Building a Better Table (/Voting System)

In my last post, I explained why trying to make a third party work in the current American electoral system is like trying to make a functional table that stands on one spindly leg -- it's not improbable, it's effectively futile.

In this post, I provide a catalogue of the current contenders for best Vastly Superior Table Design.

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Under Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV), aka Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV), aka Alternative Voting (AV), instead of picking a candidate, you pick a little list of your favorites. You keep going until you don't know who these people are or you don't care. If your first-choice candidate gets the fewest first-place votes, they get magically lopped off your list, and everybody else moves up a spot. Now your #2 choice is your #1 choice. Repeat. But, thanks to technology™, we can do this all at once now -- we take everybody's ballots, and we tally up the first-choice votes, we eliminate a candidate, and we check to see who the new first-choice "loser" is. Eventually there are two people left (or somebody gets >50% of the vote), and the winner of that standoff wins. This person tends to be the candidate most people are broadly okay with.

Why does this work better? You don't have to lie. You can vote for whatever nutjob or savior you want, and when they lose, your vote isn't wasted -- it still counts. That's why RCV, unlike FPTP, is a "transferable-vote" system.

Is it perfect? No.

• It'd be tough to implement on the current generation of voting machines, so we'd need new ones (though we'll need some eventually anyway, so what the heck).
• You can't really do regional tallies, because you have to have everybody's votes in before you start the runoff. Otherwise, relatively small differences in votes can cause snowball effects.
• Ties are pretty common early on while there are still a lot of candidates -- you have to eliminate somebody every round, and when all the randos are "tied" at close to zero, it can be kind of a headache to sort through (especially since we already know that none of them is likely to win). Although, using a % cutoff in the first round can quickly sort the wheat from the chaff. See e.g. this awesome visualization of the recent Minneapolis mayoral contest!
• It's hard to see what's happening from the outside -- there are ballots, then Math occurs, and then it spits out a winner. Though as the link above demonstrates, it's pretty digestible after the fact.

BUT. Can it sustain third parties? Can it offer people real choice?

YES! Well, in the long run there will still tend to be two dominant parties, but which ones they are may change, the other parties can genuinely compete for top billing, and nobody has to hold their nose at the ballot box EVER AGAIN.

Oh, also: if the GOP Primary were RCV, Trump would not be the nominee. But hey, NBD...

Is this some hippy-dippy political science pipe dream?

NO. There is an organization called FairVote.org that is making huge strides. A number of American cities already use it, there are were several (successful!) ballot initiatives LAST NOVEMBER to use it at the state level to elect legislators and governors, and Australia has already been using it for a while now. We only haven't heard about it because we have our heads up our asses trying really hard to make a super tall table with crappy parts.

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Under Range Voting, aka Score Voting, you say how much you like each candidate. It's Yelp, it's Amazon, it's Olympic gymnastics. That's literally it, that's the whole thing. We could use zero to five "stars," or a scale of one to ten, it doesn't really matter. This means it's not "first-past-the-post" either -- you don't win once you reach a large enough number of votes, you win by pleasing enough people.

Can this sustain third parties? Obviously. If everybody in the country agrees the "top two" candidates are not actually that great, they lose. It's the ultimate level playing field. Because you've used Yelp and Amazon, you get how this works. Sometime the big name brands make a crappy product, some scrappy mid-tier contender puts together a winner, and voila.

But ALSO because you've used Yelp & Amazon, you also know the slight pitfall here. People with agendas can really influence the vote -- all those crappy one-star reviews by the idiots who didn't pay attention to what they're ordering, or worse, sponsor competing products? Their votes still get averaged in. RCV avoids this problem because you can't spike the ball on people you hate (or even mildly dislike), you can only rank them lower.

Does that mean the system is broken? No. It's still better than just asking "meh, what's popular?" It's just that on its worst day, it ends up performing similarly to what we have now.

Moreover, unlike RCV, it'd be a snap to implement on current voting machines; you CAN do regional tallies; ties don't matter unless they're near the top; and it's really obvious what's happening. You can easily sort through ballots by hand if you want, and just take the averages.

So, pluses and minuses relative to RCV. But still better than our current system pretty much any day of the week. Is *this* a political science pipe dream? Well, kind of. There are very, very smart people who would take this over RCV -- see rangevoting.org -- but not really a committed ground game at the moment. Still, spread the word, and we'll see what people think.


