Voting Choice: Illusion and Disillusion

Voting Choice: Illusion and Disillusion

By Joel Levin

Choice is at the center of our politics and of our economy. We think, in the economy, that consumers should have the right to choose, that buyers and sellers should also have that ability, that our selection or election or choosing ought to be our own, knowledgeable and uncoerced, and that it is a central role of the market to make that happen. If we are proper liberal or neo-liberal theorists, we think the market will likely or even certainly make that happen. That is, we value the market because of choice, not choice because of the market. If the market fails us—perhaps because it is controlled by monopolies, restricts entry, limits participation or is too inscrutable or replete with pitfalls, is populated by fraudsters and gangsters, or otherwise fails to allow us to make a free and knowledgeable choice—then we should ignore it. That is, our goal is to achieve the freedom that comes with choice through a healthy market, not to achieve a market that increases our freedom. When the two diverge, the market and freedom, so much worse for the market.

The same is true for our politics. We value choice, and in that, we have a democracy, or something akin to a democracy; voters ought to be able to decide among candidates, parties, referenda, and other political matters that come their way. We would like the politics, like the marketplace, to be uncoerced and open, easy to navigate without undue expertise or knowledge and serve transparent choice. If the politics fails—for reasons of corruption or coercion or non-transparency—so much worse for politics, not so much worse for choice. Politics, like the market, holds that it is the freedom of choice that counts, not some patriotic allegiance to our quasi-democratic process, let alone one whose only justification is tradition.

From time to time, the market fails. It fails badly. Monopolies, dangerous working conditions, junk securities, and junkyard drugs: all require regulation by the market simply to allow people to make free and informed choices. Similarly, with matters the market seems unable to handle building bridges and highways and airports, revitalizing cities, providing for primary and higher education, curbing pollution, and giving protection from extreme poverty for under-nourished children and the destitute elderly, to name just a few things. We might quibble about the reach and scope of any of these, but from a larger perspective, they appear to be reasonable patches on the failures of the market. What, then, about our politics?

I want to address the structural problem, one inherent in the voting system, one independent of individual political intentions. That is, it is separate and apart from the intentional sabotaging of the democratic system, the process long underway since Elbridge Gerry more than 200 years ago gave his name to gerrymandering, a system whereby voting districts are manipulated to protect certain officials or parties in an unrepresentative way. For example, to look at a state notorious for gerrymandering, in the 2018 Wisconsin elections, the Republican popular vote for the Statehouse was 44.7% but the number of seats they were awarded was 64%. That means essentially that Republicans received almost 50% more legislative seats than the voters wanted them to have. In other times, in other places, historians, neutral election observers, and international courts would call this election fraud. In any case, this practice seems to be in disregard of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of Baker v. Carr, the one-man, one-vote decision, essentially now disfavored in Rucho v. Common Cause, where the Court decided political gerrymandering—the process of deliberately disenfranchising those out of power—is not a problem of Constitutional dimensions. It apparently is not a tactic that should be reformed.

Election denying—ignoring the outcomes of reasonably fair elections absent any evidence—is also a problem, but also not a structural one. It is alarming, though. There is a series of direct attacks on voting by election deniers now running for office, officials that may well (but certainly not always) be in office themselves because of gerrymandering. Theirs is nothing but an authoritarian attack on democracy and about all that can be said of it is that it is profoundly immoral, undemocratic, unprincipled, illegal, and wrong.

What happens, then, if there is a systematic failure in voting? Is there some easy cure for that, or should we simply work to make sure it stays as pure as we imagine it always has been, thinking that the quasi-democratic system we have, like the somewhat capitalist market system we have, is so good that it needs only to be kept pure, not to be improved? Not quite. If we step back, we can see that politics have always had problems in getting us choices. However, in recent times, for reasons that are hardly a secret—extremism, Trumpism, cultism, white nationalism, and the social networks that have grown up online that direct us to our extreme isolated and siloed views—structural weakness has exposed what was an irritating weakness and made it a glaring problem.

