US Election Day’s unsung races

Beyond several “off-year” and special elections with or without predictive significance for major future races, there were several ballot measures or elections today involving STV/IRV, including:

• One on a new IRV implementation (at time of writing, it looks good);
• One on a new STV implementation (at time of writing, it doesn’t look good;
• One on whether to keep IRV;
• One advisory vote on whether to keep IRV;
• One first-time use of IRV;
• Three uses of IRV for the second or more times;
• And two uses of STV in the same town, continuing an almost 70-year run with the system.

Over the last decade, we’ve accumulated quite a set of referenda on these systems. That set does not include legislative votes (probably several) or statewide referenda (one). It would be interesting to identify patterns in support for these measures.

Preference voting for El Sal?

The other day I had the opportunity to attend a talk by Juan Carlos Sanchez from the Foundation for the Study and Application of Law (FESPAD), a civil society organization that seeks to reform El Salvador’s electoral system.

He opened by arguing, quite bluntly, that El Salvador has “one of the worst electoral systems in Latin America.” To demonstrate this, he pointed to a number of specific facets of the system, such as the lack of absentee voting, the politicization of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), the laissez-faire approach to parties and campaign regulation, and feckless mechanisms for enforcing the rules of the game.

What struck me most about Mr. Sanchez’s talk was what he did not address: the actual processes by which voter preferences are translated into political representation.

El Salvador utilizes a system of closed-list proportional representation (CLPR), a system known for encouraging strong, platform-oriented, but sometimes also deeply ideological and polarized parties, not unlike those found in El Salvador. Briefly, a closed list allows the party leadership to select candidates with little or no input from the electorate, while proportionality provides opportunities for parties to garner substantial representation without necessarily having to reach across the political aisle or even into the center aisle in order to acquire district-wide majorities/pluralities. While it must be recognized that the two main parties – Arena and FMLN - have made considerable strides in moderating themselves since the days of the civil war, they nevertheless remain deeply divided, so much so that many question whether they will uniformly recognize the legitimacy of a loss in the upcoming presidential election.

Of course, in a country where civil war wounds have not yet fully healed, and where substantial socioeconomic disparities remain a potent political reality, it would be silly to attribute full blame for the country’s polarized politics to its electoral institutions. Yet, it seems reasonable to begin to question the degree to which this system may be exacerbating, or at least failing to ameliorate, the nature and dynamics of existing political divisions.

To be sure, PR has its virtues and it has been proposed as a means to alleviate the effects of deeply divided societies in a number of contexts. However, such proposals are almost always tied to the caveat of parliamentarianism and the assumption of several relevant political parties - two additional factors that would presumably contribute a more conciliatory executive, legislative coalition building and, by extension, a more consociational political dynamic overall.

This model, however, does not reflect the political realities of El Salvador, where holdover Cold War manichaeism and deep class divisions have encouraged the emergence of two dominant parties, which are currently involved in a bitter, winner-take-all struggle for the powerful presidency.*

With this background in mind, I asked Mr. Sanchez whether anyone has ever recommended a move away from CLPR, towards a system that provides incentives for existing parties to moderate the selection of their candidates, and for individual candidates to soften their rhetoric, such as the Alternative Vote (AV) or the Single Transferable Vote (STV) (the latter would seem a more likely option for a country already accustomed to proportionality and multi-member districts). The virtue of these systems is that they allow voters to select not only their first choice, but their second, third, or however many candidates decide to run. If their first choice does not receive enough votes to win a seat, their second choice candidate then receives their vote. For this reason, AV and STV systems are both referred to as forms of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). This can create strong incentives for parties and candidates to attract votes outside their traditional base by moderating their platforms, campaigns, and rhetoric, as they begin to recognize the value of being voters’ “next-best choice.” Given that upwards of 14 percent of the electorate remains undecided going into tomorrow’s presidential election, it seems plausible that there is a substantial underrepresented “center,” whose voice could serve as a force of moderation if amplified through one of these preferential systems.  

To Mr. Sanchez’s knowledge, despite the near-universal recognition of the need for a less polarized political dynamic, no one has made such a recommendation. In fact, he confessed that he - ostensibly one of the foremost domestic experts on reforming the Salvadoran electoral system – was unaware of any electoral alternatives for diminishing polarization.

