Voting System Reform Can Solve the Spoiler Problem -- or How You Could Vote for Nader without Helping to Elect Bush

Douglas J. Amy

Ralph Nader's candidacy has ignited a fierce national debate
among those on the political left. By now the battle lines are
familiar. On the one side are those who believe Nader is the
only candidate promoting a truly progressive political agenda,
and so we should vote for him to send a message to
Washington. On the other side are those who fear Nader could
act as a "spoiler" candidate, taking away enough votes from Al
Gore in key states to give the election to George Bush. 

So should progressives vote their conscience and risk disaster,
or abandon their principles and support Gore? It's a real and
very frustrating political dilemma for many voters. 

The current debate over Nader is simply a replay of the
discussion that takes place every time a serious third-party or
independent candidate runs for president. We heard the same
arguments about John Anderson in 1980 and Ross Perot in
1992. And just as with Perot, some people have even criticized
Nader for running in the first place and placing his supporters in
such an awkward political position. 

But our anger and frustration would be better directed not at
the candidates but at the voting system that creates this
aggravating political dilemma. The problem is a product of our
continued reliance on an outmoded and unfair voting system:
plurality voting. 

We all know how plurality voting works: The candidate with
the most votes (the plurality) wins the election. If there are only
two candidates running, this system works well enough. But if
there are three or more, then plurality voting starts to misfire. 


A classic example is a race for the House of Representatives
that took place in New Mexico in 1998. The Republican
candidate got 46 percent of the vote, the Democrat got 43
percent, and a Green Party candidate received 11 percent. In
this situation, plurality voting allowed the Green candidate to
act as a spoiler, and the Republican was able to win what had
traditionally been a Democratic seat. To make matters worse,
plurality voting allowed the winner to take office without the
support of the majority of voters. Most people actually voted
against the Republican candidate -- hardly a ringing mandate
for the conservative policies he would pursue in office. 

Many Americans have come to see such problems as a
lamentable but inevitable part of elections. But that need not be
the case. There are better voting systems that don't create
these problems. Some other democracies, such as Ireland (for the presidency) and
Australia (for their lower house of parliament), use a voting system called "instant runoff voting" or
IRV. This system eliminates the spoiler problem and ensures
that the winning candidate is supported by the majority of
voters. IRV allows people to vote their conscience without
fearing that they will help elect the candidate they hate the
most. 

Here's how instant runoff voting works: When you go into the
voting booth, you are confronted with a ballot with all the
candidates' names. But instead of simply placing an "X" next to
your favorite candidate (or pulling a lever), you instead rank the
candidates. You put a "1" next to your most preferred
candidate, a "2" next to your second preference, and so on.
Let's assume there are four candidates for president: Gore,
Bush, Nader and Pat Buchanan. As a progressive, you would
rank Nader first and Gore second. When the ballots are
counted, if a candidate has a majority of the first-place votes,
he is declared the winner. But if no one has a majority of the
first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is
eliminated. The votes that had been cast for that candidate are
then redistributed to their designated second choices. A second
count is then immediately held -- an instant runoff -- to see if
any candidate now has a majority of the votes. This process of
eliminating candidates and having another instant runoff
continues until one candidate receives more than 50 percent of
the vote. 

If, for example, Gore received 40 percent of the vote in a state,
Bush got 42 percent, Nader 15 percent and Buchanan 3
percent, Buchanan would be eliminated and his supporters'
votes would be redistributed to their second choices. But there
would not be enough to give Gore or Bush a victory. So then
Nader would be eliminated, and his votes redistributed. If the
bulk of them -- say 11 percent -- went to Gore, he would have
the support of the majority and would win the state and all of
its electoral college votes. 

The advantages of IRV for third-party candidates and their
supporters are obvious. Third parties can run candidates
without fearing that they will act as spoilers. And their
supporters can vote their conscience without worrying that they
will help elect their least favored candidate. Politically speaking,
third parties could have their cake and eat it too. And
interestingly, there are no constitutional obstacles to using this
approach for presidential elections. If a particular state wanted
to, it could pass legislation mandating a change to instant runoff
voting for deciding who will win their electoral college votes. 

But as good as IRV is, it isn't even the best voting system for
those interested in third-party candidates. 

While IRV allows you to vote for such candidates, it usually
doesn't result in their election. Third-party candidates usually
just don't have enough public support to eventually garner the
majority of the vote that is needed to win under this system.
But there is another voting system -- one that can be used in
legislative elections -- that not only allows you to vote for
third-party candidates but also allows them to win most of the
time, even if they receive only 10 to 20 percent of the vote.
That system is proportional representation, or PR -- the voting
system used to elect legislators in most other Western
democracies. 

There are many kinds of proportional representation voting
systems, but they all share two basic differences from our
traditional winner-take-all, plurality voting system. First, instead
of electing legislators one at a time in small districts, PR
combines these smaller districts into larger, multi-member
districts in which five, 10 or more legislators are elected. The
second difference is that who wins office is determined by the
proportion of the vote won by each party. So if we have a
10-member district and the Democrats win 50 percent of the
vote, they will get five of the 10 seats. With 30 percent, the
Republicans will get three seats. And if the Greens and the
Libertarians each receive 10 percent of the vote, they will each
get one seat. 

If we had PR elections, third parties would finally have a good
chance of winning their fair share of representation. These
smaller parties would instantly become viable alternatives to the
two major parties. Voters would have much more choice at the
polls, and much fewer votes would be wasted. And we would
have multiparty legislatures that actually represented the true
political diversity that we find in America. 

Clearly, proportional representation is the political promised
land for third parties, and so it is not surprising that an
increasing number of them, including the Greens, have now
made PR part of their agenda for reforming the election system.

Of course, the hard part is not finding voting systems that are
better than what we have now. These superior alternatives
have been around for years and have been used successfully in
many other democracies. The difficult part is making
Americans aware of these alternatives and building an effective
movement to promote these reforms. 

As with other election reforms, like term limits and campaign
finance reform, it is likely to be an uphill political battle. But
reformers can take solace from the fact that history is on their
side. Worldwide, for the last 100 years, the trend has clearly
been away from plurality elections and toward alternatives like
PR. And more recently, nearly all the emerging democracies in
Eastern Europe, Africa and the former Soviet Union have
rejected plurality voting for some form of proportional
representation. 

Perhaps most encouraging is that there is substantial support
for alternative voting systems in Great Britain, the traditional
home of plurality elections. Recently, the mayor of London was
elected with instant runoff voting, and the new parliaments in
Wales and Scotland both were elected using proportional
representation. 

The movement for voting system reform is beginning to get off
the ground in the United States, too. Grassroots groups in
several states, including California, Washington and Illinois,
have begun to promote a change to IRV and PR voting
systems. The National League of Women Voters decided this
summer to encourage all its local chapters to study alternative
voting systems. And there is now a national organization, the
Center for Voting and Democracy in Washington, D.C.,
dedicated to educating the public about alternative voting
systems. (Information about these systems and the voting
system reform movement can be found at www.fairvote.org
and www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/prlib.htm.) 

Next to campaign finance reform, voting system reform is the
most important change we can make to our dysfunctional
election system. Without it, third-party candidates will continue
to be denied a fair chance at election, and their supporters will
continue to be faced with disturbing dilemmas every time they
enter the voting booths.

 

Douglas J. Amy teaches politics at Mount Holyoke College and is a former fellow at the Open Society Institute.  His latest book is "Behind the Ballot Box: A Citizen's Guide to Voting Systems" from Praeger Publishers.

(This article was first published in the Valley Advocate, October 12, 2000.)