Elections with more choices and less divisiveness

The way in which candidates are elected to office affects not only who wins but also who runs and how they go about it. With few exceptions, the United States holds simple plurality elections, that is, elections in which voters must vote for a single candidate and the candidate that receives the most votes is elected. From this fact alone it follows that there are typically at most two viable candidates for U.S. elections. The reason is that introduction of a third candidate invariably reduces the share of votes received by whichever of the other two he most resembles, thereby increasing the odds that the remaining candidate wins. In other words, introducing a third candidate that you like better into a two-man race often causes both him and whichever of the initial two that you preferred to lose. This is called the spoiler effect and is a well known issue with plurality voting. As a consequence, both political parties and voters are highly motivated to ensure that there are only two serious contenders for any given election.

Two-candidate plurality elections in turn lead to polarization. Partly, this results from a real lack of options. Whatever a voter's top priority, at best one of the two major parties is likely to champion it. Partly, it is the effect of negative campaigning. It is generally easier to convince a majority of voters that the opposing candidate is horrible than it is to run on any positive message, and in a two-man race the opponent's loss is always a candidate's gain. These issues are exacerbated by the voters themselves. The most reliable voters in both primary and general elections tend to be those with the most extreme views. In trying to appeal to these voters the candidates become more extreme themselves, thereby justifying their opponent's claims that they are unconscionable. Further, over time voters tend to align their views with those of their chosen parties, meaning that a vote for the opposition is really contrary to most of their beliefs. The result is that political parties and voters with a strong party affiliation will often back their candidate even if they lie egregiously, make ridiculous promises, or violate the law since the only alternative is to help elect a candidate with diametrically opposed views.

The obvious issues with simple plurality elections have led many alternatives to be proposed, but these alternatives frequently suffer from problems of their own. For interested readers we discuss some of the more popular options on another page, but here we focus on transfer elections¹, which we believe to be the best way to increase choice and reduce extremism when electing a single individual.

It is helpful to consider an example. Imagine a transfer election between three candidates, a liberal who receives 40% of the vote, a conservative who receives 39% of the vote, and a moderate who receives 21% of the vote. The moderate might appear to be at a disadvantage, but in fact he is likely to win. If no one transfers votes, the candidate with the lowest vote total, the moderate, will be eliminated, causing the liberal to win. The moderate could cause the conservative to win instead by transferring votes to him but has little reason to do so. On the other hand, the conservative has a strong incentive to transfer his votes to the moderate since his voters would strongly prefer the moderate to the liberal. The moderate should win even if he announces that his voters strongly prefer the conservative candidate and that he will transfer his votes to the conservative if necessary. In this case, the liberal has a strong incentive to transfer his votes to the moderate since his voters would strongly prefer the moderate to the conservative. This example illustrates how transfer elections strongly favor consensus candidates.

People sometimes object that the winner of a transfer election need not be the first choice of many voters. This is true, but we do not regard it as a disadvantage. In the example just described, the moderate wins because a majority of voters prefer him to any other single candidate. In the theory of electoral systems he is what's called a Condorcet winner. Assuming that the candidates accurately represent their constituencies and do not make strategic errors, transfer voting always elects the Condorcet winner. This is a miraculous outcome, widely regarded as the best possible.

A related objection is that the winner of a transfer election need not have very enthusiastic support, but again we do not regard that as a disadvantage. In the example above election of either the conservative or the liberal would result in roughly 40% of the population being very unhappy and roughly 40% being very happy. Election of the moderate, on the other hand, results in roughly 20% of the population being very happy and everyone else being happier than they would be if their least preferred candidate had been elected. We feel that good government obviously does not consist of making one sizable minority ecstatic and another miserable but of choosing leaders and policies that everyone can live with. Transfer elections help to achieve that.

A final objection is that candidates might fail to achieve the best outcome for voters due to selfishness, stubbornness, or incompetence. While this can certainly happen, the vote totals will be known and articles analyzing the choices made by each candidate will no doubt be numerous, so it should be relatively easy for voters to decide for themselves whether they approve of their candidate's use of vote transfers. If a candidate or party fails to represent their voters well then the voters can punish them by voting for someone else in the next election. A candidate whose voters are averse to any kind of compromise might refuse to transfer votes, but this greatly reduces his ability to affect the outcome of the election, thereby punishing such extremism.

In summary, we believe that transfer voting has the potential to significantly improve both government and the tenor of our national debate, and we advocate for its adoption. Switching to transfer voting would be easy. The ballots would look the same, but there would be no reason not to have multiple serious candidates on them. This would not cause a problem since there would be no strategy to voting. Picking your favorite candidate would always be the right choice: doing so would either help him to win or help empower him to choose the winner. With more candidates to choose from, each would need to have a positive agenda to attract voters. Yet despite there being more candidates, the winner would typically require the support of more than half of the electorate, either directly or through transfers, so he would be strongly incentivized to be a unifying force. We believe that more unifying forces are exactly what the country needs.

1 Transfer elections are more commonly known as asset voting, but we consider that name to be confusing and so will generally avoid it here.