 Hey everyone, I'm Eric Sanders from the Center for Election Science here in New York City and I'm honored to be joined by our Executive Director, Aaron Hamlin, in lovely Washington, D.C. How you doing, Aaron? Doing great, Eric. All right, so we're very fortunate to have the opportunity to talk about a very, very cool sort of voting theory 101 topic that maybe doesn't get enough airplay. And the idea is vote splitting. So what do we mean when we say that X and Y candidates split the votes or that vote splitting occurred in an election? Sure, sure. Vote splitting is a phenomenon that is pretty inherent to our vote for one method, plurality. So when there are a number of candidates that are similar in their platform, you under our current voting method, you can't support all these candidates at once. So as a consequence, that support for that platform is divided by the number of candidates. That makes sense. That actually makes a lot of sense. But I mean, is this a common phenomenon? Yes, it happens in general elections and it's inevitable in primaries where candidates are more likely to be similar. So anytime you have similar candidates that are running and they're running against another candidate or candidates that have another platform, you're going to have vote splitting when you're using plurality. So I mean, this makes sense to me that it happens, but let's be honest, why should I care? Why is this a problem? But it's a problem if you want a particular ideology to have an accurate reflection of support. Okay, so for example, in a primary where, let's say there are four candidates running for an office, three of them are relatively moderate, sort of on the same page, very similar platforms, and one of them, sort of a more extremist, maybe 25% of the voters love him, the other 75% hate him, or let's say 30%, so the math works out. Are you saying that that candidate, that fourth candidate with only 30% support could actually win that primary? Yeah, I mean if you have, there's other three candidates and they have their support divided by three, then it doesn't matter how much support they had initially, I mean, so long it's divided so that that other candidate is able to get ahead of them. Wow, okay, I think that makes sense. And maybe this is a good moment to transition to a related topic called the spoiler effect. So what's the relationship, you know, we hear a lot in elections, someone's called the spoiler or don't be a spoiler, you know, don't run. What does this mean and how is it connected to vote splitting? A spoiler effect, well a spoiler refers to a particular, it's a term that refers to a particular candidate that changes the outcome of the election. That candidate in themselves won't be able to win, but because of them entering the race, they make it so that the candidate that would have won loses. Okay, and of course I'm thinking of the famous Ralph Nader Al Gore example where, you know, it's pretty obvious that thousands and thousands of Gore voters, I'm sorry, Nader voters would have likely voted for Gore if Nader hadn't been in the race. Is that fair to say? Well there's some talk about whether those Nader voters would have voted at all. But surely they had, they'd been out there and been willing to vote. Nader's platform has much more similarity with that in Gore than that of Bush in that election. Okay, so I think I understand, but I mean this doesn't have to be a problem, it seems to me that like in 2004 there was a major push for Ralph Nader not to run. So as long as spoilers don't run, then there won't be the spoiler effect. Am I missing something? Well that is a common solution. That is pushing a candidate not to run. For instance in 2004, both Bill Maher and Michael Maher were big fans of Nader from 2000, but in 2004 they joined a lot of other people in pushing him not to run. Actually on Bill Maher's show, both of them literally got down on their knees and begged Nader not to run. What do you think that says? I mean are they misunderstanding something? It seems like that would be sort of the logical conclusion which is look I like Gore better than Bush in this case. I like Nader a lot too, but I don't want to take votes away from Gore and do anything to allow Bush to win. So it seems like the only solution is to try to coerce Nader not to run. I mean is there some alternative that I'm not thinking of? Their behavior was rational. They heavily preferred Gore to Bush in that scenario even though they actually liked Nader more than Gore, but they saw Nader as not being able to win and so they wanted the best outcome. But pushing people not to run is not the only solution and it's a good thing because good democracy is about having competition. So having an answer that means less competition is likely not a very good answer. Okay, so let's say we like competition but we still don't want spoilers. What can we do? What can we support? We have to look at the cause. The cause is the way that we're expressing ourselves to vote which is choosing one candidate and that's what's causing us to split our votes because we can't choose all the candidates that resemble that are supporting a particular platform. So if we want to be able to address this we have to avoid that splitting up so we need a voting method such as approval voting for example would do it which would allow you to choose all the candidates that represent a platform that you're interested in. That way you're not dividing yourself. Okay, that makes sense and I'm trying to think of any downside to that. So you're saying that by being able to support multiple candidates who share similar views or a similar platform at the end of an election we're going to have an accurate picture of what the voters support for certain ideologies or views are and that we currently don't have an accurate picture of the will of the people so to speak. The support for a particular platform is going to be much more accurate under a voting method that allows you to be more expressive. For one you're providing more information and on top of that information being provided approval voting counts everything. So just to summarize here you're saying that because of vote splitting is our single choice plurality voting method is that fair to say? Totally fair to say and like we've been looking at this from sort of this being a problem for the left but this is equally a problem for the right as well. You have people that support libertarian candidates and they've got the same dilemma in front of them. So well I don't like the Democrat but I'm going to have to vote for the Republican because my libertarian candidate doesn't show much likelihood of winning and I don't want to divide that conservative vote. I see so it's sort of moving towards that lesser of two evils calculation that people have to make a lot of the time huh? Right, right they face that on both sides and I mean even in the middle I mean you can have moderate candidates that are out there and someone can say well I like that moderate candidate but unfortunately this candidate that's a little bit more to the left or to the right is more likely to win so I'm going to have to vote for that candidate. Right because they don't want to ostensibly throw their vote away and help the diametrically opposed candidate that they don't like win by voting for a spoiler right? Right, right. Okay well I think that makes sense I mean we really I think we've clarified the connection between vote splitting and spoilers and it sounds like there's a simple solution amazingly just let people vote for as many candidates as they want and no more spoilers no more vote splitting. Exactly. Wow if only everything was that simple. Alright well Aaron thank you so much for clarifying that topic and it was really nice talking to you. You too Eric.