It's Election Day in the United States. Across the nation, millions of ballots are being cast. But what would happen if the rules of our electoral system were changed? Certain states are about to find out. This year, several places have alternative voting systems up for consideration on their ballots, and those systems could set an example for voting reform throughout the rest of the country. Short Wave producer Hannah Chinn and host Emily Kwong dive into three voting methods that are representative of those systems: Where they've been implemented, how they work, and what they might mean for elections in the future. What to hear more about the math powering our lives? Email us at [email protected] and we might cover your idea on a future episode! Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the significance of voting systems on Election Day?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. It's election day here in the States. If you can vote and you're listening to this, maybe you voted early. Maybe you mailed in your ballot. Maybe you're waiting at a polling place listening to Shortwave right now. Regardless, before you even marked a ballot, there was a choice already made for you.
Chapter 2: How do different voting systems affect election outcomes?
And that's the choice of which voting system to use. Hey, Hannah Chen. Hi, Emily. Hannah, our producer today is going to tell us about some of those voting systems. Though, wait, hold on. What is a voting system? Good question. So for our purposes, a voting system is the set of rules that you use to determine the winner of an election. Uh-huh.
And there are a lot of different rules that you can use. So to illustrate this, I talked to a math professor at George Washington University in D.C. His name is Dan Ullman. And for the past 20 years, on and off, he's been teaching this class called math and politics. And on the very first day of class, he has all his students conduct a mock election.
There are three candidates and there are 99 voters in this little scenario that I made up. But it's made to be a very close election.
The 99 voters are these made-up people. Oh, so it's not the students. No, no, no, no. But they know all the preferences of these 99 imaginary voters. Okay. Whether they like, say, candidate A more than candidate B, or candidate B more than candidate C, or maybe they like candidate B the most and they're indifferent to both A and C. Interesting. Okay, so then what happens?
So they have to decide which election rules they're going to use. So maybe they want to weight the votes, right? Each voter's first choice gets two points and each voter's second choice gets one and their last choice gets zero and they tally up all those points to decide who wins. Yeah. Or maybe they have a first round of voting and then the top two advance to like a runoff vote.
Or maybe they're just going to count each voter's first choice and just totally ignore their other preferences. He's letting them, like, change the rules of the game. Right. Okay. But again, Dan has created all of these imaginary voter profiles, right? He knows what's in them. So depending on the election rules that the class uses, they're going to end up with a different winner.
Any two different methods, if they're actually different, could conceivably lead to a different result.
That's striking. Yeah. And Emily, this isn't because of voter fraud or like double counting ballots or anything. These are all perfectly legitimate ways to count voter preferences.
The point is that different ways of thinking about it, different ideas you might have, different ways of eliminating or tallying the ballots can give different answers. You don't have to get people to change their mind. You just have to count their votes in a different way and a different winner can have them.
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Chapter 3: What is plurality voting and its pros and cons?
And the second factor is polarization, like the more different that candidates are from one another. Interesting. OK, so if in any given election there's either a lot of options or the options are particularly polarized, the voting system could matter a lot. Exactly. So we're going to look at those voting systems. First up, plurality voting, often called first past the post.
Emily, this one is probably going to sound the most familiar. Basically, everyone gets to vote for one and only one candidate. And any candidate who receives more votes than all the other candidates wins the election. This is how I had my teddy bears vote. When I was in elementary school and I held my mock election. I have questions. One vote per teddy bear.
So in this scenario, yeah, you see the list of candidates. You choose one. This is like most of the ballots I filled out in my life, though, to this day. Right. It's super common in single winner elections. And Wilman says that's for a reason.
It's very simple to run, and it's very simple to understand for everyone. Everybody sees a very clear connection between how many votes are received and who gets elected. So that's for that reason, at least. It's a very, very good system. But it has disadvantages.
Right. I mean, one problem with having multiple candidates is that there might not be an actual majority winner. Right. The first candidate could get 40% of the vote, the second 45%, and the third 15%. And in that scenario, the second candidate would get elected, even though more than half the voters didn't like that person. No, totally.
And another problem with plurality voting is that it's super vulnerable to something called vote splitting. So that's when candidates with some similarity and maybe with overlapping voter bases pull votes away from each other. And that leads to something called the spoiler effect, which is when voting for a losing candidate ultimately affects which candidate wins. Okay.
In that case, voters are pressured to vote for one of the two candidates most likely to win, even if they don't actually prefer either. Right. Which means a lot of voters might be unhappy with the options that they're given. Right. And this brings me to the second voting system, ranked choice voting. Some people also call this instant runoff or single transferable vote.
Yeah, we had this in the state where I used to live, Alaska. They used ranked choice for the general election. OK, so you already know how this works. But for our listeners who don't, on the ballot, you fill in a bubble for your top candidate.
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Chapter 4: What are the issues with plurality voting?
But you also have the option to fill in one for your second choice candidate and your third choice candidate. We constantly rank things in our head, what shows we're going to watch, where we want to travel. what we want to eat. It's not complex. So this is Carolyn Tolbert.
She's a professor of political science at the University of Iowa. And she says ranked choice voting has this huge advantage, which is that it provides a majority winner. Like over half the votes. Yeah. The winner who gets that wins the election. Yes.
