross the threshold, then a couple of undesirable impacts will occur.

First, upwards of 15% of German voters will have wasted their votes. If these voters had known their party was not going to win any seats, they might have voted for one of the four larger parties that are certain to win seats. But unfortunately, without a magic crystal ball no one has advance perfect knowledge. So many German voters are about to waste their votes on an unelected political party.

Of course, that happens in American elections all the time. Germany’s MMP system (which combines List PR with single-seat districts) doesn’t waste nearly as many votes as America’s “winner take” electoral system. In the US, for each district seat election, 49.9% of voters can waste their vote on a losing candidate. If there are three or more candidates, an even higher percentage of voters could cast votes for losers. In the 2024 presidential election, in which Donald Trump won with 49.8% of the popular vote, a majority of voters wasted their votes on losing candidates.

Some members of the US Congress, as well as governors and other elected officials, have won their seats with 32 to 40% of the vote (most particularly in party primaries in lopsided partisan districts), which means up to two-thirds of voters wasted their votes on unelectable candidates. And supporters of small parties like the Libertarians or Greens have no chance at all to elect their candidates and party.

While the “wasted vote” situation is not as extreme in PR democracies like Germany, nevertheless any voters considering a vote for their favorite small party still have to consider voting strategically by casting their vote for a party with a better chance of winning. These voters are still stuck calculating whether to cast a vote for the “lesser of two evils.”

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Wasted votes can contribute to distortions in coalition-building

The second undesirable impact that can happen in List PR elections as a result of wasted votes, especially when combined with a parliamentary government like Germany's, is in the coalition-building process. Specifically, whether or not the FDP, Die Linke and BSW pass the threshold could significantly impact which parties are included in the governing majority coalition.

For example, if the FDP, Die Linke and BSW all win less than the 5% threshold and end up with no seats, the four winning parties would be awarded more seats, even higher than their share of the popular vote. That would especially benefit the frontrunner, the Christian Democratic Party, who currently are polling at around 30% (in combination with its smaller sister party in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union). But that vote share would win about 37% of the seats, allowing the CDU/CSU to form a government majority with just one additional coalition partner, either the SPD or the Greens.

However, if the FDP, BSW and Die Linke all surpass the victory threshold, the CDU/CSU's seat share would shrink to 30%, and that would mean it would have to form a three-party coalition. That becomes more challenging to juggle the demands of two coalition partners, since the partners might make for strange bedfellows. That’s what happened in the current SPD-led coalition with the FDP and the Greens, and when that unstable coalition finally fell apart from internal tensions and infighting, the voting public blamed the coalition partners, which boosted the CDU’s electoral fortunes in this election.

Generally I like the simplicity of most List PR systems, but “wasted votes” is one of the drawbacks of this system, compared to another PR system like single transferable vote/proportional ranked choice voting. In a close election in which the outcome of either vote shares or coalition partners (or both) is decided on the margins, and when a number of small parties fail to reach the electoral threshold, those voters have essentially wasted their votes. And those wasted votes can impact the coalition formation.

Past results tell the story

This dynamic already manifested in the 2013 federal elections in Germany, when 34 political parties competed but only five parties crossed the 5% threshold and won seats. Votes for the other 29 parties were wasted, resulting in 15.7 percent of the List votes going to losing parties. In Germany’s more recent 2021 elections, approximately 7.5 percent of the List vote went to parties that fell short of five percent.

An even bigger impact can be seen in the Israeli election of 2022. There were 40 political parties and 10 of them crossed the 3.25% threshold necessary to win seats. With votes for the other 30 parties being wasted, it meant that 8.5 percent of the vote did not count toward electing a party. Because nearly 300,000 anti-Netanyahu votes were wasted on parties that did not reach the victory threshold and win representation, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing coalition of allies was able to barely squeak out a majority of legislative seats despite his religion-dominated coalition winning only 48 percent of the popular vote. Given the corruption and criminality of Netanyahu personally, as well as the war crimes and genocide perpetrated by his government according to everyone from the International Criminal Court to the United Nations and Israeli historians, these “wasted vote” dynamics have had tragic consequences.

Wasted votes in List PR elections are fairly common. In Italy’s recent election, 11.2 percent of the List vote went to losing parties; in the Czech Republic 19.9 percent, Slovenia 24 percent, Slovakia 28.4 percent, Latvia 28 percent, New Zealand 7.8 percent. However elections in other List PR countries have resulted in much lower percentages of wasted votes, so this is not always a hard and fast rule. But when it happens in a close election, it can affect not only the number of voters who waste their votes on losers but also the outcome of which party finishes first, and the formation of the majority coalition government.

The solution: ranked ballots to the rescue

If Germany or other List PR democracies used ranked ballots, that would greatly reduce the number of wasted votes and increase the proportionality of the elections. Voters could be allowed the option of ranking up to three parties, and if their vote for their favorite party cannot help that party cross the victory threshold, their vote would pass on to their next-ranked party choice. So if a German voter ranked Die Linke first, and Die Linke failed to cross the 5% threshold, that voter’s vote would not be lost. She could rank another party that is somewhat ideologically aligned with her views, such as the Green Party or the SPD, as her second choice. Her vote would then count for that party.

The ranked ballots would ensure that votes for parties that don’t have enough support to reach the victory threshold are not wasted – voters’ rankings would be used to re-allocate votes to the parties still in the race, using every voter’s ballot efficiently. The ranked ballots would maximize the number of voters who actually cast a vote that helps elect a party, and that in turn would increase representative proportionality, i.e. it would better ensure that parties win the number of seats that reflects their true popularity.

In the most recent Ireland elections using ranked ballots, only one percent of votes were cast for parties who failed to win any seats and were therefore wasted. The use of transferable ranked ballots is why proportional ranked choice voting can be used successfully in a district magnitude of 3 to 7 seats (and a victory threshold of 12.5 to 25 percent), a design that is used in the Republic of Ireland and Australia. Few votes are thrown away. In contrast, a List system with a low number of district seats would likely result in substantially large numbers of wasted votes and a degree of instability in election outcomes and coalition formation.

Ranked ballots are one of the wonders of modern representative democracy. Allowing voters to rank their ballots is an unequivocal democratic improvement, and it's puzzling why they aren’t incorporated into List systems.

Some people believe ranked ballots are complicated, or make the voting process more complicated, but that’s just an unjustifiable disparagement of allegedly "dumb" voters. Millions of voters in the US, as well as millions more in Australia, Ireland and other places, use ranked ballots and handle the task of ranking candidates as easily as they handle the task of ranking their favorite flavors of ice cream or movies. In exit polls from New York City's first ranked choice voting elections, over 90% of Black, Latino, and Asian voters found their RCV ballot "simple to complete."

There actually is a version of ranked choice voting that can be applied to the ranking of parties instead of candidates, called Spare Voting (also sometimes known as “two-choice MMP”). The Spare Vote is intended to encourage voters to vote more honestly for their favorite party and not worry about “lesser evils” dynamics. Democratic nations using List PR methods would be wise to incorporate ranked ballots into their elections. Doing so would reduce wasted votes, increase representative proportionality, and better ensure coalition congruence. A List/RCV hybrid would empower voters with more electoral choice, and reduce fears over unintended consequences of wasted votes.

With so many people today having gone sour on government and democracy, adding ranked ballots to List PR would liberate voters and perhaps help some of them feel better about government again.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776.bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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[Editor’s note: DemocracySOS welcomes guest author Greg Dennis from Voter Choice Massachusetts. The Bay State has been a hotbed of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) activism, substantially due to the efforts of Greg and others. Currently 27 communities in Massachusetts are actively pursuing RCV, including Boston. Proponents have won the support of Gov. Maura Healey, both US Senators Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey, six of Massachusetts’ nine US House members, several former governors, both Republican and Democrat, a number of good government groups, labor unions, NGOs and state and local elected officials. The list of endorsers is impressive.]

[A good-natured warning about Greg’s article — this one is going to get a bit wonky. He engages in some rigorous comparative analysis examining RCV vs Condorcet Voting, looking at the pros and cons of each. If you give the article a try, I think you will find it illuminating and rewarding.]

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is one of the fastest-growing voting reforms in the United States. Twenty-three years ago, the only US jurisdiction using RCV was Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to fewer than 60,000 registered voters. Today, RCV is used for public elections in 50 American jurisdictions, including 2 states, 3 counties, and 45 cities, reaching nearly 14 million voters. While new statewide adoptions fell short this past November, Ranked Choice Voting made net gains with wins in Washington, DC and Oak Park, IL, and the state of Alaska and the city of Bloomfield, MN voted to continue using RCV for their elections, too. Despite the speed bumps, for more than two decades we’ve seen a long, steady march toward greater RCV adoption nationwide.

As Ranked Choice Voting has grown in popularity, its benefits have become progressively more apparent. Numerous studies have found the adoptions of Ranked Choice Voting to have boosted turnout, promoted campaign civility, and diversified representation. Moreover, the foremost criticism of RCV – that it is too “complicated” for voters – is being steadily dispelled by the mounting real life experience of voters actually using it. As survey after survey demonstrates, once voters cast a RCV ballot, they tend to like it, understand it, and want to keep it.

Naturally, any reform will draw its share of detractors, and RCV is no exception. While most critics of RCV prefer to keep our existing plurality system, not all are defenders of the status quo. A small number of detractors do agree with us about the failures of plurality voting; however, they would prefer those problems be addressed with a different alternative voting method instead. While there are myriad alternative voting systems, and an enthusiastic advocate for just about every one, this essay focuses on the recent arguments made by proponents of “Condorcet methods,” a class of voting systems named after the brilliant 18th century French philosopher and mathematician Marquis de Condorcet, and explained in greater detail below.

This essay focuses on Condorcet advocates not because they are particularly numerous, but because their arguments, while ultimately flawed, are grounded in a kernel of truth. In short, these critics argue that Condorcet would be more effective than RCV at reducing political extremism due to its ability to elect a compromise candidate in a polarized political environment. While this theory has some mathematical appeal, it overlooks the ample real-world experience from actual RCV elections and fails to account for the differing strategic incentives offered by both systems. An alternative theory, one better supported by the available data, shows why RCV is superior to Condorcet as a tool for depolarization, and for fixing the broken plurality system used in the US today.

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The Case for Condorcet Voting

To understand the rationale for Condorcet voting methods, let’s start from a purported flaw in RCV that Condorcet proponents like to highlight. Namely, they point out that RCV may fail to elect a compromise candidate when the electorate is polarized. The canonical example involves three candidates – one on the left, one on the right, and one in the center – where candidate Center trails candidates Left and Right in first-choice support. Here are the ranked ballots for one such scenario involving 100 voters:

No. of voters	First choice	Second Choice	Third Choice
  44              Right	            Center	    Left
  43	          Left	            Center	    Right
   8	          Center	    Left	    Right
   5	          Center	    Right	    Left

Assuming these rankings reflect the sincere preferences of the voters, the Center candidate is preferred by a majority of voters in head-to-head match-ups against either Left or Right individually. Specifically, in a head-to-head matchup of Center vs Right, Center would win with 56 votes (43+8+5) to 44 votes; and in a Center vs Left match-up, Center would win 57 (44+8+5) to 43. A candidate like Center that beats every other candidate in head-to-head theoretical matchups is called the Condorcet winner. Although a Condorcet winner isn’t guaranteed to exist in every election (due to a phenomenon known as a Condorcet cycle), a voting system that guarantees the Condorcet winner is elected whenever one does exist is known as a Condorcet-compliant method, or a “Condorcet method” for short.

A few more technical definitions will come in handy. While the Center candidate above is the Condorcet winner, the Right candidate is a Condorcet loser, meaning they lose every head-to-head matchup. Finally, the voters who ranked Left > Center > Right and those that ranked Center > Left > Right together form a majority coalition, because they support a common set of candidates (Center and Left) over all others (Right) and combined constitute a majority of all voters, 51 (43+8) of 100 voters.

In the above scenario, any Condorcet method by definition elects Center, because again, Center is the Condorcet winner. But both plurality voting and RCV choose someone else. Under plurality, candidate Right is elected, because Right has the most first choices and plurality ignores later preferences entirely. RCV and Condorcet proponents generally agree that this is the worst possible outcome, as Right is a Condorcet loser and is the only candidate not supported by the majority coalition.

Ranked Choice Voting, on the other hand, elects Left, a candidate who is both supported by the majority coalition and not the Condorcet loser. In fact, RCV is guaranteed to always elect a candidate from the majority coalition and never elect the Condorcet loser. However, as demonstrated in the example, RCV is not guaranteed to elect the Condorcet winner. This scenario has been colloquially referred to as the “center squeeze,” referring to the Center candidate’s support ostensibly being siphoned off by the Left and Right candidate, causing Center, the Condorcet winner, to be eliminated in the first round of a RCV tally.

For some academics, the center-squeeze possibility – this potential failure to elect a Condorcet winner – is not a negligible curiosity that can be quietly tolerated. For them, it is a fundamental threat to RCV’s capacity to substantially moderate our politics. Professors Nathan Atkinson and Scott Ganz have warned about an “extremist bias inherent to … ranked choice voting.” Professor Ned Foley is concerned that RCV may elect the “most polarizing candidate.” To see why they’re wrong, let’s first look at the data.

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A Plea for Real-World Empiricism

With the level of concern expressed by Condorcet proponents about the center squeeze scenario, one might assume that RCV fails to elect the Condorcet winner with significant frequency. If that is the case, one would be mistaken. Indeed, when Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos of Harvard Law School studied the question, he found the opposite to be true.

In his 2024 paper “Finding Condorcet,” Stephanopoulos calculated that Condorcet winners were elected in 181 of 183 races in the US over the last two decades and in 191 of 193 races in Australia and Scotland. As he concluded, RCV “functions essentially as if it were a Condorcet-consistent method, electing the Condorcet winner almost all the time,” and as such, “there are only minor majoritarian gains to be had by switching … to a Condorcet-consistent method.”

The full data set of RCV elections in the US makes an even stronger case. Out of more than 800 single-winner RCV elections in US history, RCV has failed to elect the Condorcet winner exactly twice, or less than one quarter of one percent (0.25%) of the time. Even if we restrict ourselves to only RCV elections featuring 3 or more candidates, it’s still only 0.4% of the time. That’s a factor of 100 lower than the statistical simulations of Atkinson, Foley, and Ganz, a fact that speaks to the importance of real-life empiricism, and as a corollary, the unreliability of mathematical models.

Condorcet fans should be thrilled to see a fast-growing voting reform demonstrating a near-perfect level of Condorcet efficiency. Even if one believes that center-squeeze scenarios weaken RCV’s propensity for moderating our politics, it’s implausible that they could be consequential at such a low frequency. Those who insist otherwise owe us either a careful argument as to why such rare events could have a substantial impact, or an argument as to why they might be more common in the future. We haven’t seen any of either. Instead, the only genuine, real-world evidence they’ve marshalled are anecdotes. And, again, there’s only two of those to choose from, out of many hundreds of races.

The anecdote that’s featured most prominently in the recent pro-Condorcet commentary is the August 2022 special election for Alaska’s US House seat, to fill the seat left vacant after the death of Republican incumbent Don Young. Democrat Mary Peltola beat Republican Sarah Palin in the final round of that RCV election, but the rankings indicated that moderate Republican Nick Begich would have beaten both Peltola and Palin in head-to-head contests. In the phraseology of the center squeeze scenario, Begich is that Center candidate who was “squeezed” between the Left candidate Peltola and the Right candidate Palin.

Did this election demonstrate the propensity for RCV to elect an “extremist?” Far from it. Peltola was a clear moderate who endorsed moderate Republican incumbent Lisa Murkowski for Senate. Moreover, she went on to win reelection to a full term a mere three months later – that time as the Condorcet winner, no less – and then clocked in as the most popular Alaskan politician. As political analysts observed at the time, Peltola beat Palin, not with a polarizing campaign, but by “forging a coalition across class, party and ethnic lines,” and once in Congress, she stressed the importance of bipartisanship. In the most recent November 2024 election, while Peltola was among the many Democratic incumbents that lost, she finished 5 points ahead of Harris, whom Peltola had declined to endorse to further broaden her moderate appeal.

In short, the leading anecdote trotted out to show how RCV enables polarization actually tells the opposite story. It showcases a winner who fully embraced moderation and coalition-building. To his credit, even Condorcet proponent Ned Foley now admits that the 2022 Alaska races show that RCV can “combat polarization and elect candidates who are closer to the center.” With no other recent center-squeeze anecdotes available, he is now leaning heavily on pure hypotheticals, like “what if incumbent Republican Senator Rob Portman had run for reelection?” None of the hundreds of real RCV races over the past several years will do. Certainly the RCV elections to the Alaska state legislature won’t make the point, as a bipartisan compromise coalition has now captured both of its houses.

Furthermore, where is the real-world data that makes the affirmative case for Condorcet? While it is true that practical use of Condorcet methods is limited, it isn’t zero. It was used for city elections in Marquette, Michigan in the 1920s, for example. How did that experiment work out? Was it a force for moderation while it lasted? Why did it end? And how have Condorcet methods fared for private organizations that have tried them? Condorcet proponents have produced virtually no research into these experiences. These are useful, if not necessary, questions to answer before advocating the broad adoption of Condorcet method for high-stakes governmental elections.

Comparing Campaign Incentives

But for the sake of argument, let’s put aside the practical data analysis and look purely at the theoretical case. Conceptually, Condorcet proponents do have a point: in a center squeeze situation, the candidate closest to the median voter is more likely to win under a Condorcet method than RCV. However even in the theoretical plane, that's not an open and shut case. It’s a fundamentally incomplete argument, because neither polarization, nor its inverse, moderation, spring up from single, isolated elections; they evolve over a period of time due to the various political forces in operation. When we extend our gaze beyond single elections to the broader electoral incentives at play, a very different picture emerges, one in which Condorcet isn’t the tool to promote depolarization that it may appear to be at first blush.

To see why, let’s return to that Alaska example and ask an important question. Namely, why did Peltola run such un-polarizing campaigns in the presence of two potential center-squeeze scenarios in 2022? Her campaign logic was obvious: she needed to win a large fraction of Begich’s supporters to rank her second in order to best Palin in the final round and win the election. That was her most likely path to victory.

It was therefore advantageous for her, and for her constellation of supporters and promoters, to appeal to the concerns and issues voiced by the Republican Begich. As Professor Benjamin Reilly and others have repeatedly documented, RCV tends to exert this kind of centripetal political force in divided societies.

Under RCV, if a potential center-squeeze scenario takes shape, picture that Center candidate as a magnet that attracts the Left and Right poles inward. If candidates Left and Right are smart, they and their respective supporters will appeal to the supporters of candidate Center to earn more 2nd choice rankings. The Left and Right campaigns have an incentive to seek common ground with the Center candidate, offer policy concessions where possible, and generally behave in a more civil and respectful manner towards Center. That’s precisely what Peltola did in 2022, and equally importantly, what Palin did not do.

With the introduction of a Condorcet method, those centripetal forces would disappear from any center-squeeze scenario. If the Alaska race used Condorcet, Peltola and Palin would not improve their odds by earning more second choice rankings of Begich supporters. In a center squeeze, second choice rankings from the Center do not bring the Left and Right candidates any closer to victory, and therefore centrist appeals and moderating rhetoric are of little value.

More problematic incentives would likely emerge in Condorcet elections instead. As Left and Right would soon discover, in a center-squeeze configuration they have an incentive to encourage their respective supporters to “bullet vote,” meaning rank them first and leave the rest of the rankings blank. While bullet-voting offers no advantages to candidates under RCV, under Condorcet it could take the Center candidate out of the running, effectively setting up a plurality-style contest between the Left and Right candidates where they might stand a better shot at winning. To justify the bullet-voting strategy, candidates Left and Right would likely spike their rhetoric with dismissal and demonization of the Center candidate and centrism generally.