One footnote: how do we deal with people you don't have an opinion on? Leave it blank. Only take the average of actual scores for a candidate. Wait, wouldn't that mean some random UFO enthusiast with 1000 fans could just come in at the end and win?!? Yeah, you'd probably have to restrict the final vote to like the top five or ten candidates. But right up until election day, leave 'em in -- as soon as the UFO guy randomly wins a poll, everybody will be like "who's that? OH." And, if the people decide he's crazy, he will never harass the polls again.

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Under Approval Voting, you say "I do/do not like this person" for each candidate. It's basically just Range voting, but with a scale of zero or one, instead of one to ten. It's the Rotten Tomatoes to Range Voting's IMDB. (Alternatively, you can think of it as: you can vote for as many people as you want, and the person with the most votes by all voters wins.)

That means you can't express as much information about your preferences, but it's also less sensitive to extreme opinions. If you're like me, and you hate to pretend things are black and white, this makes you very mad, but if you worry a lot about the system getting hijacked -- if, for example, it turned out one political faction tended to vote ten for their candidate and one for everybody else, while another used the full scale -- then Approval is a little less risky.

Even easier to implement than Range; still levels the playing field tremendously; means races will be closer, and voters won't get to say as much about their preferences. But a solid choice, and again, still vastly superior to the current system.

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There you have it, folks. If you're truly a Gary Johnson or Jill Stein fan, or think further outside the box; or if you hate Hillary and Donald, whether or not you can pick one; or if you just think we can maybe stop pretending the whole US is two perfectly, fundamentally opposed groups of people for one goddamn minute so we can think straight and accomplish things, then get on board the screw-this-table train and get involved.


Probably the shortest path to this is signing up to volunteer with FairVote, but Range is great too; in any case share, discuss, do what your heart tells you. That's the whole point!

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PS - if you want the ULTIMATE POWER MEGAZORD METHOD that has the fewest concessions to bad math, and don't mind if it's a little complicated, say hello to your friend Condorcet Voting! This is actually a criterion rather than a method per se, but there are two most common versions, I think: one that's like RCV but asks you to rate both your top and bottom candidates, and one that requires the voter to rate each head-to-head combination of candidates running. You can see why these are... less likely to catch on, despite being pretty bomb-proof mathematically. (Probably don't muddy the waters by lobbying for this right now, thanks.)

PPS - ...Did I mention with RCV primaries, Trump wouldn't be the nominee, to the relief of most Republicans and everyone else?

(Also, did I mention there was a candidate trying to get into the Dem debates last fall who had FairVote's system on his platform [cf. footnote]? Did I call this jazz coming? Not that I'm bitter or anything... Oh Lessig. <3)

American 3rd parties don't fail because of cynicism. They fail *because math.*

A pole is not a table.

You want to build the tallest, most beautiful house of cards in the world. But all you have to build on is a short, squat table that's falling apart. You decide you won't stand for this any longer. You want to go big.

You effortlessly pluck off the four barely-attached legs of your table, stack them on top of one another end-to-end, and place the tabletop on the highest leg, gloriously towering in the air.

For a moment, you have a higher surface on which to build a tall, beautiful house of cards. And then, quite obviously... you don't. It all comes crashing down, and once again you have a crappy pseudo-table piled on your kitchen floor.

Why didn't this work? It was taller, it was made from the same raw materials, and it had the same basic idea -- put a tabletop on some legs so it's elevated. Shoulda been fine!

Clearly, it didn't work because it's not stable. Gravity pulled the thing down, and it inevitably fell back to its original position (or a crappy version of it, anyway).

A pole is not a table, for any reasonable definition of either. They are Different Things. This is not a mere problem of engineering -- no combination of nails, screws, etc., can take four (spindly) legs and a tabletop and make a pole-table that will stand taller than the original product for any functional length of time. All you can do, if you believe yours is the only table-wood available, is refurbish the current mess so it doesn't break so easily.

Building a pole that is taller and better is not improbable. It is not a matter of *convincing* your unimaginative, table-raised house-of-cards buddies that it is superior. It is effectively impossible. It will not work.

If you want a better, taller table, you need to build one.

"See? We just needed to eliminate the Superdelegates. It's fixed!"
(photo from Hubush)

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This is why we can't have nice things third parties right now. We're working with a shoddy old table, and we're pretending we can improve it by just rearranging it.

