Participants 140
An election is a decision-making mechanism. In a democratic republic, we use elections to choose the representatives who will wield the fearsome power of government force over us citizens. It’s possible that there are better ways to make such decisions, but we use elections in order to keep the decision-making power dispersed among many people. It would obviously be undemocratic and undesirable to have this power concentrated in a few individuals (an oligarchy) or a single person (a dictator).
Definition: The primary and overriding purpose of any and every (public) election is to make the “best” choice of the candidates for the office being filled (with the caveat that decision-making power be kept “reasonably dispersed”).
The above definition may seem simplistic and unnecessary to state; that definitely is not the case. It is always important to have a clear and unequivocal goal firmly in mind as a “guiding star.” For example, much “propaganda” circulates to the effect that absolutely everybody should vote in elections. But almost certainly, achieving that goal would not facilitate making the best choices.
Of course, it is of critical importance to guarantee the right of all eligible citizens to vote, whether or not they wish to do so. And it is a responsibility of each citizen, not just to vote, but also to be informed about the issues and candidates so that their vote will contribute to making good choices. However, many citizens are not willing to accept and carry out that responsibility; they cannot and must not be forced to do so.
Some eligible citizens do not even bother to register to vote. Turnouts for general elections are in the 60% (of those who did register) range. For primary elections it typically is only in the 20% to 30% range. And of those who do vote, there is always some percentage of “uninformed” votes; these hinder rather than help making the “best” choices.
If there were a way to have only the well-informed, thoughtful voters cast ballots, the consistency of choosing the best candidate clearly could be improved. This is not a new idea and so-called “voter qualification tests” used to be employed in quite a few states, ostensibly to accomplish that. Sadly, such tests were blatantly abused to screen out minority voters. Consequently, the practice was essentially eliminated by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was a very good thing.
Still, there is nothing wrong with the basic idea; it was hijacked for nefarious purposes by misguided implementations and that is what was wrong. If there were a test that is both relevant and unquestionably fair, impartial and unbiased, its use would be beneficial. There are some simple ways to accomplish that, but the topic is outside the scope of this course.
An observation to be made here is that the caveat to have decision-making power kept “reasonably dispersed” is being met by a very small percentage of eligible citizens; perhaps dipping as low as 20% in races for major offices and considerably lower than that for down-ticket races. This is less than desirable, but is not a serious problem as long as two other requirements are solidly maintained: 1) the right of all eligible citizens to vote is guaranteed; and 2) the integrity of elections is so airtight that results can be implicitly trusted by everyone. There are many serious issues with election integrity, but that topic also is outside the scope of this course.
A voting method is the critical mechanism at the heart of an election which performs the function of gathering some specific information from each voter, then processing that data in some manner to select the “best” candidate(s) in each race. Hundreds of voting methods have been proposed and debated. To name just a few:
Plurality (sometimes called “First Past the Post” or FPTP);
IRV (Instant-Runoff Voting – the best-known of many “Ranked-Choice Voting” methods);
AV (Approval Voting);
Pairwise Comparison (sometimes called Condorcet);
Borda Count (which has many variants);
Score Voting (sometimes called Range Voting);
BAWV (Best/Alternate/Worst Voting);
AADV (Approve/Approve/Disapprove Voting).
Congratulations if you read the definition near the beginning of this lesson (The primary and overriding purpose of any and every election is to make the “best” choice of the candidates for the office being filled) and immediately thought, “Wait a minute. What does ‘best’ mean?” In fact, every time “best” has been used, it has appeared within quotation marks. The next lesson will state a definition of “best” and examine the ramifications of adopting that definition.