And that's what Carolyn says most Americans want. So what it does is if a candidate doesn't come out with 50% or plus one, then the candidate with the least votes is removed. And their second place votes are counted and added to the tallies. So at that point, if a candidate has 50% plus one, they're the winner. If not, then the next candidate with the lowest amount of votes is removed.
And so on and so on and so on.
Okay. This system has gotten really popular in the last few years, right? Yeah, it's been implemented in state elections in Maine and in Alaska, like you mentioned. plus in local elections for 45 cities across the country. And this year, it's on the ballot in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, D.C., and Oregon, my home state.
Though Alaskans are actually going to the polls today to vote whether to keep this system or not, which is kind of interesting. Oh, yeah. I mean, Caroline's researched the impact of ranked-choice voting after it's been implemented as well. And she says there are several kind of surprising additional outcomes, like candidates campaigning for second and third place,
which creates a different and less polarized atmosphere compared to current elections.
And we found statistical evidence both among the candidates who were running and among the voters that they perceived these elections as having less negativity. Right. I mean—
The way we do elections now, the plurality system is kind of a zero sum game where candidates are incentivized to take down the competition. You have to vote for me if I'm going to win at all. Ranked choice voting, though, sounds like different campaigning styles may result. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: How does ranked choice voting work?
So our last contender is approval voting. Okay. This is when you have a ballot in front of you with all the candidates listed, and instead of just choosing one, you can vote for as many or as few as you want. That's really different. Yeah, it's one of the least common electoral systems used, but even though it's not used very much in elections, it's actually fairly common in everyday life. Really?
How so? Yeah, so if you have a big group of people and you have to decide where you're going for lunch, and you might just be like, who wants tacos? Raise your hand. Who wants ramen? Raise your hand. You can vote for as many as you want. Yes, yes, I get it. And you just go to the place with the biggest number of votes. Exactly. Which makes the system pretty straightforward, right?
You can't fill in the bubble for too few or too many candidates the way you would in other systems. It's simple to vote and it's simple to count.
One of the big appeals for me as a scholar, but also as, you know, a second gen, right, is equity of access. We want to make sure that people who are from diverse backgrounds and from diverse education backgrounds can still understand how to vote. This is Whitney Hua.
She's a doctor of political science and the director of applied data and research at the Center for Election Science. which advocates for voting reform and specifically focuses on approval voting. Oh, okay. And approval voting has been implemented in two cities, St. Louis, Missouri, and Fargo, North Dakota. But the reality is we don't have a lot of other real-world examples to point to. In St.
Louis and Fargo, what have the results been? I mean, so far, it seems like it's really worked. And supporters say that that's because it basically solves the problem of vote splitting when candidates with overlapping voter bases pull votes away from each other. Exactly, which basically makes it spoiler-proof. And it generally discourages polarization.
If anything, it encourages consensus, which I talked to Jean-François Lallier about. He's a director at the French National Center for Scientific Research. He specializes in social choice, game theory, and economics. And he's done a ton of research on approval voting in the past 20-some years.
You can see that people take this opportunity to vote for several reasons. In order to both state what they want, really, and also what is reasonable to hope.
In order to both state what they want, really, and also what it is reasonable to hope. Yeah. That's a really sensible approach. Right. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah. But unlike in ranked choice voting, you can't express intensity of preference. Like, all of your approvals are equally weighted. So it might make it harder for you to make a decision.
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Chapter 6: What are the advantages of ranked choice voting?
Chapter 7: What did the simulations reveal about voting systems?
Chapter 8: How can changing voting rules impact election results?
So today on the show, the math of elections. We're going to cover three different voting systems, three different ways that a ballot can look, and that voter preferences can be taken into account. And we'll look at the pros and cons of our current system, which is one of these voting systems, and what the alternatives could look like. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Okay, and earlier you told me this kind of bonkers thing that changing the election rules could change the winner. Right, right, right. But how often does that happen in the real world, in real world elections? So this is a really good question. And the issue is in order to test these systems, you can't just run elections because like those have real world consequences, right?
But I found a researcher who did something really close. He and his colleagues ran a bunch of simulated scenarios using alternative voting systems.
So we gather data on about 200 elections from about 50 countries where we have information about how the different parties are liked by voters. And not only the one they prefer, but their relative preferences over several parties.
This is Romain Lachat. He's an associate professor who studies voting behavior and electoral systems at Sciences Po in Paris. And he ran simulations for nine different voting systems using this voter preference data. And one of his big questions in this study was exactly the same as yours, Emily. Basically, does it really make a difference?
In a majority of case, that wouldn't make a difference. And it makes sense because they are really situations, cases where clearly there is one party or candidate that is preferred by a majority of voters.
But in approximately one third of the cases he simulated, Roman said there was a difference. These simulations led to different outcomes and different winners. And those cases tended to have two things in common. So the first factor is just the number of candidates, like the more people or parties that there are to vote for.
And the second factor is polarization, like the more different that candidates are from one another. Interesting. OK, so if in any given election there's either a lot of options or the options are particularly polarized, the voting system could matter a lot. Exactly. So we're going to look at those voting systems. First up, plurality voting, often called first past the post.
Emily, this one is probably going to sound the most familiar. Basically, everyone gets to vote for one and only one candidate. And any candidate who receives more votes than all the other candidates wins the election. This is how I had my teddy bears vote. When I was in elementary school and I held my mock election. I have questions. One vote per teddy bear.
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