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Bullet voting wouldn’t be the only problematic incentive. Without any value in persuading the center, the Left and Right candidates would focus on amplifying their base turnout and mobilizing voters further to the extremes. Expect more red meat rhetoric and maximalist positions under Condorcet as a consequence. Worse still, these polarizing effects might be reinforced in election after election, repeatedly cleaving the electorate and pulling the coalitions further apart in both policy and rhetoric. Far from the centripetal effects of RCV, we could see strong centrifugal forces at play, of coalitions and voters moving away from the political center. If RCV turns the Center candidate into a magnet, under Condorcet that candidate becomes the center of a merry-go-round, propelled by every election and flinging its riders to the edges of the platform, if not off it entirely.

A Condorcet proponent may counter that polarization of the coalitions wouldn’t matter, because the Center candidate will ultimately win regardless. But how long can that center hold? It could easily lead to either of two ugly outcomes: first, a candidate from the Left or Right coalitions might succeed in their base turnout strategy and eke out a majority over the Center candidate. A polarized coalition with a mandate would be a scary result, but perhaps not the most likely one. A second and perhaps more probable outcome is that the Left and Right coalitions gang up on the Condorcet system itself and repeal it altogether. After all, in a center-squeeze configuration, neither major coalition gets their way in the outcome, and together they have an absolute majority to undo the reform via a ballot measure.

Conclusions and Predictions

At the end of the day, a conceptual analysis of elections is only as good as its ability to explain real-world outcomes. By this standard, an analysis that warns about an abundance of center-squeeze scenarios and potential polarization under RCV is a dud. An analysis that contradicts the actual results and practical effects of RCV in Alaska, Australia, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere offers little explanatory power. When a theory doesn’t explain reality, it’s time to find a new theory.

Fortunately, we have another theory handy: the one outlined above that focuses on the comparative campaign incentives under RCV and Condorcet. Under this theory, center-squeeze scenarios would be at most transient conditions under RCV, because its incentives would depolarize these conditions out of existence when they crop up. While RCV may permit a non-Center candidate to win on rare occasions, its centripetal effects eventually bring the electorate to rest at a depolarized equilibrium. This theory, in contrast to the one forwarded by Condorcet proponents, aligns quite well with the data from real world elections, stretching back 100 years in the cases of Australia and Ireland.

The theory additionally predicts that when presented with a center-squeeze configuration, a Condorcet method may well amplify polarization and this amplification may result in its own undoing. While RCV enlists the candidate and the candidate’s supporters in appeals to the center, Condorcet enlists them in appeals to the extremes. It’s doubtful that the system itself can withstand the division that will ensue. And the merits of a Condorcet system mean nothing if the system itself cannot be sustained.

The preceding predictions about the behavior of Condorcet are just that—predictions. Claims about the practical effects of a voting system, in the absence of real-world data, should be offered with a healthy dose of humility. Unfortunately, gathering that data on current and past Condorcet use is homework that its advocates have yet to turn in. Then again, perhaps a key reason why there is limited real-world experience to study is that Condorcet can’t reach a stable equilibrium in a competitive, political context. Perhaps the merry-go-round invariably breaks down, and is then replaced with an entirely different ride.

Greg Dennis @VotingNerd

Related: “Alaska election results show why Condorcet is obsolete: Condorcet advocates use the wrong standard for evaluating Ranked Choice Voting elections”

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[Editor’s note: The following piece is updated from Rob Richie’s recent commentary in the Fulcrum which appeared in more than 20 newspapers across the country.]

Imagine it’s election night 2024. As forecast by oddsmakers at ABC’s 538, a few close swing states will decide a tossup presidential election – and test the health of our democracy. In that scenario, we can be certain of two facts: Neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump will win a majority of the vote nationally, and votes for independent and third-party candidates will dwarf the final margin in the closest swing states.

Dissatisfied voters regularly peel off to insurgents like John Anderson in 1980, Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996, Ralph Nader in 2000, and Jill Stein and Gary Johnson in 2016. With Robert Kennedy regularly polling in double-digits and projected to appear on nearly every state ballot, and with independent Cornel West, Libertarian Party nominee Chase Oliver, and the eventuta Green Party nominee, there’s a whole shadow campaign emerging. Democrats are spending millions against these candidates, while Republicans are eying whether they can repeat the 2016 playbook — in which Trump flipped the decisive states of Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin even while winning an average vote share of less than 48 percent.

There’s a proven solution to the “spoiler” problem that is ready-made for American politics: ranked-choice voting. Australia has an average of more than five candidates in its RCV elections without any “spoiler” talk. Maine and Alaska already will use RCV for president this year, with a recent RCV poll in Maine suggesting Kennedy may do well and the statewide outcome could come down to which major party nominee can build a majority by appealing to his backers. If all states joined Alaska and Maine in passing RCV, there would be no worries that a third-party candidate could tip a state — and thus the White House — against popular will.

Instead of indicating a single choice, RCV voters get to rank the candidates first, second, and so on. If no one wins by securing more than half of first choices, the trailing finishers are eliminated and ballots for those candidates count for their next choice. The final “instant runoff” between the top two candidates ensures a representative outcome without the costs and burdens of a December runoff election.

Alaska voters adopted RCV for presidential elections in 2020 and Maine did so by legislative action in 2019. But why have 48 states not passed RCV — particularly the handful of swing states that will decide this November’s election? Why are the collective decisions of voters unwilling to settle on the “lesser of two evils” a bigger wildcard than Trump’s criminal trials and Biden’s age?

To be sure, change is happening. RCV has been a clue on Jeopardy and in the New York Times crossword. 50 American cities and hundreds of NGOs use RCV, with generally strong support for it in exit polls. RCV has won 27 consecutive city ballot measures, and four states (including those here and Colorado) are expected to vote directly this November on adopting RCV statewide, with other ballot measures to adopt RCV in cities like Washington, D.C. and in two states (Arizona and Montana) where wins create new reasons to enact RCV legislatively.

A few proven approaches will help scale RCV that much faster. Perfection is illusory, but we should never settle for less. Voters of all backgrounds easily rank things every day, and all jurisdictions should use well-designed ballots and tested voter education models to allow them to do that in RCV elections. RCV results should be as fast, transparent, and auditable as non-RCV ones. Election officials should stop holding onto RCV ballot data and instead release preliminary RCV results and datasets that can enable anyone to confirm the accuracy of their RCV tally. States should buy voting equipment that makes RCV as easy to use as flipping a switch.

These changes are coming. Many cities now release preliminary RCV tallies on election night and embrace best practices on transparency, audits, and timely data releases. Now that all modern voting equipment can run RCV elections (a real concern for cities looking to adopt RCV in the 1990s and 2000s), policymakers are aligning on standards to enable vendors to offer RCV as a default option. More jurisdictions are investing in good ballot design, intuitive results displays, and voter education.

Effectively ending the presidential spoiler problem by 2028 is within reach by focusing on the swing states that decide the White House. RCV is already on the ballot this November in Nevada, and active movements in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin can lead to change. The rest of the states can adopt RCV for presidential elections too, just as Oregon and Washington, DC voters can do at the ballot box this year, and RCV can be built into the National Popular Vote interstate compact if it is won by 2028.

With Americans fundamentally restless with their ballot choices, the spoiler problem can’t be wished away. It’s time to take RCV national to accommodate voter choices and reward our leaders for seeking to represent a majority of Americans.

Rob Richie @Rob_Richie

Richie is senior advisor, co-founder and former president and CEO of FairVote, a nonpartisan electoral reform organization.

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As we approach the November 24 elections, it is increasingly apparent that much is at stake. The closeness of the polls in the grudge rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump has the whole country on edge. But there has been less focus on the fact that the Republicans have one of the slimmest majorities in US House history: currently 217 to 213 seats (with five vacancies).

And in the US Senate, Democrats are defending their razor-slim 51-49 majority, with open seats in swing states Arizona and Michigan, and a near-certain loss in West Virginia where Democrat incumbent Joe Manchin is retiring. Democratic incumbents are defending tough seats in several swing or pro-Trump states, including Montana, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada.

So the presidency and both houses of Congress are up for grabs. I can’t predict how those seats will turn out, but I can predict that treasure chests of money are going to get spent in the pursuit of victory. With each new election the candidates set more spending records, reaching nearly $15 billion in the 2020 election cycle, larger than the budget expenditures of 12 states. This year is predicted to break new records.

Such spending has created a widespread perception of cronyism, corruption, and a “pay-to-play” political system marinated in money. Over the next several months we are going to see a lot of sensationalized headlines about how campaign spending is going to drive the elections and determine which side will win majorities.

But is that assumption accurate? Certainly campaign spending has an impact, but these analyses often confuse cause and effect, and cloud our understanding of how our broken democracy really works, as well as how to repair it.

The real impact of winner-take-all elections on campaign finance

The overwhelmingly dominant factor in who wins and loses most elections — all but the closest elections — is not campaign spending inequities but partisan residential patterns in red and blue America, combined with winner-take-all elections. Liberals predominantly live in urban areas, conservatives in the rural areas and exurbs, with suburbs being the toss-up areas. It’s those residential patterns that largely determine who wins, dwarfing other factors such as campaign funding, as well as local issues or candidate strength.

The partisan tilt of any district can be fairly easily determined by tracking the presidential vote in each district. Using this methodology, FairVote projects that 85% of the 435 House seats will be “safe” for one party this November, and another 9% leaning toward one party, leaving only 6% of seats as true toss-ups. The 85% share of safe seats is the highest in the 25-year history of FairVote’s Monopoly Politics predictions. The Cook Political Report estimates that in 2024 only 22 out of 435 House seats – barely 5% -- will be tossups. In the vast majority of seats, the dominant party has as much chance of losing as a snowball melting at the North Pole.

Wait a minute, you think…but the winners usually have a lot more campaign funds than their challengers – isn’t that the reason why they win?

No, just the opposite. In most legislative elections, campaign spending inequities follow electoral success. The money goes to candidates who donors know will win, because the partisan demographic tilt of that specific election guarantees that result. By betting on the sure horse in each race, donors are buying access and influence—but not elections.

This natural partisan tilt based on residential patterns also affects other reforms, such as independent redistricting commissions. There are a few states, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina, in which redistricting abuses have added a sinister twist. But most incumbents live in safe, non-competitive districts because geography – where we live – has become destiny.  Americans have settled more and more into definable and balkanized residential patterns between cities, suburbs and rural areas, and there is little that redistricting reforms can do to change this. It’s a byproduct of where people live.

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The Pyramid of Money

So if campaign funding inequities are not a crucial factor in deciding the vast majority of legislative elections, why do all these candidates bother raising so much money, breaking records year after year?

To understand the true role that private campaign funding plays in our elections, it’s important to understand what I call the Pyramid of Money. Representative Nancy Pelosi (and former Democratic Speaker of the House) represents the district in which I live in San Francisco. This is a heavily Democratic city, there is no chance that a Republican candidate could ever beat Pelosi or any other Democrat here. Pelosi won her 2022 election with 84% of the vote, she does not have to spend a dime on her own reelection. Neither does current GOP speaker Mike Johnson, who ran unopposed in 2022 in his heavily GOP district in Louisiana. It turns out that most legislative districts are like that—naturally tilted for one party or the other.

Nevertheless, the Big Money queens and kings like Pelosi, Johnson and others raise huge sums of money. Pelosi in 2022 raised over $25 million. Johnson so far in 2024 has raised $9 million. Former GOP speaker Kevin McCarthy raised $28 million in 2022 to run in a district he won with 67% of the vote; current Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has raised $15 million so far in 2024 even though he won his last race in a landslide of 72%.

Why do they all raise so much money when they represent the safest of seats?

Because they funnel the money into euphemistically-labelled “party-building activities,” also known as “soft money,” mostly to finance colleagues in the handful of hotly contested races. In the process, they buy themselves influence among their peers, as well as important party leadership positions. Think of it as a pyramid structure with each party’s kings and queens sitting at the top. These party fat cats target the slush flow of money to the predictably tight races, hoping to win a majority of seats for their team. The rest of the safe-seat incumbents, along with the lobbyists, lawyers, allied political action committees and high roller donors, fill out the lower levels of the pyramid, funneling money into its labyrinth, where it is directed by party leaders skilled in the art of deception. It’s a well-oiled operation.

The Pyramid is so welded into our political system’s framework that it can take bizarre forms. A few years ago, GOP leaders set a new low bar -- they explicitly tied the reward of leadership positions and chairmanships of powerful committees to those incumbents who raised the most money for the party. Since committee chairs have near-dictatorial powers to set committee dockets, dole out pork and establish the national agenda, this quid pro quo debased government to a whole new level of crass political patronage and being “for sale to the highest bidder.”

But keep in mind, the GOP leadership was only able to do this because most incumbents don’t need to spend a dime on their own re-elections. And that’s because of the “winner take all” district-based system in which most incumbents live in safe, non-competitive districts due to natural partisan demographics.

The Pyramid of Money symbolizes the shape and flow of private money in our political system. The fact that a lot of candidates receive chunks of money from various lobbyists, corporations, and special interests, as well as boosts from various PACs and super PACS, while definitely a toxic relationship that needs to be disrupted, is not proof that these politicians have been “bought.” Oftentimes the donors and politician-recipients are part of the same Pyramid team, because they have the same beliefs and legislative priorities. One is the point person in the legislature, the other is the honcho raising the money needed to win elections.

So when you want to understand the crucial dynamic of how money works, don’t think of high rolling donors buying candidates or shadowy lobbyists offering briefcases of bribes. Think of the Pyramid of Money, with its octopus arms redirecting money between the private and public sectors to the handful of battleground races that will decide congressional majorities. The lobbyists and special interests follow the lead of political leaders, not the other way around. They scratch each other’s backs, each playing their respective roles inside the Pyramid of Money.

That Monopoly Politics also means that party primaries are the real battle in those 94% decided districts. And that's also where party leaders who have raised millions spread it around to help their hand-picked candidates to win their primaries.

In short, the Pyramid is the problem, with its one-party winner-take-all fiefdoms and kings and queens sitting atop the slush pile, directing the show.

The Supreme Court’s ideological bias enters the winner-take-all game

The impact of the Supreme Court’s horrendous Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United decisions -- which equated money with political speech -- is made even worse every election due to the perverse dynamics unleashed by the basic architecture of our winner-take-all political system. Even with strong campaign finance reform or independent redistricting reform, breaking up the pyramid will be very difficult as long as we are using a winner-take-all system in which most legislative seats are lopsided one-party strongholds due to partisan residential demographics, and invincible incumbents can funnel their campaign funds to party leaders and their super PACs.

Now that we understand the Pyramid of Money, it’s clear that the most effective and simplest type of campaign finance reform would be to stop the ability of politicians to share money with other candidates, whether for the November general or in party primaries. Why should a politician raising money from San Francisco tech billionaires or Oklahoma oil tycoons have an absolute “soft money” right to share those funds with candidates running 2000 miles away? Curtailing their ability to do so would have a much greater impact than what we usually call "campaign finance reform."

But to really overturn the pyramid, we need to do more than plug the holes that the Supreme Court has ripped open via several terrible SCOTUS decisions. We also need to reform the winner-take-all, district-based electoral system.

How can we topple the Pyramid of Money?  

The most crucial fix to these anti-democratic tendencies of our political system is to elect all our legislatures using a method founded on the bedrock of proportional ranked choice voting. The recently introduced Fair Representation Act would get rid of geographic-based, single-seat, winner-take-all districts and elect House members in multi-winner “super districts” of up to five seats each. That would result in “moderate proportional representation” in which every part of the U.S. would be competitive for both major parties, and multiple political parties would be able to win seats. It would produce more contested and more competitive races, and virtually all voters would be able to cast a vote for a winning candidate or party. And it would disrupt the Pyramid of Money in ways that would turn it on its head. Party leaders would still have an important role, but they wouldn’t be able to target money to the handful of battleground races.

It also would add a new vibrancy to our politics by opening up elections to new voices and new ideas, and giving voters a lot more choice. It would create a vibrant dialogue between the political center and the margins, allowing new parties to act as the laboratories of new ideas and better ensure that policies are enacted with the support of a majority of Americans.

When combined with public financing of campaigns and free media time for candidates and parties, so that all players have sufficient resources to reach voters, these reforms would topple the Pyramid of Money and revitalize US democracy. If we don't understand the dynamics of how our political system actually works, we will miss the mark when we try to reform it.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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[Note from the editor: This article was first published on the FairVote website]

For me, the most powerful value of ranked choice voting is the new incentives RCV creates for voters and candidates to engage with one another. Doing so ultimately brings citizens closer to the legislators who represent them.

But RCV also directly improves the fairness and legitimacy of outcomes and makes it harder for operatives who seek to game the system. When electing powerful leaders, elections should uphold “majority rule.” Winners with a popular majority are more representative, have clearer mandates and engage with more voters. This article highlights candidates who have won with less than a popular majority in critical elections, from city halls to Congress to the presidency, both in the US and around the world. Let’s review some examples of consequential non-majority wins in elections that did not use either ranked choice voting or effective runoffs.

Plurality winners in presidential elections

Let’s start with presidential elections. Since 1824, when John Quincy Adams won with only 29.8% of the popular vote, 19 Electoral College winners earned less than a majority. Low plurality “wins” in primaries also boosted potentially weak and unrepresentative nominees.

In 2020, Joe Biden won the popular vote by 51.3% to 46.8% – but won three states narrowly with less than 50% in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. It’s unlikely that every backer of Libertarian Jo Jorgensen would have preferred Trump to Biden, but if so, Trump would have been elected president.

In the 2020 Democratic primaries, Joe Biden stumbled in Iowa (4th place, 14.9%), New Hampshire (5th, place 8.4%) and Nevada (17.6%). But after a 48.6% win in South Carolina, several candidates withdrew and Biden’s sudden momentum led to Super Tuesday wins and the nomination.

In 2016, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. He lost the popular vote by 48% to 46%, but won Arizona (48.1%), Florida (48.6%), Michigan (47.3%), Pennsylvania (48.2%) and Wisconsin (47.2%). Voters for Libertarian Gary Johnson and the Green Party’s Jill Stein in an instant runoff would have decided the election.

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In the 2016 GOP Iowa caucuses, Ted Cruz earned 28% compared to Trump’s 24% and the rest of the field’s 48%. Simulations show that Cruz would have won a big landslide in a head-to-head race with Trump, greatly changing the narrative.

In 2012, Mitt Romney won the Republican nomination before losing the White House in November to Barack Obama. 24 of the first 30 GOP state primaries and caucuses were won with less than 50%, including Senator Rick Santorum winning Iowa with only 25%.

In 2008, Obama won the Democratic nomination. He won Iowa with 38% over Edwards (31%) and Clinton (30%). Clinton then won New Hampshire with 39%. Edwards’ withdrawal turned it into a head-to-head contest not requiring “instant runoffs” to determine majority winners.

In 2008, John McCain won the Republican nomination before losing to Obama. He got only 13% in Iowa, but won New Hampshire with 38%, then carried South Carolina with 33% and Florida with 36%. That gave him momentum over Romney in 22 Super Tuesday primaries that McCain mostly won with less than 50%.

A fun fact about 2008: Both GOP nominee John McCain and Democratic nominee Barack Obama had boosted ranked choice voting – McCain with a recorded message in Alaska in 2002 and Obama by sponsoring a pro-RCV bill in Illinois.

In 2004, Senator John Kerry from Massachusetts won the Democratic nomination before losing to President George W. Bush in November. He was an upset winner in the Iowa caucuses with 37%, then won his neighboring state of New Hampshire with 38%. That momentum was enough to sweep him to the nomination.

In 2000, Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote by 48.4% to 47.9%, but Bush won the Electoral College. Gore would have won if he had reversed defeats in either Florida (537 votes) or New Hampshire (7,211 votes). Ralph Nader may have spoiled the race with his votes earned in Florida (97,488) and New Hampshire (22,198).

Democrat Bill Clinton won presidential elections over independent Ross Perot and GOP nominees President George H.W. Bush (in 1992) and Senator Robert Dole (in 1996). Clinton won the 1992 race with 43% of the vote, and the 1996 race with 49%. In 1992, fully 49 out of 50 states were won with under 50%, including Clinton’s wins in four states like Montana with less than 40%.

