How to count votes
On New York's mayoral primary, stopping bad legislation, and why there's no perfect way to count ballots
With the New York City mayoral primary election just around the corner, it's interesting to watch how people respond to the incentives and triangulations that go into a method like ranked-choice voting. This is only the second time a ranked-choice ballot will be used in New York, so there's still a lot of fresh strategizing underway.
■ Any time something other than a conventional first-past-the-post, winner-take-all election gets underway, a predictable cadre of people get worked up about how this or that method of counting votes is the One True Way. They are right that there are shortcomings to whatever the incumbent system might have been; they are wrong to believe that theirs is ideal. The reality is that no method of vote-counting satisfies everyone completely.
■ That's the essence of the democratic deal: We enter it knowing that it's imperfect and that nothing is going to completely satisfy everyone. The key is to broadly distribute the dissatisfaction -- better that 100% of us get 60% of what we want than an outcome wherein 60% of the people get everything and the rest get nothing. Compromise is factored into the system by design.
■ There are both good and bad in alternate methods of vote-counting. But we shouldn't imagine that the "how" of vote counting is the only thing that matters. So does the "who" -- the basic allocation of votes.
■ We mostly decide representation by defined geographical spaces: Wards, precincts, Congressional districts and the like. But there would be nothing inherently undemocratic about divvying up representation by, say, occupation. If seats in a legislature were still allocated proportionally to population, but drawn by job types rather than geographical borders, outcomes would probably be different.
■ The outcomes of that different approach might be better or worse than what we get from allocating by geography. But if the representation were still truly proportional to population (with retirees voting for one set of seats, students another, service-sector workers in another, and so on), then the process would still be democratic in nature. Some outcomes would probably improve, some would probably become worse.
■ In theory, the more diverse the methods of allocating representation going into different legislative houses, the greater should be the ability of that legislative system to filter out really bad ideas.
■ For some of us, at least, that property would be appealing -- in the words of Calvin Coolidge, "It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones." Above all, though, knowing and acknowledging that democracy is designed to leave people less than fully satisfied -- that it really cannot work any other way -- is the first step towards avoiding the fantasy that any one way of counting (or allocating) votes is the only "right" way.
