I hate Citizens United as much as anyone, and I hate corporations buying our elections. However, I have concluded that the problem is not with the Supreme Court or with the corporations. It is with the system we use to vote. Fix that, and the other stuff falls into place.
Here is a simple example, courtesy of electology.org. Say we have the following voter preferences:
% of voters Their ranking
35% conservative > centrist > liberal
33% liberal > centrist > conservative
22% centrist > liberal > conservative
10% centrist > conservative > liberal
[I.e., the first row says that 35% of the voters prefer the conservative, over the centrist, over the liberal.]
Now whom should we elect? Which candidate best represents the will of these voters? Note that the centrist is preferred to the conservative by a huge 65% majority (rows 2,3,4). And the centrist is preferred to the liberal by an even bigger 67% majority (rows 1,3,4). It seems clear that the centrist is by far the most broadly appealing candidate. Further, 55% of the voters prefer the liberal to the conservative (rows 2,3).
Under what election system do we discover that the centrist is the best candidate to represent this district? Answer: none of the ones currently in use.
In a straight up election or primary, as run in most areas of the US, the conservative wins, despite being the least preferred candidate. This explains some of the lunatics currently in Congress.
If this were an open primary, where the top two candidates proceed to the general election, the conservative and the liberal would win, and in the runoff the liberal would presumably win.
In both cases the centrist loses, despite being the most appealing candidate. (It is even worse if there are two centrists—they split the vote and don’t even come close to the more extreme candidates.) We cannot blame outside funding and anonymous PACs for this—it is the system.
If elections are games, so be it. But in my opinion, elections are tools to help us select the people we want to represent us in the halls of power; therefore we should choose the tool that has the best chance of electing the representatives the people want.
There is one system that will correctly choose the centrist as the candidate most people want to represent them. It is called Approval Voting. With this system, you can vote for as many candidates as you want, anyone who is acceptable to you. The winners are the candidates who get the most votes.
In the above example, people would still vote for their first choice. Many would also vote for their second choice: liberals would also support the centrist to keep the conservative from winning, and vice versa. We can imagine that most would not cast a vote for their third choice. If everyone cast two votes, the centrist would receive votes from every voter, but no one else would. Even if some voters did not cast two votes, it would not take many voters registering second choices to pull the centrist ahead of both the other candidates. If this were a straight up election, the centrist would win. If this were a primary, the centrist would runoff against one of the others, and presumably win.
The main problem with our voting system is that we have to choose one candidate in the primary, from a specific party. This often leads to the more extreme person winning, and in the general election we, the people, end up having to choose between two people we do not like. With Approval Voting, you no longer have to choose the lesser of two evils, because in the open primary, the person who most of the voters support makes it to the ballot.
There is no situation I have been able to discover in which this breaks down. Approval Voting always chooses the most popular candidate, while our current system sometimes chooses the least.
Am I missing something? What is the downside to this? Why doesn’t every state do it this way? Or at least one???