14 other presidents won with less than 50% of the popular vote. 1844 offers a powerful example of a swing state split vote. Pro-slavery James Polk’s win over slavery critic Henry Clay depended on Polk’s 1% win in New York, where anti-slavery candidate James Birney spoiled the race with 3% of the popular vote.

Some argue Lincoln’s 39.7% win in 1860 shows plurality voting can be good. But he won majorities with over 50% in states comprising an Electoral College majority. He wasn’t even on the ballot in nine southern states – deepening pre-war polarization.

Turning to other elections in the U.S. and overseas 

Let’s turn to consequential international and non-presidential U.S. elections, presented chronologically. Some are momentous. The winners weren’t necessarily “wrong,” but many had disputable outcomes with plurality voting or in runoffs with highly fractured 1st round results.

Taiwan’s presidential election, January 2024: The nationalist ruling party won with 41% over 2 candidates seeking to reduce tensions with neighboring China. The legislature elected simultaneously at least benefited from a more representative 61-53 majority for the 2 opposition parties.

Pirna, Germany mayoral election, December 2023: The far-right populist Alternative for Germany party won a mayoral race for the 1st time. Its candidate won with 38.5% in a three-person runoff in which the two more traditional candidates together won 61.5%.

Memphis, Tennessee mayoral election, October 2023: The winner in a 17-candidate race earned only 27.6%. Unfortunately, the state legislature in 2022 blocked the city from implementing ranked choice voting, which Memphis voters had approved twice.

Philadelphia and Pittsburgh mayoral primaries, May 2023: Democratic primaries effectively chose new mayors in these Pennsylvania cities. Both were won with less than 40% of votes. A poll had found that most Philadelphia voters back ranked choice voting.

U.S. Senate and House primaries, 2022: 120 primaries were won with less than 50% of the vote, including three current House members who won with less than 29%. Republicans lost U.S. Senate races after controversial candidates won primaries with low pluralities in Arizona (40%), New Hampshire (37%), and Pennsylvania (32%).

Peru presidential election, 2021: Most runoffs mean winners have over 50% of the vote, but runoffs can still undercut majority rule. Peru’s 1st round advanced only far-left Castillo (18.9%) and far-right Fujimori (13.4%). Castillo won the runoff, but has since been removed from office.

New York City district attorney primary, 2021: NYC uses ranked choice voting for city primaries, contributing to diverse winners earning more votes. But district attorneys need only a plurality, and Alvin Bragg won Manhattan’s Democratic district attorney primary by just 34% to 31%.

Florida state senate election, 2020: Plurality voting helped partisan political operatives to promote spoiler candidates. In Senate District 37, a phantom candidate with the incumbent’s name ran and won over 6,000 votes, enabling the GOP challenger to win by 34 votes. It led to criminal convictions.

Fall River, Massachusetts recall election, 2019: Mayor Jasiel Correia was recalled by a landslide, 61% to 39%. But his 35% of votes was enough to win the plurality election to replace himself. Later, he lost his re-election bid and is now incarcerated for crimes in office.

Washington State Treasurer election, 2016: Top-two primaries produce majority winners, but not always representative choices. In the all-voter primary, three Democrats split 52% of the vote, enabling the two Republicans to advance and then win the seat in November.

Montana U.S. Senate election, 2012: Democrats won 10 U.S. Senate seats with less than 50% from 1998 to 2016. In 2012, Sen. Jon Tester (D) won re-election by just 0.3%. A Libertarian had 6.6%, boosted by an ad buy from Tester-aligned operatives seeking to split GOP vote.

Missouri U.S. Senate primary, 2012: Sen. McCaskill (D) boasted about her operatives using plurality voting to help controversial GOP Rep. Todd Akin win the GOP primary with 36%. She won easily in November, although lost to a stronger Republican in 2018.

Egyptian presidential election, 2012: Egypt’s “Arab Spring” ended with an effective dictatorship. 2012 was a turning point. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi eventually won the presidential election, but the two polarizing runoff candidates together won only 48% in the 1st round.

Maine gubernatorial election, 2010: After the two previous Maine governors also won with less than 40%, Paul LePage won the GOP gubernatorial primary with 38% and the general election with 37%. He was reelected with 48% in 2014. His plurality victories may have contributed to voters approving ranked choice voting in 2016.

New York U.S. Senate elections: Some argue fusion voting avoids spoilers, but in 1970, Buckley won with 39% over two major party nominees. In 1980, D’Amato won with 45%, also due to split votes.

Ranked choice voting upholds majority rule

Ranked choice voting is a proven reform used in Alaska and Maine to elect the president and Congress. It’s used to elect Ireland’s president, including when Mary Robinson won a comeback victory in 1990 to become the country’s first woman president.

Ranked choice voting can be a proportional system, as it will be used this year in Portland (OR) for city council, and as it has been proposed in Congress with the Fair Representation Act.

Ranked choice voting is used by all voters in at least one election in Australia, Ireland, Malta, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, and in 50 cities in the U.S. As we build a more perfect union, let’s look for better ways to elect majorities and the minorities who together form those majorities.

Rob Richie, FairVote Senior Advisor @Rob_Richie

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While Donald Trump prepares to rumble through the Republican presidential primary field on his way to the GOP nomination, some of us democracy experts wonder how much will remain of US democracy a year from now. Meanwhile, we continue to debate ways to improve US democracy, such as which electoral system would be best for our Quivering Republic, despite the possible irrelevance of the conversation.

But hey, what can a poor boy to do, ‘cept to sing for a rock ‘n’ roll band, right?

So let’s dive further into this debate. Lately a few political scientists have issued a call for an “open list proportional representation” (OLPR) method as the North Star to hitch our democratic wagons to. I'm a big fan of open list PR systems, or virtually any other method of proportional representation that is politically viable. But every electoral system has its pros and cons, and the new-day proponents of OLPR appear not to understand how OLPR actually works, or how it compares to other methods such as ranked choice voting (either single-winner or proportional). As a result, their views on the subject are inconsistent and contradictory.

The complex truth about Open List PR

Åsa von Schoultz, a professor of political science at Helsinki University in Finland, has written a detailed paper about the Finnish Open List proportional representation system (OLPR) that is illuminating. I would especially recommend it to leading proponents of OLPR in the United States, such as Lee Drutman and Jack Santucci.

Professor Von Schoultz writes that the Finnish electoral system has two levels of competition -- one level is that of a multiparty democracy using proportional representation, with lots of competition as nine political parties won seats in Finland’s most recent election. Like all PR systems, parties are awarded representation more or less in proportion to their share of the popular vote. Two hundred parliamentary seats in the unicameral Eduskunta/Riksdag are distributed in twelve to eighteen constituencies, with the number of seats per district (the magnitude) ranging from 6 to 35.

But unlike many other PR democracies, in Finland’s “open list” system voters do not vote for parties, they vote for an individual candidate, and that personal vote doubles as a vote for that candidate’s party. This is what Santucci has called a “one-vote” version of OLPR.

But as Von Schoultz points out, this feature unleashes a second level of competition – a high degree of intra-party competition, because within each party the candidates that win seats are those that garner the most personal votes from voters. That in turn means that candidates within the same party are all competing against each other to see who will be awarded the seats that the party collectively wins.

“To cast a vote, all voters are obliged to choose one candidate from a fairly large selection of aspirants,” writes Von Schoultz.  And as we will see, this feature can sometimes be bewildering for voters and unleashes a number of electoral dynamics that Drutman and Santucci have criticized in their opinions regarding ranked choice voting.

For example, Lee Drutman has been particularly vocal that he favors what he regards as “party-based” reforms like fusion and open list PR. After being a supporter of ranked choice voting, Drutman has now disavowed RCV because he says it is a “candidate-centered” reform that undermines political parties.

But according to Professor von Schoultz, Finnish election campaigning in the open list system has experienced a shift in recent years from being party-based to candidate-centered. Up until the 1960s, she writes, parties were the main actors running the political campaigns. Today campaigns involve two distinct levels of competition: a collective campaign organized by the party at the national and district levels, and a large multitude of individually run candidate campaigns.

The collective campaign is run by the central party organization and revolves around the party leader. But a large measure of election campaigning is decentralized and run by the individual candidates, independently of the party. In fact, in an effort to distinguish themselves and broaden their appeal, many candidates stage joint campaign meetings with candidates from other political parties rather than with co-partisans. So those OLPR elections, and the system that Drutman favors, can hardly be characterized so simply as “party-based.”

Also, it should be noted that the dubious claim that RCV elections are candidate-based would be laughed out of any tavern in Australia or Ireland, where in the most recent elections seven parties won seats in the Australian House using single-winner RCV and nine parties in the Senate using proportional RCV; and in Ireland nine parties won seats (elected by proportional RCV) and several parties plus several independent candidates have competed in Ireland’s presidential elections using RCV.

Drutman’s observation is somewhat correct when it comes to the dozens of cities that use RCV, but those elections are statutorily nonpartisan. No political parties are ever on the ballot, only candidates. And RCV is hardly to blame, because those nonpartisan elections existed before RCV was used.

According to Professor von Schoultz, “This inherent duality has a multitude of effects on how elections are played out at different levels of the political system. It has consequences for the nomination of candidates, for how campaigns are fought and elections won, and for the behavior and attitudes of voters, politicians, and parties…The high degree of intraparty competition influences the political logic of Finnish politics.”

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Spoiler candidates and split votes in OLPR

Because candidates within the same political party are running against each other, that means they can spoil each other’s chance of election. Spoiler candidates within a political party can undermine the intra-party solidarity between those candidates.

Von Schoultz describes a common dynamic in Finland’s OLPR elections in which a party fields a very popular candidate (such as a party leader or even a celebrity) with a very high number of supporters, whose personal vote is enough to guarantee that the party wins seats. However, as a result, any other candidates elected from that list will win a marginal share of the vote. For example, in one parliamentary election the Finns Party in the district of Uusimaa fielded 24 candidates. Out of nearly 29,000 votes cast for that party, the party leader won nearly 20,000 personal votes (69.5 percent of the list total), while the second-place candidate on the list had barely a thousand personal votes, only 3.7 percent of the vote total, yet still won a seat.

Or imagine a scenario in which, within a political party, there are two factions, one more conservative than the other. With all of the candidates running against each other – sometimes hundreds of candidates, for which the voter has only one vote – some candidates will inevitably act as spoilers for others. If the majority faction splits its votes among too many candidates, the non-majority faction could end up winning most or all of that political party’s seats. Or if a highly popular candidate won most of her faction’s votes, that could result in the other party faction winning the rest of their party’s seats, resulting in an internally divided party within the legislature. Despite the obvious potential for spoiler/split vote mischief, one political scientist has puzzlingly written that OLPR is much better than RCV at avoiding the “spoiler problem.” Huh?

In short, says Von Schoultz , candidates are faced with “the delicate balance of trying to maximize the collective party vote while simultaneously engaging in intraparty rivalry.” And “voters are overloaded with information and torn between political campaigns played out at two distinct levels, a party-centered campaign characterized by vagueness at the national level and a multitude of highly individualized candidate campaigns at the district level.”

Too much complexity with OLPR?

Drutman and Santucci have indicated that RCV is overly complicated for voters. Drutman has written that RCV is more complicated for voters who have to “independently evaluate all the candidates,” and that RCV forces “voters to differentiate among independent candidates without party labels.” Santucci has written that, unlike RCV, OLPR “does not ask voters to research candidates;” that it’s so simple for the voter that “there is no need for voter education.”

But Professor Von Schoultz tells a different story. “The Finnish OLPR can be considered highly demanding for voters to use,” she writes. In the one district of Uusimaa, the total number of fielded candidates in one election amounted to 395, and each voter was required to pick a single candidate. Says Von Schoultz, “The extensive amount of candidates and the individualized style of campaigning mean that voters are overloaded with information to process, while receiving little guidance or shortcuts from parties as central actors.”

Drutman has additionally complained that RCV forces “voters to differentiate among independent candidates without party labels,” but that’s only true for nonpartisan RCV elections. That certainly was not true in the partisan elections in Maine, Alaska and some other states. Apparently he is unaware that the same criticism applies to OLPR itself, especially within the parties as candidates from the same party duke it out to see who wins each party’s seats.

It gets even more slanted – and familiar – from there. Von Schoultz: “From the perspective of candidates running for election, the duality embedded in the electoral system provides them with binary campaign incentives: try to maximize the party vote total, as well as the personal share of the votes in the constituency. To be successful, therefore, they need to cultivate a ‘personal vote’— votes derived from their personal characteristics, experience, or record of constituency service” — alongside a party vote.

What’s the best way for a candidate to cultivate their personal vote? The same way you do in the US-style plurality system – name recognition. Von Schoultz: “While name recognition can be seen as vital to cultivate a personal vote, it can come in many forms. A distinct characteristic of Finnish politics has been that of celebrity candidates, that is, candidates who have gained a reputation from areas other than politics.” For example, hockey stars. “Being a celebrity indeed significantly increases the chances of being elected.”

How about that? In OLPR, celebrity and name recognition can play a significant role in who gets elected, just like in US-style plurality elections. But OLPR advocates don’t ever mention it, for whatever reason.

But it gets even more familiar. Given the premium value of name recognition and celebrity status, it should come as no surprise that in Finland’s open list system, “the incumbency advantage is substantial.” One study found that 85 percent of MPs ran for re-election and 76 percent were successful. In one analysis of the candidates in the elections, “incumbency unsurprisingly stands out as the most powerful vote-earning attribute.”

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The “wasted vote” problem in proportional methods

One of the primary criticisms of “winner take all” plurality elections – including by Drutman and Santucci – is the number of “wasted votes.” In the US system, whenever there are multiple candidates in a plurality election for US House, Senate or president from different political parties, the winner can have far less than a majority of the vote. Some members of Congress, as well as governors and other elected officials, have won their seats with 32 to 40% of the vote. In recent years, presidential elections have been won by candidates who failed to win support from a majority of Americans. In these elections, all voters who cast a vote for losing candidates are said to have “wasted” their vote because they did not help elect someone. It’s not uncommon in the US for 60% or more of voters to waste their vote on a losing candidate.

Proportional representation systems significantly increase the number of voters who have an effective vote and drastically reduce the number of wasted votes. But according to this criteria, not all PR systems are equal, and some waste more votes than others.

In particular, List PR systems tend to waste a fair number of votes (though still not nearly as many as the US-style plurality system). In a list system, there is a percentage of votes – called a victory threshold – that a party must pass in order to win any seats. In Germany, for example, that threshold is five percent of the vote. In the 2013 federal elections in Germany, 34 political parties competed but only five parties crossed the 5% threshold and won seats. Votes for the other 29 parties were wasted, resulting in 15.7 percent of the List vote going to losing parties. In Germany’s more recent 2021 elections, approximately 7.5 percent of the List vote went to parties that fell short of five percent.

In Italy’s recent election, 11.2 percent of the List vote went to losing parties; in the Czech Republic 19.9 percent, Slovenia 24 percent, Slovakia 28.4 percent, Latvia 28 percent, New Zealand 7.8 percent. Elections in other countries by Party List have resulted in much lower percentages of wasted votes, so there is not always a hard and fast rule. But when it happens in a close election, it can affect the outcome of which party finishes first and is allowed to try and form a coalition government.

For example, in the Israeli election of 2022, there were 40 political parties and 10 of them crossed the 3.25% electoral threshold necessary to win seats. With votes for the other 30 parties being wasted, it meant that 8.5 percent of the vote did not count for a successful party. Two Arab-based political parties, Meretz and Balad, failed to win any seats for the first time since the early 1990s. Votes for those two parties totaled over six percent and were wasted, as were votes for other small Arab-based and progressive parties.

The front runner party Likud, led by former right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, achieved only 23 percent of the popular vote. Yet because nearly 300,000 anti-Netanyahu votes were wasted on parties that did not win representation, his allied bloc was able to barely squeak out a majority of legislative seats despite his rightwing, quasi-religious coalition winning only 48 percent of the popular vote. Given the corruption and criminality of Netanyahu, as well as his government, these kinds of “wasted vote” dynamics can have tragic outcomes.

In Finland, the electoral system designers have found a work-around -- most small parties join electoral alliances in which different parties can pool their votes. That tends to reduce disproportionality between votes and seats and ensures that most voters contribute to electing a candidate or party.

Unfortunately, some OLPR proponents refuse to admit that ranked ballots greatly reduce the number of wasted votes and increase the proportionality of the elections. The ranked ballots ensure that votes for parties or candidates that don’t have enough support to reach the victory threshold are not wasted – voters’ rankings are used to reallocate votes to parties or candidates, using every ballot efficiently. RCV, whether proportional or single winner, maximizes the number of voters who actually cast a vote that helps elect a candidate or party.

In the most recent Irish elections using proportional RCV, only one percent of votes were cast for losing parties and therefore wasted. The use of transferable ranked ballots is why PRCV can be used successfully in a district magnitude of 3 to 7 seats (and a victory threshold of 12.5 to 25 percent), a design that is used in the Republic of Ireland and Australia. Few votes are thrown away. In contrast, a List system with a low number of district seats would likely result in substantially large numbers of wasted votes and consequent instability in election outcomes.

More voter choice and coalition-building – or “vote leakage”?

Oddly, Jack Santucci has actually criticized this positive coalition-building feature of ranked ballots. He calls it “vote leakage” (or inter-coalition “vote leakage”) when a voter’s vote transfers from one political party to another. He sees this as a dilution of a political party’s ability to hold onto its votes. Instead of this being a feature that liberates voters to pick their favorite parties and candidates rather than the “lesser evil,” to Santucci, and presumably Drutman too, the votes don’t belong to the voters themselves, they belong to the political parties. While fully aware of the desirability of fair and proportional representation along party lines, nevertheless I find their view to be anti-voter and therefore anti-democratic. 

Certainly, there are pros and cons to any electoral system method, and it’s fair game to point those out. Ranked choice voting, both the single-winner and proportional versions, is the fastest-spreading and most important political reform of our times. Understandably, advocates for OLPR have turned this discussion into a compare-and-contrast contest, in which OLPR’s attractions are presented at the expense of ranked choice voting’s alleged defects.

And certainly the “one-vote” OLPR system favored by Santucci and Drutman has many appealing qualities to recommend it, but it also has a number of eccentricities that deserve closer inspection. Up close, it’s clear that some of the same qualities that these political scientists say they do not like about ranked choice voting are also applicable – and in some cases even more applicable – to their preferred “open list” proportional method.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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Women’s underrepresentation at all levels of government is a persistent problem in the United States. RepresentWomen’s research shows that although we have made progress towards parity, this progress is slow and inconsistent, meaning we are unlikely to reach gender balance within our lifetimes. Increasing and sustaining women’s leadership in elected office requires us to remove the barriers women candidates and legislators face. This drives our research at RepresentWomen to identify the barriers and system-level solutions we can implement to create a more representative, gender-balanced democracy. 

RepresentWomen’s latest brief, “Proportional Ranked Choice Voting: Promoting Fair Elections and Removing Barriers for Women in U.S. Politics,” shows that a fair voting system, such as proportional ranked choice voting (PRCV), is one of the best ways to accelerate the pace of change toward gender parity in politics. PRCV elevates historically overlooked and underfunded candidates by increasing competition, allowing for new candidate entry, decreasing polarization, and encouraging issue-focused campaigns. Importantly, PRCV can replace our antiquated, winner-take-all system with one that yields more proportional outcomes. It is the only form of proportional representation that is compatible with all U.S. elections, both partisan and nonpartisan. 

But what is PRCV, and how does it help women? 

In PRCV elections, voters rank candidates in order of preference, and multiple candidates are elected to represent the same district. The below graphic demonstrates how this process could look for a district with three seats. In the first round, if not enough candidates reach the required vote threshold, the candidate with the least amount of votes is eliminated and votes are redistributed to those voters’ second choices. This process continues automatically until enough candidates have reached the required number of votes to win and the number of available seats is filled. 

PRCV eliminates barriers for women, in particular, for several reasons. 

