The future of US democracy: OLPR vs RCV

Open list PR (OLPR) advocates show inconsistencies and contradictions in their criticisms of ranked choice voting

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.”

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.”

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