This blog is concerned with what might be called ‘local’ voting issues. That is, can the relevant voters in the relevant community make informed and knowledgeable voting decisions based on having the appropriate choices to select from? This is, in fact, only part of the larger or ‘global’ voting issue. For illustration purposes only—and these illustrations are of a problem outside the scope of our discussion here—we might see two kinds of reasons that local voting is hardly the entire space concerning the problem of choice. Consider the fact that we pay taxes in jurisdictions where we have no vote. Those who live in one city and work in another (a suburb) may be assessed an income tax in the city they work but have no vote. Moreover, when they buy lunch there or travel elsewhere to a hotel or take a plane, they may be subject to sales tax, hotel tax, and airport taxes, all in jurisdictions in which, again, they have no vote. How is it fair to have taxation without representation, at least as that bit of the holy writ that constitutes the American legend?

On a larger scale, what America does with its economy, its military, its environmental policy, its fiscal and economic policy, its immigration policy, and just about every other policy affects people everywhere in the world. Yet those others, everywhere in the world, have neither a voice nor a vote in any decision. Today, Pakistan is 1/3 underwater although it contributes a minuscule part to global warming. Why should the 220,000 million residents of Pakistan have no vote in environmental policy in any of the places where that policy matters, namely in the United States, Brazil, Japan, China, or India? Choice is of little value if it is restricted to the unimportant things. Not only, for example, did Russians not get a vote on whether to invade Ukraine, neither did Ukrainians, nor the Europeans who are affected by the mass migration into its borders, energy depletion in its homes, and the security threat to its people. Moreover, neither did the African and Asian countries that face starvation because the unilateral decision by Russia to invade Ukraine cut those countries from their main sources of grain. Again, the most important choices are not the relevant populations to make. Any bragging about democracy ought to be tempered with a great deal of modesty in the face of this larger problem.

However, all that aside—and that is a great deal to put aside—it is worth mentioning how far America is from the kind of democracy enjoyed by almost every other western democracy. We might list just a few of the of the structural anti-democratic notions. The electoral college, when it works, is a winner-take-all system (with a few minor exceptions), with the entirety of each state’s votes going to a single candidate. This allows minority candidates to become President, including, recently, Donald Trump. Put simply, if one believes in democracy, then one should believe that in each of the five elections where the majority vote winner was denied office, including Al Gore by more than 500,000 votes in 2000 and Hillary Clinton by more than 5,000,000 votes in 2016, the result of putting the vote loser in office was the wrong one. That said, the system has a fundamental disparagement of choice regardless. If a voter lives in a state that is, by clear majority, contrary to his or her views, say a Democrat in Utah or a Republican in Massachusetts, then that individual has no real Presidential vote. His or her choice cannot be added to that of other Americans who vote as they do. They count for nothing. A voter who lives in a state that could swing for either party, say Maine or Nevada, has a greater voice than one who lives in a state reliably for one party or another. 

But that is hardly the only problem with the electoral college system. Each state is made up of its joint congressional delegation, the number of members of the House of Representatives and the number of Senators. This means each state gets two additional votes, regardless of whether they are Wyoming, with a population of 580,000 or California with a population 39,600,000. In fact, even in Wyoming, each Congressperson represents 580,00 people, while in California each Congressperson represents 747,000.

Perhaps all of this could be put aside as a reasonable weighing in favor of smaller communities to prevent self-consumed urban areas from occupying all the voting space. That would be a difficult argument to make—in fact, it is almost never made—but one could see it as an attempt to balance the interests of urban and suburban individuals concentrated on small accumulations of land, wanting to maximize their own freedom and increase their own prosperity, while ignoring, perhaps imprudently, the interests of a smaller population of rural and small town individuals who grow crops, extract energy, herd animals, manage waterways, and otherwise have interests worth protecting. For that argument to get off the ground, and as I said, no one seems to want it off the ground, one would have to show that those small town and rural interests vote in a way that protects the kind of choice worthy of outsized protection: perhaps interests including agriculture, energy, environmental, land and water use, parks, and forests, and otherwise. In America today, given actual voting patterns, that argument would be virtually impossible to make. Consider Brexit as an illustration. Rural and small town voters least likely to encounter immigrants were those who are most adamant about keeping immigrants, who mainly settled in London and the large cities, out of England. That is, their actual voting interests were untethered from their actual votes.

