Plurality voting is frequently maligned, but it truly is a superb voting system provided there is a maximum of two candidates. That is a serious restriction, however, that makes this voting system a poor choice for our elections. Unwise as it is, we continue to rely mostly on plurality voting.
When there is an established duopoly, the reality is that additional candidates beyond the two from the duopoly have no realistic chance of winning. But these other candidates can upset an election by drawing away votes from candidates who otherwise would have won and for that reason, these extra candidates are frequently called spoilers. But derision this implies is misplaced; having these extra candidates is a good thing; plurality voting deserves the blame for these spoiled elections, not the extra candidates. Plurality voting simply is not up to doing the job it is assigned.
We feel faced with a dilemma. Frequently, movements are convinced that, against all odds, they can be the exception to win election against the duopoly; and consequently, elections are spoiled. While we would prefer to have more candidates and to give voters more choices, but having a duopoly ensures that extra candidates beyond the two duopoly ones will surely lose and possibly trigger a spoiled election.
It might seem excessively optimistic to hope for finding a better voting system. But perhaps there is one that not only accommodates, but even encourages elections to have more than just two viable candidates? The word viable is important here; a viable candidate is one with a realistic chance of winning election. Adopting such a voting system would seem to be a way to have more candidates and to end the duopoly. Happily, as simple a voting system as it is, balanced approval voting (BAV) does exactly this. As a bonus, adopting BAV makes voting easier.
Voters find it challenging to compare the virtues and vices of candidates with one-another to make a judgement as to which candidate they prefer; consequently, many voters bypass such efforts and simply rely on the simple test of party affiliation. Also, there could be several candidates who seem so similarly qualified that choosing just one can seem impossible. With BAV there is no need for an individual voter to make such problematic comparisons and choices.
With BAV, voters are asked simply to designate candidates as either acceptable or not acceptable. Voters who want to neither support nor oppose, perhaps, an unfamiliar candidate are encouraged simply to skip over that candidate as a way to avoid registering an opinion. In essence, voters are asked to divide up the candidates into three categories: the good, the bad and the others.
Voting with BAV does not just seem easy, it is easy; with little effort, voters become aware of which candidates they would be content to see win and which they would prefer to see lose, and all they need to do is just put that information on the ballot. Of course, having hundreds of candidates would make such voting a tedious chore, but a preliminary election could trim the number of candidates to a more manageable size, perhaps somewhere between six and twelve.
Sometimes an objection is raised that BAV violates the principle of One Man, One Vote (OMOV). The same objection would surely apply just as appropriately to approval voting, to ranked choice voting or in fact most other alternative voting systems that have been proposed. But OMOV is surely not one of the ten commandments, the Supreme Court has not yet exposed it to be in the Constitution and it is not a law of nature. There is no identifiable authority insisting on it nor is there a study suggesting it to be an important issue. OMOV seems merely to have been penned as a catchy phrase for demonstrators to chant, probably during a campaign for expanding the right to vote. Still, that would be a long time ago and we now live in a world that has changed considerably.
That concern aside, OMOV lacks clarity because the word, "vote," is ambiguous when used as a noun. It could refer to any single mark on a ballot (in which case OMOV would forbit addressing multiple issues in an election). At the other extreme "vote" could be interpreted as the aggregate of all of the marks on a ballot. Generally, the meaning falls somewhere between these two extremes, with the exact shade of meaning left to be inferred from context. It seems ironic to think that possibly an ambiguous chant, penned long ago for a campaign to improve democracy, to now be invoked instead to keep voters from adequately expressing their opinions.
In the second article of this series, we introduced a voting system, B1, which arguably seems simpler than BAV. That was useful name to use in that article a decade ago, but this is a different time and a different article and at this time I favor a more descriptive name, balanced plurality voting (BPV). An organization that promotes adoptin g BPV often refers to it instead as the negative vote.
BPV insists (just as does plurality voting) that the voter express an opinion regarding only a single candidate on the ballot. Of course the voter is free to choose which candidate to evaluate but, once chosen, the BPV voter can specify either support or opposition for only that candidate.
Unfortunately though, when there are more than two candidates, making this choice of candidate can be a challenge. After all, a voter is apt to agree with any specific candidate on some issues but not on others and both the issues and positions vary from one candidate to another; there can be a whole host of different issues to consider. While BPV probably makes election administration fairly easy, but when there are several candidates BPV can make voting a serious challenge.
A voter who does find the choice difficult may feel forced to just choose one candidate arbitrarily. But this is vote-splitting, precisely what triggers the spoiler effect. And this variant of vote-splitting could likewise trigger erroneous election outcomes.
Alternatively, such voters may base the decision on some inappropriate consideration (electability for example). Making decisions in this way is a most harmful form of strategic voting. It clearly tends to corrupt an election by preventing ballots from reflecting opinions about the candidate. Perhaps the greatest deficiency of plurality voting when there are multiple candidates is the limitation on voters to express an opinion about just one of them. BPV adopts this same deficiency.
Unfortunately, an all too common feature of voting systems is favoritism on the basis of name recognition (fame). Balanced voting elections seem unique favoring neither the famous nor the less famous; both BAV and BPV are balanced systems, and it follows that both systems avoid this so common hazard. It would be possible to structure other voting systems so that the imbalance would favor the least famous candidates, but somehow the structural thumb on the electoral scale always seems to be in the other direction, consistently to favor the most famous candidates. Favoring the famous in elections is a problem because it helps to perpetuate a duopoly (whose candidates are famous, if only by the very fact of that nomination).
While BPV is balanced, it fails to be evaluative. An evaluative system (such as BAV) asks a voter to answer the very same question for each candidate. This allows voters to judge each candidate on individual merit rather than in any comparison with others; voters are not asked to choose one (or more) candidates for special treatment nor are they asked to rank the candidates relative to one another. Using an evaluative voting system, a voter can (and should) vote exactly the same for two candidates whenever that voter feels the two are (roughly) just as acceptable. This way, voters can express in considerable detail their willingness to compromise with other voters. The evaluative nature of BAV gives voters a way to influence the compromise with other voters in choosing a winner. Encouraging such compromise is uniquely a feature of evaluative voting systems like BAV and approval voting.
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