This is the second episode in a two-part series about changing how we vote in the United States. In today’s episode, Talk Policy To Me reporter Elena Neale-Sacks talks with voting systems researchers Sara Wolk and Clay Shentrup about what they think the order of operations should be to get to a place where everyone can vote their conscience and votes accurately translate into who ends up in power. GSPP researcher and policy analyst Charlotte Hill will be back with her thoughts too.
To learn more about STAR voting, which Sara discusses in the episode, go to starvoting.us.
For more information on ranked-choice voting, go to fairvote.org/prcv.
And check out a brand-new initiative to bring proportional representation to the House of Representatives at fixourhouse.org.
Transcript
Amy: [00:00:11] So we’re back a week early. We normally release episodes every other week, as you may have noticed, but if you listen to last week’s episode, then you know that this week we’re bringing you a follow up.
Noah: [00:00:20] That’s right. Last week, our reporter Elena interviewed GSPP researcher Charlotte Hill about proportional representation voting and what impacts a similar system could have on democracy in the U.S..
Amy: [00:00:32] If you haven’t listened to part one yet, pause. Go back to the Talk Policy To Me page, and start with last week’s episode.
Noah: [00:00:37] If you already listen but need a quick refresher on what Elena and Charlotte discussed last week, here’s the gist. In most elections in the U.S., we vote using a single-winner plurality system. This is sometimes known as winner-take-all voting because a candidate who gets one more vote than the second place candidate wins the whole thing. So say there are three candidates in a race for a single seat–a Democrat, a Republican, and an Independent. And the vote splits 34, 33, 33. Say the Republican gets the 34%. That candidate would then win the one seat, even though 66% of voters wanted someone else.
Amy: [00:01:11] Meanwhile, in a proportional representation system, elections are typically oriented around multiple seats. So in the scenario above, if there were 100 seats instead of one and the vote share was the same for each party, Republicans would get 34 seats and Democrats and Independents would each get 33 seats.
Noah: [00:01:27] And as Charlotte argued last time, this system is way more representative of what voters actually want. And not just that, countries with proportional representation voting and multiparty systems tend to be stabler democracies than countries with voting systems like ours in the U.S.. And that’s because there’s a built-in incentive with proportional representation or PR to form coalitions and work together. Whereas with plurality voting, the incentives are the opposite.
Amy: [00:01:53] Exactly. And the reason we decided to break this into two episodes is because there are tons of ideas out there about how to implement more representative voting in the U.S., particularly through the ballots we use. And we wanted to dig a little deeper into some of those options.
Noah: [00:02:06] So today, we’ll hear from Sara Wolk, the executive director of the Equal Vote Coalition and an advocate of a method called star voting.
Amy: [00:02:14] We’ll also hear from Clay Shentrup, a voting systems researcher with a background in game theory.
Noah: [00:02:19] And Charlotte will be back with some more thoughts, too.
Amy: [00:02:21] You’re listening to Talk Policy to Me. And today, we’re talking a voting overhaul, part two.
Sara: [00:02:34] I’m Sara Wolk, and I’m the executive director of the Equal Vote Coalition, so that’s a nonpartisan, nonprofit working for equality in the vote and voting system reform specifically. Voting system reform may sound like one of the more dull causes that a person could choose and be inspired by, but after years working on a number of different things, it just became very apparent that in order to be effective on any of that, we are going to need to address this fundamental issue with democracy. We need to be able to make collective decisions. We need to be able to elect good leaders, hold them accountable. And as a voter, fundamentally, if I can’t vote my conscience and know that my vote is going to make a difference, and my vote is not going to be wasted, then how can I hope to elect good leadership?
Elena: [00:03:30] So this problem says, referencing of not being able to vote your conscience has come up again and again, especially when it comes to third party candidates in national races. We’ll come back to her in a minute. But Clay Shentrup, who researches voting methods through a game theory lens, had an interesting analogy to describe this idea.
