So I Heard Your Candidate Lost

Nov 11, 2024

The Endless Cycle of Loss and Urgency

I’m so sorry to hear that. I heard last time their candidate lost, too. I know they were upset then. They looked, well, a lot like you do now.

That last presidential election was the most important—ever. Absolutely it was. The same as this election. The next election? Why yes, that will be the most important, too. Of course, it will.

If we step back, just for a moment, we have to admit how strange this election was. For a while, we had the two oldest major-party candidates ever running. For context, imagine if the two most qualified people for U.S. president just happened to be about as old as the typical U.S. life expectancy. That would be weird, right? And one of them kept running. And that’s the one who won!

The Democratic Party also changed its candidate three and a half months before the election. I’m trying to remember. Did they support a competitive primary where voters could nominate their candidate? No, right? I didn’t think so.

The Republicans did run a competitive primary, however. And Trump won. He’s the most recent president to have a nonsequential term after losing since Grover Cleveland almost 150 years ago. Cleveland at least won the national popular vote though when he lost his re-election bid. Trump won despite multiple impeachments, felony counts, and an actual felony conviction for falsifying business records. That’s just so far.

This time, Trump won the Electoral College and popular vote. He did not win due to vote splitting from third parties or independents running. He did not win merely because of the Electoral College. The current tally has him at greater than 50% of the vote, an absolute majority, which means in that snapshot in time, he would have conceivably won under any voting method. He may fall a small fraction below 50%, but that shouldn’t change the conclusions.

Both Major Parties Guard the Fort

This isn’t to say other candidates wouldn’t have run if they thought it was feasible. But our system, as RFK and Cornell West can most recently attest, does not make it feasible. Both have had to battle Democrats every step of the way to get on the ballot.

In my own state of Pennsylvania, for instance, I saw Cornell West missing from my ballot. This was not accidental. Those aligned with the major parties, particularly the Democratic Party, are incentivized to knock candidates off the ballot so that they don’t split the vote with their preferred candidate. I noticed that there were only two choices for my district’s U.S. House seat as well. Ballot access is weaponized far beyond just the presidential office.

Is that how we want to describe our democracy? Is that what a functioning system looks like in an open political marketplace?

When we see other countries stifle competition by jailing or otherwise sidelining competing candidates, we call foul. Yet, we do this all the time. In particular, those from the Democratic Party do this a lot. Although Republicans have been helpful in co-signing the statutes the Democrats weaponize. And they haven’t shied away from harassing Libertarian candidates.

Running for president as an independent or third-party candidate in the U.S. is extraordinarily expensive. In a number of states, getting on the ballot can cost over $100,000 in legal fees alone, often due to the sheer volume of paperwork and signature challenges in court. Ross Perot, for example, spent roughly $40M in today's dollars to get on the ballot. Perot is the last independent to get on every state ballot.

Let me try to predict what some of you are thinking. Perhaps it goes something like, sure, it’s probably bad that we don’t let third parties or independents get a fair shake. But look at who runs! They are obviously bad.

Sure, lots of folks made fun of the worm that found its way into Robert Kennedy Jr.’s head. Maybe you liked him, or maybe you thought he was out there. But we can’t look at RFK’s run and say that because we didn’t like him we should make his ballot access harder. RFK had resources and at times polled over 15%, the first to do so since Perot in 1992. He also had higher net favorability scores than the other candidates running.

If it’s okay to make access to our elections hard for RFK (including blocking him from the debates, which both parties were happy to do), then there’s little hope in access for the next candidate. And perhaps that’s the candidate you do like. The way we should err on ballot access is clear. It’s much easier to ignore candidates we’d rather not vote for than it is to vote for a candidate who’s not on the ballot in the first place.

