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by Miracle Jones
I like some things about politics, but only the messed-up and insidious parts. Politics is undignified and its aesthetic merits are paltry and non-nutritive. Sometimes the slogans are intriguing: vote yourself a farm, black is beautiful, eat the rich, every man a king, lips that touch liquor must never touch mine. On the other hand, the personalities involved are usually stock characters out of commedia dell'arte who can be reduced to motivating vices almost as soon as you lay eyeballs on them.
Is political power sexy? Maybe once, long ago. But in the modern age, power as "sex potion" vis-à-vis politics might as well be gas station energy pills for boring shitheads.
In fact, I tend to be uniformly unimpressed with almost everyone who has any kind of clear political identification that they are able to articulate. Left, right, reaction... center-right, far-left, purge. The blame lies with the first French Republic for eternally forcing us to talk about politics like it is Dance Dance Revolution.
Yet it is our laziness as political consumers that keeps us from testing whether such dichotomies as "left" and "right" are merely ridiculous or are actively weapons for suppressing neutral, useful ideas. We do not generally think about political organization in terms of pragmatic adherence to negotiated policies that might advance all of our dark interests as one Dread Horde of the Broken and Damned. It is hard to say to what extent virtual reality “position” metaphors have turned the cafeteria psychodrama of “where am I gonna sit at Robespierre’s nasty old French Revolution” (where “right and “left” were born) into something even worse, where we calculate tribe in terms of intensity of belief along a weird invisible power meter, politics as breathalyzer, politics as dive bar love tester.
If only our metaphors for democracy came more from the pirate ships where our kind of capitalist republic has its roots and less from France’s ergot-fueled gentleman’s nightmare.
Perhaps the solution to moving beyond these “false choices” does lie sunken in the very same historical septic tank where our current linguistic dilemma first festered and grew. Even the French revolutionaries who had to choose between turning left or right at lunch every day—showing whether they were for the king or against him—were worried about what a binary system might mean for future political calculus.
In 1785, even before the bloody turmoil that tore apart France and led right to Napoleon, the Marquis de Condorcet published a work called an “Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Decisions Given by the Majority of Voices” that suggested a more generous kind of voting system that might avoid extreme factionalism and extreme personalities. He was concerned about less obvious problems with respect to voting than merely choosing a winner, such as how to fully invest a leader with the General Will...not with more power over those swept from office in an election, but with enough mystical democracy-energy to keep a nation from eating itself.
To make this magic happen, he proposed a method now often called ranked-choice voting. For Condorcet, it was important to find the choice that everyone could accept on some level, who could create a breadth of support rather than stimulate intensity among fanatics. Finding the one person who commanded a temporary simple majority was not good enough for Condorcet. Additionally, he was cunning enough to understand that by asking voters to rank candidates, he would be asking them to vote for everyone who was running, asking voters to have a relationship of some kind with every single candidate, meaning that the winner might actually be able to govern instead of the winner provoking instant animosity from the other side.
Who did you vote for? All of them, to some degree or another!
In ranked-choice voting, voters rank candidates in order of best to worst, in contrast to simply choosing one among many. This means that the person who wins is not necessarily the person who gets the most first choice votes, but is instead the person who has the best overall stats against every possible contender. Condorcet wanted to create an alternative to the polarizing nature of discourse that was already leading to deadly civil war. On paper, actual “power to the people” looks a lot like a complicated algorithm to derive percentages from a series of decision trees.
There are many different varieties of Condorcet voting (and true Condorcet voting is different from modern applications of ranked-choice, such as "instant runoff"), but all the varieties force voters to consider how they feel about each possible candidate in relation to every other candidate, asking voters to tell a little story about all of these people, like a thematic apperception test that looks for unconscious bias or hidden aggression. In ranked-choice voting, you want to make sure you don’t piss anyone off too much as you fight to get elected. In fact, you can win a divisive election if you are everybody's second-place pick.
Is ranked-choice voting better? Psephologists (scientists who study voting) uniformly agree that getting to a “Condorcet winner” is what every election ought to achieve and they even use this hypothetical Condercet winner to test elections. All voting systems are therefore already ranked by psephologists in terms of their “Condorcet efficiency.” The American system is not as good as some countries with respect to Condorcet efficiency, but it is better than others. Personally, I would be happy if we simply accepted that improving the Condorcet efficiency of our elections ought to be a permanent goal. I think there are plenty of citizens who prefer the power of systems to the power of personalities and are therefore exasperated with our current dialectic.
However, I do not actually think it would be a good idea to overturn our “first-past-the-post” voting systems by autocratic fiat overnight. I don't think we would be ready for it. We currently have an extremely simple system, and it is already hard enough to get people to use it. Instead, I would prefer to see ranked-choice voting adopted gradually, using the “laboratories of democracy” of federalism to work out inevitable problems slowly and intentionally.
