Preferential Voting

Getting another option when your first choice is not available

Minority Winners

Bill Clinton

In the 1992 American presidential election the three major candidates were Republican George H.W. Bush, Democrat Bill Clinton and third party contender Ross Perot. Because of the latter’s anti-Washington stance and concern for a balanced budget, the billionaire businessman appealed mostly to conservative voters who were disenchanted with George H.W. Bush. Winning only 43% of the popular vote, the liberal Bill Clinton won the election over the divided conservative candidates despite them totalling 56.3% of the vote.

George W. Bush  

A mirror image situation happened to occur only eight years later in the 2000 presidential election where the left wing Al Gore was running against the right wing George W. Bush. There was an independent, the far left Ralph Nader, also running. Many Americans on the political left were not sure who to vote for: Gore or Nader.  Nader was estimated to have no chance by pundits and was viewed as nothing more than a spoiler. One of the often heard catch calls was “a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush”.
In the end Gore actually won more votes, but due to the gerrymander effect he unfortunately won fewer electoral votes (officials who actually decide who shall be President). Putting aside the controversy of the Florida vote recount, it is estimated that if the 2.74% of the voters who voted for Ralph Nader has instead voted for the other liberal candidate, Al Gore, then the result of the election would have been different, and the minority conservative candidate would not have won the election.

Jacques Chirac

French presidential elections are a two stage affair. The first election is for all aspirants vying to occupy the Élysée Palace and only the two candidates winning the highest number of votes go on to the second election to decide the winner. Jean-Marie Le Pen of the small, right-wing extremist National Front had the second largest individual vote in the first round of the 2002 elections, mainly because the leftist parties happened to split into smaller groups. The final stage of the election wasn’t between the two most popular candidates but between one of moderate popularity, Jacques Chirac, who received 20% of the first election votes, and one outsider. Whereas Chirac might have won the election under normal circumstances, the 2002 election definitely did not give an indication of who was the preferred candidate for the majority of French voters.

President of Singapore Tony Tan

Unlike most elections in presidential type democracies where there are only two major party candidates, three or more established parties or candidates enter the Singaporean presidential elections. In the 2011 election Tony Tan Keng Yan won over three other candidates, gaining 35.2% of the vote. The new president took office despite the fact more than 64% of the voters chose someone else.

Local Member elections

Below even a third

In the British general elections of 2010, the Liberal Democrats candidate, Simon Wright, won the constituency of Norwich South with a grand total of 29.4% of the vote. He thus became the MP to represent Norwich South in the House of Commons despite the fact that more than 70% of his constituents voted for someone else.

Mr 24.5%

Poor Simon was not able to hold on to his representation ‘record’ for long. Five years later in the 2015 elections an Alasdair McDonnell, representing the Social Democratic and Labour Party, set a new benchmark by winning his seat of Belfast South with the approval of less than a quarter of the popular vote, leaving over 75% of his voting constituents desiring someone else.

All the above elections were under an electoral system known as first-past-the-post, aka, pluralist voting.

The first in, the front runner in the race, is served with the laurels no matter how few votes he/she actually received and no matter if even a majority of the voters specifically dislike their new rep.

Why not the electorate’s least objectionable candidate?

An antidote to this fault in democracy are systems to allow voters to not only indicate their single preferred choice, but also further choices, thus designating candidates they specifically do, and do not, approve of.
In deciding the election winner all candidates’ primary (first preference) votes will be counted and if one candidate has a majority, then a winner is declared and the counting is finished. However if no candidate managed to prove himself popular with the majority of the electorate, then counting continues to find out who is least objectionable to the majority. This is managed by first eliminating from the election the candidate with the lowest vote count. His / her votes will now be distributed amongst the remaining candidates according to the preference indications on each ballot paper. This will continue to be done with the next least popular candidate until a candidate finally achieves a majority of votes.

Preferential voting is also known throughout the democratic world as: Choice voting, the Alternative vote, Instant-runoff voting and Ranked voting. Four variations of preferential voting are:

• Contingent voting:
• When there is no majority winner after the first count, there is only one more vote count which uses all the preferential votes from the candidates except the top two.
• Optional Preferential voting:
• The voter has the option to mark off only as many candidates as one chooses. Hard to see the logic in doing this unless the voter values all the remaining candidates as equally bad.
• Range voting:
• Range voting allows voters to express preferences of varying strengths. Voters rate all candidates each with a number within a prescribed range (eg. 1-9). The virtue of this system is that not only do you rank the candidates in your order, but also by the degree you like or dislike them.  If a voter truly liked one candidate, could tolerate two others (by, coincidentally, equal amounts) disliked two more, and simply loathed the last one, she could mark her ballot paper in order: 10, 7,7,5,4 and 1. The results of the election are determined by the average each candidate receives.
  
• Approval voting: 
• You mark all the candidates with either a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. Strictly speaking, not preferential as you don’t declare your order of preference for the candidate of the single-member electorate. However, you have the option to declare a group of candidates as equally acceptable over others, or just one as your choice.

An innovation universally embraced?

So why isn’t preferential voting utilized in most of the democratic world where the UK, USA, Canada, India, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia still embrace First-Past-the-Post?

The general response is that it is confusing and too complicated? This does not speak well for how certain governments view the intelligence of their average citizen.

Over the last 30 years Australia, with preferential voting utilized in both single member and proportional representation elections, has had an average rate of informal voting of only 4.3%. Considering Australia has compulsory voting where some people forced to the polls express their outrage by either not bothering to understand how to vote, or intentionally invalidating their vote, it would seem that introducing preferential voting has had little effect on the average citizen wishing to make a valid vote.