California’s complex voting and election system has recently been faced with another obstacle. The California Appellate Court in Greene v Marin County Flood Control District is currently debating whether the secret ballot ought to be mandated in certain special elections.

Special elections in California are used in exceptional situations, such as the recall of an elected official, a vacancy to be filled, or a special ballot measure that needs to be voted on before the next regular election. Special elections are largely unique to California, and they tend to involve a complicated system of inauguration, often because of other, sometimes contradictory, laws in the state.

Proposition 218, which was passed in 1996, mandates that voters must approve of all taxes and most charges on property owners in order to limit potential abuses of government revenue-raising power. 

Prop 218 took the form of an amendment to the Constitution, creating Article 13, section D of the California Constitution. A quick text excerpt: “Voter Approval for New or Increased Fees and Charges. Except for fees or charges for sewer, water, and refuse collection services, no property related fee or charge shall be imposed or increased unless and until that fee or charge is submitted and approved by a majority vote of the property owners of the property subject to the fee or charge or, at the option of the agency, by a two-thirds vote of the electorate residing in the affected area. The election shall be conducted not less than 45 days after the public hearing. An agency may adopt procedures similar to those for increases in assessments in the conduct of elections under this subdivision.”

Prop 218 also inspired the Proposition 218 Omnibus Implementation Act of 1997, which detailed the procedures for the principles outlined in the Constitution. Part of the Act specified that the ballot must be “in a form that conceals its contents once it is sealed by the person submitting the assessment ballot” and, once received by the agency, must “remain sealed until the tabulation of ballots . . . commences.” And during and after the process of counting the ballots, they become “disclosable public records . . . equally available for inspection by the proponents and the opponents of the proposed assessment.”

Notably, the Act also required that the special elections “shall not constitute an election or voting for purposes of Article II of the California Constitution or of the California Elections Code.” The California constitution requires secret voting in Article 2, section 7. The text simply says, “Voting shall be secret,” but it is under the Article 2 heading of “voting, initiative and referendum, and recall,” which does not explicitly include special elections.

This confusing theoretical situation of whether or not special election ballots ought to be secret is compounded by the facts of the case. In Greene v Marin County, voters’ names and addresses were printed on the ballots, and voters signed their ballots. Because the ballots become public record as soon as the election has ended to ensure tabulation accuracy, it seems as though there is no voter privacy at all.

This issue will (hopefully) soon be decided by the California Appellate Court. Although the Constitution does not explicitly require the votes to be secret, a secret ballot is integral to the functioning of a democracy. If the court ruled that way, it would only necessitate a more logical ballot design, so that special elections can be run like regular ones. And if the court rules the other way, the elimination of secret ballots bodes for an ominous future for the safe functioning of Californian democracy.

Though red-carpet glamor is hardly a typical subject of FairVote’s work, I’m happy to provide an exception today.  Yesterday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences shocked the cinemaphile world with its announcement that there will be 10 nominees for Best Picture in 2010, double the usual number. I’ll leave the qualitative discussion of how this alters the characteristics of the eligible movies and the entertainment value of the ceremony in other, more qualified hands; instead, I’ll focus on the process by which the nominees are chosen.

As a colleague of mine noted earlier this year, choice voting has been used to select Academy Award nominees since the 1930’s. The Academy wants the nominees to reflect the views of as many Academy members as possible so that they feel well-represented  by their choices on Oscar night. Each of the five nominees has the strong support of nearly a fifth of Academy voters, collectively making nearly every Academy voters invested in the outcome.

The importance of using choice voting with ranked ballots can be illustrated by a quick thought experiments. Suppose the Academy used a winner-take-all method for nominees, with each voter having five votes. Oscar night would quickly lose some of its entertaining diversity, with one kind of acting or one sort of movie dominating each category.

Or suppose the Academy instead used a non-transferable ballot system, with each member casting only one vote, and the top five vote-getters becoming nominees. There are at least two ways such a “single non-transferable vote” system (which in fact is the system used in Afghanistan) could easily produce skewed results.

For the purposes exercise, let us presume that 10% of the voters suffer an unfortunate head injury which compels them to vote for last year’s insipid Mike Myers vehicle The Love Guru. Considering the extent to which votes are likely to be divided among the plethora of other candidates, The Love Guru would have a good to excellent shot at becoming a nominee. Choice voting prevents this tragedy from happening; the voters in full command of their faculties will not rank Myers’s comprehensive demonstration of lame bodily function humor, allowing better films to win as preferences are allocated in later rounds.

The other possible misfire would occur in a year when one film receives an overwhelming number of votes. Suppose The Love Guru was stacked up against Titanic, or Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, both of which were tipped to take the statue well before the nominations were announced. If one of these films received – for example — 75% of the nomination votes in a plurality contest, it would be quite easy for an aesthetic tragedy to win a place in the sharply reduced vote pool (7% of the vote would ensure a place and 4% might be enough). Thus, choice voting serves as a safety, producing reasonable consensus outcomes in a massive field.