For federal elections in the United States, we have a first-past-the-post (FPTP), winner-take-all, non-transferable voting system. In this system, you only get to vote for one person for each position; if you vote for your favorite and they lose, you don't get to vote again; and the person with the most votes wins. (That is, the first to gain a plurality -- hence, first-past-the-post.) In this system, there is no prize for second place, and there is equally no prize for third, fourth, or fifth place. Everyone casts their vote at once, so everybody has to vote bearing in mind what they believe everybody else will do. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but I am being *very specific* about what we have, because it's far from the only way we could do things. (Psst -- there is a craft and hardware store down the street that sells wood for tables. We will pay it a visit in a moment.)

In the classic example, if there are three candidates, Alice, Bob, and Chuck, and 60% of people think both Alice and Bob are far better than Chuck, but fail to agree on which is the "most" better, we get Chuck. (This is literally what happened in the Republican Primary.) Most of the time voters understand this, and eventually have to form an agreement between Alice and Bob to get the best chance of beating Chuck. This means voters, in order to avoid electing somebody a majority do not want, have to essentially "lie" about their first choice. But the more candidates there are, the more likely it is things will go very sideways, because coordinating mass action in that competitive an environment is really hard. A majority of Republican primary voters preferred every other candidate to Trump, but didn't get their act together in time to boot him out. Now we find ourselves here.

Why does this usually boil down to the lesser of *two* evils? Simple -- as the GOP Primary proved, this situation is very unstable. Every vote is "stolen" from some other candidate, i.e. that voter's second-choice candidate. The more votes a (long-shot) candidate gets, then unless they steal votes equally from every other candidate, they're hurting one competitor and helping another -- and moreover, for most voters, the candidate getting most screwed is the (viable) one with the most similar views to their own!

This is called the "spoiler" effect, or more recently, the "Nader" effect. So, two political parties inevitably emerge and jockey to win by 51-49, or thereabouts, and third parties aren't really sustainable. As soon as there is a third party that's really, really good, it will immediately murder both itself and its closest ideological competitor in the election (thus ensuring the catastrophic short-term failure of its policy goals), and then next time around, maybe become the new "second" top-tier party. We will once again be left with two "evils" to choose from -- they may be slightly rearranged, but there will be two of them. That is all that can ever happen.

As our pole-table would tell us, gravity is a b**ch.

Now let's just take a trip down to the hardware store and see what other kinds of tables there are.

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Very briefly, there are perhaps three top contenders for Vastly Superior Table Design, all of which would absolutely crush the crappy status quo. They are:

• Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV). (Also sometimes called Alternative Voting, as in the linked video, or Instant Runoff, as in the FairVote link on the GOP primary.) List candidates in order of preference. If your top choice receives the fewest #1 votes, they're eliminated, and your second choice becomes your new first choice. "New" votes are tallied; repeat until somebody wins.
• Range Voting. Rate candidates on a scale of 1-10, highest average score wins. ("Yelp/IMDB-style")
• Approval Voting. Thumbs up or down for each candidate, most-approved wins. ("Rotten Tomatoes-style")

See how easy that was? See how obviously better they all are, because you don't have to "lie" about your top choice to keep your vote from being wasted?!? Oy.

And they're not just pipe dreams, either. RCV is furthest along: it's already used for elections in many American cities, is on the ballot *this November* to be used for some state elections, and has been used in Australia... since 1918.

(For more information, go to FairVote.org RIGHT NOW. Or just browse the Wikipedia page.)

Let's just pick a table and build it. There are trade-offs for each, but we can't lose by switching from the pile of splinters we have now.

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In my next post, I'll provide a little more gory detail for the interested. If you only read this one and leave saying, "It's not only useless, but BAD, to vote third-party in federal races until we change how we vote, and that could *realistically* occur in the near future if I take action!" then I have accomplished my goal. If you want to be the cool kid who already has a position staked out on which Vastly Superior Table we should switch to, so you can tell your kids you were a hipster voter, then by all means stay tuned.

PS -- thanks to my awesome science friends Tory, Erin, and Jess for putting me up to this post. It's been a long time coming, but I wouldn't have gotten around to it if not for them!

PPS -- exceptions:

• This doesn't necessarily apply in local, and some state, elections.
• Voting 3p at the federal level in a non-swing state might be fine, but just remember that you're relying on the strategic voting of others: if everybody who wanted to vote like you scratched the itch, you'd all screw each other over.
• If you are absolutely, positively against everything either major party stands for, I get where you're coming from. But you are still reducing your "electoral" voice by not picking. Either way, you actually stand to benefit the MOST by advocating for electoral reforms, because you would plausibly get real representation for the first time. Make some noise!

