The Key to Third Party Success?

Having spent my entire adult life involved in third party politics, I've always thought that I had an appreciable understanding of how the two major parties protected their political duopoly by manipulating the rules of American democracy to block competition from smaller parties and independents. When it comes to refoming the state-by-state rules and laws governing ballot access, we can’t really look to the two majors for any type of support for reform because they are the direct beneficiaries of the status quo and the current arrangements produce no real downside for them. We can thus expect that they will always stand together to fight any reform that would enable others to take votes from them.

This is the reasoning that more or less forms the conventional wisdom that is most commonly used to explain the protracted dominance of the two major American parties and the obstacles to success that third parties must overcome to compete electorally. But as I've recently come to learn, this isn't the whole story. In fact, all of the rule-rigging is only a peripheral factor driving the two-party system. The primary cause was posited by French political scientist Maurice Duverger decades ago. He observed that when elections are based on choosing a single winner for office from within a geographical district, a two-party political system is the system most likely to emerge over time. Eventually this has become known as Duverger's law, and if it is correct, then America’s two party system is pretty much here to stay. And even if one believes, as I do, that the two-party system is on whole a more effective democratic system than multiparty systems, that doesn't mean it couldn't be better still for all of us if the Democrats and Republicans didn’t have a permanent lock on their memberships in this exclusive club, but rather rose and fell in prominence relative to other parties as well as each other according to their responsiveness to the desires of American voters.

As the Libertarian Party's repeated ballot access successes and subsequent dismal election results over the years have demonstrated, getting on the ballot and getting votes are two entirely different things. As it turns out, there's another hurdle, long lamented by third parties, that dwarfs the issue of ballot access: the "wasted vote" dilemma. Most voters intuitively sense the game theoretics behind our current single-vote/single winner election model: any vote not for the contender (the second place candidate) is for all intents and purposes a vote for the favorite (the front-runner) since any vote for any other candidate—because he or she has virtually no chance of winning—is "wasted" by not contributing to the ultimate outcome of the election. The wasted vote dilemma is thus an unintended Hobson's choice produced by the fact that voters have but a single vote to cast in any election, where most supporters of alternative candidates find themselves compelled to vote for one of the two front-runners instead of their actual preference. Net result? The vast majority of votes wind up going to the top two candidates and the two parties that support them. Third parties are cheated out of electoral support and thus the opportunity for long-term development because a mojority of their would-be voters choose the short-term gratification of participating in the contest between the top two contenders on the slate. Now there exists sound rebuttals to the wasted vote argument, but all of them require independent voters to trade their short-term electoral interests for potential preferred electoral opportunities in the future. Like most gratification deferral arguments, these arguments are not popular, and will most likely never be popular enough to drive any meaningful change.

Currently all fifty states use a voting system whereby each voter gets a single vote to exercise for any one candidate in any race. This single-vote/single winner system is most commonly referred to as a plurality vote system. Plurality voting has the benefit of being very simple, perhaps even the simplest form of voting, far easier to understand than some of the ranked ballot proportional voting schemes practiced in some countries in Europe as well as in Israel and Australia. Single-choice plurality ballots are simple to cast, and votes are simple to count, with each vote having the same value. And finally, the outcome of plurality elections are generally perceived by the electorate as fair and deliberate. In spite of these advantages however, there are still drawbacks to plurality voting. For one, there's tactical voting, where voters may decide to cast their one vote for a candidate they don't desire in an attempt to defeat a candidate they desire even less. For the major parties, the biggest flaw in the current system is it's tendency to regularly produce outcomes where a "spoiler" candidate splits off a margin of the vote to cause the otherwise most popular candidate to lose (think Perot in 1992, or Nader in 2000). And as we often see in our elections, candidates are too easily tempted to "go negative" with their campaigns, because the single-vote system makes the loss of a vote for the attacked opponent worth the same as a positive vote for the mud-slinger even though opinion polls show negative campaigns to be harmful to both the slinger as well as his or her target.

Does this make the electoral aspirations of American third parties a hopeless pipe dream? Maybe not. There is an election reform for which all of America—including the Democratic and Republican parties—just might be ready. The election reform that would put a stop to all of the negative externalities of our plurality system is called approval voting. In an approval voting system, the only difference from our current system is that voters can each vote one time for any candidate in any race. After the polls close, votes are tallied for each of the candidates the same way they are today (using the exact same methods and equipment) and the candidate with the most votes wins. There are advocacy groups currently agitating for this reform which can explain the simple mechanics more thoroughly than I can, but in short, approval voting would mean that every voter could vote for either one or both of the two front-runners and their preferred down-ballot candidate if they choose, making the wasted vote dilemma a thing of the past. The wasted vote dilemma can only occur when voters have only a single vote to cast. Third parties would finally be free to thrive or die based on their own merits instead of an unintended consequence of our electoral system. Although approval voting or similar electoral reform may not be sufficient to end the duopoly of the Democrats and Republicans, it may very well be a necessary step. Otherwise third parties will be stuck having to wait for one of the two major parties to completely collapse like the Whigs of yore, or pray for a political superstar like a Teddy Roosevelt to materialize and lead them to victory. And at the end of the day, an approval voting system also would result in more power in the hands of voters. In a democracy, more actual votes equals more political power for the People.