Alternate Voting Systems

In Indian history the number of seats won by a party have never matched the percentage of total votes they received. This disparity is not just limited to the past election in India but is found in nearly every plurality democracy in the world. One of the most prominent examples of this in recent history is the 2016 US Election, in which Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the election. This begs the question as to whether there are other alternatives to our current election system.

First Past the Post 

(The Current System)

The simple First-Past the Post System (FTTP) or ‘winner takes all’ works such that whoever receives the most votes wins the election. Most countries implement this system at a constituency level, in which the winner of the constituency receives a seat in Parliament. Granted, this system provides better representation than an even more dated General Ticket election in which the government is homogeneously comprised of the winning party. The advantage of this system of plurality voting (The candidate with the most votes wins as opposed to a majority which has a minimum requisite of 50% for victory) is that it decides a clear decisive winner and is very easy to understand and implement.

Flaws

1. Disproportionate Representation

A major issue with this system is that all votes do not count the same. What I mean by this is that, voters in swing states have a far greater effect on the outcome of the election than voters in a state with clear majority. The number of seats almost never correspond to the number of votes received and it is generally observed that the winning party gains from this. The problem with this is that in a democracy that depends on representation in parliament, the disparity in seats won can change a country’s policy significantly.

For example, in the 2019 general elections in India BJP won by a landslide. However, the ratio of votes received between BJP and Congress was around 2:1 (229,076,879:119,495,214), while the ratio of seats won was almost 6:1 (303:52). Congress similarly benefitted the same way when they were in power. It is also noticed that this phenomenon of amplification is more noticed in larger parties while under representation is found in smaller ones. This holds true for all plurality systems as shown by the graph below detailing the shares of electoral votes to the popular vote in the United States for the past 200 years.

2. Majority reversal 

In some cases, a phenomenon of majority reversal is observed. The 2016 elections in the US are a great example of this. The overall majority had voted for the Democratic Party with Hillary Clinton amassing 48% of the votes to Donald Trump’s 46%, however the democratic party received only 227 seats as opposed to the 304 seats received by the Republicans. Some other examples of these phenomena include Canada in 2019, Ghana in 2012, New Zealand in 1978 and in 1981 and the UK in 1951.

This occurrence indicates that narrowly winning seats and losing large in other constituencies is a more efficient strategy to optimise vote distribution than winning large in any constituency, leading to other political banes such as gerrymandering.

3. Duverger’s Law

Duverger’s Law states that in single ballot plurality elections, with constituencies represented by a single member (such as that of FTTP) will tend to favour a two-party system. To be fair, this is a relatively weak criticism for Indian democracy, considering that we have 37 parties in parliament (even though most of the seats are shared at the top and these parties form alliances with bigger ones). This may be attributed to the huge cultural differences and massive population in India. However, in most countries with plurality elections it is clear that two parties command most of the votes (which is the case in India as well albeit to a lesser extent). The mechanisms and reasons for this has been well documented and summarised in papers written by far more knowledgeable individuals than me and I suggest you watch CGP Grey’s politics in the Animal Kingdom Series for better understanding of this. But to sum it up the main reason is a cycle of people not wanting to waste their votes on third parties (see strategic voting) and third parties not being incentivised to use resources and compete which then leads to people taking them less seriously and so on.

4. Strategic Voting 

Voters in an FTTP system are incentivised to vote for one of two parties. A vote for a third party is essentially considered a wasted vote as it not only will not lead to them coming close to winning in a dominant 2 party system, leading to a ‘wasted vote’ but it also take a vote away from a candidate of the 2 main parties that the voter supports. Imagine that there are 3 parties A, B and C in a constituency of 100 people. A poll shows that 49 people are going to vote for A, 48 for B and 3 for C. The three voters for C strongly dislike A and are indifferent to B. To them it is clear that C has no chance of winning, so they change their vote and decide to vote for B instead. This way B will win the election but they are not actually content with the result and are just happy that A lost. Voters will end up voting based on who they think others will vote for, not based on who they want to elect, leading to less satisfaction with the government and making it extremely difficult for a third party to become a serious candidate. 