Wonderful Swedes, Workable Science

If y'all haven't already discovered The Weeds, Vox's policy podcast, OMG you don't know what you're missing. It's like the antidote to the vitriol and despair of American politics: detail-oriented discussion of nuts-and-bolts policy on the level of people who actually do that work. While Trump and Clinton and Sanders exchange body blows, the business of governing quietly carries on in Federal, state, and municipal offices around the country, and it's reassuring to remember that and learn what the cutting-edge ideas are in how best to advance that business.

In their May 27, 2016 episode, they discuss a shiny new paper using the near-omniscience of Swedish administrative data to estimate the effects of psychological trauma during pregnancy on the mental health of the child when they reach adulthood. It's cool. But in the most recent episode from June 3 (middle show segment), they note that the paper in question has been called out for failing to acknowledge its intellectual forebears, possibly in an effort to appear more novel than it actually is. Matt Yglesias and Sarah Kliff then capably recap some of the key questions in the replicability crisis that's kept the scientific community up nights lately. And that means that for a hot minute this became a science policy podcast, which of course got me all heebly-jeebly.

They do a great job of explaining, to a policy audience probably not as obsessed with this crisis as sciency types have been, how incentives to publish ever more novel and controversial findings may have rendered suspect a considerable chunk of research in the last few decades. I'm super glad for that, and am totally stealing Sarah's "hot take machine for the academy" line. However, one important thing they don't touch on is the good reasons the system came to look like this in the first place.

What we fear when we talk about the value of original research is not replication; it's duplication. Not so much in the sense of fraud or plagiarism, though those are certainly undesirable, but rather in the sense of research on a treadmill, wherein a failure to learn the history of one's field leads to wasted time and energy reinventing the wheel. I get the sense that this is one area where scholarly work is genuinely better than most opinion journalism, even the data-driven variety: if you usually have to cite 100 other papers to publish an article, there will typically not be a gigantic surplus of articles on a subject (and yet even despite that, it feels like that sometimes), and you will probably not miss giant chunks of important information, all of which leads to efficiency and centralization in the field.

As an exercise in contrast, consider this article from the right-wing blog Zero Hedge. It's a retort to a WaPo "fact check" of a collage of charts ZH posted (you follow that?). While obviously more low-brow in tone and aim, this is pretty similar to the kinds of substantive exchanges you see in academia all the time. The difference is these articles were not, of course, subject to peer review; not carefully scrutinized for evidence of bias in presentation (though that is in part what the debate is about); not held to exacting disciplinary standards for analytical methods (though both maintain they do, at least for the standards within their own spheres of influence); and thus, able to be published within days of each other. I do give more credence to the fact-checking article, and I don't mean to draw false equivalence -- only to point out that when there isn't sufficient emphasis on drawing from a base of common knowledge, you can always throw charts at each other and most readers will just believe whichever one sounds the best to them. Thousands of such feuds erupt all over the internet all the time, and most of them ultimately produce nothing but heat, and a sense of tribal superiority. The emphasis in academia that you can't just go make stuff up without looking at what everybody else in your field has done tends to minimize the flash-in-the-pan aspects of these debates, so even though they take longer, they do tend to resolve in one direction or another -- at least for a while.

In the Vox example, it's true that Matt only saw the article because of the new publication and its presentation on NBER. However, that didn't have to be the case: if NBER runs a feature on seminal papers from the past alongside the freshest work, for instance, it accomplishes much the same thing in terms of disseminating useful knowledge, without present-day authors becoming incentivized to angle for a moment in the spotlight, prior literature notwithstanding. The website would, in a sense, better resemble the sort of didactic structure of the academy: know the oldies & goodies as well as the new hot stuff in somewhat equal measure, so we're all working from the same base of knowledge and can speak a common tongue.

So originality and lit review, which are significant factors in the novelty-controversy maelstrom, are still definitely worth maintaining even as we figure out how to best incentivize replication, data-sharing, open-access publishing, all that sort of stuff; and professional organizations & science journalists can help in advancing the cause too, perhaps by adopting some of the healthier norms of the academy while rejecting the less healthy ones. I'm 1000% in favor of staid replication, but it's good to remember what else we want to maintain at the same time.

TL;DR: science's historical emphasis on original work requires people to understand the prior literature, so we don't lose knowledge as fast as we generate it. It just also has the side effect of overvaluing novelty. We should fix that, but we shouldn't conflate ignorance or plagiarism with hot-takeism; they're two separate problems and require different solutions!



Also, note: another post about how to be a skeptical reader of science journalism in the right ways, not the wrong ways. Stay tuned!