 I'm Eric Sanders from the Center for Election Science, and I am very pleased to be here with our new Executive Director, Aaron Hamlin, in Washington, D.C., our nation's capital. How are you doing, Aaron? Very well. Thank you. Great. So, just before we get into the sort of subject of today's talk, I want to frame it by asking you this sort of big picture question. And I've had people asking me this many times, I've debated with people over it. Why is it so hard in the United States for third party and independent candidates to win seats in government? It seems like we have almost no third party or independent politicians, you know, making laws for us. Why are we stuck with this sort of de facto two-party system? I think probably the easiest way to explain that, or way to point to that effect, is Diverger's Law. And Diverger's Law just says that the voting method plays a prime role in determining how many parties we're going to wind up with. Okay, so Diverger's Law, so who is Diverger, is this a person? Yeah, he was a French scholar as well as attorney, Maurice Diverger, and he wrote a book in 1951 called Local Parties, which is where he first described his law. So what is the law? Is this a law on the books in France or in the United States somewhere? It was an academic work, and it's really, he's pointing out a tendency of certain factors that are used to predict how many parties the system is going to wind up with. And what are these factors that he says lead to the number of parties in a government? Sure, there are two factors. The first factor is the threshold necessary to be able to have a third party or independent get elected. And by definition, when we're using a single-winner method, you're going to need a high threshold. And so any time you elect a single office position, it's going to be pretty difficult to get past that first factor. And the threshold meaning basically you need more votes than anyone else? Right, right, right. Okay, I'm going to move to the second. Good. And so there's said that the second factor, the second factor is the sort of more of a psychological factor. So that feeling of being able to vote for whom you want regardless of whether or not you perceive them as being viable. And so we have a two-party system in some cases because people don't vote for candidates they genuinely want for some reason? Right, right. When we use plurality, plurality makes it so that if you want a chance at determining who the winner is, well, you're going to start by looking at who's in the lead. It doesn't make sense if you want to determine the winner and you're seeing someone that has one or two percent support, I mean that candidate is unlikely to win. And plurality just to be clear is single-choice voting where you're legally forced to pick only one candidate, right? Right, right. So that's the bare minimum of information that you can provide. That's our current method. And you're saying that voters, if not many voters, often don't vote for the candidate they might most want because they think they might be wasting their vote if they do? Yeah, absolutely. And if voters had a way to be able to give a more accurate response, you would get a much more accurate reflection of third parties and independence as far as what their support is. Okay, so that makes sense to me, but so what are some ways that third parties and independent candidates could, you know, get more support? I mean, are we stuck in a two-party system? Did Diverger say that there are some solutions? Well, Diverger said that plurality will tend towards a two-party system, but he also said that using proportional methods will tend towards multi-party systems. And do other countries use proportional methods? Does anyone use that? Yes, pretty much most places besides us. Okay, but we are special, so that's totally fine. So because we're special in the United States, we don't want multi-winner elections, we want single-winner elections. So let's say we're going to keep our, you know, laws the same. We're only going to pick one winner in all our elections for House and Senate and President and all these things. Is there any other way other than proportional voting methods that we could, you know, help third parties and independent candidates have a more accurate level of representation? Sure, sure, and sticking with the framework of Diverger's law, he had this two factors, that first factor dealing with the high threshold. Single-winner method, it can't get past that. There's no way around it. But you can't get around that second factor, that psychological barrier that says whether or not you can choose an independent third-party candidate that's sort of up and coming. So if you want to be able to use a single-winner method and get past Diverger's law to allow for multiple parties, you have to hit that second factor. So what can we do? What's the American solution for overcoming that second factor? Well, if you want to get past a second factor, you have to use a while within single-winner framework, you have to use a voting method that permits you to choose your honest favorite every single time. And so, but fortunately, while that's a very difficult criterion to achieve, there are methods that do pass that. And I'm at the edge of my seat. I think you're going to tell me, can you give me an example? The easiest example of a voting method that passes this, that is, lets you choose your honest favorite no matter what, would be approval voting. OK, and approval voting, I've been sometimes saying multi-choice voting. It lets you select as many candidates on the ballot as you like, and then the candidate with the most approvals or selections wins, right? Right, right, yeah. It's doing the same thing as plurality only when you choose multiple candidates. They don't throw your vote away, they count it, just like normal. Well, that sounds nice, because those over-vote laws drive me crazy. Sometimes I want to vote for more than one candidate. But so that makes sense from the voter's perspective. You know, great, yay, I get to express myself more fully. I get to say all the candidates I like. But how does that help third-party and independent candidates have a chance of winning? Well, when voters are allowed to choose as many candidates as you want, those third-parties and independents get a much more accurate reflection of support. Because whereas before on your plurality, a voter will look at them and say, well, I like this candidate's ideas, but I don't want to throw my vote away. I want to have a say in who wins. Or even worse, they will see among the front-runners and not even bother to look at other ideas, because where's the motivation to do it? Right, why am I going to waste my time going to your rallies or reading your campaign literature if I don't even think you have a chance of winning anyway? Right, right. Whereas if you use a method that permits you to choose your honest favorite, then now you're in a system where not only can you choose your honest favorite and get them a more accurate reflection of support, but you're also incentivized to learn about new ideas. But