In any case, there is a very different kind of problem worth considering, at least briefly. That is, what choice is up for grabs? Initially, we notice it is almost always bilateral choice: there are usually only two possible things to select from. If we move to the end of the American election cycle, i.e., the general election, almost every race is between a Democrat and a Republican. Given the fact that the Democrats and Republicans in the United States are increasingly so different, isn’t it simply fair to say we are always given a choice?

After all, choices do not need to be perfect. Often, they are problematic either way. We may have to make difficult choices about family budgets, employment, social and romantic relationships, and a host of other things where neither of the candidates vying for our consideration look particularly attractive. Choices do not need to be between two attractive things: do we want the dentist to give a shot of lidocaine or use the drill alone? But they can be: do we want baklava or chocolate cake for dessert? So, are our choices in voting, as elsewhere, sometimes good, sometimes not, but reasonable given all the limitations in the social world, in everyday life, and in our own existence?

I want to suggest that question avoids the core problem here. Suppose we have three choices in a primary election. Assume it is a Republican primary. Suppose candidate No. 1 is an extreme conservative, Trump-supporting, election-denying, Q-Anon-following, MAGA-enthusiast. Any diehard Trump supporter is likely to qualify. Suppose further that there is a second contender, No. 2, who we might think of as a traditional Republican, perhaps one in the tradition of Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, and today of Rep. Adam Kinzinger or former Gov. Nikki Haley. Former Sen. Jeff Flake might also fit the description. Finally, there is a third contender, No. 3, who is more like an old-fashioned moderate Republican in the tradition of what was once called a Rockefeller Republican and embraced for some time people like William Scranton, Earl Warren, Jacob Javits, and John McCain. Perhaps Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland would fit that bill today. Former Sen. Jeff Flake might also be a good fit here. (I don’t want to get too hung up on where any of these people fall on any location on a spectrum, or at least how they are viewed. Instead, my placements are suggestive of where they may be positioned. The reader is welcome to insert their own candidates).

Let us also assume this is a closed primary where only Republicans can vote. This is, of course, already a limitation on choice, as one, to exercise full choice about elections, ought to be able to vote where they want. This is true even when we allow that a strategic vote is equally as valid a choice as a sincere vote. Choice is choice. However, we will not address that restriction here. It might seem in the three way race, the choice is beneficially bestowed, reasonably applicable to all Republican voters. Is it?

Let us assume further that 45% of the voters find it difficult to choose between candidate No. 1 (the extreme conservative) and candidate No. 2 (the traditional conservative). Moreover, another 45% of the voters find it difficult to choose between candidate No. 2, the traditional Republican, and the moderate Republican, No. 3. However, people often vote, as they say, with their heart and not with their head, that is, with emotion rather than reason, for reasons of sympathy rather than strategy. Given that, let us assume that about 36% of the 45% on each side vote respectively for No. 1 or No. 3. The other 9% of each vote for the traditional Republican, candidate No. 2. Moreover, we only started with 45% and 45%, leaving 10% of the voters unaccounted for. These Republican voters were always traditional Republicans and vote for candidate No. 2. What is the result? The math is simple: about 36% of the votes go to No. 1 and about another 36% go to No. 3, while about 28% (9% of the more right-leaning and 9% of the more left-leaning, combined with the 10% of those in the middle) go to the traditional Republican, No. 2. Exact ties are extraordinarily rare in large elections (given the law of large numbers, they are almost statistically impossible), so the nominee will either be the extreme or the moderate Republican. A fair election? Not quite.