Clay: [00:03:49] With plurality voting or first past the post, and you can only vote for one candidate. Strategically, if you think about a horse race, where you have a bunch of horses sort of neck and neck and you want to have some influence on who wins, obviously you want to have any impact the only thing you can do is either help the number two overtake the number one or help the number one avoid being overtaken. If somebody is further behind like third or fourth, the odds that your vote will do anything are extremely small. And so the obvious strategy then is just focus on the front runners. And we tend to do that. I mean, in an exit poll that was done in the year 2000, something like 90% of voters who claimed to prefer the Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader, said they also voted for somebody else, most of them for the Democrat, Al Gore. So that strategic voting behavior seems to be a very strong factor here. If people were able to vote for third party candidates, two things would happen. So first, you look at exit polls that are done like Occupy Wall Street in 2012, did this exit poll in New York City and they showed that, you know, you take the exact same voters and you give them a few different ballots, like a plurality ballot score voting, approval voting, ranked choice voting. You look at the same voters and the same candidates, and all of a sudden, Jill Stein, for instance, Green Party nominee in that year went from having like 1/27 as much support as Barack Obama to having almost half. And that doesn’t mean she wins overnight, but it means that the viability perceptions there, you know, is she even worth putting on the debate stage? Is she worth interviewing? Kind of just goes away. So I think generally, because we’re so constrained in terms of the time and the attention we have for different issues, we have a tendency to just for efficiency, write off things that seem unviable.
Elena: [00:05:29] Okay. I want to pause for a minute here and talk a bit about those different ballots Clay just mentioned. Last week’s episode focused a lot on the big picture idea of adopting systems like proportional representation to make sure the winners of an election actually reflect how people voted. But the other side of the coin is the kinds of ballots we use, how our preferences get counted in the first place. There’s a standard plurality ballot where you vote for one candidate, what we’re used to in presidential elections, there’s a ranked choice ballot, like Charlotte mentioned last time, where you rank candidates in order of your preference. But when I spoke with Sara, she had a slightly different take on ranked choice voting.
Sara: [00:06:10] So let’s say we’ve got a ten candidate election. It could take up to nine rounds to find a winner. And if my second choice gets eliminated first in the first round, and then my third choice is eliminated, and my first choice is still in the running. Great. By the time my first choice is eliminated, it might actually not be able to transfer to my second choice or my third choice because they’re gone already.
Elena: [00:06:37] Right. So it’s almost like you have to like as a voter, it’s like a strategizing more so than like necessarily what you just genuinely want and the order you want it in.
Sara: [00:06:50] Right. Yeah. Your vote won’t necessarily transfer even if you do everything right. And what we see is that most people think it’s simpler than it is. Most people will vote their conscience with ranked choice voting, but that might backfire on them. It might be that they’re told, hey, you don’t have to be strategic anymore. You don’t have to vote lesser evil anymore. Don’t worry about it. And that’s actually a false guarantee. They actually should have worried about it because the system can disenfranchize you if you don’t understand how to navigate it.
Elena: [00:07:26] Here’s an example Clay gave of a scenario in which our RCV could backfire.
Clay: [00:07:32] If you were to rank, let’s just say, the Green, then the Democrat, then the Republican, you risk this thing where what if there is a strong push from the left and the Green actually outlast the Democrat? Democrat is eliminated. Then in the next round, the Green loses to the Republican by not having enough of the center. That’s the center squeeze effect. And so now you have to think strategically, and a lot of people just intuitively do this. They would tend to, you know, they would say, well, I know my number one doesn’t have a shot anyway, so I’m going to just boost my number two up, and that will reverse the order of those two candidates, but hopefully help my lesser evil defeat my greater evil. And that’s a big issue with rigged voting methods. And there’s some you know, it’s hard to see when you look at ballots. Did the voters actually cast their sincere preferences, like we don’t know what they were really thinking. So it’s hard to say.
Elena: [00:08:17] I had a chance to talk to Charlotte again after speaking with Sara and Clay, and since she advocates for using RCV in some elections, I wanted to get her thoughts on this too.
Sara: [00:08:27] I have heard this critique levied at ranked choice voting that it could in theory result in some voters accidentally helping folks they don’t like. Ranked choice voting is used in a lot of places around the world, and that’s not something we tend to see in practice. That’s more of a if you run a bunch of mathematical simulations using your fancy computing software, you might come up with some instances where like if all of the circumstances were perfectly bad, you can see where that could happen. And so I think it’s worth taking seriously. But when I’ve looked at the data, I have not found it compelling, especially when compared to the status quo. I am a little skeptical of the argument, not because, you know, I do believe there are rare but real instances in which that could happen with ranked choice voting. But we just don’t really see it happening in in real life instances. And we see it happening so often with the status quo. So I say let’s push for a system that is a heck of a lot better than what we have now.
Elena: [00:09:43] So clearly, there are different views, even among people who generally agree that we need to radically change the way we vote in this country and do so with a focus on accurately reflecting who voters want to see elected. And really, that is the bottom line. The main takeaway I hope you get from both of these episodes. But for the sake of digging deeper, we’re going to talk about another kind of ballot, too. So far, we’ve mentioned a standard plurality ballot and a ranked choice ballot. Coming up, Sara gives a primer on STAR voting, which stands for score, then automatic runoff.