it seems to me one of the major problems here is this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy we have of the front-runner and the front-runners being the only candidates that are worth paying attention to by definition, because why waste your time even considering voting for someone who can't win? So did Divergent talk about how we could undo that sort of vicious cycle? Well, that goes right back into the second factor. So if you feel that you're going to be throwing away your vote, then this can have no opportunity to be able to grow. Well, when I look at polls, I see maybe the independent candidate I like has 10% support. So I'm not going to vote for that person and throw my vote away. Right, right. And the reason for that and 10% for a third party independent would, under priority, is actually pretty high. Yeah, it's probably more like two, which is a little bit disturbing, because it's not like people disagree with all third party independent ideas. It's just that when you have a poll that is run in the same way that we do our voting method with our elections now, and you're just not going to get a very accurate reflection. Whereas if you use- Right, because the poll, go ahead. Whereas if you use another method, you're going to match that with the polling method. So I can make- Right, because our current polls say, who are you planning to vote for in the upcoming election? That assumes that you're only permitted to vote for one candidate, right? But are you suggesting that if we use polls under the approval voting framework and ask people who are the candidates you plan to vote for, we would have a much more accurate sense leading up to the election of overall support for the candidates? And it would sort of eliminate that frontrunner self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Yeah, you're right in that if you're using approval voting for your voting method, it makes sense that you're going to use approval voting for your polling method as well. A poll is designed to be a predictor for what the election's outcome is going to be. And so you're going to need to match the measurement. So if you're using priority voting in your election, that measurement needs to be the same when you're using polling. And same thing for approval voting. And with approval voting, you're still using that feedback with polling information. So it's still going to determine who you're going to be looking at among the frontrunners. But one thing that's completely different is it doesn't matter to you at all what the polls are for when you're choosing among your favorite candidates. So if you really like a candidate, it's no bearing how much support they have. You choose that candidate for what their idea is, and there's no distance in them to do so. Right, because you're saying that there's no negative repercussions for you as a voter ever for voting for or supporting all the candidates that you like on the ballot, unlike now, right? Right, under approval voting, if you have an honest favorite, you can always choose that honest favorite, no matter what. And would you say that if we switched to approval voting, say here in New York State, would independent and third party candidates maybe start getting more media exposure, have access to debates? I mean, would it completely change the whole election cycle? It would. It would have an avalanche of secondary effects. Right now, when you have debates, the debate commissions, they have to use, suppose, an objective criteria in order to decide who gets in those debates. And the big criterion that they often go with is polling information. I see. Yeah. So if you're using plurality polling, you're getting a pittance of support. Whereas if you're using approval polling, then you get a more accurate reflection. And if you're polling 20%, 30%, they can't kick you out of the debates anymore. And so, importantly, your ideas are represented. And you have a more competition with discussion and ideas, which, I mean, if you're talking about democracy, you need that. Well, that sounds great. I mean, because I have a lot of conversations with people and they're fed up with the two-party system. I'm just wondering, other than the voting method, are there some other reasons why it's hard for third party candidates and independent candidates to really have a fair chance? Sure. There are other factors. And de Verger recognized this. Perhaps it's a little bit of a misnomer by calling it a law, perhaps more of a tendency. But this wasn't something de Verger was ignorant to. So he recognized other factors, such as access issues, whether there is a good third party, whether people liked the ideas of a third party. But also, there are other academics that looked at, for instance, the issues that were important to the electorate and how many conventions those issues had. So if there were two big points or sides of an issue, then it would lead more towards two parties. But if there are three or more sides to a big issue that were really prominent, then it would lead more towards three or more parties. That makes sense, because it gives candidates a chance to differentiate themselves and splinter into various competitive factions, right? Right, right, right. But if you had to distill de Verger's law, and if you had some advice for, say, a Green Party supporter or a Libertarian Party supporter, or someone came to you and said, what can we do? What's the real way to help third party independent candidates? Would you say the voting method is the real place to start? That's the fundamental problem here? I would agree. De Verger was more accurate in saying that there are other factors involved. But he really hit the nail on the head by appreciating the voting method itself as the overall most important actor here. Wow, well, that's kind of mind-blowing, because I've had many conversations with people, and there's all the other topics you talked about are brought up, but rarely do I hear people say, the voting method, the fact that we're forced to pick one candidate is the fundamental reason why we have a two-party system. That sounds so simple, but I just don't hear it that often, so I'm glad that you sort of elucidated that point. Yeah, I mean, we're talking about the very way that we provide information for votes to be calculated to determine a result. So if you're hindered in being able to provide that information in the first place, it's hard to imagine a situation that's gonna be able to come up with an accurate reflection of what the electorate wants. Right, right, and we look at all these sort of trickle-down problems and complain about those, but we don't realize the underlying problem is the voting method itself, huh? Yeah, you're really looking at it at the source when you're looking at the voting method. I like that, I like getting at the source. Well, that's good stuff, and who knows? Maybe one day in our lifetimes we'll pick our president using approval voting. That sounds awesome. Maybe a third-party candidate, you never know. Thanks a lot, Aaron, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Eric.