There was also some question as to whether RFK was taking more votes from the Democrat or Republican candidate. That’s actually a good signal—again, regardless of what you think about RFK. It suggests he was getting support from the center, which is where ideal candidates live. If we say again that RFK was crazy in his ideas, we should remember that major parties aren’t immune to craziness either. You may recall the now president-elect claiming that we should build a wall completely across the Mexico border and have Mexico pay for it. We’ve yet to see such a wall, and Mexico has yet to send a check for what has been built. Trump will also have to explain what he’ll do regarding the 60% tariff on Chinese imports given the enormous impact on our economy.

Of course, under our choose-one voting method, RFK didn’t stand a chance. In the end, perhaps he brought more votes to Trump, not as a matter of vote splitting with Harris but from his endorsement of Trump. While he offered to talk with the Democrats, they ultimately shamed him for offering in the first place.

Lis Smith, an advisor to the Democratic National Committee, said, "No one has any intention of negotiating with a MAGA-funded fringe candidate who has sought out a job with Donald Trump in exchange for an endorsement."

Between the Democratic Party shaming him and forcing him to exhaust his legal budget just to get on the ballot, it’s perhaps not surprising that he would make the same endorsement offer to Trump.

Again, I'm not saying RFK was the answer here. But if we become okay with our system preventing him from running on an even playing field, then we’ll have built in our own failure. We will have poisoned the well for future strong candidates who are willing to challenge the two parties.

The Problem with Instant Runoff Voting (IRV)

There are other voting methods than our choose-one method. When we think of alternative methods, the first that comes to mind is typically instant runoff voting—coined ranked-choice voting by its advocates. This is the one where you rank each candidate and each candidate is sequentially eliminated according to how few first-choice votes they have. Those candidates’ next-choice rankings then go to the other candidates until someone has more than half of whatever active votes remain.

On 2024’s election day, instant runoff voting was used in Maine, Alaska, and numerous other cities. How much did it help third parties? Not much at all.

In Maine, no third party got over 2% (being generous in how Stein will get votes in the next rounds). In Alaska (again being generous in how votes will transfer), no third party or independent got greater than 3%. Despite the way IRV advocates (and bizarrely third parties) clamor about the benefits of IRV to alternate voices, these are not transformational numbers.

Some voters may have grown skeptical to the many claims IRV advocates have made. Statewide ballot initiatives for IRV failed in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon. There was a quasi-IRV loss in Arizona as there was a carve out for IRV in its majority requirement proposal. The loss margins ranged from 8 percentage points to a tear-gushing 40. Alaska, as of this writing, appears as if it will repeal IRV.

A statewide ban for IRV also passed in Missouri. Five other states already banned IRV earlier this year: Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. These states join existing IRV bans from Montana, Idaho, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Florida. That’s a fifth of all states that now ban IRV, in case you were counting.

The token win for IRV this cycle was in Washington D.C., where it passed by a large margin. A few other cities also voted to begin using IRV.

These losses and token wins all came with a heavy price tag. IRV advocates spent over $60 million trying to pass their initiatives despite only having passed in D.C. and a few cities. It’s actually over $70M if you count Arizona’s carve-out for IRV. Add another $22M if you count the indirect path attempted by including a "majority" requirement in Montana. In contrast, those opposed to all these IRV initiatives collectively spent less than $4M. To add even additional costs, Alaska IRV advocates spent nearly $15M to protect the measure they narrowly passed the last election cycle. They outspent the repeal effort nearly 30 times over. And it’s looking like IRV advocates may still lose [Edit: Advocates fended off the repeal measure by a margin of 0.2%]. That is an enormous amount of lost money by any calculation.

The kind of voting method we really want is the kind that prefers candidates in the middle. That’s where we can find the candidate who appeals to the widest breadth of voters. And although we’ve seen few examples of it, that can also be an independent or third-party candidate.

We’ve seen elections by IRV explicitly exclude this candidate. Examples include Alaska in 2022 and Burlington, VT in 2009. While there were many elections that went along fine, it’s important to note that most elections aren’t interesting. It’s the close elections where the voting method matters. These would also be the elections where a third option comes from the middle. Unfortunately, those are also the elections where IRV struggles the most.