Remember our premise. There was only a slight, an ever-so-slight, preference by the left-leaning and the right-leaning for the more extreme candidate on their side. It is perhaps an emotional tie to where they think they would like the world to become. However, along with that very slight choice, would have come a profound misgiving, a recoil, perhaps even a hatred for the candidate who is at the other end of this spectrum. Those choosing between No. 1 and No. 2 would hate No. 3 and those choosing between No. 2 and No. 3 would hate No. 1. However, all the Republicans would be comfortable with No. 2. That is, a modern Sen. Charles Percy or Mayor John Lindsay would be treated as a pariah by right-leaning Republicans, while a present Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green or Lauren Boebert would be considered an intolerable choice by the moderate-leaning side of the party. If one were making the typical utilitarian calculus that one sees as typical in trying to maximize choice—that is, trying to get to the greatest happiness for the greatest number, the largest achievement of preferences for the largest group, the highest degree of pleasure or social welfare for the most people—this system, one of making about 36% of the primary voters only slightly less happy than a traditional candidate and making 64% of those voters extremely unhappy, with the alternative (the traditional candidate, No. 2) making 100% of the people either extremely happy or very happy, is a clear failure.

This would appear to be an appalling result during a primary race. In fact, it often is. But is it a big problem? We might not think so for two reasons. First, given the fact that many voters are simply excluded from the polls for reasons having nothing to do with attempting to maximize choice—but having everything to do with restricting groups that may be deemed, in general, hostile to whomever is controlling the legislature, whether racial minorities, women, indigenous peoples, those convicted of a crime, or any traditionally disenfranchised group—obviously the problem of having limited choices is better than the problem of no choice. Second, though, so many of the primaries are really a two-way race that one might argue that it is hardly the most difficult problem facing voting today. That might be true, but it has been a problem, it continues to be one, and anytime there is a limitation on choice, we should be concerned.

The real problem—the one that endangers our democracy—is how it affects the general election. Those elections generally present two choices, although third-party candidates who could potentially act as spoilers—arguably Ross Perot in 1992 or Ralph Nader in 2000 or Jill Stein 2016—rarely appear in either national or yet more rarely in state elections. That is, there are fewer spoilers for elections for senator or governor than president. In the two way general elections, voters are given a choice that is often unsatisfactory in some sense. We choose based on a variety of criteria almost impossible to be imagined as embodied in a single individual. That is, we may want someone with imagination, integrity, experience, and courage as personal qualities, perhaps for some the addition of a strong family loyalty and military or religious or sectional ties, as well as agreement on a wide variety of positions that we may hold from in such diverse areas as foreign policy, the environment, civil rights, economic policy, taxation, immigration, and a slew of other issues. No one candidate fits it all. Compromise is unavoidable. But there is the problem of the primary we just discussed that only gets worse at the general election.

The entire cumbersome, byzantine process we use to choose our candidates rewards first-to-the-gate to the exclusion of overall choice. Thus, we often come out of the primary elections with candidates who may be ones that the majority dislikes. We are then offered a choice between the two party nominees as the only names on the ballot. The entire ideology of this first-to-the-gate winner discourages third parties, as third parties are often made up of those individuals who take positions that ameliorate differences across the spectrum. This is not just a plea for moderation in candidates or choosing the vanilla-middle Goldilocks “just right.”

The Congressional race in the New York 10th District provides an example. Most of the candidates were progressive, left-leaning liberals. One candidate, Dan Goldman, was a moderate, and won the election in a crowded field of more than a dozen candidates with 26% of the vote. The district was more progressive and left leaning than Goldman but, as a moderate who largely occupied a solo position among prominent candidates, he was able to win without necessarily being in alignment with most of his voters or their attitudes. In fact, in any race with many candidates, a particular candidate alone in their own lane, holding a position at odds with the others, may well be able to secure sufficient votes to win the plurality, which is generally all that is required.

One solution, a solution itself often complex to navigate, is some variety of ranked choice voting. The variations of this are large, but in general, if no candidate wins by a majority of first place votes, then second or third (or potentially more distant) choice votes would count. Alaska is using this system now, as does Maine and several cities from New York to Minneapolis to Santa Fe to Portland.