Sara: [00:10:23] STAR voting is a newer voting method and it allows you to score your candidates from zero up to five stars. So a lot like a five star rating, essentially. So my favorite gets five stars. If I have two favorites and they’re both fantastic. Lucky me. That rarely happens in politics, but I could give them both five stars or I can give one five stars and one four stars to say, “You’re really good, too.” I can give somebody one star to show that I prefer them over my worst case scenario, who would get a zero or be left blank.
Elena: [00:11:02] Okay, if this sounds a lot like ranked choice voting to you, I thought that too at first. But the main difference is that with star voting, votes are counted in a simple two-step process. First, the total scores for each candidate are counted up across all ballots that were cast. The two highest scoring candidates then advance to a runoff.
Sara: [00:11:22] And then my vote automatically goes to the finalist, who I prefer, whichever finalist I gave a higher score to, they will get my one vote. And so the finalist preferred by the most voters, preferred by a majority of voters who had a preference will win. It’s very adaptable and I think that’s one of its strengths. It’s totally compatible with any number of electoral systems, whether they’re single winner, proportional, multi winner or whether they’re, you know, partisan, nonpartisan. And also it’s highly compatible with other really important electoral reforms.
Elena: [00:12:01] Yeah, can you talk about that a bit more?
Sara: [00:12:03] Yeah, so voting reform is one piece of the puzzle for electoral reform. You know, when we talk about the equal vote, for example, voting reform, the spoiler effect and vote splitting is one inequity that’s designed right into the fabric of our system. But there’s also things like gerrymandering. There’s also voter disenfranchisement. There’s also barriers to access to voting. You know, there’s the Electoral College and then there’s election security, election integrity, election fraud and auditing. So STAR voting has a couple of things really going for it that allow it to work with any of those types of reforms and basically that all stems from the fact that you’re doing addition. Like I said in the first round, you’re adding up the stars, second round, you’re adding up the votes. So there’s no algorithm needed for that. It’s not really rocket science.
Elena: [00:13:03] After talking with Sara, Charlotte, and Clay. It seems like they each have different priorities for reaching the same end goal. In Sarah’s mind, we need to fix the ballots first.
Sara: [00:13:14] I definitely think there’s a bit of an order of operations question. So whether or not we go with a single winner or a multi winner, a proportional representation system, we need a ballot that functions. We need as voters to be able to show a more nuanced opinion, ideally show our preference order, show our level of support for the different candidates, and have the system accurately elect one winner even. You absolutely can do proportional representation first and then update the ballot and fix vote splitting second. But, historically, that isn’t what’s happened around the world. People that have gotten proportional representation in multi-party systems have often gotten there first by doing other electoral reforms that combat vote splitting.
Elena: [00:14:07] But Charlotte sees it in reverse. To her, we need to implement PR in its most popular forms first and then play with different ballots once we have the foundation in place. I think you mentioned this a bit last time too, of just like, can we focus on just getting to a significantly better system than we currently have first, and then if there’s something that’s maybe a little better than that, but that no one would go for right now, we can have that conversation after we’ve gone 80% of the way, you know?
Sara: [00:14:38] Yeah, I mean, that’s where I that’s where I tend to land. I mean, listen, if there were a system that were demonstrably better than ranked choice voting and could attract sufficient political support to get implemented, like, yes, I would want that system. I don’t care about the specific mechanics of how we elect people. I care about outcomes that better represent where the public is. But we do, you know, I’m a policy analyst, not just a kind of wonky political scientist, and when you’re doing policy analysis, one of the, you know, criteria for evaluating which policy to pursue is often political feasibility. You know, is there support for this already? Can we build the support for it? And I take that very seriously because we don’t have forever to fix our democracy or to even make sure that we have a democracy. We’re in a really dark place in the U.S. in terms of our political system, and we have to move quickly to fix things. So right now, you know, we have multiple pieces of legislation in front of Congress that have co-sponsors that call for adopting ranked choice voting, or at least allowing states and municipalities to more easily adopt it. You know, making sure that election software vendors are building ranked choice voting into how they, you know, let jurisdictions tabulate votes, all sorts of policies revolving around RCV. And we have elections that, you know, many elections in this country, including here where I live in the Bay Area, using ranked choice voting, where we see that more diverse candidates get elected, that voters are overwhelmingly satisfied with this approach to voting and that they find the ballot pretty intuitive and easy to understand. So we have all of that, and it’s I do think that data from, you know, statistical simulations can be compelling, but. Right. But it needs to. I’m not. To me, it doesn’t outweigh the real world data and opportunities that we have in front of us right now.
