Raw script of the video
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TikTok is incentivizing me to make more non-political educational videos. It’s a little tricky because my training was mostly in POLITICAL science. But one of the political science topics I can talk about without being political is the mechanism of different electoral systems, which happened to be my dissertation topic.
New York City had this interesting primary election a few weeks ago, using something called the ranked-choice system. But their general election in November will be using the more common first-past-the-post system. So I want to talk a little about the technical difference between these two systems. Very important.
First-past-the-post is simple. You check one name. That’s it. Whoever gets the most votes wins.
But you can probably see that it has some obvious problems. Firstly, if the number of candidates is large, one of them may win the election with a very small share of votes.
Since this is a non-political video, I’m not supposed to evaluate specific parties and candidates. But I still need to give you an example. In Taiwan’s 2000 election, the winner of the presidency only got 39% of the votes. The other two candidates actually had more similar policy positions and had 60% of the votes in total, but ended up losing.
Papua New Guinea, an island country next to Australia, is another example of that. They started their democracy with a ranked choice system to elect their members of parliament. Then in the 70s, they switched to first-past-the-post to make things simple, you know, make it easier to vote. But it totally messed up. It’s a country with hundreds of islands and hundreds of different languages and tribes, which means they have a lot of parties. So when they used first-past-the-post, the winning candidate of each district always had a really small share of votes. Some winners had as few as 15% of the votes. That certainly made a lot of people feel unrepresented. And sometimes ethnic violence broke out because tribes wanted to decrease each other’s turnout.
So in the early 2000s, they ended up switching back to the ranked-choice system. Political scientists love this kind of natural experiment because they can observe what happened before and after. Not many countries had that.
So that was the first problem of first-past-the-post: The winner may have a very small share of votes. Some popular policies may end up losing because their votes are split. But that’s not the only problem.
In the long run, when voters and candidates try to avoid the split-vote problem, they may have to forego small parties even if they like them. You probably heard of the term “strategic voting”, right? You give up your first preference to avoid wasting your votes. Not only voters engage in strategic voting, politicians also strategically choose big parties over small parties.
So after a while, it becomes very hard for new parties to survive. That feels kind of depressing, right?
So, how does the ranked-choice system work? Firstly, the ranked-choice system has two other names, “the instant run-off system” and “the alternative vote system”. If you see these names somewhere else, they mean the same thing. So, when you vote, you assign a number to each candidate to indicate your preference. If you’re too lazy to study all the candidates, you can also just check one. But of course, the more you rank, the more likely your vote will matter.
It’s a little different in Australia. They also use a ranked-choice system, but their voters have to rank all the candidates. And they also have mandatory voting. So I guess Australian voters have a lot of homework to do before elections, which is a good thing, in my view, but I can’t speak for them.
So anyway, let’s talk about how to count votes in a ranked-choice system. In the first round, the election workers or the election computers, whoever is in charge, will only count your first preferences. If you put 1 after candidate B, then your vote will go to B. After counting the first preferences, if one of the candidates gets more than 50% of the 1st preference votes, the election is over. But if no one gets 50%, than what? The candidate that gets the least amount of first preference votes is eliminated. His or her votes will be reassigned to other piles based on the 2nd preferences on those ballots. Now, you count them again. If one of the candidates has more than 50% of the votes, the counting is over. If not, another candidate is eliminated, and their votes get reassigned based on the next preference on the ballot. As you can see, eventually, one person will get 50% of the votes when all but two candidates are eliminated, which means the winner will always have a majority of the ballots in their pile.
So the best thing about this system is that the winner will represent more than half of the voters, including some people who aren’t crazy about them but consider them to a safe choice. So in the end, at least a majority of voters are happy.
In the long run, it also partly solves the rigidity problem. Voters don’t have to forgo small parties because even if their favorite parties get eliminated, their 2nd, 3rd choice will still matter. They can feel free to vote with their hearts.
France has a system kind of similar to the ranked choice system, even though it looks very different. It’s called a two-round system. So there is no ranking; each voter just checks one of the candidates. If someone wins a majority, they’re elected. But if there is no majority winner, what do they do? Voters will come back and vote again, but this time, the minor candidates from the first round will be excluded from the ballots. If your first preference gets eliminated in the first round, you still have another chance to vote for the “lesser of the two evils”.
France has slightly different rules for their presidential and parliamentary elections. But I don’t want to bore you with the detail. All you need to know is that they use two-round systems for both kinds of elections.
You can probably tell that, even though the format is very different from the ranked-choice system, the math is similar. Voters first express their sincere preferences. And after their candidates get eliminated, they have a chance to switch to a more hopeful candidate.
So what happens is that the winning candidates tend to be centrist figures with broad appeal because they not only need passionate supporters in the first round, they also need those who are OK with them in the second round. Having a passionate cultish following can make you do well in the first round, but it may not be enough to give you a majority in the 2nd round. The National Front leader, Marine Le Pen and her late dad both had that problem. This is 2017, Le Pen did pretty solid in the first round, but got crushed in the 2nd round.
As you can see, a lot of small party voters abstained in the 2nd round, which was pretty normal. But most of them still showed up and switched their votes to one of the top two candidates, because why not?
And you can also see that the French party system is much less rigid than the US one. Parties and coalitions come and go. This is their party system in the last election vs. their party system 18 years ago. You can hardly recognize they are the same country. People aren’t afraid of trying new parties in the first round because they have the 2nd round anyway.
Is it a good thing, policy-wise? I don’t know. It’s very hard to compare two countries’ policy performance because, what parameter do you use? But if you want more choices, more changes, this seems to be a good outcome.
So yeah, a country’s choice of electoral systems matters a lot. The US system is simply too old and too rigid. Almost kind of hopeless. About 80-90% of the US Congressional seats are considered safe seats because you know which party will win. That would be unimaginable in a ranked-choice or two-round system. Not only there are more competitions, but also, when you have three or found parties, it’s very hard to gerrymander.
You know what Gerrymandering is right? If you want to gerrymander a district, you have to accurately predict the geographic distributions of your supporters, especially based on race. But if there are 4 or 5 parties that cut across racial lines, how do you draw the map? That’s why gerrymandering is almost exclusively an American phenomenon. Other countries simply have too many parties. Well, of course, some countries only have one party. In that case, they don’t even need to gerrymander.
OK, that was probably the shortest introduction you can find on this topic. Three electoral systems in one video. Impressive, right? I also want to let you know that, in my view, none of these systems is as good as the proportional representation system, which I’ll explain some other time.
I do provide personal tutoring services. Hit me up if you’re interested.
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