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New York Times
How to Vote?
Let Us Count the Ways
By Michael Cooper
July 27, 2003
There is a cynical precept of politics that says that those who
cast the votes decide nothing, but those who count the votes decide
everything. A third group, though, decides quite a bit, too: those
who set the election rules. New York City's election rules could be
rewritten soon, if the voters approve Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's
plan to abolish party primaries in 2009. The mayor says his push
for nonpartisan elections will lead to fairer elections. But fair
can be in the eye of the beholder. While the pros and cons of the
mayor's proposal will be debated in the coming months, it is worth
noting that recent history is riddled with well-intentioned election
reforms that ended up having unintended consequences. Think of the
decision to hold the old community school board elections in the
spring, so they would not be overshadowed in November. Voters forgot
they were being held, or did not care, and turnout had to be
measured with electron microscopes. Then there is New York's system
of nominating candidates for State Supreme Court at judicial
conventions, which was supposed to insulate the bench from politics.
The thought now seems risible. Or take a look at what happened with
redistricting, which was supposed to preserve the
one-person-one-vote standard by periodically redrawing district
lines to take population shifts into account. In practice it
regularly becomes an exercise in partisan gerrymandering, with the
political parties redrawing electoral maps to guarantee themselves
safe, uncontested seats. Redistricting, it has often been observed,
turns the age-old principle of having the electorate choose its
leaders on its head. Some scholars would go so far as to question
whether any system of choosing a winner by way of a vote can truly
be fair, at least when more than two candidates are concerned.
Kenneth J. Arrow, a Stanford University economist, won the Nobel
Prize in economics in 1972, in part for his work in the late 1940's
and early 1950's for developing what came to be known as Arrow's
Impossibility Theorem. It provided proof that there is no way to
arrange an electoral system to perfectly reflect the will of the
people when it comes to choosing a winner from more than two
candidates. "It was a little disquieting," Professor Arrow recalled
last week, explaining that he had originally set out to find a good
system. What's the problem? Depending on how an election is
structured, it is almost bound to have some imperfections from a
mathematical point of view. In the American system, the candidate
who wins the most votes wins the election, even if he (and it still
usually is a he) falls short of a majority. That sounds fair. But
does it accurately reflect the will of the people, to the extent it
can be known? Consider the last presidential election results from
Florida. If you accept the final, much-disputed tally, it showed
that George W. Bush got slightly more votes than Al Gore, and both
men trounced Ralph Nader. So Mr. Bush won the state, and the
presidency. But most people in Florida voted for someone other than
Mr. Bush. And since most Nader voters would presumably have
preferred Mr. Gore to Mr. Bush, it follows that Mr. Gore would have
been a more acceptable choice to most Floridians than Mr. Bush. But
second choices do not count in the American system. A number of
alternative election systems exist. A runoff election between the
top vote-getters can be held if no candidate gets a majority of the
vote. Such a system, though, can keep members of minority
groups—racial, ethnic or ideological—from winning, even when they
finish first in the initial count. In the Democratic mayoral
primary in 2001, Fernando Ferrer, who forged a black-Latino
coalition, beat Mark Green. But since neither man got more than 40
percent of the vote, a runoff election was held. Mr. Green won the
runoff (only to lose the general election), and some of Mr. Ferrer's
supporters complained that the runoff system was unfair. Other
countries use other voting systems. Many parliamentary systems use
proportional representation—an alternative to the American
winner-take-all system—in which parties are allocated seats based on
their share of the popular vote. Such an arrangement gives a voice
to smaller parties, giving their representatives a small number of
seats. But critics argue that they create unstable governments held
together by fragile coalitions. Then there are systems in which
voters rank their choices in some way. One such system of ranking
candidates, and choosing the one at the end with the largest number
of points, was championed by Jean-Charles de Borda, an 18th-century
French scientist. And why was he interested in voting systems? "He
thought the wrong people were being elected to the French Academy of
Sciences," said Donald G. Saari, a professor of economics and
mathematics at the University of California at Irvine who has
written several books about election theory. He said that the Borda
system appears to be the fairest way of voting. Many groups in the
United States now advocate a ranking system called Instant Runoff
Voting. Known by its avuncular-sounding acronym, IRV, this is a
system in which voters rank their choices. If a candidate wins a
majority of the vote on the first count, that candidate wins.
Otherwise, the losing candidate is eliminated and those votes are
accorded to those voters' second-choice candidate, and so on, until
a winner gets a majority. But changing voting systems can be even
tougher than figuring out a butterfly ballot. For one thing,
governing parties like to stick with the systems that brought them
to power. For another, many new systems sound as if they came out of
that New York State Math Regents exam, the one whose results were
discounted because it was too difficult. But it is not an academic
question. Dan King, a professor of mathematics at Sarah Lawrence
College, offered a hypothetical example to demonstrate how the
choice of election system can actually determine the outcome of the
election. Imagine nine people trying to figure out which actor was
the best James Bond: Sean Connery, Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan.
(O.K., actually Professor King's example said that the nine people
were trying to choose between candidates A, B and C, but this is not
math class.) Four of them like Connery best, followed by Moore,
followed by Brosnan. Three voters like Brosnan, followed by Moore,
followed by Connery. And two voters like Moore the best, followed by
Brosnan, followed by Connery. So who is the best Bond? In a
plurality system, Sean Connery would be the winner: he got four
votes, while Pierce Brosnan got three and Roger Moore got two. But
that's no majority. But what if a runoff election were held? Roger
Moore would be eliminated, because he got the least number of votes.
But the Moore fans liked Brosnan second best. That would leave four
voters preferring Connery to Brosnan, and five voters preferring
Brosnan to Connery. Pierce Brosnan would be the winner of the 007
runoff. And in a Borda count—giving 1 point to the least favorite,
2 points to the second and 3 points to the favorite—Roger Moore
would be the Bond of choice. "Three procedures, three different
winners," Professor King noted. In the coming weeks Mayor
Bloomberg's Charter Revision Commission will come out with proposals
for how a nonpartisan election system might work: how people will
qualify to get on the ballot, whether runoffs will be held, what the
thresholds will be. Some of those details could be as significant as
their primary goal of abolishing primaries. "You can skew the outcome of any
election," said Burt Neuborne, the legal director of the Brennan
Center for Social Justice at New York University School of Law,
"depending on how you structure the democratic system." |