• PRCV incentivizes candidates to build coalitions and campaign collaboratively, as exemplified by the “Rose Slate” in Portland, Maine’s 2021 Charter Commission Elections. Women cite negative campaigning and dirty politics as one of the most common reasons for not wanting to run for office. And understandably so. Running and serving in office can pose a significant safety concern for women, regardless of location or political party.

• More available seats mean women are more likely to win; research shows that women are more likely to win in multi-winner elections. The multi-seat districts aspect of PRCV helps to level the playing field in politics.

• PRCV removes the need for party support; women are more often overlooked by parties who do not have a strong track record of supporting women and tend to fund “establishment” candidates. Parties sometimes actively discourage women from running for office for fear that they will pull votes away from someone more “electable,” (usually the aforementioned “establishment” candidates). 

  

In 2023, women still make up under 30% of Congressional seats. However, as shown above, the Republican party especially lags in its progress, with women holding under 20% of its share of seats in the U.S. House. 

Moreover, PRCV and its positive impact on women’s representation is not new to the U.S. As shown in our historical timeline, “The History of PRCV in the U.S.: PRCV’s Impact on Women’s Political Representation,” not only has PRCV been around since the early 1900s, but women’s representation has consistently benefited from its adoption. Between 1915 and 1962, 22 cities across the U.S. adopted and implemented PRCV. A number of these early adopters elected their first women to their city councils, including Cleveland, OH; New York, NY; Hamilton, OH; and Cambridge, MA. 

Of these localities, only two still use the system: Arden, DE, and Cambridge, MA. As of October 2023, five women sit on Arden’s Board of Assessors (71%), one of whom serves as the chair, and four women sit on Cambridge’s nine-member city council (44%), and two are women of color. On the Cambridge school board, three women hold seats (50%), and two are women of color. 

Continuing the push for PRCV today

The push for PRCV has once again gained momentum. Today, in addition to Arden and Cambridge, PRCV is used in Albany, CA, and Minneapolis, MN. On Albany’s five-member council, one woman holds a seat (25%), and on Minneapolis’ 13-member council, seven women serve (54%). PRCV was also used for the first time in Arlington, VA, this year for the Democratic primary for two County Board seats, both of which were won by women. 

Portland, ME passed PRCV as part of charter reform in 2022, but this year, there are no seats where there would be multiple winners, so PRCV likely won’t come into play this election cycle. Two additional cities (Amherst, MA and Portland, OR) have pending adoptions of PRCV. Amherst is waiting for state approval of their new charter that will include PRCV, with the opportunity for implementation in 2025. Portland, OR’s first use of the system is expected in November 2024, after Portlanders strongly approved it at the ballot box. 

Furthermore, this push is not only at the local level. In 2017, House Representative Don Beyer introduced the Fair Representation Act (FRA), H.R. 3057, for the first time. The FRA would implement PRCV for U.S. House elections (using multi-winner districts) and create an independent redistricting commission for congressional districts. Although the bill has not passed, a study done by RepresentWomen and FairVote in 2021 projected that if passed, an additional 50 women would be elected to the U.S. House.

Nevertheless, we must note that PRCV is not a fix-all solution. To achieve gender balance in government, we must implement a twin-track approach, a multitude of solutions in tandem– both systems-level and candidate-level. PRCV is undoubtedly a vital component to uplifting women in politics, but it is only a piece of the puzzle to building a sustainable and representative democracy. 

We need women in leadership now more than ever. Despite being 51% of the population, we comprise less than 30% of congressional representatives. Women are far overdue for equal representation and have proven themselves to be effective legislators time and time again, able to create policies that are in all of their constituents’ interests. 

Take the women-majority New York City Council, for example. A women of color majority has allowed for the passage of numerous equitable bills and legislative packages on topics ranging from maternal health and menstrual equity to salary transparency and cost-of-living adjustments that benefit all New Yorkers. Breaking the barriers that prevent women from running, winning, serving, and leading is vital for all Americans. Innovative and scalable solutions such as proportional ranked choice voting will help us to build women’s political power and create a healthier, more representative democracy.  

Steph Scaglia and Alissa Bombardier Shaw @ScagliaSteph @alissashaw_

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By Alissa Bombardier Shaw and Nora Weiss 

RepresentWomen recently released our Golden Year Analysis, which identified the factors influencing global progress toward gender parity in politics in 2021 and 2022. Of 85 countries that held elections in these years, 43 achieved a “golden year” by electing a record-high number of women to their national legislatures. While this is certainly cause for celebration, gender-balanced governance remains far from reach for many countries, including the United States. Of the 23 countries that achieved a golden year in 2021, seven are either at or nearing gender balance: Nicaragua (51%), Mexico (50%), Norway (45%), Argentina (45%), Ethiopia (42%), the Republic of Moldova (41%), and Peru (40%).

While the United States is making slow progress toward political parity, other countries are making more significant gains over time. A number of nations broke records for women’s representation, making 2021 their golden year. These countries include Cabo Verde (39%), Albania (36%), Chile (26%), Armenia (36%), South Sudan (32%), Chad (31%), Canada (31%), Vietnam (30%), Iraq (29%), Liechtenstein (28%), Kazakhstan (27%), Honduras (27%), the Czech Republic (26%). Morocco (24%), the Russian Federation (16%), and Côte d'Ivoire (14%).

The Golden Year Analysis emphasizes the role that systems-level factors, such as voting systems and election rules, play in improving women’s representation in government. By analyzing global trends in women’s representation, this report sheds light on the most promising pathways to progress. Our research, as well as the research of others, show there are three crucial factors:

Factor 1: The most effective reform: gender quotas 

Of all systems-level reforms, gender quotas are among the most effective in facilitating rapid and impressive gains for women in politics. In 2021, Mexico achieved gender balance (50% women) in parliament due to a gender quota law implemented a few years prior. Though still far from parity, Malta’s new gender quota law also resulted in women’s representation progressing from 15% in 2021 to 28% in 2022. Similarly, Guinea’s 2019 gender quota law resulted in a 17% increase in women’s representation in 2022. Guinea’s law stipulates that at least 30% of party lists must be reserved for women candidates and enforces legal sanctions for non-compliance.

Still, adopting gender quotas does not always guarantee better outcomes for women. In Cyprus, gender quotas are voluntary, and parties are not punished for failing to comply. As a result, in 2021, Cyprus experienced significant declines in women’s representation, demonstrating how voluntary gender quota laws produce mixed results, especially in contexts where patriarchal norms are strong. 

In the same way that implementing gender quotas can advance women’s representation, removing these reforms can result in lost progress. The nations that repealed quotas experienced an immediate decline in women’s representation. Despite Algeria’s recent advances towards a gender-balanced parliament, women’s representation decreased from 26% to 8% after President Abdelmadjid Tebboune waived the parliamentary gender quota. To foster sustainable progress toward political parity, countries must ensure that gender quotas are strongly enforced and maintained over time.

Factor 2: Proportional representation  

While well-designed and enforced gender quotas tend to have the most immediate impact on women’s political representation, other systems-level reforms also have the potential to accelerate progress towards gender balance. According to our research, women tend to fare better in proportional voting systems compared to majority and plurality voting systems. By allowing for multiple winners and diversifying candidate pools, proportional voting systems mitigate barriers that have historically gate-kept women from serving in elected office. 

65% of countries that attained their best year have either proportional (PR) or semi-proportional (semi-PR) voting systems. This finding echoes previous research that has established a positive relationship between gender quotas, proportional representation, and women’s representation.

Factor 3: Cultural values

Although voting systems and election rules are critical in achieving gender-balanced governance, social norms and cultural values are equally important. To create sustainable change, we all must foster a culture that condemns gender-based discrimination and promotes equity in the context of politics and all aspects of society. Systems-level reforms can accelerate progress but must be supported by cultural narratives that empower women.

In Colombia, women's representation increased by 10% in 2022, but not due to a new or recently reformed gender quota since Colombia adopted a 30% legislated candidate quota more than ten years ago. Instead, increased awareness and advocacy on women’s issues resulted from protests that started in April 2021, the participation of the feminist political party Estamos Listos, and an overwhelming increase of women candidates after the country increased the number of electoral districts.

The United States: wealthy superpower, underachiever in women’s representation

As of October 2023, the U.S. is ranked 68th in the world for women’s representation, tied with Iraq and Columbia. U.S. women are still underrepresented at every level of government, holding one-third of all elected positions, despite comprising over 50% of the population as highlighted in RepresentWomen’s annual Gender Parity Index (GPI). The GPI also calls attention to how women of color are further underrepresented, holding approximately one-tenth of all elected positions. 

In the 2023 GPI, 23 states have earned a “D” grade and Louisiana received a lonely “F.” It’s not all bad news, however. Following the 2022 elections, 12 states have women governors, breaking the previous record of nine. Higher rates of representation for women were concentrated in the Northeast and West Coast, while women’s representation in Southern and many Midwestern states lags far behind. 

The Golden Year Analysis is meant to bring attention to how election rules and voting systems shape opportunities for women to enter politics; the social and cultural factors in each country further shape the impact these systems have on women’s representation and political power. While having more women in office is an important factor in creating a more representative government, not all of the countries covered in this analysis are free and fair democracies, and this analysis does not constitute our endorsement of any other country’s regime. In addition, while electing more women is an important first step in achieving a representative government, this alone won’t transform women’s political power. 

Undoubtedly, golden years are noteworthy milestones in women’s global representation and deserve recognition. However, the fight for gender balance in politics is far from finished. While some countries are making significant progress toward political parity, many, such as the United States, have only experienced incremental gains, despite breaking records. 

To achieve gender balance in our lifetimes, we must invest in structural solutions like proportional representation and gender quotas that increase women’s representation. RepresentWomen is committed to advancing women’s political representation by researching, identifying, and promoting evidence-based, systems-level reforms that can accelerate progress toward gender-balanced governance.

Alissa Bombardier Shaw is the Outreach Manager at RepresentWomen and equips the democracy reform and women’s representation spaces to understand how systems strategies remove barriers to women’s political power.

Nora Weiss is a communications intern at RepresentWomen and a current undergraduate student at George Washington University.

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You may not have seen the headline or received the memo, so I’m alerting you here on DemocracySOS:  the next threatened species to save is not baby seals, or black rhinos, or unicorns, it’s – POLITICAL PARTIES.

That’s what we are hearing from the American Political Science Association (APSA) and a handful of political activists like Lee Drutman and others. Recently an APSA task force co-published with Protect Democracy a report, More than Red and Blue: Political Parties and American Democracy, in which the breathless take-away is that “political science shows we need to reform political parties rather than sideline them…Reforms that try to sidestep political parties in elections, or that ignore their role in legislating, are unlikely to improve democracy.”

Sideline or ignore political parties? Who’s doing that? Is that even possible?

In reflecting on this diagnosis, a cognitive dissonance takes hold. We are bombarded in headline after headline, tweet after tweet and via TV talking head chatter about the omnipresence and über-influence of political parties. There’s Speaker McCarthy at the podium, ordering an impeachment inquiry of President Biden. Here’s Senate Majority Leader Schumer in front of the TV cameras, averting a government shutdown. Yet somehow the parties are weak and endangered? Something doesn’t add up.

Founded in 1903, the APSA is the leading professional organization for political scientists with more than 11,000 members. Protect Democracy is a helpfully vigilant NGO endeavoring to defeat the very real “authoritarian threat” plaguing US democracy. Their report offers up 14 articles from two dozen political scientists, many of them noted scholars in the field. Throughout the report, the roles and functions assigned to “healthy” political parties include activities like candidate-vetting, organizing and coalition-building. In some of the authors’ telling, parties also should prevent dangerous populist candidates from gaining traction.

Indeed, the specter of Donald Trump hangs heavily over this report. In the narrative of the report, the fact that Trump, a political novice with no governing experience, was able to barnstorm into Republican primaries in 2016, ride roughshod over traditional GOP leaders and win not only the Republican nomination but the hearts and minds of most of the party’s voters seems self-evident proof of the sidelining of the Republican Party.

But what if it’s not the GOP that failed, but the voters? Aren’t they culpable for going along with Trump’s delusional rants about a stolen election? In a short period of time the US has experienced an astonishing level of the unthinkable: a rush of political violence, including physical attacks on people and institutions; threats against election workers; intensifying voter suppression, and an attempt to steal a presidential election. This can’t just be blamed on a sidelined political party or a handful of its debased, unethical leaders. After all, it has long been recognized that parties have always been little more than “vote maximizers” – it’s the voters who substantially decide the behavior of parties, not the other way around. 

James Madison once wrote, “A people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which Knowledge gives.” The only thing many Trump supporters have armed themselves with are guns and QAnon ignorance. This failure is more Downsian than Trumpian, it’s more about what resides in the “mean GOP voters’” heads.

Digital media has played a toxic role as well (which the report gives a mention to) — for example Facebook’s private groups. That's where the conspiracy crazies of the world have been able to find each other online and hang out together, like the cretins and trolls in the bar scene in Star Wars.” Rather than being ignored and isolated wherever they reside as “the nutty next-door neighbor,” they can all virtually congregate and learn from each other, and organize and strategize and add the final Bricks in the Wall of their demented world view. Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, for inventing encrypted digital hideouts.

Beyond the voters and digital media, what if the problem is not political parties but the electoral system itself? What if the methods of elections that we use in the US are providing the wrong incentives and optimizing polarization and division, leaving voters with no good choices so they pick among the two bad choices, or increasingly stay home as America descends into post-democracy? (I’ll return to the impact of election methods in a minute)

Blaming the sidelining of political parties seems too easy and simplistic to me. Certainly healthy political parties are essential to a stable democracy, I don’t know anyone who would argue the opposite. But how does one “improve and strengthen parties” to stop a Donald Trump, or to vet other candidates? What kind of special powers should political parties assume? Is there, like, the equivalent of a vitamin regimen or a special diet we can put parties on in order to bulk them up from their apparent 97-pound weakling status?

Apparently there is. The report offers several diagnoses on page 8, among them:

“Changes in campaign finance law have empowered groups at the expense of parties themselves, inhibiting the ability of parties to serve as gatekeepers…”

and

“The innovation of party primaries democratized the nomination process but also lead to a loss of control of the party by its leaders…the significant coordination difficulties posed by the current campaign environment limits their ability to provide effective gatekeeping.”

That word “gatekeeper” pops up in several crucial places in the report, and on page 180 we are told “Parties are essential gatekeepers.” In one of the 14 contributions, political scientists Seth Masket and Hans Noel propose (p. 80) that “party leadership can assume greater control of the nomination process.” How might leaders do that? Parties could “assert a level of ‘peer review’ to the nomination process, requiring party officials to approve of candidates before those candidates can run.” Of course, right…like the way the Chinese government approves which candidates are allowed to run in Hong Kong elections?

This “gatekeeper obsession,” which blames open primaries and campaign finance laws for the inability of the GOP to stop Donald Trump and other populist demagogues, feels a bit like sticking a finger in the dike to stop the flood, even though the flood has already occurred and there’s no water left behind the dam.

One person’s “strong party” is another person’s Boss Tweed

These political scientists should come to California, where party leaders regularly put their thumbs on the scale of political power. I remember attending a honcho-politico event in Sacramento, one of these high profile affairs on the social calendar, in which the three Big Name speakers were Pete Wilson, former (and the last) GOP governor of California, who was the face of the anti-immigrant Prop 187 that eventually buried the Republican Party’s prospects in California; Willie Brown, the wily, scheming former Democratic speaker of the California Assembly whose main claim to fame was to so soil the birdcage of his office that the California voters enacted term limits in 1990 to get rid of him; and powerful state senate leader John Burton, chair of the California Democratic Party, whose previous career as a US Congressman was derailed by a cocaine habit.

All three of these powerful politicians were classic gatekeepers, and their parties were strong under their leadership. What were the secrets to their success? They regaled the audience in realpolitik terms.

Governor Wilson told a story about how if he needed to win some votes from members of his party, or if he needed to find some votes from Democrats, he would pull out the booze and they would share some swagger over ice, mano a mano. Whiskey and gin apparently oiled the machine.

Senate leader Burton told the story about needing some support from a GOP leader, and so he took him to see some strippers in Barbary Coast San Francisco. As Burton told the tale, the Republican said to him, “John, I woulda crawled across glass to see that broad’s t*t*!”

Not to be outdone, the master manipulator Willie Brown told a story about how in his day, when he needed to twist some recalcitrant arms, there weren’t so many campaign finance laws and transparency rules back then so he could call together the handful of people necessary into the back room where they would, yes, smoke cigars and drink booze into the wee hours to fix the deal.

So there you have it:  booze, broads and back rooms, the unholy trinity of powerful political (male) leaders…of GATEKEEPERS. As I read through chapter after chapter of the APSA report, I couldn’t help but wonder if this report isn’t mostly a nostalgia trip about the “good ol’ days” that never really existed.

No question, strong political parties, or healthy political parties as they are framing it in this report (more on that below), are an essential component of a stable and functioning democracy. The same with strong and healthy political leaders. But the problem is that one person’s “strong” is another person’s “Boss Tweed.” In fact, many of the factors outlined in this report as contributing to the weakening of parties, such as campaign finance laws, open primaries, nonpartisan elections and more, were all reforms from a bygone era in which advocates were trying to rein in the substantial abuses of political parties and leaders that had become scheming and unscrupulous patronage machines.

Have the incentives and enticements of those bygone eras changed so much that these reforms are no longer helpful? It seems unlikely. But there is little recognition of this in most of the offerings from this report. Instead, the report mostly has a “turn back the clock” feel.

But here’s what has truly upended my ability to understand this perspective. When it comes to the functions of political parties, namely candidate-vetting, gatekeeping, organizing and coalition-building, are these political scientists saying that the current major political parties, Democrats and Republicans alike, do not currently do this? That seems like such a “thin ice” argument to me. Perhaps they could play it better, or differently – yes, if we had a closed list proportional system like in Italy, Sweden or Israel, their gatekeeping role would be even stronger.

But in many of those democracies, party bosses call the shots like Russian autocrats. Dissent by junior parliamentarians – backbenchers, as they are called – is not tolerated at all. If an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pops off with even a single off-tune note, her career turns downright Hobbesian, i.e. “nasty, brutish and short.” Is that what these political scientists are advocating? I’m guessing probably not. In that case, then it sounds to me like they are asking the Democrats or Republicans to do something that they already substantially do, albeit imperfectly.

In short, I am confused by this report.

“Healthy” and “political party” is a contradiction – like wearing a bikini at the North Pole

But my confusion grows exponentially when I read a sidebar contribution from New America’s Lee Drutman to this keening funeral oration for political parties. Drutman, for those readers who do not know, is the most prominent anti-ranked choice voting opponent in the US today (after strongly favoring RCV in his well-received book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, Drutman now says he has “seen the light” and changed his mind). His viewpoint was not included in the APSA report, so instead he wrote his own 30,000 word exegesis as a parallel document. Calling his contribution “More Parties, Better Parties: The Case for Pro-Parties Democracy Reform,” Drutman piled on this notion that the endangered political parties are being sidelined, and that the US needs more “party-centric” reform.

As a solution, he extolls the virtues of Fusion Voting rather than RCV as a vehicle to, yes, strengthen political parties. Apparently for Drutman, fusion is the Charles Atlas “secret sauce” that will bulk up the 97 pound weaklings, and actually conjure up more of them (despite there being no evidence that fusion has accomplished that in the handful of states where it is used).

Drutman accompanied his fusion homily with an even more curious series of Twitter haikus extolling the virtues of what he calls “healthy parties.” Who can argue against health? His series of apple pie tweets included such solemn bromides as:

* Healthy parties engage and mobilize voters.

* Healthy parties vet and support qualified candidates for public office.

* Healthy parties make elections meaningful

* Healthy parties do not lie to voters.

* Healthy parties do not engage in corruption.

* Healthy parties police extremism and authoritarianism in their ranks.

* Healthy parties also perform all these roles with honesty and integrity.

On and on and on, across nearly a dozen tweets, sounding like the Beatitudes of political science (the Beatitudes are a series of biblical blessings allegedly orated by Jesus to his disciples during his Sermon on the Mount). Like a high priest of political parties, Father Drutman has been at the forefront of this effort to restore the reputation of political parties so that the public will want more of them. Indeed, his own 30,000 word bible for this newfound religion of “party-centric reform” pits that against what he calls “candidate-centric reform.” The reviled candidate-centric reform includes ranked choice voting and open primaries, while party-centric = fusion.

