Do ‘winner-take-all’ elections serve democracy?
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Ned Temko Columnist
| London
It’s a tale of two women, and two political triumphs, a continent apart. And it raises the question whether the United States and Britain should change their electoral systems to attract more voters and encourage voices of compromise across partisan divides.
Liz Truss became leader of the British Conservative Party – and hence prime minister – this week. She was elected by members of her party, who make up 0.3% of the electorate.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onMight the U.S. and other democracies reduce divisive partisanship and encourage compromise by counting votes differently at elections? Alaska suggests they might.
In contrast, the recent election victory of Mary Peltola in Alaska highlighted one variety of the less skewed election systems used around the world, called ranked choice voting. It is a form of proportional representation, whose goal is to match seats in parliaments as closely as possible with the way the voters voted.
Ms. Peltola won the U.S. congressional seat because she attracted moderate voters who chose a voice of compromise over the strident partisanship of Sarah Palin. Polls suggest millions of U.S. voters would follow that path if moderate candidates stood a chance against the two big parties. But under the current winner-take-all system, they don’t.
Proportional representation can lead to unstable governments. But the flip side is that the results force parties, even those with deep differences, to cooperate and compromise in the shared responsibility of governing.
It’s a tale of two women, and two political triumphs, a continent apart.
But their starkly different routes to victory highlight a conundrum facing the world’s most durable democracies, America and Britain: whether they should reform their electoral systems to attract more voters and encourage voices of compromise across partisan divides.
That’s unlikely to happen anytime soon; the two main parties in each country have too much self-interest in retaining a system hardwired to maintain their power and limit third-party challengers.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onMight the U.S. and other democracies reduce divisive partisanship and encourage compromise by counting votes differently at elections? Alaska suggests they might.
Yet reform advocates point to the steep potential costs of inaction: an increasingly angry partisan divide that has left growing numbers of people feeling politically disconnected, disillusioned, and unrepresented.
Liz Truss this week won the leadership of the British Conservative Party, and hence the prime minister’s job, in a purely internal party vote involving 180,000 party members, or just 0.3% of the electorate.
In contrast, the recent election victory of a lesser-known Alaskan politician – Mary Peltola – highlighted one variety of the less skewed electoral systems long favored by other democracies around the world, including 40 of Europe’s 43 countries.
Alaska has broken with the U.S., and British, norm of winner-take-all elections in favor of so-called ranked choice voting. Voters don’t just choose a single candidate, with the seat going to the person who comes first even if the “winner” falls far short of an absolute majority.
They list, in order of preference, whom they’d want if their favorite candidate doesn’t get at least half the votes.
In the recent election to fill Alaska’s seat in the House of Representatives, Ms. Peltola – a longtime Democratic Party state legislator with a record of working across party lines – did outpoll her opponents, former Republican governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and a more moderate Republican, Nick Begich.
But Ms. Peltola won around 40% of the vote. Ms. Palin got 31% and Mr. Begich 29%. So the second-choice votes were counted.
If enough of Mr. Begich’s supporters had made his fellow Republican, Ms. Palin, their second choice, she would have won.
Instead, nearly a third preferred Ms. Peltola, choosing a voice of compromise over strident partisanship, something polls have suggested chimes with millions of other voters.
Yet such voices are being marginalized in both the U.S. and Britain, where the major parties are bitterly at odds, disinclined to cooperate, and confident that the existing system protects them from any serious challenge to their hold on national politics.
Alaska-style ranked voting, or any other version of the system used in over 80 democracies around the world, would threaten that duopoly.
It’s known as proportional representation.
It takes different forms in different countries, but the core principle is to match seats in national legislatures as nearly as possible with the share of votes each party actually receives at the polls. The idea is to make parliaments better reflect the way the voters voted.
This isn’t just of theoretical interest. In the 2019 British election, which gave the Conservatives a big majority, Britain’s main third party, the centrist Liberal Democrats, won 11% of the national vote. Under the first-past-the-post system, that gave them just 11 seats in the 650 member House of Commons.
Under proportional representation, they would have won 71 seats.
In the U.S., the potential implications are obvious: A third party such as the recently announced Forward Party, seeking to attract moderate Democrats and Republicans, seems to have little chance of winning congressional races against the two main parties.
But if the system enabled the party to win seats in line with the actual number of votes it won nationwide, it might look like a much more attractive proposition.
That’s one reason why none of the major parties, on either side of the Atlantic, thinks proportional representation is any good.
The parties also raise a substantive objection: that it would undermine the stability and strong government that the current system provides.
There’s merit in that argument. Proportional representation does often leave no single party with a parliamentary majority, resulting in coalition governments that can sometimes prove unstable.
But the flip side – one Ms. Peltola’s voters would presumably welcome – is that the results force parties, even ones with deep differences, to come together, cooperate, and compromise in the shared responsibility of governing.