Strategic voting is significantly more common in FTTP systems due to the Spoiler Effect, essentially making it a necessary evil in plurality voting. The spoiler effect occurs in all systems to some extent; however, plurality enables a candidate to win with under half the vote magnifying its repercussions. The spoiler effect occurs when multiple candidates share the same ideologies. Since people can only vote for a single candidate, they are forced to choose between them if they support those ideologies, leading to a splitting of the vote. Imagine that 60% of the country preferred dogs and 40% preferred cats. Candidate A and B both support dogs and receive 25% and 35% of the votes each. Candidate C who is in favour of cats will still have 40% of the votes and since plurality systems by definition do not require a majority (over 50%), Candidate C will win although most people supported the other candidates instead.

Ranked Voting

There are a couple of methods of ranked voting

Instant runoff voting is widely considered to be the most feasible alternative to plurality voting considering that it would require the least restructuring to the government. Australia and New Zealand are some examples of countries that hold their main elections in this fashion while several other countries use it for smaller polls such as India (Election of the President), Canada (primaries) and even the United States has recently implemented the system in some local elections and regional primaries. 

It essentially works by ranking candidates based on voter preference. In this system, two scenarios may occur

a.     A candidate receives >=50% of the first place votes and they are elected.

b.     No candidate receives 50% of the first place votes. Then the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and the votes they received are distributed amongst other candidates based on their second choice.

This process continues till a candidate finally receives a majority of the votes.

Advantages Over Plurality Voting

• Reduces strategic voting and spoiler effect.

• Provides a more accurate representation of votes and therefore higher voter satisfaction.

• Facilitates the introduction of third party candidates better than plurality voting.

• Promotes majority support as at least 50% of the voters need to have approved a candidate

• Discourages negative campaigning

Flaws

You may have heard that Instant Runoff Voting completely eliminates the Spoiler Effect and strategic voting. This is true to some extent, but when the candidates roughly form a line on the political compass (something that voters tend to perceive when classifying candidates as left or right), a phenomenon known as centre squeeze occurs.  

Imagine that there are only two candidates A and B and 100 voters. A is to the extreme end of a political spectrum, while B is in the centre. A gets 38 votes and B receives 62.

Now consider a new candidate C enters the election. C is at the opposite end of the spectrum as A. The new vote share is as follows.

A – 38, B – 29, C – 33. (Note that all the votes for C are taken from B) 

Now B is eliminated as they have the lowest share of the votes. B is roughly in the middle of the other two candidates so it is observed that 13 of B’s 29 votes go to A and 16 go to C. Tallying these new transferred votes, the new vote share becomes A – 51 and C – 49.  

If C never ran, then B would have defeated green and won the elections as they received 62 votes at first. Some voters that chose C as their first option may decide to vote for B instead as they prefer B over A. 

This form of strategic voting once again makes it difficult to introduce new parties into a countries political landscape and eventually trends to two parties as well albeit less often and slower than in plurality voting. 

Apart from this implementing instant runoff voting will require voter education and greater transparency in the election process to function. Instant runoff voting should not be seen as the infallible saviour to democracy but it is certainly, in theory at least, superior to plurality voting.

A great example of how this system better represents the popular vote is shown in the following graphic of the 2016 US elections.

Some other lesser known forms of ranked choice voting are Borda Count (adding up the rank numbers and the lowest total wins like in golf) used in Slovenia and Concordet voting which pits the candidates against each other in a sort of tournament and the majority wins (this always picks the theoretically ‘best’ candidate but sometimes fails to find a winner which means it requires a backup system to fall back on, therefore it is not used anywhere in the world.)

Kenneth Arrow’s infamous impossibility theorem discredits all the aforementioned systems by considering their flaws. The following two systems while flawed as well were endorsed by the mathematician himself and are widely considered the best alternatives in theory.