However Drutman’s polarized presentation is riddled with contradictions and is, empirically speaking, inaccurate and a false choice. There are elections in a number of US states and other countries with strong parties yet voters are selecting individual candidates. Look at North Carolina, where the Republican Party drew a heavily gerrymandered legislative map in 2018 that allowed it to win 77 percent of US House seats with only a minority of votes (49.3 percent). Doesn’t that require a pretty darn strong party to pull that off?

And look at the ranked choice voting elections in Ireland, Australia, Malta, and in the US states of Alaska and Maine -- all of those places use partisan elections with vibrant political parties, even as voters rank individual candidates instead of a political party. The Irish and Australians would be quite surprised to hear that their system is “candidate-centered” to the detriment of political parties, given the robustness of their multi-party competition.

Even more puzzling in his ongoing political evolution, Drutman now states that he favors an open-list PR system. But depending on what kind of open-list system you select, those would certainly be called candidate-centered by any credible observer. In Finland’s “fully open” PR list, the voter can only vote for individual candidates, not political parties. According to Drutman’s way of thinking, that is “party-centered” -- but Ireland’s recent election using a ranked ballot method of proportional representation, in which voters merrily ranked individual candidates and nine parties won seats, is somehow “candidate centered.”

The same in Australia, where Aussie voters ranked their candidates and eight parties won seats in its proportional voting elections. Unfortunately for Finnish voters, they don’t enjoy the advantage of the Aussies and Irish who benefit from transferable ballots, which helps to ensure that voters do not waste their votes on longshot candidates or parties who do not reach the victory threshold.

Drutman’s confused categorization is not only muddled and inaccurate, it’s also not helpful toward enacting credible political reform.

Why Voter-centered reform makes more sense

There are two offerings in the APSA report that deserve deeper consideration, and that’s because they point the way toward a better approach than so-called party-centered reform, which is bound to fail given the unpopularity of political parties (one recent survey found that just 11% of Americans expressed “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in political parties). These two articles point the way toward what I call “Voter-centered” reform, by exploring the primary factor that determines how political parties behave -- the electoral system.

The most interesting paper of the bunch, from political scientists Benjamin Reilly and David Lublin, entitled “Encouraging Cooperation and Responsibility” on page 138, explores some of the impacts of using ranked choice voting in conjunction with a Top Four primary in Alaska in the 2022 elections. All political parties ran at the same time and the four highest vote-getters competed again in the final November election, with the winner elected by a majority using RCV. Alaska voters were liberated to pick the candidates they really like instead of being stuck voting for the “lesser of two evils.” They could rank candidates from whatever political parties they wanted, giving them maximum choice and allowing them to engage at the level that politics makes sense to them.

As the authors write, this combo means that “both traditional and insurgent candidates…can potentially make it to the general election.” It also “mitigates the need to speak exclusively to party diehards” and “makes it unlikely that only more extreme candidates make it through to the general election.” Unlike closed partisan primaries – which some hope would allow for more “gatekeeping” -- this innovative electoral system “prevented winnowing out of more centrist candidates,” such as incumbent Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski (who won re-election under the new system but likely would have lost a closed primary election) or Alaskan House Rep. Mary Peltola (a moderate Democrat in this very conservative state).

Did this open primaries/RCV combo undermine the strength of Alaska’s political parties? Not at all. Even a cursory glance at the headlines during months of campaigning, which resulted in Peltola beating right wing GOP celebrity Sarah Palin twice within a few months, revealed that these elections were intensely focused on parties, even as voters ranked individual candidates. The fact that the GOP vote split among two Republican candidates is not reflective of a weak party as much as the fact that 60 percent of Alaska voters, most of them conservatives, are registered as independents of one kind or another, not Republicans. And many of them detest their failed former Governor Palin who ran off to the Lower 48 to become a Fox News celebrity.

Contrary to the claims of the “party-centric” theorists, the authors conclude RCV performed admirably in Alaska, and within a very intense partisan environment, at the same time that it empowered independent and moderate voters over partisan diehards and hardliners. According to Reilly and Lublin, the combo of Final Four Voting and RCV unleashed a centripetal pressure for candidates to move toward the center, potentially mitigating “the polarization that reduces the propensity of parties to act responsibly and negotiate the compromises necessary under the American constitutional system” (p. 145); promoted coalition building; incentivized candidates to campaign less dirty, since they may need reciprocal support from each other’s voters; and “offers the strongest incentives for more cooperation amongst campaigning politicians, with potential flow-on effects in government.”

Indeed, the Alaska state legislature now features a most remarkable phenomenon – moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats have formed governing coalitions in both the state House and Senate, kicking to the margins the right-wing, obstructionist Trump Republicans.

Party-centric fundamentalists like Drutman and the APSA apparently seem to claim that this kind of centrist-incentivized centripetalism resulting from RCV and Final Four Voting undermines political parties. But their rationale is not convincing. Instead, it forces political parties to look themselves in the mirror and existentially ask: “Why do we exist as a party? Is it merely for our own self-perpetuation? Is it just to beat the other side? Or are we here to get things done on behalf of the voters?”

A second paper looked at the impact of electoral systems, but ultimately failed to think through the full impacts of their proposal. In “Toward a Different Kind of Party Government: Proportional Representation for Federal Elections,” political scientists Matthew Shugart, Jack Santucci and Michael Latner sketched a vision of multiparty democracy founded on the bedrock of proportional representation (PR). They provide ‘pros and cons’ of three PR forms: mixed-member proportional, single transferable vote, and open-list proportional. Their preference is for a type of open-list PR system in which a voter’s one vote would count for both a candidate and the list as a whole, and candidates’ position on the party’s list would be determined entirely by how many votes each candidate received. This method certainly has great merit, as it empowers voters and gives them a number of electoral choices in a multiparty democracy.

But it has the troubling downside of promoting intra-party competition among each party’s candidates. Ironically, the method for determining each party’s top candidates is a “plurality wins all” election, which would likely result in spoiler candidates and split votes. Often times in party list systems there is a designated lead candidate known as “the puller,” who is the most recognized and popular candidate on the list. That candidate is likely to win the vast majority of votes from that party’s voters, at the expense of other candidates from the same intra-party faction. While the party itself would still win overall its fair and proportional share of seats, the intra-party competition between individual candidates could well result in the puller’s faction losing a disproportionate number of seats to another intra-party faction due to the lack of ballot transferability. This in turn would undermine the teamwork necessary within that party’s legislative caucus, and impact the party’s effectiveness.

That’s why transferable ballots are desirable, because they help voters to not waste their votes on unelectable candidates, or on popular candidates that have more than enough votes to win a seat. For the same reasons that RCV is useful for electing representative winners in single-seat elections like a president or mayor, or in multi-seat elections like a legislative parliament, it would also be extremely useful in an open-list PR system to ensure proportional representation within a political party. Open-list PR that allows voters to rank their favorite candidates would be a very voter-centered reform, but the authors’ proposal fails to include that crucial feature.

Voter-centric vs party-centric vs candidate-centric

The artificial, as well as inaccurate, division of party-centric reform vs. candidate-centric reform does nothing to advance reform. And to the extent that it pits the two against each other, it actually sets reform efforts back by dividing reformers’ collective efforts. In this political moment, in this urgent time when so much is at stake – climate change, inequality, global insecurity, indeed democracy itself – what America desperately needs is voter-centered reform.

Voters are the constituency that needs to be empowered if we are to save our democracy. Political parties are not about to go away or get relegated to the sidelines, and any suggestion to the contrary misses the forest for the trees. If we change the electoral system to a method that provides the right incentives, the political parties will find their way – toward voter-centered reform.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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[Editor’s note:  Democracy is inherently difficult in societies with deep cleavages. Elections in such societies can encourage extremist appeals, zero-sum political behavior and conflict, and consequently often lead to the breakdown of democracy. In this article based on his important book Democracy in Divided Societies: Electoral Engineering for Conflict Management (Cambridge University Press), Australian political scientist Benjamin Reilly sets out the potential of “electoral engineering” as a mechanism of conflict management in divided societies. He focuses on the experience of divided societies which have used preferential, ranked ballot electoral systems – what are known in the United States as “ranked choice” systems. He shows that such systems can encourage bargaining between rival political actors, and present politicians with incentives to cast a broad net to attract votes, thus aiding the development of democracy even in polarized or divided societies.]

The question of whether, and how, democracy can survive in divided societies has long been a source of controversy in political science. Some of the greatest political thinkers have argued that stable democracy is possible only in relatively homogenous societies. John Stuart Mill, for example, believed that democracy was incompatible with the structure of a multi-ethnic society, as “free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities.”

Because ethnic identities tend to be invested with a great deal of symbolic and emotional meaning, aspiring politicians hungry for electoral success have strong incentives to harness these identities as a political force. Rather than converging on the mythical ‘median voter’ (Downs 1956), divided societies tend to exhibit ‘polarized pluralism’ (Sartori 1976), with competition for votes taking place at the extremes rather than at the centre. The logic of elections changes from one of convergence on policy positions to one of extreme divergence. Politics becomes a centrifugal game. With no median voters, politics can quickly come to be characterised by centrifugal forces, in which the moderate political centre is overwhelmed by extremist forces.

While this model was developed with ethnically-divided societies in mind, it also bears a strong resemblance to contemporary cases of political polarization, not least in the United States, where partisan allegiances have taken on an identity-like status for many Americans (Mason 2018). For instance, opinions polls routinely find Democratic and Republican voters hold sharply negative views of the other side. Questions that have long been used by researchers of race and ethnicity (such as “would you be comfortable with your son or daughter being in a mixed relationship?”), are now registering similar levels of social anxiety for party ID to those once reserved for the idea of interracial marriage (McCoy and Press 2022).

In an age of hard-line partisanship, with fewer “floating voters” between the two parties than in the past, many U.S. elections are less a battle of ideas and more a statement of identity -- like those in divided societies. Electoral campaigns promoting us-versus-them divisions have become an effective way to mobilize voters, and easier to instigate than those based on compromise, deliberation and restraint (Bartels 2020). Instead of broad-based representation, the result is increased partisan rancour, ideological rigidity and legislative polarization (Lublin and Reilly 2023).

Is it possible to design political systems which instead of rewarding such divisions promote accommodation, moderation and centripetal, centre-based politics? One promising approach is to strategically design institutions such as the electoral system. Divisive, zero-sum outcomes are not an inevitable characteristic of politics in divided societies, but often a reaction to the ‘rules of the game’ under which democratic competition takes place. Democracy in Divided Societies showed how changes to these rules – for example, the introduction of electoral systems which facilitate cross-partisan communication, bargaining and inter-dependence between rival politicians and the groups they represent – can promote more responsible politics, and enhance democracy, even in divided societies.

Democracy, Ethnicity and Conflict

All societies are inherently conflictual to some degree. Democracy itself operates as a system for managing and processing conflict, rather than resolving it (Przeworski 1991). Within certain circumscribed boundaries, conflict is considered legitimate, is expected to occur and is handled through established institutional means. Representative institutions allow conflicts to formulate, find expression and be managed in a sustainable way, via institutional outlets such as political parties and legislatures, rather than being suppressed or ignored. Changing formal political institutions can result in changes to political behaviour and political practice, and the design of political institutions is thus of paramount importance to the management of conflict in any democracy.

This insight raises the prospect of engineering political rules to improve the operation of political processes and institutions. For the political engineer, institutions change outcomes, and changing formal political institutions can result in changes in political behaviour and political practice. Most scholarly advocates of political engineering agree that the electoral system is a key mechanism in shaping the wider political arena. Different electoral systems can encourage politicians and candidates to pursue starkly different avenues to electoral success: civil or hostile campaigns, broad or narrow policy agendas, cooperative or divided legislatures. This explains the scholarly consensus that “if one wants to change the nature of a particular democracy, the electoral system is likely to be the most suitable and effective instrument for doing so” (Lijphart 1995, 412).

The Theory and Practice of Centripetalism

Centripetalism envisages democracy as a continual process of conflict management, a recurring process of dispute resolution in which contentious issues must ultimately be solved via negotiation and reciprocal cooperation, rather than simple majority rule. We know from the seminal work of Duncan Black (1958) that many of the issues which confront democracies are not resolvable by majority decision, but rather ‘cycle’ through an endless series of unstable temporary majorities. In such situations, differences need to come to be seen not as irreconcilable sources of conflict, but as part of a broader collective action problem, a problem which can potentially be overcome by bargaining and reciprocal trade-offs.

Under this scenario the role of democratic institutions, as the mediating agents which can process divergent interests and preferences into centripetal outcomes, becomes paramount. As argued by emeritus law professor Donald Horowitz, one of the most feasible paths to such inter-group accommodation is to present political parties and candidates with incentives to cooperate across ethnic lines. Most of Democracy in Divided Societies was devoted to empirical analysis of the institutional foundations of such arrangements across a variety of societal contexts, ranging from elections in the traditional societies of Papua New Guinea and Fiji to modern industrialized states like Northern Ireland and Australia.

A common theme across all cases was that presenting office-seeking politicians and their supporters with sufficiently strong institutional incentives towards cross-partisan behaviour can change not only their approach to campaigning but also affect larger changes on the nature of political competition as a whole. For example, legislatures are likely to be more functional when many politicians owe their victory not just to their own diehard supporters but also those from other parties, who they may need for their re-election as well. Politicians who have had to bargain with their counterparts for mutual support at elections are likely to be amenable to doing the same once in government.

By strengthening the ‘moderate middle’ at the expense of the extremes, such centripetal reforms can also help address the widespread problems of polarization, a major issue facing the United States in recent years. Many political scientists see the standard U.S. electoral arrangements—closed party primaries followed by plurality general elections—as exacerbating political polarization and extremism, by enabling motivated partisan ideologues (who usually comprise only a small share of the overall electorate) to choose a candidate. As most Congressional and State legislative races are relatively uncompetitive, victory in many cases is a foregone conclusion, giving candidates limited incentive to pitch appeals beyond their core supporters (Gehl and Porter 2020).

Plurality voting is also a classic zero-sum game: more votes for my opponent means fewer voters for me. Ranked choice voting, by contrast, offers the potential for a positive-sum game: a candidate can benefit from ballots cast initially for someone else, if those votes return to her in the form of second or later rankings. Over time, this can encourage the formation of pre-electoral coalitions, resulting in potentially enduring “coalitions of commitment” in government (Horowitz 1985, 365-95). There is evidence of both practices occurring under the century-long use of RCV in Australia, via both formal and informal pre-election coalitions underpinned by ranking exchanges (Sharman, Sayers and Miragliotta 2002).

Such mutual reciprocity should also, in theory, promote more moderate political outcomes (Horowitz 1991; Reilly 2001; Mann and Ornstein 2012; Diamond 2015; Drutman 2020; Lublin and Reilly 2023), as in most cases, the way to attract wider support is to adopt more centrist or “catch all” policy positions which appeal to the median voter. The exception is where more votes are lost by such moderation than are gained, which is always a possibility in very safe districts or in places with entrenched ethnic polarization. But in most cases, politicians seeking to gain additional votes from non-core supporters should have an incentive to moderate their political rhetoric and broaden their policy positions to pick up additional voter support. (Reilly 2001, 2018).

There are, however, preconditions for encouraging this search for greater support. First, elections need to be genuinely competitive. If elections are uncontested or outcomes otherwise pre-determined, there is little reason to expect change. Similarly, fairly-drawn, not gerrymandered, districts are needed – to avoid the same issue of pre-determined outcomes. And there needs to be a base level of competition with at least three candidates, at a minimum – any less and elections will be won on a first-past-the-post basis. If these conditions are met, the kind of cross-party “vote pooling” -- the exchange of preferences between supporters of different candidates or parties -- which underpins moderation can occur under a range of electoral systems. But they are most likely to occur if some kind of ranked-choice ballot is present.

The Importance of Ranking

By giving voters the opportunity to express their preferences not just for but also between parties and candidates, ranked ballots have attracted significant enthusiasm from political thinkers. The first proposal for a ranked ballot in Britain in the 19^th century, for instance, was hailed by John Stuart Mill as “a scheme of almost unparalleled merit” for democratic governance, which would encourage people to behave in politics as rational individuals, forming their own opinions and considering their own interests. Contemporary political theorists agree: McLean, for instance, argues that some facility for preference ordering is one of three basic requirements of a good voting system (1987, 154). Similarly, Blais and Massicotte write that “the more information the ballots reveal about voters’ preferences, the more accurate the representation of preferences is likely to be” (1997, 76).

For most voters who are not political scientists or philosophers, the major advantage of a ranked ballot is that they do not need to be strategic about expressing their true choices. In plurality elections, by contrast, voters for smaller parties (and sometimes larger ones too) are often faced with an acute dilemma: should they vote sincerely for their true choice, even if that party or candidate is unlikely to win? Or should they instead abandon their favourite and strategically vote for the least-worst option amongst those who have a chance? While a ranked ballot doesn’t completely eliminate the potential for strategic voting, in general, voters can simply express their preferences honestly in the knowledge that voting sincerely can never hurt their chosen candidate.

Of the ten major electoral systems used in the world today, three enable electors to rank-order candidates on the ballot in this way: the alternative vote (AV), the most widely used form of RCV in the U.S. and also used for over a century in Australia, and also in Ireland for president and (in slightly different form) Papua New Guinea; the supplementary vote (SV), previously used for mayoral elections in the United Kingdom and presidential elections in Sri Lanka; and the single transferable vote (STV), as used in Ireland, Malta and most upper houses in Australia, which is a system of proportional representation. Another version of ranked ballot, in which rankings are counted as fractional votes, is used in Nauru and for some seats in Slovenia. All share a common feature: they enable electors to not only choose their favored candidate but also indicate their preference between others. It is this particular feature that distinguishes preferential voting from other electoral system options.

My book evaluated the case for centripetalism and ranked choice electoral methods by examining the electoral history of all the divided societies which utilise such institutions -- Papua New Guinea, Northern Ireland, and Sri Lanka as well as ‘one-off’ or short-lived cases such as Estonia, Bosnia, and Fiji -- plus other examples of established democracies in Australia, Europe and North America. Examination of these different cases suggested that, while vote pooling does indeed encourage viable steps towards inter-ethnic cooperation and conflict management in some countries, not all preferential systems are equally effective at promoting accommodation in divided societies.  

Case study:  Papua New Guinea

One key test of centripetalism came from a somewhat obscure case, that of Papua New Guinea. An ethnically-fragmented state in the South Pacific, Papua New Guinea’s first three elections – in 1964, 1968 and 1972 – were conducted under similar AV rules to that used in Australia, its colonial administrator until independence in 1975. These elections using AV revealed a distinctive approach to campaigning in what is a traditional clan-based society. Candidates from smaller clans or those without a large ‘core’ vote often campaigned outside their home base area for other voters’ second preferences. In other cases, traditional tribal alliances enabled aligned candidates to cooperate and aggregate support without the vote being ‘split’ several ways among competing candidates.

These accommodative trends were positive factors in a young and barely-developed democracy. But these advantages declined sharply when AV was replaced by plurality voting in 1975, leading to increasingly unrepresentative victors and increasing campaign violence (Reilly 1997, 2002). With incentives for campaign cooperation removed, ethnic groups reverted to their traditional hostilities. The return to conflict was magnified by the way plurality elections work to reward vote-splitting in a fragmented society. Candidates who previously campaigned broadly and encouraged the swapping of rankings with supporters of other candidates instead focussed their energies on maximising their clan-based vote, and in many cases restricting the campaigning of opposition candidates to their own home areas. This led to to a sharp increase in electoral violence, increasing number of split votes among “spoiler” candidates, and politicians being elected on alarmingly small pluralities, sometimes as little as 6 percent of the vote.

