Why All Electoral Reform Is Futile
Sebastian Mallaby relays a suggestion by Eric Maskin, the most recent Nobel laureate in economics, to improve our voting system. The core problem, Mallaby and Maskin suggest, is that in an election with many candidates, voters will select candidates strategically, instead of revealing their true preferences. For example, an independent who would have supported Obama may have voted for McCain after he saw polling that indicated a large Obama victory, or an Edwards supporter who was a single issue voter on health insurance mandates may have voted for Clinton because she had a greater chance of beating mandate-less Obama. A system that allows people to express their preferences, without minimal concern for strategy is clearly more desirable. Here’s Maskin’s suggestion:
Maskin’s argument is that voters should list candidates in order of preference, so we wouldn’t have to guess whether Clinton would have beaten Obama in a two-person contest. If a majority of voters for Edwards, Richardson and the other also-rans put Clinton higher on their lists than Obama, she would win the contest under Maskin’s system. But if Obama ranked higher than Clinton on a majority of voters’ lists, then he would win. After all, most people would have preferred him.
While this system seems to have problems that I can’t quite identify (political scientists and economists, this is where you tell me what they are) it seems vastly preferable to a system that can’t seem to accommodate having more than two candidates. But Mallaby wasn’t just writing a column about how our voting system doesn’t encourage people to express their preferences, but why the system as a whole is screwy. It the next paragraph, he writes “On the basis of a three-point margin over Obama that tells us little about which of the two candidates voters actually preferred, Clinton has transformed her prospects.” While he’s certainly correct that a three point win in the current system doesn’t mean much, the real reason it’s all messed up is because small, unrepresentative states like Iowa and New Hampshire have all too much influence on selecting nominees. Iowa’s caucuses, which are derided for not being accessible or private, actually allow people to express preferences — for example, someone could support Biden in the first round, and after he gets less than 15% of the vote, move on to Clinton in the second round — but the fact that a candidate can launch him or herself to the nomination from Iowa, or at least get a 15% bounce in the national polls, is infinitely more ridiculous than the actual method used to select said candidate.
And, oh yeah, we have the electoral college. As long as we allow Iowa-New Hampshire to have hegemony, or at least outsize influence, over the primaries and then use the electoral college for the general election, any better method for actually voting is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