Elena: [00:16:47] For Clay, it’s about getting to a place where all elections prioritize representation and consensus. Whether that’s through star voting, ranked choice or something else.
Clay: [00:16:57] And so that’s the idea of like proportionality though, and just different ways to do it. But it’s less of just finding that one consensus voice. But the key there is that you still try to find overall consensus. So in other words, instead of finding like three candidates, right at this midpoint, we find one who’s here and here and here. But if you put them all on a scale you balance, then they still roughly balance in that same midpoint. So that’s not a distortion from what the electorate really believes. It’s just representing different groups of the electorate and you’re still making shades of gray. So there’s not just a left faction and a right faction at war with each other. People are able to look and say, Well, I’m not like them, but these guys are okay. These I really like. And I think that also just inherently lends itself to people seeing shades of gray in policy. Once you have an assortment of different options out there and there’s even people talking about like STAR voting, I think it’ll get us to a point now where there will be a menu of options and cities can kind of pick the one that makes the most sense for them. Do they want to be really bold and try something really out there and novel or just something really simple like approval voting? Or use something that’s more tested and vetted and used on a larger scale which ranked choice voting has more use historically. They have these choices now, and I don’t think this conversation is going away. I think where the U.S. is headed, people are increasingly seeing that this may be wonky and esoteric, but it’s an obvious salve to like an actual, you know, a problem that just getting worse if we don’t do something about it.
Amy: [00:18:28] That was reporter Elena Neale-Sacks in conversation with Sara Wolk, Clay Shentrup, and Charlotte Hill. Noah, what did you make of all those different ideas for overhauling how we vote?
Noah: [00:18:37] I think Sara, Charlotte, and Clay outlined a lot of creative and innovative policies that sound like they’d really be effective in creating a more representative democracy. What I would have loved to hear more about is how these policies would be implemented. There’s already a lot of people who find the current process of voting to be too burdensome. So if we’re asking voters to show up to the polls and have a star rating for each candidate ahead of time, how can we be sure that voters wouldn’t feel more discouraged by this new extra step? Of course, this isn’t reason to doubt the effectiveness of each policy that they discuss in increasing representation. But it’s clear there need to be a significant public education effort alongside these policies, much like in New York City when they rolled out ranked choice voting in order to get voters on board.
Amy: [00:19:22] Yeah, I agree. I think that what this made me think of is that I think in other countries where they have systems like this, people have grown up with it, right. They were taught it in school, starting from, I assume, the time they were in elementary school. And so that their first voting experience was with this type of voting. It’s going to take some rewiring to get people to understand new types of systems. So even if we don’t love the current ones, they’re what we’re used to.
Noah: [00:19:47] Yeah, And I think this all really just points to the fact that there’s huge opportunity here, especially from a public policy perspective, in figuring out ways to operationalize these policies and really engaging public policy students who are going to be the leaders of tomorrow in figuring out how these things are implemented. So we could continue to see innovations in this space.
Amy: [00:20:09] I agree. I think if students all over the country who are in public policy programs right now come out with a really well-formed thesis that they can take into organizations, into these congressional offices where they hopefully are going to be staffers and then move up the ranks, I could see a future where in the next five, ten years, you start seeing more local examples of this that hopefully ladder up to national change. So for all those who are listening, if you want to have more information specifically on STAR voting, you can go to starvoting.us. [00:20:37][28.1]
Noah: [00:20:38] And to learn more about ranked choice voting, go to fairvote.org/prcv.
Amy: [00:20:45] And to read about a brand new initiative to implement proportional representation in the U.S. House of Representatives, check out fixourhouse.org. You can find all these links in the show notes as well.
Noah: [00:20:55] That’s the show.
Amy: [00:21:04] Talk Policy To Me is a co-production of UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans.
Noah: [00:21:10] Our executive producers are Bora Lee Reed and Sarah Swanbeck.
Amy: [00:21:14] Elena Neale-Sacks produced and engineered this episode.
Noah: [00:21:17] The music you heard today is by Blue Dot Sessions and Pat Messiti Miller.
Amy: [00:21:21] I’m Amy Benziger.
Noah: [00:21:22] And I’m Noah Cole.
Amy: [00:21:23] Catch you next time.
