Voting Restrictions

 

Snoopy For President

All the politicians, they swore he couldn't win
But Snoopy only shook his head and flashed his famous grin
He jumped into his faithful friend, the Sopwith Camel plane
And bounced around the countryside from Washington to Maine

You can try as hard as you can, but you are NEVER going to demonize Snoopy.

The United States has a first across the line, single representative per district, voting system. This means that there will generally be two parties according to Duverger’s Law. If one of the candidates receives a plurality of those voting, they will be elected. Thus in campaigning a viable winning strategy is to keep those who would vote for your opponent from voting. This means that the winner of the elections may not be a majority of all eligible voters (including those who were eligible but did not vote).

Whether the voters for one’s opponent are kept from voting by restrictions ( e.g. poll taxes, literacy tests, voter IDs, voting during working hours, restrictions on mail in voting, etc.) or by demonizing /throwing mud at, an opponent, does not matter. The important thing for a candidate is that they do not vote.

One way that has been proposed to deal with this is ranked choice voting. This is not an exotic system. A form of ranked choice voting is how national polls for the top college basketball or football team works. As proposed, a majority is required for elections. If a majority is not achieved, any votes for the last place candidate are eliminated and those votes are shifted to the next highest ranked candidate. ( I.e. if a candidate is eliminated, their second-place vote become first place votes for the remaining candidates.) Ranked choice voting requires that there be more than two candidates. An alternative is collegiate sporting polls where every vote is retained, but first place votes are scored more than second place votes, second place votes are scored more than third place votes, etc. The total score is tallied to determine the winner. But according to Duverger’s Law, if only two parties will nominate candidates, regardless of whether the traditional, or the sports poll method is chosen, ranked choice will not change the result.

If a ranked choice voting system exists, there is still the temptation to demonize other candidates so that they become a lower ranked choice of any voter.

Australia has a mandatory voting law, but it also has ranked choice voting and has a multiple representative per district voting system. While every voter in Australia will cast a ballot, candidates still have an incentive to demonize their opponents so that they appear lower as ranked choices on ballots.

Rather than promote ranked choice voting in the United States when there will typically only be two candidates and ranked choice voting will not change the result, or opposing voter restrictions, given only two candidates in most elections,  mandatory voting, and not opposing voter restrictions, could eliminate the incentives to demonize an opponent in an election.