As you may have heard, the Academy Awards will be happening on Sunday night. Although Avatar seems like the inevitable choice for best picture (although I’m hoping that my personal favorite, “A Serious Man,” is a Serious Dark-Horse Candidate), there are certain aspects of the best picture race that still make it intriguing AND tie in to election reform, as unlikely as that might seem. First, there are ten best picture nominees, the most since 1943. This is a good thing publicity-wise, promoting interest in lesser-known but high quality films. But, with so many candidates, how well will the winner actually reflect the will of the voters?
The answer is instant-runoff voting. Election reform advocates have been working for this type of voting system for a while but it has yet to catch on widely. In a typical, single-round election with more than two candidates, the winner only needs a plurality to win: he or she needs only to garner the most votes of anyone on the ballot, not necessarily a majority–50% plus 1–of voters. This is obviously problematic because the system fails to adequately register voters’ preferences. Let’s take as an example the 2000 presidential elections, specifically in Florida. Let’s say that your absolute favorite candidate is everyone’s favorite elderly consumer-rights advocate, Ralph Nader. If Nader doesn’t win, though, you’d MUCH prefer Gore to win over Bush. However, you’ve only got a single vote, and by awarding it to Nader, you’ve essentially helped Bush by depriving Gore, the only other candidate you like, of your vote. If the margin between Bush and Gore is small enough, a very small number of Nader voters who would by all accounts prefer Gore to Bush can tilt the election toward Bush.
This is a systemic problem with the American voting system: a vote for a third- (or fourth-) party candidate is essentially a vote for your least-favorite candidate. This has resulted in a panoply of ills: a rigid, two-party system, national politics that is dominated by corporate money, personality politics and frivolity, and the inability of many views to be represented at all. The two major parties are, of course, opposed to election reform because our current system is heavily weighted against the emergence of strong third parties, which is part of the reason it’s so difficult to effect meaningful change in the first place. Regular runoffs–where a second election is held with the top two vote-getters if no one candidate garners a majority–are a definite improvement, but they still typically result in a vote between the two establishment candidates.
In instant-runoff voting, voters rank their preference for every candidate in order. In the 2000 election scenario, a Nader voter would rank Nader 1, Gore 2, and Bush 3. Now here’s the cool part: if no candidate has a majority, the votes start being re-allocated. Since Nader is the lowest vote-getter, his voters’ votes will be allocated to whatever their second preference is, in this case Gore. In other words, there would no longer be wasted votes: expressing your preference for a minor candidate would not prevent your vote from going toward a more viable candidate, if your first choice is the lowest vote-getter. (Note that for fields of more than 3 candidates, this process is iterative: the votes of the lowest vote-getter are reallocated, then the next-lowest etc. until at least one candidate has a majority).
The Wall Street Journal had a really interesting story up recently about the advantages and disadvantages of this approach for Oscar balloting, and the implications for political elections. Who knows, maybe instant runoffs will start catching on!