How to Hold an Election? And How not to Hold an Election?

I recently saw a paper advocating reforming the Supreme Court of the U.S. by shifting to a panel system drawing judges from the courts of appeals. See Daniel Epps & Ganesh Sitaraman, How to Save the Supreme Court and How not to, Nov. 21, 2018 <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3288958>. What struck me as very odd about the paper is that such a system is basically what English/British/UK had for centuries under the House of Lords. Under Tony Blair, the House of Lords was closed and a UK Supreme Court was opened--largely following the U.S. model of a small fixed set of judges sitting atop the appellate system. There was no discussion in this paper noting that the model proposed by its authors was out there and recently abandoned -- or any explanation of why the British abandoned it. 

I think the same is largely true when we see close up the downside of our own first-past-the-post winner-take-all single-district model for elections, and romanticise alternative forms of democracy that we don't live under or even see close up. 

I live in Ireland. Just across the Irish sea, the British (like the U.S.) have first-past-the-post (plurality) winner-take-all single-member district elections for seats in Parliament. The Irish have something entirely different. In Ireland, each district (in the last election) had 5 members--selected by using proportional representation and the alternative transferable vote. Each system has an upside and each has a downside. The British are just a statutory reform away from abandoning their system if they want to do so. There is no move to do so. And the Irish have had opportunities to move toward the British model--but they have rejected those opportunities. Which model is better is a difficult judgment call. 

Here, I'll note some of the downsides of the Irish model--which I have seen as a result of living here. I don't say it is a bad model, but only some of the negatives might be missed by some of you. 

1. Did you think the ballot design in Bush v Gore and the 2018 Florida elections were complex...too complex for the voter? In first-past-the-post elections, the voter picks a single candidate for each election. But in proportional representation with the automatic transferable vote, the voter has to rank order all the candidates. That makes ballot design more complex. The Irish can do that because they tend to only have one set of offices on the ballot paper--the national parliament, or local councils. But in the U.S., we have multiple federal, state, and municipal executive and legislative positions (and sometimes judges) on the ballot. Our ballots would have to grow in size and complexity, or we would have to hold more elections. If we go down the latter route, voter turn out may be a problem, particularly where national races are not on the ballot. 

2. Voting, by each individual, will be slower. Just maybe that will deter voters?

3. Counting votes will be much slower. If you have N-candidatesopen-positions-to-be-filled on the ballot paper, then you may have as many as N-1 counts of the ballots--in connection with the automatic transferable vote.

4. If your elections don't cross state lines, then in House races, you'll have fractional voting issues in each state. (This was akin to the problem the Israelis sought to address in the Bader-Ofer Amendment 1973.) The last candidate to win in one state may win on 1st or 2nd preferences, but the last candidate to win in another state may win his/her seat on 14th or 15th preferences--and in California on 53rd preferences. That will look unfair to some, and arguably, it is unfair. Moreover, voters don't spend a lot of thought or time ranking candidates far down their preference list, but such votes can be determinative in close races. 

5. If you respect state lines in congressional races, you'll still have winner take all in states with one House member. We have 7 states with 1 House member. If you respect state lines--you'll still have seat allocation problems and dilemmas among states. Even within states, concerns about equal voting power means identifying whether you want an equal number of people in each district, an equal number of citizens, an equal number of eligible voters, or an equal number of actual registered voters. It also opens the question of why we rely on a decennial census. With population shifts, the last election on a ten year-old census is somewhat out of date.

6. Most importantly, the alternative transferable vote is not transparent and imposes an element of randomness in selecting winners. For example, when the first candidate to prevail with the most first preferences is taken out of the pool, that candidate is likely to have many overvotes that flow into the second ballot count. In other words, some votes select the first winner, and some votes don't--these latter votes are overvotes. Which are which? In Ireland, the overvotes are selected at random from the votes that chose the first winner. And this process of random vote separation after each ballot count happens at each of the counts down the ballot paper. This process of random selection (sorting or selecting the overvotes from the votes) is not transparent. By contrast, plurality single-member winner-take-all has simplicity and the advantage of using the voter's first or lead preferences. 

7. Lastly proportional representation leads to fissiparous division of parties into small parties and small factions. Whether that is a bug or feature depends on your point of view. I think it is a bug. Where many small factions build the national coalition, then bargaining, mistake, fraud, etc. will shape the majority coalition. All these things--even the legal ones--reduce the power of the voter vis-a-vis the government. 

Seth

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Seth Barrett Tillman, How to Hold an Election? And How not to Hold an Election?, New Reform Club (Nov. 27, 2018, 4:30 AM) <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2018/11/how-to-hold-election-and-how-not-to.html>

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