The ‘Hot or Not’ Solution

In the history of U.S. elections, the fall of 2000 is notorious for the debacle that occurred in the country's attempt to elect a president that year. But if a compelling new book is to be heeded, an even more significant election development occurred in the month before America went to the polls that November: the launching of the "Hot or Not" Web site.

I'll explain. According to William Poundstone, 52, author of "Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair" (to be published early next year by Hill and Wang), George W. Bush reached the White House as a beneficiary of our reliance on a demonstrably flawed system of registering voter preferences, known as plurality voting. In this scheme the winner among multiple candidates running for a single office is the one who gets the most votes. On the surface this sounds pretty reasonable, but it turns out that with alarming frequency this can result in a victor who is the least favorite candidate of an actual majority of voters. The problem is the "spoiler," a third candidate who draws support from what otherwise would be the favorite of the electorate. (Often such spoilers are financially supported by those who despise that candidate's politics, utilizing an "any enemy of my enemy is my friend" strategy.)

A clear example of the spoiler problem came in 2000, when the combined vote for Al Gore and Ralph Nader—cast by people who presumably preferred either to the eventual victor—was significantly higher than Bush's vote. Poundstone analyzes previous campaigns and concludes, "There have been 45 presidential elections since 1828. In at least five, the race went to the second-most-popular candidate because of a spoiler. That's over an 11 percent rate of catastrophic failure. Were the plurality vote a car or an airliner, it would be recognized for what it is: a defective consumer product, unsafe at any speed."

In trying to figure out how we may improve our system, Poundstone discovers that it's not so easy to come up with a system that expresses the wishes of the electorate and is resistant to being gamed. Casting a glum shadow over the book is his account of how in 1948 Kenneth Arrow, an economist who would later win a Nobel Prize, threw down a mathematical gauntlet that seems to prove that no elections system could be devised without serious flaws. It is known as "the Impossibility Theorem."

It asserts that no matter what you come up with—schemes like our current plurality voting, schemes where you rank candidates in order, or schemes that match each candidate against another—a system will have vulnerabilities and problems that can produce a result that does not reflect the will of the people. Quite a bummer and, indeed, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem has done much to discourage serious efforts to improve what we have. (If the outcome is doomed, why bother?)

Nonetheless, Poundstone himself winds up casting an unequivocal ballot for one system that he's sure can help us choose our leaders in a better way. It's called range voting.