Strategic Voting
One area of voting research that warrants extra attention is the concept of strategic voting (e.g., tactical voting or insincere voting). This refers to cases in which the voting system is set up in a manner that somehow incentivizes people to vote for a position they are actively against. Imagine voting for a candidate who isn’t your favorite during a general election because they are the most likely candidate to beat one you absolutely hate.
To say someone is voting against their interests can mean different things depending on how their interests are defined: For example, what if they vote for a candidate they believe they want, but whose proposed policies and actions would actually directly hurt them?
Some of the methodology used to determine whether an election can be “fair” includes:
- Utility criterion: Will the candidate who provides the highest aggregate utility to the voters win?
- Majority criterion: Will the candidate favored by the majority of voters win?
- Ranked majority criterion: Will the preferred option win relative to other options?
- Rated majority criterion: Will the option given a perfect rating by the majority win?
- Mutual majority criterion: If there is a subset of candidates preferred by voters, does that subset always win in races against candidates not in that set?
- Condorcet criterion: If a candidate beats every other candidate in pairwise comparisons, will they always win? (There is a separate criteria called the Condorcet loser criterion, which applies the same question to candidates who lose in pairwise comparisons.)
- Monotonicity criterion: Will ranking a candidate higher on a ballet ever hurt their chances of winning? Will ranking a candidate lower on a ballet ever help their chances of winning?
- Participation criterion: Is it possible to help your preferred candidate by not voting?
- Reversal Symmetry: Is it ever possible for the same candidate to have been elected if all the votes are reversed?
This list could be three or four times longer, but we think even this sampling will help you see how practically meaningless it is to get too far in the weeds with these sorts of questions. If you find this kind of stuff interesting, just mine Wikipedia for endless information. If this is the kind of thing you care enough to support, there are organizations like FairVote dedicated to pushing this “fairer” voting system.
Just to help you picture how criteria like those above can be used to analyze a voting system, let’s look at “score voting” in which scores are given to each candidate or issue and then added up. While it satisfies the monotonicity criterion, the participation criterion, and reversal symmetry, it does not satisfy the Condorcet criterion or majority criterion. Hopefully, through that quick breakdown, you can see why we don’t go into this topic in more detail.
This type of stuff might be useful to academics, but not to average people like us. Even when designing a governance structure, these factors are not really relevant unless we are creating a government whose core purpose is to carry out the exact and technically correct will of that governance’s stakeholders (which we have already explained is something almost no one wants except for political parties that expect to win more in that scenario).
Compelled Voting Systems
The manner in which people are motivated to vote impacts democracy just as much as the manner in which people are allowed to vote. From 2000 to 2020, compulsory voting was introduced in Bulgaria and Samoa. During the same period, it was repealed in Chile, the Dominican Republic, Fiji, Paraguay, and Cyprus.
Compulsory voting isn’t the only type of compelled voting system. In general, there are two broad models that can be used to think about compelled voting:
- How is the voting compelled:
- Sanctions for those who don’t vote: Voting is compelled through punishments for those who do not vote.
- Rewarded voting: Voting is rewarded through something other than the impact the vote itself has (typically through a financial reward or a tax write off).
- Who is compelled to vote:
- All potential voters must vote: This is the most common selection for compelled voting systems.
- All voters of a certain type must vote for the result to count: This can be seen in some company and nonprofit boards, where certain categories of voters must be present for a decision to be binding.
- Minimum required participation: These systems are rare but considering they existed in Athens, one of the first democracies, they are worth noting. In such a system, a minimum number of people must vote. If the minimum number do not vote, additional voters are recruited and punished for not being at the first vote. In Athens, slaves would use a freshly-painted rope to herd additional citizens into the voting location when voter turnout was insufficient. Those with a red stain on their robes were fined.
In some instances, these rules make a lot of sense. For example, when looking at small governing structures like home owners’ associations and student clubs, it is easy for the party in power to switch the date of a vote without notifying all potential voters and thus ensure the turnout is skewed in their favor. Through a compulsory voting system, this can be made much harder to do. For organizations in which such abuse is likely, a minimum participation rule can make sense.
In other instances, there are obvious negatives to doing this, such as random voting (essentially, when you force people to vote, a portion of them put literally zero thought into it and just vote randomly, which is something we can see in data from countries with mandatory voting).[[2]](#_ftn2) Although there are ways to address the hazard of random voting, the larger problem with compulsory voting is an increase in non-meaningful engagement with the electoral process.
There certainly are moral arguments for and against compulsory voting at the state level, such as the voting paradox in which poor people vote less frequently, or wealthy people functionally spend more to vote due to the value of their time, however such arguments don’t functionally matter. Why? Because rewarded voting almost exclusively benefits left-leaning politicians at the state level.[[3]](#_ftn3)
Compulsory voting will almost always be supported by those who support left-leaning positions and opposed by those who oppose them. At the state level, all compulsory voting does is shift policies slightly to the left and, for that reason, moral questions about it are largely irrelevant as the real question is always going to be: “Do we want more left-leaning policies?” A state could achieve the same functional outcome as compulsory voting at a much lower cost by just altering every vote a few percentage points to the left.