Plurality Voting Analysis

There is a lot of news regarding the state of voting in America. And I regret to say that it is not looking good. The 2012 election saw a 3% decrease in voter turnout, with only 58.2% of eligible voters turning up at the polls. Likewise, public approval of the government has plummeted, with Congressional approval hitting a new low of 9% in 2013. In the face of such political cynicism, it’s clear some kind of a solution is needed. The majority of democratic governments, including the United States of America use the plurality voting system for their elections. Recently however, instant runoff voting has been gaining attention as a superior alternative to plurality voting. Nations such as Australia, Ireland, Papua New Guinea and Malta have already …show more content…
In plurality voting, votes for lost candidates are eliminated, having no further effect on the election results. As a result, voters with preferences outside of the two main parties are faced with a dilemma: vote sincerely for the favorite candidate and lose all say in the election, risking the victory of a reviled candidate, or vote tactically for a more likely, tolerable candidate from a main party. Under instant runoff voting however, because votes for lost candidates can be redistributed to another one, voters are not forced to choose between supporting their favorite candidate and affecting effect election outcomes. This increase in voter freedom is widely agreed upon to be the greatest strength of instant runoff voting. Even critics are forced to admit that “perhaps the clearest justification for adopting an instant runoff voting system is its ability to eliminate the spoiler problem” (Langan, 1574). Alongside increasing voter freedom, instant runoff voting also guarantees that the election winner will have the backing of the majority by virtue of its design. Even more impressively, instant runoff voting also promises to reduce negative campaigning, the reasoning being that politicians will not be able to place negative ads without alienating the supporters of the attacked candidate and losing potential second choice votes. …show more content…
Scholars test the efficacy of voting systems through the voting system criteria, a list of mathematically desirable characteristics of voting systems. Although Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem demonstrates that no voting system can be perfect, it is significant that instant runoff voting fails nearly a third of the 19 criteria, six to be specific. Of particular note is the failure to pass the monotonicity criterion and the participation criterion. Mathematicians define a voting system as being non-monotonic if the “allocation of votes can be modified… in favor of the winner, with the effect that the winner then loses the election” (Quas, 97). In effect, this means that in an instant runoff voting election, it is possible for a voter to hurt a candidate’s chances by voting for him. In the same vein, instant runoff’s failure of the participation criterion means that in some cases, the best way to help one’s preferred candidate would be to not participate in the election at all. These are serious problems. By altering the effect of the vote, instant runoff voting would disregard voter intentions, subverting their interests instead of helping to express them. What is surprising however is the lack of attention these fundamental problems have received in public discussions. Prominent voting reform organizations like Electoral Reform Society and Fair Vote Society assert that