Fun Science Fact #34: Ranked-choice voting would not result in President Stein.
A few days ago, I had a chance to listen to a lengthy interview with Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for POTUS. Most of it wasn’t too interesting, to be honest—lots of stuff about how Republicans and Democrats are just the same, a bit about how Hillary Clinton is planning to start a nuclear war in her first hundred days, and a pretty clear demonstration that Dr. Stein doesn’t understand what the term “quantitative easing” means. In and among the nonsense, however, was a suggested solution to the eternal third-party complaint that voters who really support their positions won’t vote for them because they’re afraid of throwing away their votes. We could have a viable third (and fourth and fifth, presumably) party in this country, Dr. Stein asserted, if only we’d adopt ranked-choice voting.
At this point, it’s probably a good idea to briefly explain what ranked-choice voting is. Also referred to as instant-runoff voting, ranked-choice voting allows you to vote for more than one candidate, ranking them in order of preference. If, for example, you love Jill Stein but are terrified of a Donald Trump presidency, you could vote Stein first, then Clinton, then Johnson, then Trump. Votes are tallied under this system by first counting all the first place ballots for each candidate. If anyone gets more than 50%, that’s your winner. If not, the last place candidate is eliminated, and everyone who ranked that person first gets re-allocated to their second-ranked choice. This continues until somebody achieves a majority.
The beauty of this system is that you can vote your heart, without worrying that your vote will doom you to the worst of all possible worlds. There are obvious benefits to that, and using this system would prevent third party candidates from acting as spoilers, as Ralph Nader did for Al Gore in the 2000 election, or as Ross Perot may have done for George Bush the Elder in 1992. But—would this allow those third party candidates to actually win?
The answer, for better or worse, is no. The reason that third party candidates can’t win in the United States isn’t because of our voting system. It’s because the thing that makes them third party candidates in the first place is that they represent minority positions. The reason Jill Stein has no opportunity to win the presidency is that her policies, while very appealing to a small subset of the electorate, are anathema to enough people that there is absolutely no way for her to cobble together a majority coalition. The same can be said of Gary Johnson, and Ralph Nader, and pretty much all of the other obscure protest candidates who launch quixotic runs every four years.
But wait—lots of other countries have many different political parties that actually succeed in putting people into office. What about them? Well, the difference is that those places generally are parliamentary democracies. In a parliamentary system, a party that gets 15% of the votes gets roughly 15% of the seats in parliament. Obviously, that’s not how it works in the U.S. Here, you actually have to win a majority within your district or state or, in Dr. Stein’s case, the entire nation, to take office. This is a winner-takes-all system, and it necessarily drives toward two dominant parties, because taking second or third or fourth place in this system gets you absolutely nothing.
This is not to say new parties can’t arise, of course—but to do so, they have to cannibalize and destroy one of the two existing dominant parties. That’s what happened to the Whigs in the 1850s. The key factor that has to be in place for this to happen, however, is that the new party has to better represent the mainstream of American thought than the existing party. It could have been argued a few years ago, for example, that there was an opening for a new party embodying a combination of fiscal conservatism and social tolerance, but the existing Democratic party seems to have more or less moved into that space during the Obama presidency. It is also possible that a new party may arise to better represent the center-right in the wake of the Trump candidacy. If this happens, though, it will mean the end of the current GOP.
Needless to say, neither the current Green or Libertarian parties as represented by Stein and Johnson are likely to fit this model. Both appeal to a narrow swath of voters (those who are very concerned about GMOs, and those who are really, really into weed, respectively,) and if the United States were a parliamentary democracy, both would probably pick up a seat or two, and maybe have a shot to weasel their way into a coalition with the winning party. As noted, though, that’s not how it works here. As long as the U.S. electoral system sticks with the winner-take-all model, we’re going to have to reconcile ourselves to making the best of two imperfect choices.
Will either of those choices ever perfectly represent your views? No, they will not. This is not a bug. It’s a feature. The United States is a large and diverse nation, and perfectly representing your views means perfectly not representing somebody else’s. If there can only be one winner in an election, everyone needs to compromise on something. Understanding that principle is not a sign of moral corruption. It’s one of the basic requirements of political adulthood.