Once the nominees are chosen, however, the Academy likes surprises. The winner is determined by plurality vote. Right now, in a fractured field, the winner could have as little as just over 20% of the vote and actually have little support from nearly 80% of Academy voters. With the expansion to 10 nominees, the winner actually could have the support of barely 10% of Academy voters - about the same as it takes to get a nominee for best picture with the doubling of nominees and halving of the “victory threshold.”

Yes, the Academy enjoys those surprises, but perhaps it’s time  for it to adopt instant runoff voting for best picture. Academy voters certainly are already experienced at ranking candidates, and perhaps surprises due to the distortions of plurality voting are best for lesser categories than the best picture of the year. True, the Academy is not an institution that needs to be held to exacting democratic standards, but its example provides an excellent case study in support of the practicality and fairness of choice voting — and could do so for instant runoff voting.

NB: The harsh view of The Love Guru contained in this post is mine alone, and has nothing whatever to do with FairVote’s official position of neutrality in artistic matters.

The Delaware House of Representatives today handily passed the National Popular Vote plan by 23-12 with both Democratic and Republican legislators joining to establish elections where every vote is equal and the candidate with the most votes wins.

Of our nation’s 99 state legislative chambers, 29 have passed the NPV plan in 18 states. It is now the law in five states representing nearly a quarter of the electroal votes necessary to trigger a national popular vote.

One day after the United States celebrates its founding, Mexicans will go to the polls to elect new members to the lower house of Congress.  All 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies will be up for election on July 5, 300 chosen through the plurality system familiar to Americans, with 200 ‘top-up’ seats allocated proportionally according to the vote share earned by each party. In political science parlance, this method is known as the Mixed-Member-Proportional or MMP system. Rather uniquly, article 59 of Mexico’s constitution forbids prevents legislators from standing for reelection in consecutive contests; voters will be choosing an entirely new chamber. This is a mid-term contest, falling between the sexennial battle for the presidency, when the entire Congress – including the Senate – is up for election. In common with mid-term elections in the states, apathy is unfortunately common. This year, the electorate’s disinterest has gotten a good deal of press; a vocal ‘voto nulo’ (nul-vote) movement has sprung from the grassroots and is turning heads by asking voters to cast symbolically spoiled ballots. Logistical difficulties have cropped up as well; the recent swine-flu scare necessitated awkwardly regulated political rallies, where supporters must stand several feet apart. Somewhat unusually, the current conflict between the government and various drug cartels has been the most salient issue in the campaign. This ‘war’ has been so intense that some observers have suggested that Mexico is a ‘failed state’ unable to guarantee domestic security.

These problems have led most prognosticators to predict gains for the center-left Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) along with losses from the governing center-right Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). The socialist Partido Revolucionario Democrático (PRD) – associated with the unpopular leadership of the controversial Andrés Manuel López Obrador – is expected to lose ground as well. Though López Obrador very nearly won the presidency in 2006; his ungracious post-election behavior has alienated many voters from the PRD. The ‘voto nulo’ movement’s success may be partly due to the PRD’s fall from grace; the major alternative is now the PRI, which ruled Mexico in an increasingly heavy-handed and corrupt fashion for 71 years until voters cast the party out of the presidency and into the wilderness in 2000. Thus, the contest is between different flavors of the establishment, leading to voter disenchantment and resentment.

A final explanation for the success of ‘voto nulo’ can be derived from a quirk in the electoral system.  In most MMP systems, balloting entails two votes; one for a constituency candidate, the other for a party; constituency seats are decided by plurality rules, the top-up seats are then allocated to ensure that each party has roughly the same percentage of seats as votes. Conversely, the Mexican system allows only one vote, for a constituency candidate. These votes do double duty, based on the affiliation of a given constituency candidate, they also count as party votes. According to a study by Professors Clemente Quinones and Richard Vengroff of the University of Connecticut, this unorthodox method was implemented in the 1980s by the PRI, which hoped it would decrease sincere voting and allow the party to remain in office. However – to briefly summarize – the study concludes that most voters adapted to the system after a period of strategic voting, and largely returned to casting sincere ballots by the 2000 election (when the PRI lost power). Mexico’s democracy is still learning to walk upright as it were, the long period of PRI domination only receded 9 years ago. It seems that voters are upset less with their system of voting than with the national political culture. However, Mexico has developed into an impressively open and pluralistic polity in a short period of time; those considering the arguments of the ‘voto nulo’ movement should keep in mind that the Mexican MPP system ensures that diverse views will be represented; for those who cast valid ballots, that is.