In 2003, Papua New Guinea changed back to a ‘Limited Preferential Vote’, essentially AV with three mandatory rankings. Studies of the 2007 elections found a sharp decline in campaign violence, at least part of which can be attributed to the new electoral system. In what is still an underdeveloped, fragmented and volatile democracy, the return of ranked voting has been applied not just for parliamentary elections but also for presidential elections in the autonomous province of Bougainville, reducing tensions and increasing cooperation during election campaigning and electing more broadly-supported and representative leaders than was the case under plurality voting.

Case study:  Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland too can be judged a successful case of vote-pooling, i.e. exchanges of ranked preferences among candidates and their supporters, under its proportional ranked choice system, the Single Transferable Vote. Unlike Papua New Guinea, the Northern Ireland case has been extensively researched, with several major studies published (McGarry and O'Leary 2004; O’Leary 2013, Mitchell 2014). Most find little vote-pooling prior to the 1998 elections which ushered in the power-sharing executive under the ‘Good Friday’ Agreement. Analysis of this first election suggests that preference-vote transfers served to give voice and representation to the ‘moderate middle’ sentiment for peace that existed within the community, and to translate this sentiment into an electoral majority for ‘pro-agreement’ parties.  After that election (1998–2007) transfers across the sectarian divide between the main moderate unionist party and the main moderate nationalist one increased sharply, particularly from unionists to nationalists. However, most transfers remain within ethnic blocs, particularly since the emergence of Sinn Féin as the largest party at the 2022 elections.

Other cases are less positive. Sri Lanka has used a preferential system to elect its president for over 40 years, throughout devastating civil wars and natural disasters, but the frontrunning candidate has always won an outright majority of first rankings, meaning that the system has yet to be really tested. Bosnia and Estonia both used ranked voting in one-off uses, whether at parliamentary elections in Estonia (1990) or sub-regional presidential polls in Bosnia (2000), before reverting to unranked systems. Fiji ran two elections under a hybrid AV system in 1999 and 2001 which gave parties, not voters, the main role in allocating rankings – a move which some blamed for the 2000 coup against the elected government. Following another coup in 2006, Fiji abandoned the system, and has recently return to elected government using list proportional representation. While varying widely, one lesson from all of these cases is that stability matters for electoral rules, with voters and candidates alike needing several iterations of using ranked systems to properly utilize its potential.

Critiques

Critics of centripetalism tend to focus on these short lived cases, sometimes arguing that vote-pooling systems are inherently unstable or unpredictable. But the century long Australian and Irish experiences, and indeed the growing body of evidence from the United States, suggests the contrary – that ranked voting can actually make politics more stable and predictable. Other critics of centripetalism argue that promoting stability and centrism is not what is needed in an age of multiple overlapping crises, and that more drastic changes are needed. It is true that ranked choice voting is more an evolutionary than a revolutionary reform – which is also why it has emerged as a viable reform option in long-established democracies such as the United States.

A more subtle critique holds that the idea of centrist politics relies on simplistic median voter models which elide the complexity and multi-dimensionality of contemporary politics in advanced democracies such as the U.S. (Santucci 2021). But even in a multi-dimensional policy space featuring voters and activists with competing preferences or ideologies, a vote-maximizing equilibrium position exists (Miller and Schofield 2008), and ranked systems are far better at identifying this than a straight plurality contest.

Centripetalism draws upon core political science ideas about the nature of social cleavages, particularly Seymour Martin Lipset’s classic arguments about the virtues of cross-cutting cleavages for promoting stable democracy. Normatively, the virtues of political aggregation and centrism are appealing for those schooled in the Anglo-American tradition of two-party politics, where centripetal reforms can be seen as being compatible with majoritarian political models. This may help explain its current popularity in the United States, where single-member RCV has been adopted in two states – Maine and Alaska – and dozens of cities, and studies have shown a very similar impact in terms of civility and countering polarization to that found in the literature on ethnically-divided societies (see for instance Donovan et al 2016; John et al 2018; Reilly 2021; Reilly, Lublin and Wright 2023).

Conclusion: The future of elections in divided, multi-ethnic cities and nations

Beyond these cases, the centripetal model of inter-ethnic accommodation is likely to attract attention in many global regions in the future due to the increasingly inter-mixed nature of ethnic group distribution around the world. According to the United Nations, over three-fifths of the world’s population will be urban by 2030. This worldwide trend of rural-urban migration towards multi-ethnic ‘world cities’ appears to be leading inexorably towards the development of massive, ethnically-heterogeneous urban metropolises as models of human settlement in the 21st century.

As ethnic groups increasingly find themselves in close physical proximity but separated by growing distinctions between rich and poor, and as both education levels and voter sophistication continue to rise, so the centripetal model of inter-ethnic accommodation based on the foundation of ranked ballot elections is likely to become an increasingly attractive option for constitutional engineers worldwide.

Benjamin Reilly, Adjunct Senior Fellow, East-West Center, Honolulu

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[For this article, DemocracySOS welcomes Alan Durning as a guest contributor. Alan is founder and executive director of Sightline Institute, which is an independent, nonprofit think tank providing leading original analysis on housing, democracy, forests, and energy policy in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, British Columbia, and beyond.]

Many election reforms—gerrymandering bans, ranked choice voting, proportional representation—are controversial. Winning them is a daunting prospect. But one is snoozingly uncontroversial among US voters, even while it boosts turnout more than any other change scholars have studied.

That reform is election consolidation: rescheduling local elections to occur with national and state elections in even years (often referred to as “on-cycle elections”). Nationwide, researchers have found that local voter turnout generally doubles when elections move from off-cycle to on-cycle contests. That’s a remarkable finding, considering that get-out-the-vote and registration drives are lucky if they boost participation by a percentage point or two. That’s why, as my organization Sightline Institute has argued time and again, election consolidation to even years is the best-kept secret of reforms, the one voter turnout reform that rules them all.

It’s also amazingly popular. When an election consolidation plan comes before voters, it usually passes by a wide margin and with little debate. To voters, synchronizing elections is a no-brainer. There should be one general Election Day, they believe, and it should be the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November of even years. The primary election should precede it by a few months.

Unfortunately, legislators do not always agree. Most state bills to put local elections “on cycle” with national ones quickly die, with little active support or debate. And in many states, state legislatures have not only failed to consolidate elections themselves, they have also barred cities from doing it on their own. They require cities to hold their elections “off cycle” on strange dates or in odd years. Consequently, local voters are stuck with too many elections; local leaders are chosen by small, unrepresentative electorates; and local budgets bleed from churning through unnecessary ballot handling.

Is change possible? Is there a politically realistic path to election consolidation? Yes, there is. Three states – California, Arizona and Nevada – have blazed the trail in recent decades. It starts with mild reforms at the state level that merely allow cities an option to consolidate elections. It moves next to ballot measures in multiple cities. And then it returns to state legislatures that mandate near-universal use.

ELECTORAL WINNING STREAK

For the public, election consolidation sells itself, like ice cream on a summer beach. Citizens want to vote less often. They’d rather fill out one long ballot all at once than two or three short ballots on different days. That’s why on almost every occasion when voters have considered consolidating elections, they have voted “yes” by large—sometimes, staggering—margins.

In November 2022, voters in 11 cities and one county considered election consolidation proposals for some or all city offices and passed every single one of them, usually by landslides. These cities included St. Petersburg, Florida by 70 percent, San Francisco by 71 percent, Long Beach by 75 percent, Fort Collins, Colorado, by 76 percent, San Jose by 55 percent, King County, Washington (which encompasses Seattle) by almost 70 percent, and others.

Previously, some 77 percent of voters in the city of Los Angeles approved election consolidation, as did 73 percent of voters in Phoenix, 90 percent of voters in Scottsdale, Arizona, and 66 percent of voters in Austin, Texas. This winning streak is almost unbroken because voters across the political spectrum like their elections rare.

LEGISLATIVE LOSING STREAK

If supported by the public, though, election consolidation is few people’s priority. Most think of it as common-sense but unimportant. No politician becomes a hero by championing the rescheduling of elections, and in fact, powerful interests sometimes oppose it.

Low-turnout elections skew toward “reliable voters” – those who consistently vote – and tend above all to be voters who are older, whiter, somewhat more educated, and homeowners. Some researchers have suggested that off-cycle elections also favor motivated and organized constituencies. Local elected officials themselves often oppose reform. They got elected with a certain set of voters. From their perspective, why mess with success? And local elected officials tend to have close ties with the state legislators who write the laws governing when localities hold elections.

The net effect of this combination of forces is inertia: in the absence of public pressure, the status quo continues. Most legislative proposals die. Sarah Anzia, a professor at UC Berkeley, found 219 bills in US state legislatures between 2001 and 2011 that promised to consolidate elections. Some 88 percent of them failed. Of the 25 bills that passed, almost all were weak or optional plans.

THREE WINS, ONE LESSON

Since the period of Professor Anzia’s study ended in 2011, Arizona, California, and Nevada have passed new laws that require almost all cities to move elections to November of even years. In each case, local action started the ball rolling, and a mild state reform came before a stronger one.

How California got on-cycle elections

In California, as of 1940, a sample of 77 cities studied by Professor Anzia (p. 75) showed that all but 4 percent conducted their elections out of sync with the federal government, as was normal for the time. A trickle of consolidations started among “charter cities,” those big enough to have home rule city charters. In 1981, the state legislature allowed cities without their own charters to join the trickle, and by 1986, some 34 percent of the cities in Dr. Anzia’s sample had consolidated elections.

Election consolidation slowly picked up speed. By 1995, 62 percent of the Golden State’s 482 cities, about half the state’s urban population, had on-cycle elections^.  In 2015, the city of Los Angeles migrated to on-cycle elections by popular vote. The final push came that same year from the state legislature, which passed a law requiring all localities with low voter turnout to move to on-cycle elections (in the law, “low turnout” was defined as being 25% lower than that locality’s average for statewide elections). Earlier, cities might have objected, but by then, three-quarters of cities had already converted. The remainder were no longer much of a power bloc, and their neighbors were demonstrating again and again that consolidated elections saved money and boosted participation in democracy.

Quickly, local authorities rescheduled their elections, including large cities like San Francisco and San Jose. The new additions will push the share of California cities to well above 90 percent. All but one of the state’s largest 20 cities now hold their elections on cycle.

How Arizona and Nevada got on-cycle elections

In California, local action led to state action, which led to more local action, which led to more state action. In neighboring Arizona and Nevada, a similar pattern emerged. In 2000, the Arizona legislature lifted a prior ban on local elections in even-year Novembers, and a few cities began switching. In 2012, the Arizona legislature passed a law (HB 2826) to push remaining local elections to November of even years, and by 2018, most Arizona cities had complied, including the state’s 500-pound gorilla Phoenix, which is home to more than a fifth of Arizonans. Recent court rulings have exempted charter cities, but the rulings are largely moot since nearly all Arizona cities now run consolidated elections.

The story in Nevada has been similar: every city there voted off cycle before 2001, but in 2011, the legislature let charter cities make the switch without going through the nettlesome process of amending their charters. By 2019, 12 of the state’s 19 main cities were already on cycle or in the process of transitioning. That year, the legislature approved an election consolidation measure, Assembly Bill 50, that pushed remaining municipal elections onto the statewide cycle. Like the Arizona and California measures, it passed by a wide margin in each house, perhaps because so many cities had already switched.

A TWISTING PATH

Already, ten US states require on-cycle local elections in almost all cases (though the exact count of states is somewhat hard to pin down, due to complexities of state laws). In about 20 US states, localities may already set their elections to align with national ones, and in these states, the trend is unmistakably toward consolidation.

Unfortunately, in the remaining states—about 20 of them— state law still bans election consolidation, including Alaska, Idaho, Montana, and Washington. In these states, reformers will need to convince legislators to let cities move their elections to when the voters show up: in November of even years. They can learn from the California-Arizona-Nevada model, in which a trickle of local election consolidation became a flood, and state action moved from allowing to encouraging to requiring consolidated elections. These precedents suggest that in non-consolidated states a first step might be to advocate for state policies that let cities choose when to hold their elections.

If legislators give cities the option, reformers will only need to get the question before voters. Then will come the easy part: voters will say “yes” by crushing margins. To them, election consolidation is, if nothing to get excited about, nonetheless a no-brainer. And why wouldn’t it be? It offers the benefits of boosting voter turnout dramatically, improving representation, enhancing the accountability of local governments, and saving taxpayer dollars.

Alan Durning @Sightline

Thanks to Sightline’s senior research associate Jay Lee for analysis of the California Elections Data Archive, volunteer Todd Newman for research about laws in various states, and University of California, San Diego Professor Zoltan Hajnal for helpful review comments on an earlier draft of this article. 

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US politics can be pretty confounding. Earlier this year, analysts and crystal ball gazers were predicting a GOP takeover of Congress. Then, after the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade and a woman’s bodily autonomy, coupled with a few Biden administration legislative victories, the crystal balls’ hue turned a brighter blue. Now, New York Times columnist David Brooks says the seesaw has tilted and a Republican wave is surging.

How does an everyday person — shuffling off to work, eyeing gas prices, trying to avoid COVID (for the second time), calling their 90 year old mother with dementia, wondering if they should take their savings out of the stock market — make sense of all this madness?

And thinking even more deeply, in the middle of a sleepless night, dreading the sound of the impending alarm clock: Why is the US teetering on the cliff of minority rule and post-democracy? Why are politics and campaigns so negative? Why do certain voters seem to vote against their own self-interest?

Hoo boy, hoo girl. Many voters as well as seasoned pros and conniving politicians are scratching their heads over the many conundrums and crises of American democracy.

So I thought I would sketch out a map, a kind of Harry Potter’s “marauder’s map” of US politics, that shows the secret passages and hallways, and who lurks in them. Below are the nine pieces of this puzzling map that generally explain the ups and downs of American democracy. All nine pieces need to be seen together to grasp the whole picture. Virtually any issue that arises in American politics can be understood by filtering it through this political-electoral map.

Party leaders, political consultants and partisan strategists understand these dynamics like the back of their hands, and act according to this blueprint. But this important knowledge should not be only in the hands of the most self-interested partisans. It should also be understood by everyday Americans who are trying to keep faith, trying to participate – barely -- in this representative democracy.

And I don’t mean the sanitized version that you learn in high school or college civics classes, but the real-world map that is traveled every day in the hallways of state capitals and 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and First St SE in Washington DC. Here are the nine pieces of the map.

Piece 1. The goal of a political party is to win elections – principle and ideology are secondary to that goal. To win, parties chase base voters who fundamentally agree with most of the party’s positions on issues; and they simultaneously also pursue undecided swing voters, whose votes will determine the winners in any close races, as well as the legislative majorities in closely divided legislatures.

Piece 2. Demographics have become destiny. In recent years, Americans have settled more and more into definable and balkanized "partisan residential patterns" -- liberals and progressives populate urban areas, conservatives populate rural areas, with the moderate suburbs more or less betwixt and between.

Piece 3. Geographic-based, winner-take-all elections = “safe seats.” Combined with the demographics in #2, electing our representatives one geographic district at a time has resulted in a stunning lack of competition, a veritable sea of safe legislative seats, both red (Republican) and blue (Democratic). Out of 435 U.S. House seats in each election, experts can reliably predict who is going to win 390 to 400 of them, about 90 percent (including in 2022). They not only can tell you who will win, but the margin of victory. This in turn leads to other perverse incentives (see number 6 below).

State legislative races are even worse. In 2020, 27% of the 7383 state seats were uncontested, including 75% in Massachusetts, 61% in Wyoming, 58% in Rhode Island, 57% in Arkansas and 51% in Georgia. It is a competition wasteland out there, all across the country because the districts are such lopsided strongholds for one party that it’s a waste of time for another party to run.

Also as we have seen in recent presidential elections, as well as in most races for the US Senate, entire states now can be categorized as safe Red or Blue. This reality of our geographic-based system is what FairVote has called Monopoly Politics.

Piece 4. Little choice for voters, resulting in low turnout. We like to think we have a two party system, but in actual fact the frame of reference for most voters where they live is that of a one-party system. Their “choice” consists of ratifying the candidate of the party that dominates their district or state. Interestingly, living within those red and blue districts are lots of people who are “orphaned voters,” those without a political home, including Democrats living in Republican districts, Republicans living in Democratic districts, as well as third-party supporters and independent voters everywhere. These inhabitants of Purple America are "geographic minorities” where they live and have no representation. Entire states have become political monocultures where debate has virtually ceased amidst a political monopoly for one side or the other.

All of these dynamics act as a significant drag on voter turnout, as orphaned voters with so little real choice where they live unsurprisingly stop voting. Consequently, the US has one of the lowest voter turnouts in the world among established democracies, ranking 108th in the world for national legislative elections (and even lower in non-presidential years, sandwiched between Armenia and Bulgaria).

Piece 5. Decrease in "ticket splitting" -- voters have become extremely predictable. It used to be that many voters would vote for one party for president and another party for their local representative (i.e. Richard Nixon for president but Democrat Sam Ervin for Congress) – what’s known as "ticket splitting." Increasingly, voters have become partisanly consistent, voting for the same party for president, Senate, and the House. Though it’s often a consistency born, not of firm beliefs or ideology, but of “negative consent” – many voters today vote against a candidate or party rather than for a candidate or party they actually like. Given a choice between any Democrat or any Republican, they may not think much of the Republican candidate but they sure as heck won’t vote for the Democrat (or vice versa). Given the partisan demographics and the use of winner-take-all elections, this decrease in ticket splitting has meant that voters and elections have become extremely predictable.

Piece 6. Geographically targeted campaigns. Extreme predictability and low turnout of voters combined with a lack of competition in most races allow party leaders to precisely target resources, messaging, and campaigns to the handful of battleground House districts, as well as states for president and Senate. Party leaders and strategists approach the political map like generals in a war room: “OK, all those districts over there, we don’t have to worry about them because we know we are going to win those. And those other districts, we know we will never win them, so let’s not waste any money or resources there. We need to focus like a laser on the handful of battleground districts and states.” Consequently, they target gobs of campaign funds to a handful of undecided swing voters in swing districts and states, and ignore the vast majority of races that are lopsided for one party or another.

Piece 7. Polarization in voters’ attitudes (the twin axes of “big government” and “race”). Voters’ attitudes on a whole range of issues and topics have been remarkably consistent for decades, according to the American National Election Studies, a series of public opinion polls taken over the last seven decades by the University of Michigan -- except in two important areas, where Americans indeed have become more split since the mid-1980s. The first is over the trustworthiness of government, with more Americans today less trusting and consequently opposed to “big government”; and the second is over government aid to African-Americans and minorities, with more Americans today opposed than previously. And in the dominant public mindset these two are closely fused – “We don’t want big government wasting any of our tax dollars on those programs or on those people.” These two axes also are closely linked to issues like crime, public safety, so-called welfare queens and gun control.

Sound familiar? Remember the infamous black-baiting Willie Horton ad that the George HW Bush campaign blasted to the public in the 1988 presidential race? It caused Democrat Michael Dukakis’ double-digit lead to evaporate. GOP politicians have been copying and re-copying it ever since. Donald Trump’s entire political career is basically one long Willie Horton ad, always provoking white voters to overreact out of their fears of you-know-who. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police and subsequent nationwide protests, Black Lives Matter was used as a stand-in for Willie Horton.

One study, based on an analysis of eight ANES surveys (1992–2020), found that “white Americans’ beliefs about the trustworthiness of the federal government have become linked with their racial attitudes…racial prejudice, measured in terms of anti-Black stereotypes, informs white Americans’ beliefs about the trustworthiness of the federal government.” The study found that “the racialization of government trust…can introduce serious obstacles in the ability of government to enforce rules and regulations meant to sustain the general welfare, including the democratic process itself.”

Other cultural issues come and go (woman’s reproductive rights are particularly salient right now), but election after election for the past four decades, trust in government/”big government” spending and perceptions of race have played out in impactful ways, particularly in certain regions of the country such as undecided swing districts and battleground states.

