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Voting Preferences
Jun. 18th, 2012 10:49 pmWe all like the narrative of the popular uprising toppling the evil dictator; dealing with the political vacuum that results is a far less popular theme. Case in point, Egypt’s elections. Personally, I’m less concerned with who ends up winning than whether the military ever plans on giving any meaningful power to the elected government. Still, it is a little disheartening to see the Egyptian revolution end in a contest between an old regime loyalist and a religious hardliner.
One thing that has struck me is the reason it’s come down to these two choices – the lack of unity among the liberal/secular/revolutionary block, who failed to support a single candidate for president and whose votes ended up divided between half a dozen candidates. It occurred to me that this wouldn’t have happened in Australia – our instant run-off system eliminates candidates one by one, rather than eliminating everyone but the top two. In an Australian system, the smaller parties would have been able to form alliances among themselves, and could well have ended up with enough combined support for one of their candidates to take a majority of the vote. Even if the candidates couldn’t have come to an agreement, the voters still would be more likely to direct preferences towards other liberal candidates rather than towards the hardliners and conservative candidates.
To my knowledge, instant run-off voting is only used at a national level in Australia and New Guinea. I can understand it not being a perfect choice for new democracies. It is more complicated – Australian elections have a much higher than normal rate of invalid ballots being cast – and the added complexity of interpreting the ballots could be a problem in close elections or cases of electoral fraud. Still, it does solve some of the problems of elections with large numbers of candidates, and would eliminate problems such as Egypt, where large but poorly organised factions can feel excluded entirely from the final choice. It’s a shame the system hasn’t caught on more.
One thing that has struck me is the reason it’s come down to these two choices – the lack of unity among the liberal/secular/revolutionary block, who failed to support a single candidate for president and whose votes ended up divided between half a dozen candidates. It occurred to me that this wouldn’t have happened in Australia – our instant run-off system eliminates candidates one by one, rather than eliminating everyone but the top two. In an Australian system, the smaller parties would have been able to form alliances among themselves, and could well have ended up with enough combined support for one of their candidates to take a majority of the vote. Even if the candidates couldn’t have come to an agreement, the voters still would be more likely to direct preferences towards other liberal candidates rather than towards the hardliners and conservative candidates.
To my knowledge, instant run-off voting is only used at a national level in Australia and New Guinea. I can understand it not being a perfect choice for new democracies. It is more complicated – Australian elections have a much higher than normal rate of invalid ballots being cast – and the added complexity of interpreting the ballots could be a problem in close elections or cases of electoral fraud. Still, it does solve some of the problems of elections with large numbers of candidates, and would eliminate problems such as Egypt, where large but poorly organised factions can feel excluded entirely from the final choice. It’s a shame the system hasn’t caught on more.