IRV’s greatest strength is in reallocating votes from third parties back to the major parties. This does result in technically higher support for third parties and independents, but this support increase is not meaningful. Also, any other voting method, including plurality with runoffs, addresses this simplistic spoiler effect with ease.

Complexity Be Damned: STAR Voting

Another method, STAR voting, made it to the ballot this cycle. STAR voting has voters score candidates and then uses the scores to simulate a runoff between the top two rated candidates. STAR voting lost its local ballot initiative in Oakridge, Oregon by 8 points. This was better than its earlier loss in Eugene by 28 points. All its initiatives from previous years lost as well. While they lost previous campaigns without opposition, the Oakridge campaign was made harder by IRV advocates. In the voter guide, one IRV lobbyist made nonsensical claims that attacked STAR voting.

It’s worth stating that I think, in a technical sense, STAR voting is a fine method, both in capturing candidate support and winner selection. But I also think it’s needlessly complicated for its performance, particularly when there’s range (also known as score voting) as an alternative. Range voting is when you score candidates on a scale and the highest scored candidate wins. While STAR voting is designed to address hypothetical strategic voting from range voting, research initially suggests people may not be as strategic as we may suspect. There’s also approval voting which is far easier still. Voters merely pick all the candidates they approve of. That is to say, these STAR voting advocates may have skipped multiple orders of magnitude in complexity than necessary for a nominal increase in performance.

Of course, IRV is more complicated still and that has had nine-figure funding over the years. But if STAR voting advocates want to make the case that their method is worth the complexity, they have to overcome their consistent loss record. Or, they can just move to simpler approaches. They can always come back to STAR voting should cardinal methods like range and approval voting saturate the U.S. election landscape.

Approval Voting: The Rocky of Voting Methods

So what do we do given all these losses? My recommendation is the simple alternative of approval voting. It’s been fine in practice, though we always want more data as time goes on. Empirically, we know it does a better job capturing candidate support than IRV and plurality voting. It’s also the simplest alternative voting method that will allow candidates from the middle to get their true support and be competitive in a country where two parties have long been the norm.

But approval voting was suspiciously absent from the ballot initiative run this year. Unfortunately, the organization I built, The Center for Election Science, has taken a hard turn in its strategy and moved away from traditional ballot initiatives. This is perhaps due to a combination of shell shock from a lost campaign in 2022 and naive expectations about what real reform necessitates. While the STAR voting team may have had issues with IRV advocates, that was minimal compared to what IRV advocates did during approval voting’s last ballot initiative effort in Seattle.

Seattle is guided by the state law that says there must be a top-two runoff from a jungle-style primary. This was a perfect opportunity for approval voting as it would address the vote splitting in the open primary round before going onto the required runoff in the general. It’s the same setup St. Louis used for approval voting. A perfect fit.

Having personally seen early polling that looked just like polling I saw in Fargo and St. Louis when they passed, Seattle looked like it was going to be straightforward. It just required a reasonable campaign.

IRV advocates had been in Seattle for at least a decade with virtually no success to show for it. They couldn’t get any exceptions for IRV through lobbying the state. They needed an exception because IRV makes no sense as a way to iteratively eliminate candidates to determine the final two. This is what the state would have required. IRV would have been forced to do a simulated iterative runoff with a literal runoff. Again, this made no sense at all, which is why IRV advocates never pushed for IRV in Seattle.

But all that changed when IRV advocates lobbied the city council to get themselves added to the ballot. IRV advocates were happy to have a nonsense iteration of IRV if it meant no other voting method got traction in the country. This was despite approval voting advocates talking with IRV advocates first. The Seattle City Council, perhaps eager to complicate the ballot and have any reform lose, was happy to oblige IRV advocates. This IRV addition meant those advocates didn’t have to take on any of the significant ballot access costs that approval voting advocates did to get on the ballot.

