Looking for Voting Perfection
There’s been much gnashing of teeth recently over Maine’s use of Ranked Choice Voting, also known as Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). That’s unfortunate, because all that tooth gnashing can’t be healthy for the chompers, particularly in a state with a shortage of dentists.
The problem, as displayed vividly after the June primary, is that the term “instant” is relative. It seems reasonable when compared to the age of the universe, 13.8 billion years, but less so when it bumps up against the expectations of those with short attention spans demanding to know who won elections within minutes of the polls closing. By that measure, the 10 days it took to decide the Republican and Democratic gubernatorial nominees and the Dem candidate for the 2nd Congressional District were abominations that resulted in calls to scrap IRV and return to earlier methods of selecting leaders, such as having the candidates bash each other with clubs until all but one of them are dead.
Naturally, the gap between voting and announcing the winners led Trumpian outlets like the Maine Wire to report inaccurate claims of fraud and incompetence, which diverted the right-wing site from its core mission of smearing immigrants, socialists and transgendered people.
But otherwise, no substantial damage was done to anything except ex-gubernatorial candidate and failed Senate hopeful Nirav Shah’s and former congressional contender Joe Baldacci’s egos. Both took sizable leads in their respective races in the first round of voting but turned out to be hardly anybody’s second choice.
In contrast, GOP gubernatorial nominee Bobby Charles prevailed in his primary despite having few second-choice votes because none of the other candidates was anybody’s second choice, either. Lots of Republicans hate IRV for a variety of irrational reasons and refuse to use it, thereby saddling themselves with MAGA-kook Charles.
It’s clear that what the critics of IRV want is not voting that reflects the electorate’s wishes, but IGV, Instant Gratification Voting. These freaks open their presents before Christmas, sneak dessert before dinner and complain that all sporting events last too long. They are not the kind to read Ulysses or Remembrance of Things Past.
But neither, in all likelihood, are you. Or me. So, let’s try to temper our impatience with a measure of rationality.
If you want a fair election, it won’t necessarily be fast. If you demand a fast election, it won’t necessarily be fair. If you want dessert right now, I recommend the brownies.
It’s been suggested that a better method of selecting political winners might be to hold runoff elections between the top two finishers. But that’s not fast, it’s expensive, and it would likely result in a low turnout, producing a result that satisfies only a minority of the broader population. So, not particularly fair.
There are other election systems, none of them tested enough to determine if they work better than what we have now. One is called Approval Voting and it seems simple enough. You just vote for all the candidates you approve of. The one with the most votes (the highest approval rating) wins. The drawback is you can’t rank the candidates from those you like a lot to those you just barely tolerate, so there’s plenty of room for mediocracies to sneak into office.
Then there’s STAR voting, which stands for Score Then Automatic Runoff. In this one you rate all the candidates from best to worst. The two with the highest score automatically qualify for an instant runoff, with your vote going to the one you scored the highest. Seems sorta complicated.
Easier to understand is Score Voting, where you just give all the candidates a score, and the one with the highest rating wins. Seems reasonable, but it doesn’t guarantee the support of a majority of voters.
Can I just forget about all this stuff and open my Christmas presents now?
Because from here on, it gets weird.
Suppose picking a candidate involved holding party caucuses in every county to choose delegates to a state convention, which would then decide who the nominee would be. In practice, that would exclude independents and put potential delegates who weren’t endorsing a candidate at a disadvantage. And it might result in the convention choosing some klutz who finished third in the primary and has anger-management issues and a tendency to sound dopey.
The lesson here is there’s no perfect way to vote because the people running for office are mostly deluded, stupid or crooked. Sorting them out through the ballot box isn’t going to work because the people doing the voting also tend to be deluded, stupid or crooked. When you add impatient to the mix, you’re almost certain to get results that won’t make the majority happy and will lead to lots of complaints.
I don’t want to hear them, particularly when I’m struggling to get through page 3 of Ulysses.
Al Diamon gets instant gratification when you respond to this column or the one he writes for the Bangor Daily News e-mail newsletter Maine Politics Insider or the one he writes for The Maine Sportsman by e-mailing him at aldiamon@herniahill.net.