As an idea, it is hardly new. The insight for it came from such diverse areas as modern econometrics, game theory, philosophical logic, and the study of collective choice. It was brought forward by some of the more brilliant thinkers of the last 75 years, including Nobel prize winners in economics such as Kenneth Arrow and Amartya Sen, the innovative game theorist Robin Farquharson, and the revered philosopher of mathematics and logician Michael Dummett (or at least revered by those of us who were his students). They explored in detail how the normal electoral system of first-to-the-gate, only two main candidates, plurality rather majority choice, first but not second choices, and a number of other problems bring the wrong people to the wrong office for the wrong reasons, despite what seems like democratic voting.

This is not a new problem, and to some extent, it is one that might seem to sort itself out periodically when voters make paradigm shifts in the way they vote. This occurred on the liberal side with Franklin Roosevelt and Clement Attlee, on the conservative side with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The paradigm shift though was less a new creation than a move that still included a large overlap of shared principles and common policies. It is more like two circles in a Venn diagram whose overlap comprises a much greater area than those parts that are unique to each circle. For example, Roosevelt was a patrician capitalist, sharing the values of his free market political opponents rather than the Socialism of others on the left. He also shared moving slowly on improving racial inequality with his southern Democratic allies. Clement Attlee was Deputy Prime Minister and worked closely with Winston Churchill throughout World War II. Ronald Reagan’s most important ally through most of his Presidency was the liberal Democratic Speaker of the House, Chip O’Neill. Even Margaret Thatcher, something of a political outlier both to Tory and Labor alike, was a supporter of the EU (then the EEC) and advocating strong defense, and had great enmity for South African apartheid, all positions shared by the Labor opposition. Even at the time of paradigm shifts, the shift in choice disguised the remaining principles and policy consensus. With that disappears, the need for a more textured and complex voting system to ensure that choice is respected becomes greater.

That is, the deeper problem is one of consensus, a consensus that seems to be disappearing. When there is no consensus in a society, or at least the degree of consensus starts to dissipate, a greater distance comes the norm in voting. Then the normal voting patterns become more and more suspect, increasingly inadequate. When the German voters in the 1930s had to decide between a coalition of the Centre and Social Democratic Parties that had governed an economy that saw inflation not at 6% or 8%, but at the impossible to believe number of one trillion percent, or the Nazis on the other who promised and delivered a far better economy, there was no choice in the way we would normally like to view it. That is, there was not a race between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 Germany. Rather, it was one between a coalition that governed over hyperinflation and industrial collapse but promised a liberal politics and an authoritarian party that promised economic efficiency rooted in racial bigotry and political ruthlessness.

This is increasingly the problem with Donald Trump and the nationalist right in America, a nationalist right that began before, but certainly became most evident with, the Tea Party. It has only moved further away from democratic values with Trump and now past him with Q-Anon, reality denial, and the white supremacy positions it now takes. There is a certain reluctance, rooted perhaps in fear, inertia, and obstinacy, to move to less familiar and more complicated rank voting or some other type of complex voting system to meet this challenge. Surely it seems much clearer simply to vote for Kennedy or Nixon, Reagan or Mondale, Obama or McCain, Biden, or Trump. But that consensus, not only of candidates and parties, but of principles and policies, has faded. Having this complicated set of choices seems, intuitively, and perhaps realistically, to be less authentically American, and it is attacked as being just that.

There is literature, as we just mentioned, showing just how compelling the argument is for a more complex voting system to enrich choice. Unfortunately, it is largely accessible only to those who have taken at least four math courses beyond calculus. Knowledge here, as in so many places in modern America—from new diseases and vaccinations to global warming to pollution to globalization to the economic effects of immigration—remains obscured and hidden from the mass of voters. Those voters are asked to make a choice. They can choose scientific claims they cannot possibly understand by people they can in no way identify with; or, they can choose a no-nothing populism advocated by people they find sympathetic and approachable that they can understand. Given that reality, democratic choice is at risk.