If the city council was hoping for a more complicated ballot, they got their wish. The ballot changed into a two-part question for voters:

1. Do you want a reform? (Yes/ No)

2. Which reform do you want? (approval voting/ IRV)

Both advocate groups had to get voters to answer question 1 in the affirmative regardless of whether they wanted the other reform.

IRV advocates leveraged their ties in the liberal stronghold of Seattle. IRV has long since been more associated with progressive-leaning circles. Because of the complexity of IRV’s downfalls, regular progressive citizens were happy to just take advocates' word on whatever claims they made—no matter how impossible voting method experts knew those claims to be.

IRV advocates got voters to prefer IRV 3-to-1 on question 2. While approval voting would have won on its own, it didn’t stand the same chance in the face of the more familiar IRV when every progressive group was claiming it was the progressive reform to make. It didn’t help that IRV groups were claiming, along with progressive media outlets like Sightline, that approval voting would hurt minorities. For added context, approval voting had just been used to elect the first Black woman candidate in St. Louis. IRV advocates simply did not care.

Then there was the first part of the ballot question: whether voters wanted a reform. For the initiative to pass, it would have to pass on this question. Both IRV advocates and approval voting advocates had to say yes to this question to get their reform passed. Question 1 did pass, by 1%. Of course, this passage was only because of the approval voting supporters who had to vote Yes on question 1 to get their reform to pass. IRV would not have passed otherwise. And, of course, without approval voting advocates IRV wouldn’t have even been on the ballot.

IRV ballot initiatives failed in the two other places it ran in Washington in 2022. The ballot initiative IRV advocates intercepted from approval voting was the only one it won. IRV campaigns fail all the time, as we saw in this 2024 cycle.

IRV advocates’ plan worked. They kept approval voting from passing in another city, which would have been huge for approval voting and the people of Seattle. Also, IRV advocates frightened the other people in the organization I built so much that they backstepped from ballot initiatives altogether (at least as far as I’ve seen).

The Center for Election Science withdrew so much that they’ve since chosen to ignore a petition from its founding and past board members (including myself who grew the organization for a decade), major donors, and every one of its advisors. All of us urged them to support another ballot initiative. They refused. And so in 2024 we saw the first ballot initiative election cycle since prior to 2018 where approval voting failed to get on even a single ballot initiative in the country. Given this directional change, it’s perhaps not surprising that some of their largest donors have left.

For all the issues with IRV and the questionable tactics we’ve seen their organizations employ, they at least keep looking forward:

“Changing the status quo is never easy. Entrenched interests – including several state parties and an increasingly well-organized national opposition – pushed back hard on this year’s statewide ballot measures. But make no mistake: The future remains bright for ranked choice voting.” - Meredith Sumpter, President and CEO of FairVote

While IRV is clearly not the right direction, this is the right attitude. And I don’t see that attitude coming from The Center for Election Science. This is why (among numerous other reasons) I no longer recommend that organization. This is despite the decade of work I put into growing the organization from scratch. 

Is Your Candidate Out There?

When I write, I enjoy making fun titles like, “So I Heard Your Candidate Lost.” Although it doesn’t have the same ring to it, a more accurate title would have been, “So I Heard Your Candidate Never Ran.”

I love voting methods as much as the next person. Okay, probably much more than the next person. But we can’t forget that the effects of a voting method go beyond winner selection. When a voting method better captures support and avoids odd outcomes, it encourages people to run. When we have complex systems like elections and we want to change how people within that system behave, the only way to do that is to change the rules of the system. Approval voting is that rule change. Let voters pick all the candidates they want. No ranking. Most votes wins.

We cannot have a healthy democracy in a system where major parties are incentivized to knock candidates off the ballot and have the whole country shame those who dare run or vote for those candidates. If this is what we work with, we will fail forever.

We also can’t trust them to run candidates who represent us. They do not hesitate to run historically unpopular candidates. Both parties’ candidates were also so old that all their televisions as a kid were in black and white and commercial computers weren’t even a thing. They came from a time when we hadn’t yet agreed on as a country whether we should segregate people based on race or whether we should allow women into certain higher education programs or even run in a marathon.

