Another View: Current voting process lacks Election Day nuance
If you’re a basketball fan, you are probably tracking the NCAA basketball tournaments. Or if you’re from certain parts of the world, you might be pumped for Eurovision, a song contest between countries that’s a feast of absurdity and camp (and terrible music).
If you care about either, then you’re also familiar with how they produce the winner. What you might not know is that those methods are widely studied, which practically makes you a voting expert.
The best college basketball teams are selected and seeded using a system that includes multiple stages of sorting and voting by a committee. The tournament itself is a variant of the sequential voting method that whittles down the pool after a series of paired matchups, with a caveat that “voting” for or against a team in this situation means that a team wins or loses a game.
The elimination stage of the FIFA World Cup is another example of a sequential bracket, except that tournament also starts with the round robin stage where wins earn points. This is an example of Copeland’s method.
As for Eurovision, a team of judges as well as the viewers from each country rank what they consider the best 10 songs and assign them points from one to 12 (skipping nine and 11). This is positional voting and can be found in many contests such as college football’s Heisman Trophy and MLB’s choice of Most Valuable Player. NASCAR, tennis and many other sports use it, too.
If sports or Eurovision hasn’t made you into an authority on voting, then TV has. Shows like “The Great British Baking Show” or “The Bachelor” use successive elimination of contestants; this is precisely instant runoff, or ranked choice, voting. Many shows use a tailor-made combination of voting methods to maximize the drama and attract viewers (“Survivor,” “American Idol,” “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and so on).
If you’re still skeptical, consider the times you and your friends tried to decide what restaurant to eat at or which movie to see. You might have mentioned a few options you were happy with. In doing so, you participated in approval voting where a voter is asked to mark all the options they regard favorably. Or maybe you rated a product on Amazon or an apartment on Airbnb. If so, you expressed the intensity of your preference through range voting.
The common feature among these voting systems is that they increase competitiveness, gather input from an array of sources and ultimately declare the winner that most people would agree is the right one. Admittedly, many TV voting mechanisms are meant to heighten tension, but if all the contestants on “America’s Got Talent” performed and the judges just declared one of them the winner, you’d feel like the process was too hasty. Similarly, you wouldn’t feel like your opinion was taken seriously if you could only rate a coffee machine you bought on Amazon as “good” or “bad.” And you’d be outraged if a restaurant told you that they’re out of the dish you wanted but you don’t get to place an order for a different one.
So why aren’t you outraged when you walk into the voting booth? Your ballot is asking you to do precisely that one, simple thing — fill in the bubble next to one name — without letting you provide a more nuanced input. This is a plurality, or first-past-the-post, election method that takes in so little information that it often misrepresents the will of the voters.
Change is possible. Eurovision has been tweaking its voting for years, giving greater power to votes cast by viewers. The Oscars changed its voting method in 2009 to better capture the diversity of the nominated films. The NBA and MLB recently reformed the way the All-Star Game starters are voted on.
Countries and legislatures around the world have done this as well. Australia, parts of Canada, New Zealand and Scotland have all understood the perils of plurality and chose to abandon it. We must do the same and move to a better system — ranked choice voting, for example. Otherwise, we will continue to be dissatisfied with our politics, lament the lack of options and feel like our democracy has left us behind.
Ismar Volić is a professor of mathematics at Wellesley College and the director of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy. This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.