This response surprised me, and I was thus wondering if anyone out there on the “www” with knowledge of El Salvador or electoral systems has any insight with respect to this issue, especially since our computer time at the hotel is rationed, and opportunities for even basic research are extremely limited. Has anyone proposed a preferential model for El Salvador? Might it help temper the country’s polarized politics? Is it even a plausible option? To what degree are current power holders’ interests tied to existing procedures? Are there potential unintended consequences that one should consider? Might a simple shift from CLPR to open-list PR offer a less drastic means of achieving greater moderation, or might this have the opposite effect? Perhaps what is really needed is a focus on reforming the executive branch vis-a-vis other organs of the state, whether this means a move toward parliamentarianism or simply a curtailment of executive authority.

So many questions. With any hope, the conduct of the parties and their supporters during and after tomorrow’s election will make them all seem a little less relevant.

*Although the president of El Salvador is selected through a two-round system, which in other contexts has been credited for the success of more moderate candidates (according to the same logic of the aforementioned IRV systems). However, in tomorrow’s election, because none of the smaller parties have put forth candidates, it is understood that there will be no opportunity for a second round of voting.

How the Iowa caucuses mirror preferential voting

Now that Putin has stolen an election and the Venezuelans will keep democracy, TDP can return to more important topics.

The Iowa caucuses are a peculiar institution. Seen globally, primary elections are anomalous enough. Yet Iowa’s delegates to the parties’ nominating conventions are chosen by people walking around a room and revealing their preferences to everyone else. Two features of the Iowa caucuses strikingly mirror the logic of preferential voting systems: iterative preference flows and strategic coordination among rivals.

My old friend at FairVote wrote this overview of how the caucuses work. In a nutshell, candidates must achieve threshold levels of support to win delegates. “Support” or “votes” are the number of people standing in a part of the room that represents a given candidate.

When candidates fail to reach the threshold, deal making and cajoling begins, and things get complicated. In 2004, Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards agreed that if either of them failed to reach threshold in any precinct, their supporters would line up with the other…

In other words, rival candidates bargain for second choice support. When one is eliminated, voters walk across the room, casting “votes” for successive preferences.

Equally interesting is that, depending on the size of the precinct, the threshold to win delegates is about 15-20%. That means the caucuses use a rough form of quota-based proportional representation in which each candidate winning delegates (i.e. “seats”) is analogous to an effective party.

Institutions, Australia and the Democrats in ‘08

Last weekend Labor trounced John Howard’s conservative government Down Under, and the result continues to reverberate. Even Howard lost his own district (they’re called divisions in Oz). As E.J. Dionne notes in the Washington Post:

For the first time in the country’s history, wrote Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald, a government was tossed out in unambiguously strong economic times.

Americans who care about Australia’s election are divining lessons for the Democratic Party, namely, how to smash the GOP in 2008.

Lesson one: be a Democrat. For Dionne, Labor’s Kevin Rudd reached out to unions and the middle class, constituencies that felt the squeeze of 11 years’ conservative rule. Iraq no doubt played a role. Howard had been in lock-step with Bush there.

Lesson two: galvanize Progressives. Rudd supplemented his old-left flank with a “generational” set of new-left positions: Internet access, education and, above all, the environment.

Writing for Brookings, Justin Vaisse sees both lessons as given features of a completing cycle. Worse yet for conservatives, there was long-term electoral suicide in Bush’s failure to ram immigrant “amnesty” through Congress last summer. “Pour le Parti républicain, les défis s’accumulent.”

Lesson three: take election reform seriously. Rudd campaigned on environmentalism. Greens like environmentalism. Greens accounted for 8% of the vote. Because Australia uses instant runoff voting (IRV) to elect the House, those votes transferred to Rudd’s Labor party.

Without the environment, Green Party and IRV, the Man of Steel still would be running Australia. In her blog at the Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel spells it out:

In Australia, IRV was introduced in 1918, and has historically benefited parties on both the left and the right. Last Saturday, it helped the Australian Labor Party – but not before the Australian Greens were able to run a strong campaign and collect 8 percent of the parliamentary vote, and perhaps push debate further on issues like climate change and the Iraq War than Labor wanted to go. In the initial tabulation Labor won only 44 percent of the vote, but with IRV most of the Green votes ended up being awarded to Labor. The party had worked hard to be the second choice of Green voters, and designated former Midnight Oil lead Singer Peter Garrett – “a-rock-star-environmentalist-turned-politico” – as their likely environment minister. In the end, Labor ended up with 54 percent of the two-party tally.

I would add two other institutional factors to the mix: compulsory voting and a rational election day. Australians vote on the weekend, and they have to pay fines to avoid the polls. Turnout is regularly over 90%.

IRV has worked to Australian conservatives’ advantage in the past. Though my sympathies are evident, the point is not to rig results à la Putin. If a partisan cycle is completing, it would be nice to see our leaders expand democracy as we enter the next. Lonely issue dimensions cry out for it.