Approval voting is a rule change that is both simple and at least opens the door, if not ushers us in, for the kind of system we need for strong candidates to run and survive. We cannot expect our current choose-one method—or IRV—to encourage or even permit these candidates to run. And we certainly cannot expect them to win.

How do we create a system that incentivizes candidates who actually represent us and look to our interests? Where they can actually win?

We have to support efforts for approval voting through the only way it's ever found success—through ballot initiatives. This is the same approach IRV advocates did through their initial phase. They were right on that front. We cannot give up. As we’ve seen, the stakes will only get perpetually higher.

Show Me Integrity: Leading the Charge for Reform

Fortunately, there is an alternative route for approval voting: Show Me Integrity. Show Me Integrity has a history of successful ballot initiatives, including one on approval voting in St. Louis, the largest city to use the method. They also have a focused mentality that doesn’t give up at the first sign of opposition. That’s why Show Me Integrity is the organization I’m supporting to move approval voting forward. (As a note, while I’m a fellow for Show Me Integrity and fundraise for them. I’m also writing this essay on my own behalf.)

Giving to Show Me Integrity, and through their co-initiative Respect Voters Coalition, is frankly the best way to move towards a functional government. It is the only organization I see that has the capacity and focus to run successful ballot initiatives for approval voting. If you’d like to make a larger donation or know someone who’d like to consider such a donation, please feel free to reach out to me. As an attorney and someone who has worked in the nonprofit sector for over a decade, I can help you with any of your questions. Yes, I do fundraise for this organization. And yes, I am also particular about who I fundraise for.

Is the money even out there though for these initiatives? Of course it is. IRV groups have spent well into the 9-figures on campaigns over the years. Their spending on their organizations and campaigns this year alone is into the 9-figure mark. Individuals are also ready to spend enormous amounts on candidates with questionable results. Major parties spent over $15 billion this year on their presidential candidates. We’re not even talking about what was spent on U.S. Senate and House seats. And we’re not talking about governor races or any state positions. That’s its own enormous number.

The money is there. We just have to have that money address real systemic improvement rather than whatever nightmare we’ve been convinced is in front of us if the other party wins.

Invisible Democracy: Shining Light On the Issues

Another obstacle is getting information out there on voting methods. As far as complexity goes, it’s one of the more complex reforms out there. While the reforms themselves, like approval voting, aren’t always complex on their face, understanding why they’re good (particularly relative to other options) can be complex.

As someone who has both contributed peer-reviewed research on voting theory and worked in the trenches of reform for over a decade, I’ve seen every which side. That’s why I’m writing a book on the issue: Invisible Democracy. To make this book both accessible and tell a story that’s not just designed to sell copies for the publisher, I’ve chosen to self-publish.

While this will be my first book, I have written countless articles on voting methods and other technical areas. I’m also well over 65,000 words in on this project. The book covers our current system and its effects, approaches to understanding voting methods, how to pick a good method, and the path forward. There are also many stories about broken elections and the terrible consequences that result.

I have a writing coach, a writing advisor, and additional help. I will need editors, marketers, advertising, and additional help for this book to be successful. Fortunately, if this is a project you’re interested in, you’ll have company with other supporters. Also, I have a credits section for those providing larger amounts of support. I’d be delighted to add you to the list of others who have made significant financial contributions to this project. Again, please reach out.

Creating Systemic Change for the Future

Tough problems unfortunately do not get better on their own. They operate in a system. To expect different outcomes, we have to change the rules within that system. It’s not an accident that voting methods are often called “voting rules.”

Remember, this isn’t just about your candidate in a system where your candidate probably isn’t that great anyway. This isn’t about one election. And it’s not about just making sure your candidate wins. That’s shortsighted thinking, and we can no longer afford to be so mindless.

This is about changing a system so that we can functionally address our society’s problems. Not just for the people of today but tomorrow as well.

Contact me to learn more about how you can make an impact.