I think the best place to test ranked-choice voting should be in primaries, since primary elections are 1) run by private organizations and 2) often about who will ultimately be the "most electable," meaning who will be able to consolidate support quickly from their vanquished opponents. Unlike elections for actual Federal or state office, a party expects those who participate in a primary to vote again in a general election, meaning that determining which candidate has broad support is vital. Ranked-choice elections are specifically designed to help determine this broad support, which would also help prevent the corrosive effects of outside parties "ratfucking" elections in order to demoralize portential voters, to encourage them to feel "cheated" by some unwanted outcome and vote for a third party or not vote at all. Additionally, primaries often have more than one candidate running and there may be only fine distinctions between the policies and beliefs of those in a primary race. For all of these reasons, I think the first party to adopt ranked-choice voting will therefore have a tremendous enthusiasm advantage over their competitors, leading (theoretically) to more universal adoption by other parties and eventually in actual elections.
To this end, I think we should all be pressuring universities and the media for far more ranked-choice polls, starting in primaries and then gradually moving outward to secure polling data for actual state and Federal elections.
There is a small market for ranked-choice polling already, but the untapped potential appetite is more important: we will never clamor for ranked-choice voting if we aren’t already used to seeing ranked-choice polls on the internet, in magazines, in newspapers, and on television. The purpose of polling is to prepare us for—and to test the outcomes—of elections. Ranked-choice polling would prepare us for—and test the outcomes—of hypothetical ranked-choice voting, and possibly stimulate state and local governments who are becoming paralyzed by partisan gridlock toward moving in that direction. Both political parties in America would like to see their most divisive figures have less power and influence. Ranked-choice polling would help.
The standard poll that I find the most interesting is not the one where they ask you who you are going to vote for. The poll I love is the one where they ask you who you expect to win. The “who do you think will win” poll has fascinating chemically-inseparable information: it is a meta-poll that asks everybody who takes part to think about the country as a whole, to think about the broader narrative of an election, to think about how united the opposition might be, and to wonder whether or not their preferred candidate is actually likable to others. It also asks respondents to think strategically...do you answer honestly or do you make a wish?
It is a poll that cracks people open and makes them have transgressive political fantasies instead of calcifying them further into unreflective support for one party or another.
Additionally, it is an important statistic that serves as a check on voting irregularities: if an outcome deviates wildly from the expected result of the “who do you think will win” poll, one might expect unrest. On the other hand, if the result of this poll is insanely lopsided, as might occur under a dictatorship, one might question the robustness and vibrancy of the supposed democracy being tested. One might question the technological voting apparatus of such a country where the outcomes of elections are so obviously predetermined.
I also like this poll because it tells us how stable we can expect society to be after the results of an election. To the extent that the “who do you think will win” poll matches the actual outcome, we can expect that people will accept the results without much civil unrest or without much market fluctuation.
Currently, we only really spend money doing up-or-down "first-past-the-post" polls between the two likeliest candidates. This is because modern polling norms serve the journalists trying to figure out who will win and they also serve the political parties trying to figure out where to channel their resources and which demographics to target. It is best for them if the polls reflect the way we actually choose elected officials instead of indulging in fantasies. These polls show us who will win in a fight, nothing more, and so they keep the fight going.
I will admit: there is a very good chance that ranked-choice poll numbers would not reflect the actual outcome of elections in America and so they would not immediately be useful to journalists or politicians. However, I personally would love to see more politicians going into office knowing they do not have broad support from the American people as a result of knowing their ranked-choice poll numbers, knowing that they must govern with comity and humility if they hope to stay popular while in office. Our elections reflect a specific system's logic and they therefore attract specific kinds of candidates.
We need more data pornography to help us have hardcore political fantasies about amity between the parties, about a functional Congress, and about a citizenry that feels engaged with their government. The solution to a crisis of democracy is not to turn away from democracy: the solution is more democracy. Uncut democracy. Unrefined democracy.
If enough people are angry that ranked-choice polls don’t reflect our actual election results, we might see more honest media campaigns, as politicians might come to believe that it is in their interest not to merely win, but to be somewhat acceptable to their enemies. We might see candidates attempting to be civil to each other for strategic reasons, which is far better than candidates going to embarassing lengths to strategically seem like hateful, unstable ratbags.
Pardon me, but I really do believe that politics takes advantage of innate biological propensities toward a destructive urge for power, channeling these thwarted urges into dubious ends that could hurt us all. I think one way to more felicitously wrangle these political energies into our culture of binaries is to get people wondering about what they might be missing from a better system. More ranked-choice polling from magazines, newspapers, universities, and television is one cheap, easy, and efficient way to move us in this direction--toward a more diffuse and representative democracy that will feel more fair--even if most people won't be able to say why or to prove it with math.
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(c) Miracle Jones 2016