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The Civilized States of America and Jesusland

Vote and Supervote

In a presidential system with three candidates the winner can win with less than 34% of the vote, even assuming that electoral college vote distortions, differential abstentions and gerrymandering don't also figure that is a potential source of massive unpopularity. It does not follow that 66% of the active voters (and of course even more of the potential electorate) would have done anything to stop the guy that won but neither does it mean that the winner has the support and trust of the country. Just imagine if Hitler were running in a presidential election in a three way contest. He could easily win despite there being an overwhelming majority of the electorate against him. Is that so very far removed from the Bush-Gore-Nader situation?

A third candidate in a simple majority vote election is a destabilizing force that can produce a perverse result. (Can? Bloody well did!) Lovers of democracy must see that such a situation is inherently likely to happen from time-to-time when the electorate cannot easily be divided into two camps. It cannot be wise to continue with such a system unless there is a strong reason to expect “normal” two party politics to be re-established. But this isn't likely to happen in any modern democracy. The two party system is as dead as the simple two class system. The political scene in modern democracies is characterized by three, four or five significant groupings in most countries, forcing those multi-stranded multidimensional debates into a simple choice between Party A and Party B is not democratic, fair or sensible. In parliamentary systems the way to run things is to let the parties campaign separately and lay on the line who they may or may not consider working with as coalition allies. There are many different ways of getting some kind of proportional representation in a parliamentary system, I personally favour a less than perfectly proportional system known as single transferable vote. However, this article is not about parliaments or assemblies, it is about presidents.

The Willett System of Presidential Preference Voting

For a presidential system there is no way of getting a proportional result, there can be only one president. To me it seems perfectly obvious that a candidate that does not want to be on all the ballot papers is not a serious candidate for federal office, so nominations should be done at the federal level. "Favorite sons" are just spoilers or abuses of the electoral system for publicity. Credible candidates need nomination from the majority of states and they need something behind them to show genuine support. This could be either a substantial financial deposit or something else. I am not happy with the concept of buying power so I need to suggest something else. I suggest pledged votes.

I suggest a nomination procedure which will require 1% of the electorate (perhaps with a modest minimum number from every constituent state?) to pledge a vote to that candidate in advance of the campaign. Not only pledge a vote but have that vote recorded and locked in place. Nominator votes could be allocated as postal votes with the declared vote filled-in in advance as the first preference. This way getting nominations is simply a matter of hawking door to door with applications for a postal ballot, an activity that is perfectly suited to unpaid keen volunteers, who should always be at the heart of political campaigns.

To gather the prior support of 1% of the national electorate would require a large and efficient party structure, or an ad hoc version, it will be a barrier to frivolous candidates but would present a fair challenge to any serious challenger. Nobody wants to see a presidential ballot paper with thirteen names on it, that would be absurd, but three, four or five would be quite acceptable. This level of a hurdle would allow that to happen. A 1% threshold would allow a serious third party or even an independent to get onto the ballot paper by proving they have what it takes, real people power behind them, not just money. Such a system would not keep any credible popular political force off the ballot paper, but would stop the extreme fringe from complicating a presidential vote with a spurious and futile challenge.

Naturally the effort to find a huge number of nominators would put some strain even on mainstream parties but it is also an opportunity for them to recruit new party members and solicit for more small campaign donations thus widening the support base and the legitimacy of every candidate. It cannot possibly be a waste of effort to get out on the doorsteps and meeting the voters face-to-face, bringing politics back to where it really belongs, in the interface with the general population.

This system would allow a serious third party candidate to emerge and mount a good challenge. People would know that he (or she) already had a huge number of votes in the bag and they would know that if he was not elected their votes would be reallocated according to second preferences. So they do not have to vote for the evil of two lessers.

All voters would be allowed to express as many or as few preferences as they wished. Voting 1 for their first choice, 2 for their second choice and so on. There would be no obligation to make multiple preferences and the officials in charge of the count would be instructed to accept any clear mark against a single name as a vote but they must discard any votes which seem to be expressed in the form “anybody except this jerk”.

In the case of the last US presidential election virtually all Nader's voters would have voted for Gore as second preference, in the event of Nader being eliminated before either Gore or Bush received a majority of votes cast these votes would have been transferred to Gore and he would have been elected with a majority of the votes cast with a moral obligation to both Democrat and Green voters.

There would need to be provision for a reasonable interval between calling a presidential election and the close of nominations in order for campaign teams to be mobilized. I would say an absolute minimum of a month before nominations closed, the less the time the higher the barrier to minor party candidates.

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

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