Enjoyed the episode? Want to listen later? Subscribe here, or anywhere you get podcasts:

Say there’s an independent or a third party candidate that you really like, but you’re looking at them and you think: ‘God, this person is never going to win, what I should really be doing is looking just among the major parties, and choosing a lesser of two evils.’ With approval voting, you don’t have to do that; you can have your cake and eat it too.

Aaron Hamlin

In 1991 Edwin Edwards won the Louisiana gubernatorial election. In 2001, he was found guilty of racketeering and received a 10 year invitation to Federal prison. The strange thing about that election? By 1991 Edwards was already notorious for his corruption. Actually, that’s not it.

The truly strange thing is that Edwards was clearly the good guy in the race. How is that possible?

His opponent was former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.

How could Louisiana end up having to choose between a criminal and a Nazi sympathiser?

It’s not like they lacked other options: the state’s moderate incumbent governor Buddy Roemer ran for re-election. Polling showed that Roemer was massively preferred to both the career criminal and the career bigot, and would easily win a head-to-head election against either.

Unfortunately, in Louisiana every candidate from every party competes in the first round, and the top two then go on to a second – a so-called ‘jungle primary’. Vote splitting squeezed out the middle, and meant that Roemer was eliminated in the first round.

Louisiana voters were left with only terrible options, in a run-off election mostly remembered for the proliferation of bumper stickers reading “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.”

We could look at this as a cultural problem, exposing widespread enthusiasm for bribery and racism that will take generations to overcome. But according to Aaron Hamlin, Executive Director of The Center for Election Science (CES), there’s a simple way to make sure we never have to elect someone hated by more than half the electorate: change how we vote.

He advocates an alternative voting method called approval voting, in which you can vote for as many candidates as you want, not just one. That means that you can always support your honest favorite candidate, even when an election seems like a choice between the lesser of two evils.

While it might not seem sexy, this single change could transform politics. Approval voting is adored by voting researchers, who regard it as the best simple voting system available. (For whether your individual vote matters, see our article on the importance of voting.)

Which do they regard as unquestionably the worst? First-past-the-post – precisely the disastrous system used and exported around the world by the US and UK.

Aaron has a practical plan to spread approval voting across the US using ballot initiatives – and it just might be our best shot at making politics a bit less unreasonable.

The Center for Election Science is a U.S. nonprofit which aims to fix broken government by helping the world adopt smarter election systems. They recently received a $600,000 grant from Open Philanthropy to scale up their efforts.

Get this episode now by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or check out the transcript below.

In this comprehensive conversation Aaron and I discuss:

  • Why hasn’t everyone just picked the best voting system already? Why is this a tough issue?
  • How common is it for voting systems to produce suboptimal outcomes, or even disastrous ones?
  • What is approval voting? What are its biggest downsides?
  • The positives and negatives of different voting methods used globally
  • The difficulties of getting alternative voting methods implemented
  • Do voting theorists mostly agree on the best voting method?
  • Are any unequal voting methods – where those considered more politically informed get a disproportional say – viable options?
  • Does a lack of general political knowledge from an electorate mean we need to keep voting methods simple?
  • How does voting reform stack up on the 80,000 Hours metrics of scale, neglectedness and solvability?
  • Is there anywhere where these reforms have been tested so we can see the expected outcomes?
  • Do we see better governance in countries that have better voting systems?
  • What about the argument that we don’t want the electorate to have more influence (because of their at times crazy views)?
  • How much does a voting method influence a political landscape? How would a change in voting method affect the two party system?
  • How did the voting system affect the 2016 US presidential election?
  • Is there a concern that changing to approval voting would lead to more extremist candidates getting elected?
  • What’s the practical plan to get voting reform widely implemented? What’s the biggest challenge to implementation?
  • Would it make sense to target areas of the world that are currently experiencing a period of political instability?
  • Should we try to convince people to use alternative voting methods in their everyday lives (when going to the movies, or choosing a restaurant)?
  • What staff does CES need? What would they do with extra funding? What do board members do for a nonprofit?

The 80,000 Hours podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.

Highlights

…there’s actually a really good track record in the US for passing ballot initiatives on single winner voting methods, so we expect the likelihood of winning some to be pretty high.

The way that we look at it is instant runoff voting has been passed as a ballot initiative in a number of cities, but we see approval voting as producing better outcomes, and having better political dynamics compared to instant runoff voting. Approval voting is also so much easier, and it avoids a lot of the problems.

If instant runoff voting can win, then surely, a simpler voting method that produces good outcomes and has good dynamics should also be able to do it.

An interesting theme that comes up with a voting method, when you’re only dealing with two candidates, the voting method doesn’t matter so much, but it becomes really important when you have more than two candidates.

There’s an interesting phenomenon that can occur when you have a three-way race where all three are competitive and there’s a moderate candidate. There’s this phenomenon called the Center Squeeze Effect, which has the candidate in the middle have their votes split on either side, so here what you’re essentially having is first choice preferences being split.

The person in the middle gets split from the person on the right, and the person on the left, and they can just get a sliver of the vote, even though they appeal to the broadest breadth of the electorate.

In terms of improved welfare, the concept that we’re looking at is we have people who are elected, and these people who are elected are in charge of spending vasts amounts of money; more than the richest of the rich can spend.

In addition to being able to spend these vast amounts of money, they also determine policies that affect our day-to-day lives, in very substantial ways, and so the idea of choosing the voting method is that we’re given an effectual way to be able to decide who sits in those seats, that are able to make those types of decisions for us. That’s the underlying concept for why this makes sense as a target.

A voting method, it doesn’t just determine the winner; it gives us a flavor for all the candidates involved, and on top of that, it actually influences what your options are to begin with. As an example, in the 2016 election, Michael Bloomberg decided not to run in the election, because he thought he was going to split the vote with Hillary Clinton, and have Trump win, so that’s why he didn’t run.

We have a voting method that causes people not to run, because they’re afraid of mucking up the election, and nobody wants to be accused of being a spoiler as well, and nobody wants to go in and think, well, I don’t have the same kind of name recognition as other people, if people just hear my views, that’s not going to be enough; they’re not going to vote for me.

Articles, books, and other media discussed in the show

From the episode

Books

Relevant conferences

Relevant articles from The Center for Election Science

Related episodes

About the show

The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. We invite guests pursuing a wide range of career paths — from academics and activists to entrepreneurs and policymakers — to analyse the case for and against working on different issues and which approaches are best for solving them.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing [email protected].

What should I listen to first?

We've carefully selected 10 episodes we think it could make sense to listen to first, on a separate podcast feed:

Check out 'Effective Altruism: An Introduction'

Subscribe here, or anywhere you get podcasts:

If you're new, see the podcast homepage for ideas on where to start, or browse our full episode archive.