Approval Voting

In approval voting the candidates simply select every candidate they approve and the winner is the candidate approved by the most candidates.

Immunity to the Spoiler Effect

(The following screenshots are from a java program I created to simulate approval voting which will be linked below) 

Consider a political spectrum (as shown in grey) where two candidates 1 and 2 (represented by squares) lie. All voters (dots) that lie within the circles surrounding the candidates approve said candidate.

Now a new Candidate 3 enters the election. Note that they have a similar policy to candidate 1.

Candidate 1 still receives the same number of votes and wins the elections despite some of voters voting for Candidate 3 as well. More voters approve of 3 than 2, therefore Candidate 3 will receive more seats in parliament than 2 and the total representation will be accurate and completely immune to the spoiler effect and centre squeeze. 

This means that multiple parties and policies can thrive in an approval voting chosen democracy, which leads to an even more diverse and proportionate representation of the voters views.

(In case you were wondering why some dots remain black and do not vote for any of these candidates, it is because the locations were randomised in the simulation. They represent the people that did not vote or voted for other parties which I did not show as it become far too cluttered)

Flaws

One key flaw with this system is that similar to plurality voting a majority (>50% of the vote) is not needed to win the election. However, this only becomes a problem if the political views are dispersed and vastly different with little intersection between candidates essentially making it similar to plurality voting. 

Another flaw of this system is that the votes of voters who approve of multiple major candidates are essentially worthless, therefore they should strategically disapprove of their least favourite candidate. This form of strategic voting is solved to some extent by the next method.

Score Voting

In this method, voters score each candidate based on their approval of them. It may be thought of as a refined form of approval voting with some elements of ranked choice voting. The scoring system may be on any scale but for the sake of simplicity (and to save time in coding hell) the following simulation scores voters on a scale of 1 to 3. 

In this simulation three circles are drawn around each candidate (squares). All the voters (dots) within the outermost circle are worth 1 point, the middle circle 2 points and innermost circle 1 point. These points are added up and the candidate with the highest total tally wins.

Flaws 

Score voting shows the same flaws as approval voting except it reduces strategic voting as voters may select all candidates and score them based on their preference, allowing them to vote for multiple candidates they approve but still express the degree of their approval. It is important to understand that strategic voting is still not eliminated as voters can strategically assign scores to candidates.  

Another important flaw of all the aforementioned systems except for plurality voting is that they require public education. Voter education and illiteracy in developing countries are still barriers that we need to overcome in order to even consider the implementation of these systems as feasible.

CONCLUSION

Plurality voting was the best democratic system that humans came up with in Athens in the 6th Century, but a lot of time has passed since then. All systems are plagued with flaws and we have yet to come up with a truly flawless solution to fix democracy but there are several alternatives to plurality voting that are a step in that direction. 

Ranked voting, specifically Instant Runoff Voting is the most feasible and probable replacement for the current first past the post system, considering it has real world data to back it up. In theory approval voting and score voting outperform other systems in truly representing the choice of the electorate.

*Java IDE required

REFERENCES

Matthews, Dylan. “Would a Different Style of Voting Have Changed the 2016 Election? We Tested 5 Alternatives. - Vox.” Vox, Vox, 25 Nov. 2016, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/25/13733322/instant-runoff-ranked-voting-2016.

Primer. Simulating Alternate Voting Systems. YouTube, 2 Nov. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU.

Case, Nickey. “To Build a Better Ballot.” It’s Nicky Case!, https://ncase.me/ballot/.

Economou, Nick. “The New Senate Looms as a Serious Problem for a Damaged Malcolm Turnbull.” The Conversation, https://facebook.com/ConversationEDU, 7 Aug. 2016, https://theconversation.com/the-new-senate-looms-as-a-serious-problem-for-a-damaged-malcolm-turnbull-61019.

Verma, Dhruv. "Reflecting People’s Will: Evaluating elections with computer aided simulations" Open Political Science, vol. 4, no. 1, 2021, pp. 228-237. https://doi.org/10.1515/openps-2021-0021