How to build better elections: Electoral systems and reform in Australia and New Zealand
Countries: Australia & New Zealand
The plurality election system used in the United States is inefficient and encourages polarization. Australia shows what an alternative way could look like—and New Zealand teaches us how to get there.
Lessons:
Ranked-choice voting (which Australians call “preferential voting”) is compatible with the U.S. system of government and could lead to fairer and more representative election outcomes.
Simplicity and elegant design matter enormously. Unnecessarily complicated reforms can lead, at best, to voter confusion and frustration and, at worst, to new perceptions of backroom deals and corruption.
Electoral reform campaigns require comprehensive strategies with many simultaneous components, including political leadership, some amount of luck, and informative advertising that is both creative and fair. There are no simple solutions.
Electoral reformers should strive to be imaginative but also strictly fair; successful reform efforts should be led by nonpartisan advocates, with impartial voices to serve as educators and facilitators.
Elections in the United States can be a mess. From the electoral college to manipulating the boundaries of electoral constituencies to favor one party (a process known as gerrymandering), the principle of “one person, one vote” is warped and distorted at almost every level. Still, at its most aspirational, U.S. democracy assumes that each voter chooses one candidate, then the candidate with the most votes wins (if not the election, then at least that state’s electoral votes).
Plurality elections—those that follow this basic proposition—encourage polarization, lock out third-party candidates, and sharply increase the number of uncontested or uncompetitive races. Not to mention, single-member districts are ripe for gerrymandering and other forms of manipulation. Attempting to translate the complex landscape of political ideology through plurality races—and the two-party system it encourages—clearly has its discontents.[1]
Many of the global alternatives (mainly, various forms of proportional representation) are incompatible at the national level with the U.S. Constitution and attitudes about government. But one option—ranked-choice or “preferential” voting—avoids these obstacles and would be a clear fit. Australia, for example, has used such a system since 1918 for a legislature that resembles the United States. Although Australia’s system is parliamentary, it was modeled on the U.S. Congress, with a Senate in which every state is represented equally and a House of Representatives in which seats are distributed by population.[2]
In a nutshell, ranked-choice voting as it works in the Australian House of Representatives means that instead of picking one candidate, you rank them all. If your first choice ends up at the bottom of the pack, your vote is automatically reassigned to your second choice, and so on until there are only two remaining candidates and one is declared the winner. In Australia, this means representatives are elected with some semblance of a mandate, and Australian voters get to support whomever they prefer without worrying about throwing away their votes.
That being said, preferential voting in Australia has not avoided controversy. In the past, Australian voters had to either rank all options or pick just one party—a so-called “Group Vote Ticket”—that would decide the complete order of preference among all of the candidates.[3] With long lists of candidates often numbering more than 100, most voters naturally chose to group vote. That led parties to make backroom deals, exchanging preferences until Ricky Muir from the “Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party” won a Senate seat in 2013 with only one-half of one percent of the first-preference votes. (The Australian Senate also uses multi-member districts, on top of ranked-choice voting, which exacerbated the potential for group vote manipulation.) The system was subsequently reformed, but Australians still must vote for at least 12 candidates in Senate races. The lesson for the United States seems clear: any electoral reform should be as simple as possible and not place new demands on voters or create new avenues for distortion. This is especially important if, as in the Australian Senate, the United States were ever to experiment with multi-member districts on top of ranked-choice voting.
The benefits of ranked-choice voting should apply across any and all electoral systems, not just parliamentary systems. For example, a similar method is already used in Maine and in a variety of local elections within the United States. In fact, ranking choices may make even more sense in the United States, where polarized elections often are decided by margins narrower than the share of third-party votes [4]
The big challenge in the United States is the high barrier to any kind of electoral reform. Despite incremental steps, broad and transformational reform seems a long way off.[5]
Ranking choices may make even more sense in the United States where polarized elections are often decided by margins narrower than the third-party vote share. “
To learn what it takes to uproot a long-standing electoral system and replace it, we can look to Australia’s neighbor, New Zealand. Between 1984 and 1996, in response to growing frustrations over unrepresentative and skewed election results, the island nation dropped its “first-past-the-post” elections and adopted a complex, mixed-member proportional system. According to political scientist Jack Nagel, there were 11 key ingredients that contributed to success—9 before reform, and 2 after.[6] These included widespread discontent with policy outcomes; a vigorous grassroots movement; a process for enacting reform outside of elected representatives; and “an element of luck, such as blunders or miscalculations by defenders of the status quo.” Taken together, the implication is that only a comprehensive and multi-faceted reform effort can succeed.
While many of the necessary ingredients exist in the United States today, several are conspicuously missing, including the following:
disinterested leaders able to facilitate reform;
a nonpartisan proposing body; and
an effective and impartial campaign to educate the public on reform options.
In New Zealand, the government created a five-member Royal Commission to study the electoral system, which was directly linked to all three of these missing ingredients. While such a body is unlikely in the United States, Nagel believes that the Royal Commission can still be instructive—especially should private philanthropists or state governments take up the mantle of proposing electoral reforms while honestly educating the public about the reforms’ pros and cons.[7] Nagel is particularly complimentary of the Commission’s advertising campaigns, which featured the same actor presenting arguments both for and against each proposed reform. In short, Nagel says, the advertisements were both “imaginative and very fair,” which could, in itself, be a guiding mantra for democracy reformers.[8]
Recommended Reading:
Ingredients Conducive to Successful (and Lasting) Electoral Reform by Jack Nagel
End Notes:
[6] Jack Nagel. Interview by Ben Raderstorf. Phone. July 29, 2019.
[7] Jack Nagel. Interview by Ben Raderstorf. Phone. July 29, 2019.
