Proofiness - Charles Seife [66]
Democracy is inherently an institution based upon a mathematical operation—that of counting votes. As we’ve seen, that operation is vulnerable to proofiness. Armed with bogus mathematical arguments and underhanded tactics, politicians and their judicial allies are working to stack the electoral deck to get their party into power and keep it there. They are succeeding.
Democracy is in danger, buckling under an assault from proofiness.
At the same time that Norm Coleman’s final appeal was limping around the hallways of the Minnesota Supreme Court, Minnesota justices were deciding yet another lawsuit about Minnesota elections—one that had the potential to change the way elections in Minnesota are run. In theory, it could prevent fiascos like the Franken-Coleman race from ever happening again.
As an experiment, the city of Minneapolis dispensed with the standard vote-for-one-candidate “plurality” method for deciding certain elections. Instead, the city would use what’s known as instant runoff voting, where each voter would rank the candidates in order of preference. Advocates argue that instant runoff voting makes elections more fair and more transparent. They have a point: had instant runoff voting been used in the 2008 Senate election, officials would almost certainly have been able to declare a victor within a matter of days.
After the recount, after all the legal challenges, the final results of the 2008 Minnesota Senate election were:
1,212,317 for Norm Coleman
1,212,629 for Al Franken
437,505 for Dean Barkley
Since this was a plurality election, with each voter casting a single vote in the Senate race, the winner was simply the person with the most votes—Al Franken, in this case. But because the election was so close (and the lawyers were so skilled), it took eight months and millions of dollars to determine the final winner.
An instant runoff vote, on the other hand, would probably have made the recount unnecessary. In such a vote, the ballots are slightly different from what they are in a plurality election. Instead of voting for a single candidate, each voter gets to rank the candidates, from least to greatest of all possible evils. Using those ranks, officials can figure out who wins the election. It’s not quite as simple as merely counting votes; an instant runoff version of the 2008 Minnesota race would have had a much more complicated-looking result than a plurality election. It might have looked something like:
1,202,310 prefer Norm Coleman over Dean Barkley over Al Franken
10,007 prefer Norm Coleman over Al Franken over Dean Barkley
1,201,620 prefer Al Franken over Dean Barkley over Norm Coleman
11,009 prefer Al Franken over Norm Coleman over Dean Barkley
287,010 prefer Dean Barkley over Norm Coleman over Al Franken
150,495 prefer Dean Barkley over Al Franken over Norm Coleman
So . . . who wins? This requires a little number juggling. First, you look at everybody’s first choice. In this case:
1,212,317 chose Norm Coleman as their first choice
1,212,629 chose Al Franken as their first choice
437,505 chose Dean Barkley as their first choice
. . . exactly the same as in the plurality election. But the election isn’t over yet. In an instant runoff vote, you can only win if you get more than 50 percent of the votes. Neither Franken (at 42 percent) nor Coleman (also at 42 percent) managed to cross that threshold and win a majority of votes. When this happens, the “instant runoff” begins: the candidate at the bottom of the pack, Dean Barkley, is eliminated; it becomes a two-person race between Coleman and Franken. Barkley voters aren’t disenfranchised, though. Officials count their second-choice votes in lieu of the now moot first-choice votes for Barkley. Using the above—hypothetical—numbers, the result of such an instant runoff would be:
1,499,327 votes for Norm Coleman (including 287,010 former Barkley voters)
1,363,124 votes for Al Franken (including 150,495 former Barkley voters)
Norm