Piece 8. Intensity vs preference. A related point involves a key concept about voter attitudes, called Intensity versus preference. You can poll voters on a whole range of issues and they will give you their preferences. But what is even more important is understanding how intensely a voter feels on a particular issue, and whether it will motivate her or his vote. As leading Republican strategist Grover Norquist has said "Will they vote on that opinion?" Will it motivate how they vote for a particular candidate or party? Republican strategists in particular have been proficient at grasping this part of the “winner take all” system. Keep this point in mind when you consider the twin planets around which American politics orbits (government trust/spending/tax cuts and race), and how those issues play out in the swing (i.e. undecided) districts and states.

Piece 9. “Polarize, not compromise” through “simulated responsiveness.” Partisan campaign strategists have become expert at using modern campaign tools and techniques (polls, focus groups, 30 second ads, social media ads) to slice and dice the electorate -- especially voters in the swing districts and states -- along the twin axes, figuring out how intensely voters hold certain views. They use these campaign tools to conjure what political scientists Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro have called "simulated responsiveness" and "crafted talk," able to simultaneously target undecided swing voters with a moderate message and their base voters with a highly partisan, motivational message. These campaign tactics allow candidates to portray themselves as being all things to many people. GOP candidates like Mitt Romney and George W. Bush presented themselves as proponents of both the 1% dominant class and a “compassionate conservative” to fool moderate or independent voters. And Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton portrayed themselves to liberal voters as being more progressive than they actually were while reassuring Wall Street. This clever manipulation smoothly feeds into an audacious strategy of "polarize, not compromise" instead of true bridge-building and centrism.

And the latest communication technologies are only getting more powerful and insidious – check out this “deep fake” video of President Barack Obama calling Donald Trump a dip shit. What happens when people can’t believe their own eyes and ears about what they see and hear?

If we map this ginormously complex jigsaw puzzle composed of these nine “rules of reality,” suddenly the bigger picture emerges. Virtually any issue that arises in American politics can be understood by mapping it with this model. Climate change, gun control, reproductive rights, health care, inheritance taxes and tax loopholes, labor policies, all of these policies get distorted by these “winner take all” gremlins on steroids.

Different dilemmas for Democratic and Republican strategies

While both major parties are operating according to these rules, each party handles them in very different ways.

Republicans can motivate their base with cultural and religious issues (i.e. abortion, gun rights, gay marriage, school prayer) which costs nothing in terms of government taxes or programs and therefore do not alienate the fiscally-conservative swing voters who tend to see themselves as “independents.” Some of these swing voters and independents may not agree with the right wing on cultural issues, but that disagreement is not intensely felt and does not greatly motivate their vote the way higher taxes and scary monster government does. Many of these are part of the group of Trump and Reagan Democrats, and the blue collar workers that Bill Clinton tried to woo back with his pronouncements in the early and mid-1990s that "the era of big government is over," and his disses of black leaders like Reverend Jesse Jackson and Sister Souljah. Joe Biden managed to attract some of them back by emphasizing his working-class roots.

But the Democratic base (i.e. racial minorities, urban dwellers, young people, recent college graduates, working class and labor union members) want the government to lend a helping hand, whether for lower tuition or forgiving educational loans, health care, pensions, climate change and more. Those state interventions can only be realized by an activist government, government spending/programs, higher taxes — at least, that’s the perception. So the Democrats’ attempts to motivate their base conflicts with their need to attract socially liberal but fiscally conservative swing voters who are not very welcoming of higher taxes or more government spending, especially for those programs.  

In most elections, the most viable way for Democrats to overcome this structural disadvantage is to hyper-mobilize their diverse base, so that the loss of some swing voters is counteracted by a wave of base voters. To do that, Democrats need to run the right candidates who motivate that base. Or, Democrats can wait until Republicans in power go too far, such as extreme MAGA Trump Republicans did, alienating many independent voters and pushing the Pendulum to swing back toward the left.

The Harry Potter map of this big picture is hard to see sometimes. But now you can understand why some pundits say, “Politics is more art than science.” Remember that after the elections on November 8, when you are shaking your head over the latest choices of the American people.

As Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government – except all the others that have been tried.”

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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Watching the polarized, paralyzed state of two party politics in the United States, one is tempted to ask: what would be the best form of representative democracy? That’s an easy or hard question to answer, depending on one’s perspective, since it really depends on what values and principles you want your political system to uphold. But certainly we can say that some forms of representative democracy are worse than others.

I still remember my great surprise when I learned that you can take the same votes, cast by the same voters, and count them using different electoral systems -- single-seat districts vs. plurality at-large vs. Winner Take All vs First Past The Post vs. instant runoffs vs. proportional representation -- and end up with completely different results, in terms of which candidates and parties win and lose. I was in my early 30s, and it was like realizing for the first time that humans don’t actually live forever -- a fact so fundamental to our existence that I am still shocked that I had never learned about the overwhelming power of electoral systems in any political science or civics classes. Just as shocking was the realization that I was not alone in my ignorance: previous professors, editors, academics and politicians all shared in this political illiteracy, as did the general public.

The particular electoral system used is so fundamental and crucial to any political system that when you select a particular method for your local, state or national elections you are selecting a set of values and philosophy of government, as well as a range of accompanying effects and externalities. Once you internalize the full import of this knowledge, you realize it is quietly revolutionary.

Winner Take All and its discontents

The US-style Winner Take All electoral system possesses an internal logic that stems from two basic characteristics inherent to the system: 1) Winner Take All, for the most part, is a geographic-based political system, in which elections usually are contested in single-seat district elections (including for all congressional seats, most state legislative seats, and most city council seats in major cities). You win representation based on where you live rather than what you think; and 2) Winner Take All, for the most part, is a proxy for a two-party system, since smaller parties almost never reach the high percentages of votes typically needed to win that single-member seat; by definition, a minority perspective, whether a geographic, partisan or racial minority, does not normally win a majority or the highest plurality of votes.

Our nation is galloping toward a multi-racial society that will see whites eclipsed as a majority, particularly in certain regions and key states. The very terms “majority” and “minority” are being turned on their heads. Will our political institutions and practices be able to accommodate this horizon?  Or will they increasingly pit different races, genders, parties and partisans against each other for a scarce and precious commodity -- political representation?

Beyond its strained representational challenges, the Winner Take All system’s geographic and two-choice architecture unleashes a host of disruptive progeny that bedevil candidates, parties and voters alike. These mischievous gremlins often turn political representation and policy formation into frustrating, confusing and opaque exercises. To truly grapple with the dynamics of Winner Take All, we must understand these five gremlins -- the One-Winner Conundrum, Phantom Representation, Swing Voter Serenade, Artificial Majorities and Two-Choice Tango.

One-Winner Conundrum. Under Winner Take All’s two-choice menu, voters, candidates and legislators are confronted by a relentless series of polarizing dilemmas and zero-sum decisions for which there are no easy solutions. The One-Winner Conundrum ensures that elections and policy-making will be frustrating and disappointing exercises over impossible choices.  Here are the operative principles:

        If you win…                                                          I lose

        If you have representation…                                I don’t

        If I vote for my favorite candidate…                     it may help elect my least favorite

        If we drive voters from their candidate… the only choice left is our candidate

        If I run to the center to attract swing voters…      I will alienate my base

        If I appeal to my base...                                         I’ll drive away swing voters

The One-Winner Conundrum is a by-product of our two-choice system, and it reveals so much about the underlying dynamics of what frustrates our politics today. For instance, one of the defining characteristics of the One-Winner Conundrum is that it promotes pointlessly adversarial politics. In an election where only one of the two choices can win, everything is at stake. That’s why it’s called “winner take ALL.” It increases the intensity, the fury of politics, whether during campaigns, between campaigns or during the legislative sessions. On a whole host of issues it is painfully obvious that the overriding agenda of both major parties is not policy, principle or ideology, but that each side stake out short-term positions contrary to the other side in their efforts to win the next election.

This presents political parties, candidates and voters with conflicting options. For political parties, they must always mediate between different constituencies, whether swing or base voters, trying to calculate which ones will help their side win the next election. For candidates, they must present themselves as the brand that is distinctly different from the other brand, much like a business would advertise different types of laundry soap. For voters, you must often decide whether to vote for your favorite candidate/brand or to hold your nose and pick the unpleasant lesser-evil candidate/brand, your enthusiasm dimming for this whole sordid game. All the actors in this uneasy drama proceed according to a script determined by the demands of Winner Take All.

Phantom representation and orphaned voters. A subset of the One-Winner Conundrum and the two-choice system is something I call “phantom representation.” It’s ironic, but the thirteen original colonies rallied into a nation around the slogan, “No taxation without representation.” Yet today, millions of voters cast votes for losers and, in the zero sum game of Winner Take All politics, effectively end up with no representation. In the 2020 congressional elections not a single Republican voter in Massachusetts or a single Democratic voter in Oklahoma cast a vote for a winning candidate. Seventeen more states have such monopoly representation by one party or the other (11 GOP and 8 Democrat), and eleven more states are only one representative shy of monopoly representation, a total of 30 out of 50 states suffering from a substantial degree of monopoly politics.

All across the nation, tens of millions of voters living in the wrong districts and states vote for losing candidates election after election. They should be thought of as “orphaned voters,” with no electoral home and no effective representation. To disguise this appalling deformity of our democracy, and to obscure the inherently disenfranchising nature of Winner Take All, it has been necessary to manufacture a truly odd notion that defies even second grader logic:  that a legislator “represents” you just because he or she sits in the chair -- even if that representative is diametrically opposed to your point of view, and even if you in fact voted for someone else. It is “representation” defined in such a way as to be turned on its head and rendered meaningless. If the loser in an election somehow is represented by the winner, then what’s the point of holding elections?  Why not flip coins, draw straws or rotate the office among the candidates?

Today, there are numerous legislative districts where, for example, a white Christian Republican lives next door to a Latina single mom Democrat who lives next door to an independent Korean small businessman living beside a Sierra Club member and Green Party supporter, etc., etc., ad infinitum. There are entire sub-regions where geographic minorities of many persuasions are swamped by the partisan avalanche that dominates their electoral districts. Consequently, under the geographic-based representation of single-seat districts, only a handful of voters ever win actual representation. Voters become sorted into two unequal camps -- winners and losers. Those who voted for an elected representative, and those who did not. Elected officials find themselves ever more hard-pressed to provide representation for increasingly diverse constituencies. Asking a single representative to straddle the divide between so many perspectives has become impossible in most legislative districts, despite the inclusive rhetoric.

Winner Take All proponents like to hold forth smugly with a little patronizing lecture that goes something like this:  “If you would just get out there and work harder for your candidate, or for your political party; or if your party only ran better candidates; or if your candidate could only raise more money, then you would win representation.”  But the paradox is that even if you do work harder or raise more money and your candidate manages to win, then somebody else is now a loser and has no representation. That’s the zero-sum paradox of phantom representation -- if you win, I lose.

Swing voter vs base voter serenade. In a Winner Take All system, swing voters are the mighty fulcrum that moves politics. They are the Copernican center around which everything else turns, and the reason why is simple: how they vote determines not only which candidates will win close individual races, but also which political party will win a legislative majority in a closely divided legislature (like the US House of Representatives).

Given a choice between Democrats or Republicans, most voters already know which party’s candidates they prefer, often because they are vehemently opposed to the other party. Most Americans don’t vote for a political party anymore, they vote against the other side.  But in any given election, about 12 percent or fewer of voters, for various reasons, are fuzzy or unsure enough in their thinking that they cannot make up their minds. They are what Anthony Downs, the political economist and author of The Economic Theory of Democracy, called the baffleds -- the almighty swing voters. One campaign consultant describes swing voters as those voters who “by definition are those least informed and interested in politics...You motivate these people with fear, or 30-second sound bites that are simplified to make someone who is not interested or not informed take action.  If you can’t tell them in eight words or less why you are the better choice, you’re probably going to lose.”

Ironically, these indecisive, baffled voters are the ones who politicians serenade the most in a Winner Take All system. Policy overtures are directed to them, campaign messages are fashioned for them. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on focus groups and opinion polls to determine their opinions, and then those opinions are targeted right back at them like heat-seeking missiles using slick TV and social media ads. Swing voters are extremely fortunate to have bestowed upon them vastly inflated influence in our Winner Take All system.

Beside swing voters, Winner Take All elections also produce swing districts -- those handful of close races in legislative districts that are not a slam dunk victory for one party or the other. Approximately 90% of the district races for the US House occur in one-party fiefdoms that are too lopsided for one party to be competitive (not primarily due to redistricting abuses – though in some states that is a factor -- but due to the natural partisan demographics of where people live, i.e. liberals dominating in urban areas, conservatives in the rural areas and exurbs). So in a legislature closely divided between Democrats and Republicans -- like the House of Representatives is today -- that 10% of swing districts will determine which party will win a majority of seats and control the legislature. The handful of swing districts acquire exaggerated importance, with more attention and campaign spending occurring in these races than in all others. This applies in presidential elections as well, where a handful of swing states determine which candidate wins the presidency.

Now, smash the two together -- swing voters in swing districts and states -- and you arrive at the utter pointlessness and absurdity of America’s Winner Take All system.  A handful of muddle-headed, indecisive and least-informed voters -- those who are “best motivated by fear” and “30-second sound bites” and “need to be convinced in eight words or less” -- stumbling to the polls in a handful of close races can determine which candidate wins the presidency or which party wins a majority in the Congress and in numerous state legislatures. These voters influence national policy beyond the weight their minority numbers should warrant. Election after election, all the billions of dollars raised, all the strategies deployed, have been predicated on this dynamic of our Winner Take All political system.

Conversely, another category of voters that can have untoward influence over politics are the opposite of Downs’ baffleds -- those zealots who care passionately enough for a single issue or cause. This reality also is a byproduct of our Winner Take All system, where in a close race a small number of motivated voters can determine which candidates “win all.” This dynamic is especially prominent in party primaries, which typically have extremely low turnout (often 25 to 30% of voters), allowing a relatively small core of passionate voters to have overwhelming influence in the outcome of that primary. And with most legislative districts lopsided for one party or the other, the winner of the majority party’s primary is virtually a lock to win the November election. Reflecting these dynamics, one report found that only 10% of voters nationwide in U.S. House races in 2020 cast ballots in primaries that effectively decided 83% of those races.

A key part of this dynamic is that controversial topics (known as “wedge issues”) can acquire exaggerated importance, commanding national attention, in the “all-or-nothing” atmosphere of our geographic-based, two-choice system. The duopoly of our political system, when combined with modern campaign technologies and digital media platforms, allow the targeting of ever-smaller slices of undecided or base voters, cleverly triaging their messaging and micro-targeting different appeals to different audiences. “Swing voter” and “base voter” dynamics – much more than campaign finance inequities or redistricting abuses -- allow special interest groups like the National Rifle Association to thwart majority national opinion that has been demanding effective gun control. It will do the same for any number of issues, from climate change to reproductive rights.

Here is what is so deeply ironic about this -- many defenders of Winner Take All criticize alternative voting methods of proportional representation because of the latter’s propensity to elect small parties that may hold the balance of power in a parliamentary government and cause the collapse of the government-- the so-called “Italy and Israel effect.”  Yet under Winner Take All, small slices of the most uninformed and uninterested spectrum of the electorate, or conversely of the most fanatical parts of the electorate, also can acquire vastly exaggerated power and determine which party wins a majority. They are able to hold hostage any semblance of sane policy, as the middle erodes and legislative bridge-builders disappear.

Artificial Majorities (that distort policy). The One-Winner Conundrum, Phantom Representation, and Swing Voter Serenade in turn can result in another broken, anti-democratic mess:  Artificial Majorities. One of the purported strengths of the two party, Winner Take All system, which has been repeated endlessly by its defenders, is that it comes closest to guaranteeing “majority rule.” While it’s true that a two-party system guarantees by default that one party must win a legislative majority, it’s also true that the governing majority hasn’t necessarily been elected by a popular majority. Consequently, the policies enacted may not be the ones preferred by the majority of the public.

For instance, a number of analyses have shown that, for the urban-concentrated Democrats to win a bare majority of seats in the US House of Representatives, they must win 53.5% of the nationwide popular vote in all 435 House district seats. In some election years, such as 2012 and 1996, Republicans won House majorities despite Democrats winning more of the popular vote. But don’t feel sorry for Democrats; during the last several decades, the Republican Party has been consistently cheated out of seats due to such distortions, losing as many as 43 House seats in 1976, and losing an average of twenty-seven seats per congressional cycle from 1976 through 1988. Between 1945 and 1980, during the decades of Democratic congressional majorities, elections produced artificial majorities 17 percent of the time, where one party received less than 50 percent of the national vote yet ended up with more than 50 percent of the House seats.

Today's imbalance is due not so much to the partisanship of gerrymandered district lines but to natural partisan demographics, in which Democratic voters increasingly live in more concentrated urban areas, making it easier to pack them into fewer districts during redistricting. The resulting one-party fiefdoms ensure predictable outcomes, a decline in competition in all but a handful of districts, and declines in voter enthusiasm and turnout.

The structural anti-majority bias in the US Senate is even more severe than in the House. Every state receives two senators, regardless of population, elected in statewide single-seat districts. So Wyoming with a half a million people has the same representation as California with 40 million. At our country's founding, this large state-small state population bias was around 12 to 1…now it's closer to 80 to 1. Moreover, in the last few decades, the two parties have gradually undergone a dramatic urban-rural sorting that has made most low-population states reliably Republican. Consequently, while the U.S. Senate is currently split 50-50 Senators for each party, the Democratic half won over 41 million more votes than the Republican half and represents 56% of the American people. GOP senators have not represented a majority of the population since 1999, yet Republicans have held a majority of Senate seats for most of the past 20 years, passing or blocking key legislation.

Winner Take All systems, not only in the US but also in the UK, Canada and India, are notorious for producing disproportional results where the largest minority bloc of voters (i.e. a “plurality”) wins a majority of seats, leading to ‘minority rule’ that undermines one of the most fundamental principles of representative democracy – “that the sense of the majority should prevail,” as Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist Papers No. 22. After a victory for Republicans or Democrats in the House, major media outlets caught up in the horse race typically blare headlines like “GOP wins stunning landslide victory” or “Democrats retake the congressional majority.” A more accurate headline would read, “Defects of Winner Take All electoral system give minority party a lopsided majority.” The media don’t report it this way because artificial majorities are considered normal, even as they generate toxic impacts.

Two-Choice Tango. Another subset of the One-Winner Conundrum is the Two-Choice Tango. Politicians and their political consultants have figured something out:  in a two-choice field, the last candidate standing wins. Winning does not require positions on a broad range of issues, because if the goal in Winner Take All is to win more votes than your lone opponent, you can do that as easily by driving voters away from your opponent as by attracting voters to yourself. In fact, it’s easier, all you have to do is find a good wedge issue or two, or selectively strip-mine your opponent’s voting record for votes on taxes, crime or child pornography, or dig up some youthful indiscretion or inflated sex scandal that you can distort out of all recognition. Then use that information to target slickly-prepared campaign messages at the undecided, barely informed swing voters who determine the outcome in a close race. In a one-on-one, mano a mano campaign, the mudslinging dynamic inescapably boils down to a zero-sum choice: “if you lose, I win.”

This is especially effective whenever the field has been reduced to two candidates; that’s when the One-Winner Conundrum is maximized. Going negative on one’s opponent is an effective campaign tactic, as accusations fly and nuance and middle ground get eroded. Modern campaign technologies -- polling, focus groups, 30-second TV spots, direct mail and digital media data harvesting -- are uniquely tailored to this task of spin, hype and targeting. We can expect that scandal and mudslinging will always be excessively important under the intense competitive pressures of the Two-Choice Tango. With the specter of the modern “permanent campaign” that never ends, these dynamics now extend past the elections and into the governance process as well.  Despite all the national disgust over negative politicking, there has been surprisingly little discussion by political scientists and pundits about how the two-choice, Winner Take All system substantially drives attack-style tactics. In fact, it is malignantly suited for it.

Once you have unleashed these Winner Take All gremlins into your political system, these puzzling dilemmas and paradoxes will frustrate voters, candidates and legislators at every turn. While the surface structure for electing representatives under Winner Take All appears simple -- deceptively so, what could be more simple than “highest vote-getter wins”? -- the underlying mechanics and the dynamics unleashed by the Winner Take All gremlins render it extremely complex, vexing and unfair.

Remedies for Winner Take All

There are fixes to these anti-democratic tendencies, but they will be challenging to enact within the straitjacket of Winner Take All. The most profound reform would be to get rid of single-seat, Winner Take All districts and change the method for electing all our legislatures to proportional representation (such as ranked choice voting in multi-seat districts). With PR, as it is sometimes called, voters win representation based on what they think, instead of where they live (though there are different configurations, including hybrids that allow both geographic and ideological representation). With PR methods, there is no phantom representation since the vast majority of voters actually help elect someone and the number of “orphaned voters” is negligible. Multiple parties can win representation in the legislature, including minor parties, and there are no artificial majorities since a majority of votes always wins a majority of seats. With a range of viable political parties from a wide ideological spectrum to choose from, there is more chloice, more competition and higher voter turnout because all voters become swing voters. Partisanship doesn’t disappear but it finds a softer voice, both during and between campaigns. Politics has a better chance of finding a win-win common ground among the different political forces.

This is not just a pipe dream. A bill has been introduced into Congress, the Fair Representation Act, which would create a uniquely American form of proportional representation that would tame these gremlins. House members would be elected in multi-winner districts of up to five seats, cultivating “moderate proportional representation” in which every part of the US would be competitive for both major parties. Monopoly representation by one party in any state (with more than one representative) would be a thing of the past. A well-organized minor party and independents would have new opportunities for winning representation and holding the major parties accountable. Parties would not be so beholden to their own fringe extremes, and the ideological diversity within each party would not get strangled by scheming, unscrupulous party leaders.

The tendency towards an anti-democratic, exclusionary, “If you win, I lose” politics is an inherent part of the Winner Take All system’s DNA. These challenges have been exacerbated as the US has become more diverse and socially complex. At this point, the Winner Take All political system and its five mischievous gremlins undermine political participation and authentic representation, increase polarization and nasty mudslinging campaigns, and undermine legislative majorities, cross-partisan bridge-building and government's legitimacy. Acting in devious concert, they could well continue to push the US down a worrisome path toward a future of post-democracy.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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Post-election commentary and kibbitzing over the Alaska election in which Democrat Mary Peltola beat Sarah Palin continues unabated. But increasingly it has run off the rails over attempts to discredit the election method used, Ranked Choice Voting.

The first wave of criticism came from some apoplectic MAGA Republicans, furious that their Mama Bear Palin had lost. Right-wing GOP Senator Tom Cotton tweeted "Ranked-choice voting is a scam to rig elections,” and one unhinged pundit said ranked choice voting “has the rank odor of Third World authoritarianism.” Palin herself called it a “new crazy, convoluted, confusing” system, while that expert judge of electoral fairness, Donald Trump, called it “ranked choice crap voting…a total rigged deal” (and Trump should know).

Now some advocates for different electoral systems, such as approval voting, range voting, STAR voting and more, are taking dim views of how ranked choice voting performed in Alaska. Some elections commentators measure the worth of all electoral systems by whether or not that system elects what is called “the Condorcet winner.”

Okay, let me warn readers right now:  this is going to get a little wonky. At the end of this discussion, no doubt some of you are going to say, “I can’t believe so many people spend so much time thinking about these things.” I will try to boil it down to the basics.

Introducing…Condorcet

No, Condorcet is not the name of a new French cologne or champion wine from the Challenge International du Vin. Condorcet was a French mathematician in the 18th century who, among other brilliances, had a very long name: Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, a.k.a. the Marquis de Condorcet.

He designed his own voting method that posits that the only true winner in an election is the one candidate who defeats every other candidate in simultaneous head-to-head contests. But such an election is completely impractical to organize in the real world. You would have to stage multiple separate elections, each candidate running in a series of “top two”-style runoffs against all the others. The one candidate who beats all others would finally be crowned the blessed winner.

Since this is so unworkable logistically, instead the Condorcet advocates simulate an election in which the same ballots are counted multiple times, and in such a way that the election process pairs each candidate in a one-on-one contest with all the other candidates. The single candidate that defeats all others in this simulated election eventually is declared the winner (called a “pair-wise election”). Its advocates have promoted the “Condorcet winner” standard as a measuring stick to evaluate all other electoral methods, whether it makes sense to do that or not.

Are you still with me? From here, it only gets better.

The real winner in Alaska is…the loser!

According to the rules of this Condorcet simulation, the true winner of the congressional election in Alaska was not Democrat Mary Peltola, who had a nine point lead in first rankings over the nearest candidate and defeated leading Republican Sarah Palin in the final instant runoff. No, they claim it was the third place finisher, Nick Begich, Palin’s fellow Republican. That’s because when you use the ranked ballots to count them in this pair-wise fashion, lo and behold Begich beats Peltola 52.5%-47.5% in head-to-head contests, and Begich beats Palin 61%-39%.

For advocates of the “Condorcet winner” standard, and those who exaggerate the importance of this standard, such as the advocates of approval voting, range voting and STAR voting, this is their “Eureka!” moment. If the ballots had been counted with their preferred method, the ballot rankings show that Begich in fact would have been the simulated winner. And since ranked choice voting did not come up with that result, they of course castigate it as a pile of Sasquatch squat that should never ever be used again in a public election.

It never occurs to these advocates that, given the fact that Begich is the “Condorcet winner” in the Alaskan election, this is clear and compelling proof that the Condorcet winner standard is as obsolete as its 18th century origins.

Think about it: a candidate who finished in third place, who was nearly 12 points and 22,000 votes behind the eventual winner, and 2.7% and 5000 votes behind the second-place finisher, and who would not have won this election in Alaska’s old closed primary system either, because he would have lost to Sarah Palin in the Republican primary; and who has lost to Palin three times now, including in 2 primary elections and 1 general election…yes, THAT candidate…under Condorcet rules…is the “real winner.”

In fact, using Condorcet rules Begich would have stomped Palin by a landslide of 22 points and Peltola by six points. So according to the Condorcet standard, a candidate who finished in a distant third place, who was in fact dead last, is actually the legitimate winner by a wide margin.

Huh?

No wonder the Condorcet voting method is not used for any public elections anywhere in the world. In fact, I don’t know of any country or sub-country that uses an election method in which a candidate can win after finishing dead last. The idea that Begich is the Condorcet winner is kind of an "alternative universe" argument to make. As we saw in that Alaska election, the Condorcet winner criteria is saying that a more popular candidate (either Peltola or Palin) spoiled an election for a less popular candidate (Begich). Even Donald Trump apparently does not agree with this methodology, as he complained about RCV saying, “You could be in third place and they announce that you won the election.”

And yet that’s exactly what the champions of the Condorcet standard are promoting. What’s wrong with this picture?

The values in your voting system

Here's what’s wrong:  it really comes down to what values and principles are embedded into an electoral system. The voting method used is fundamental to any political system because when you select a particular method for your elections you are selecting a set of values and philosophy of government, as well as a range of accompanying effects and consequences.

For the purposes of this discussion, it's really not a matter of which system is better, either ranked choice voting or Condorcet or approval voting or range voting -- it's a matter of what are the incentives for winning? What kinds of candidates do you want to reward with an electoral victory? 

Here’s what I mean. With RCV, winning candidates in a single-winner contest (like a governor, mayor or a representative of a legislative district) must have BOTH a broad base of support AND a strong core of support. RCV rewards both deep support as evidenced by a high number of first rankings, and broad support, as evidenced by many backup rankings. But with Condorcet and these other methods, winners only need to have a broad base of support, and do not need much core support.

Let's say in an RCV election there is a candidate who is ranked second on every single ballot in the election. That would be a clear indicator of broad support. But let's say that same candidate is ranked first on only a single ballot. That candidate will be the first one eliminated from the race, because that candidate did not have strong enough core support — enough first rankings — to prevent being rejected early in the round by round vote tally.

RCV rewards candidates who show real leadership and can attract a nucleus of voters who strongly believe in that candidate. But not exclusively, because the truly defective plurality voting method also rewards candidates with a strong core of support. So RCV also rewards candidates that have a broad base of support. The values and principles of RCV are boldly declaring: "A candidate who has virtually no core support, even though the candidate did have broad support, that candidate should not win. You need BOTH core and broad support to win an election under RCV."

But with Condorcet voting, that same candidate who is ranked second on every ballot and first on hardly anyone’s ballot will be the winner. Being no one's first choice but everyone's second choice is not a losing strategy in Condorcet voting, quite the contrary. It encourages candidates to be bland and take few strong stands on anything. They are incentivized to water down their true beliefs and hide them from voters so as to not offend or be opposed by anyone.

That is also a feature of approval voting, because it doesn't allow a voter to distinguish between her first, second or third choices. It’s also a component of range and STAR voting, which also allows a candidate to win who does not have the highest score from many voters but instead is supported broadly.

In what alternative universe does that make sense? You can't have it both ways. When you are selecting an electoral system, you have to choose which values and principles you want to prioritize. Once you have done that, it makes no sense to evaluate a system like RCV -- which awards "winners with a broad base AND core support" -- by a method like Condorcet that, by definition, prioritizes "winners with just a broad base and little core support."

What is the better “good democracy” standard?

From a “good democracy” standpoint, a candidate in a single-seat election should not be able to win just by being many voters’ second choice. The higher democracy standard is that winners should have BOTH a broad base AND core support. With that as the values-based foundation for an electoral system, then it no longer makes sense to evaluate RCV with a Condorcet standard.

So rather than measuring RCV by some Condorcet benchmark, the reality is that the Alaska election has substantially discredited and delegitimized Condorcet, either as an actual electoral system that can be used in public elections, or even as a measurement or standard by which to evaluate other electoral systems such as ranked choice voting.

Certainly it's fair game to use a range of criteria to compare different electoral systems, and the Condorcet standard could be in the mix with other criteria. But using Condorcet in such a rigid and compulsive way, as some are doing, where it becomes the only criteria or even the primary criteria for evaluating all electoral systems, is severely flawed, methodologically.

Also, it is fair to point out that candidates will shift their campaign tactics depending on the rules. If Begich was actually running in a top two election, head-to-head against either Palin or Peltola, the candidates would all adopt a different strategy than they used with RCV. Indeed, if they had used the old closed primary system, which would have been a head-to-head contest between Begich and Palin, does anyone doubt that Palin would have beaten him? With the Trump endorsement, she would have been able to rally the Republican diehards around her in that head-to-head contest.

Also, as an aside beyond these theoretical arguments, RCV in single-winner races nearly always elects the Condorcet winner. Of the 375 single-winner RCV elections in the US between 2004 and June 2021 (in which researchers had sufficient ballot data for an assessment), 374 RCV elections were won by the Condorcet winner. That’s 0.27% of races in 17 years where the so-called “Condorcet winner” lost.

One race? In 17 years? OK readers, if you have made it this far, now you can express your exasperation: “WhyTF are so many people obsessing over the results of one race out of hundreds???”

All of these factors are warning signs against applying the values and standards of the Condorcet system to ranked choice voting. It makes a lot of assumptions that simply don't play out in the real world, and makes little sense.

So the next time you are at a dinner party with your politico acquaintances and wonky confrères, and you hear someone suddenly hiss with conviction, “But Begich was the Condorcet winner!”, just smile and nod and then make a dash for the rest room. Because this is an argument that you cannot win, since the different electoral systems are by definition trying to elect different kinds of candidates. Instead, you have to first decide what values and goals you are trying to fulfill, and then design your electoral system to fit that mission.

Considering all the evidence, it’s clear to me that the most democratic values and standard for assessing single-winner races should be that winners must earn both a broad base and a strong core of support. Elected representatives should be able to demonstrate both leadership potential and extensive acceptance by voters.

But Condorcet produces winners who have only a broad base and not a strong core of support. RCV advocates believe that is the wrong value and standard to prioritize in single-winner elections. Consequently, the Condorcet criteria is not really useful for evaluating RCV.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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As we near the cusp of November’s elections that will decide whether a Democratic or GOP majority will take over Congress, let’s talk about…money. Specifically, money in politics.

One of the most discussed political reforms of the last thirty five years has been campaign finance reform. Many experts and reformers blame much of what ails our democracy on the pernicious effect of private money in politics. In the 1990s, tales of the Keating Five, the Lincoln Bedroom, and Buddhist temples became the stuff of political legend. In the 2000s, House majority leader Tom DeLay was convicted of campaign and money-laundering violations and lobbyist Jack Abramoff went to jail over influence-peddling and bribing various members of Congress. In 2016, the 10 most competitive Senate races with almost $1 billion in expenditures saw “dark money” groups outspend all candidates and political parties combined, providing 55 percent of total expenditures.

With each new election the candidates set records for spending, reaching nearly $15 billion in the 2020 election cycle – larger than the budget expenditures of 12 states -- and is predicted to break new records in the midterms this fall. Such spending has created a widespread perception of cronyism, corruption, and a “pay-to-play” political system marinated in money. Supreme Court rulings such as Citizens United, Buckley v. Valeo and others have blessed it all, with the Black Robes’ counterfeit jurisprudence opening the floodgates by equating money with political speech.

So campaign finance reform is crucially important. But other pieces of evidence suggest that all of these big spending numbers may dazzle and distract us from recognizing another equally toxic source of the democratic crisis that American’s are facing.

For example, though campaign finance reform, especially public financing of campaigns in places like Arizona and Maine, have created more contested races, there is scant evidence that it has led to more competitive races. Or has resulted in more points of view being elected, such as those from minor parties or independent candidates, or racial minorities and political moderates. Campaign spending inequities are not the cause of the many lopsided one-party districts, which allows everyone from FairVote, Charlie Cook’s Political Report and party strategists to predict which candidates will win 90% of the U.S. House district races this November. They not only can predict who will win, they can tell us the margins of victory. How is that possible? Do they have a magic crystal ball?

No, it’s because the overwhelmingly dominant factor in who wins and loses all but the closest legislative elections is not campaign spending inequities but partisan residential demographic patterns in red and blue America, combined with district-based, winner-take-all elections. Liberals predominantly live in urban areas, conservatives in the rural areas, with suburbs being the toss-up areas, and those residential patterns largely determine who wins. The partisan tilt of each district can be fairly easily determined by tracking the presidential vote in each district (and with another non-campaign spending factor being the power of incumbency, which bestows name recognition on officeholders). In this November’s election, all but about 40 district races out of 435 are so skewed that the dominant party has as much chance of losing as a snowball melting at the North Pole.

Wait a minute, you think…but the winners usually have a lot more campaign funds than their challengers – isn’t that the reason why they win?

No, it isn’t. Quite the opposite. In most legislative elections, money follows electoral success, not vice versa. The money goes to candidates who donors know will win, because the partisan demographic tilt of the districts guarantees that result. By betting on the sure horse in each race, donors are buying access and influence—but not elections.

Sensationalized headlines over campaign spending confuse cause and effect, and cloud our understanding of how our democracy really works and how to repair it. And that confusion exaggerates our expectations of how much campaign finance reform, as well as other worthy reforms such as redistricting commissions, really can accomplish within our winner-take-all electoral system.

Look at a state like Arizona, which passed a type of public financing called “Clean Money” over 20 years ago. Yet the partisan residential patterns undermine many of that reform’s best effects. Liberals and Democrats are more numerous in the southern areas around Tucson, while conservatives and Republicans dominate the rest of the state. The only way to make winner-take-all districts more competitive and make voters more powerful would be to draw districts like narrow bands extending vertically from south to north, like the teeth of a fork. However, such districts would both look ridiculous and break up communities of interest, such as geographic regions and racial minorities.

This shows one of the severe trade-offs of winner-take-all districts: you can have competitive elections or representative results, but it’s pretty difficult to have both. Unfortunately, campaign finance reform and redistricting commissions do little to counter these realities. Demography is destiny, in Arizona as well as in many other states.

The Pyramid of Money

To understand the true role that private campaign funding plays in our elections, it’s important to understand what I call the Pyramid of Money. Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi represents the district in which I live in San Francisco. This is a heavily Democratic city, there is no chance that a Republican candidate could ever beat Pelosi or any other Democrat here. Pelosi won her last election with 78% of the vote, she does not have to spend a dime on her own reelection. Neither does Republican minority leader Kevin McCarthy, who won his last election with 64% of the vote. It turns out that most legislative districts are like that—naturally tilted for one party or the other.

Nevertheless, the Big Money queens and kings like Pelosi, McCarthy and others raise huge sums for their own reelections. Why? Because they funnel the money into “party-building activities,” mostly to finance colleagues in the handful of hotly contested races. In the process, they buy themselves influence among their peers, as well as important party leadership positions. Think of it as a pyramid structure with each party’s kings and queens sitting at the top. These party fat cats target the flow of money to the predictably tight races, hoping to win a majority of seats for their team. The rest of the safe-seat incumbents, along with the lobbyists, lawyers, allied political action committees and high roller donors, fill out the lower levels of the pyramid, funneling money into its labyrinth, where it is directed by party leaders skilled in the art of deception. It’s a well-oiled operation.

The Pyramid is so welded into our political system’s framework that it can take bizarre forms. A few years ago, Republican leaders set a new low bar -- they explicitly tied the reward of leadership positions and chairmanships of powerful committees to those incumbents who raised the most money for the party. Since committee chairs have near-dictatorial powers to set committee dockets, dole out pork and establish the national agenda, this quid pro quo debased government to a whole new level of political patronage and crassness.

But keep in mind, the GOP leadership was only able to do this because most incumbents don’t need to spend a dime on their own re-elections. And that’s because of the “winner take all” district-based system in which most incumbents live in safe, non-competitive districts due to natural partisan demographics (in a few states, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina, redistricting abuses also have added a sinister twist).

The Pyramid of Money symbolizes the shape and flow of private money in our political system. The fact that a lot of candidates receive chunks of money from various lobbyists, corporations, and special interests, as well as boosts from various PACs and super PACS, while definitely a toxic relationship that needs to be disrupted, is not proof that these politicians have been “bought.” Oftentimes the donors and politician-recipients are part of the same Pyramid team, because they have the same beliefs and legislative priorities. One is the point person in the legislature, the other is the point person for raising the money needed to win elections. When you want to understand the crucial dynamic of how money works, don’t think of candidates receiving briefcases of bribes from shadowy lobbyists. Think of the Pyramid of Money, with its octopus arms redirecting money between the private and public sectors to the handful of battleground races that will decide congressional majorities.

The infamous case of former House majority leader Tom DeLay and lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who both were convicted of various campaign finance violations, illustrates the point. In one brazenly revealing comment, DeLay said, “No one came to me and said, ‘Please repeal the Clean Air Act.’ We say to the lobbyists, ‘Help us.’ We know what we want to do, and we find the people to help us do that.” The lobbyists and special interests today follow the lead of political leaders, not vice versa. DeLay got what he wanted, which was large donations to grease his political machine, and Abramoff got what he wanted, personal favors for his businesses and clients. They scratched each other’s backs, each playing their respective roles in the Pyramid of Money.

So the Pyramid is the problem, with its one-party fiefdoms and kings and queens sitting atop the slush pile, directing the show. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, as bad as it is, is made even worse due to the perverse dynamics unleashed by the basic architecture of our winner-take-all political system. Even with strong campaign finance reform, breaking up the pyramid will be very difficult as long as we are using a winner-take-all system in which most legislative seats are lopsided, one-party strongholds, and invincible incumbents can funnel their campaign funds to party leaders and their super PACs.

If we don't understand the dynamics of how our political system works, we will miss the mark when we try to reform it. To overturn the pyramid, we need not only to plug the holes that Citizens United has ripped open, we also need to reform the winner-take-all, district-based electoral system. Proportional voting methods, such as the type that would be implemented by the Fair Representation Act currently pending before Congress, would produce more contested and more competitive races. It would open up elections to new voices and new ideas, and give voters a lot more choice. It would create a vibrant dialogue between the political center and the margins, allowing new parties to act as the laboratory of new ideas and better ensure that policies are enacted with the support of a majority of Americans.

When combined with public financing of campaigns and free media time for candidates and parties, these reforms would topple the Pyramid of Money and revitalize US democracy.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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