In the New Hampshire Libertarian primary, a flawed voting system led to the selection of a flawed – possibly the most flawed – candidate.
The 2020 Libertarian primary season has begun. Last week, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire (traditionally the first primary state in the nation) announced the result of its non-binding Presidential Preference Primary.
Having lost its ballot status last year, as state chair Brian Shields explained on Facebook, the party came up with the idea of the primary to attract some free media. In late 2019, ballots were mailed to all 110 party members eligible to vote at the state convention – the 44 ballots returned by the deadline were tabulated, and the results announced at the convention on January 11. Kudos to the LPNH executive for the idea, which worked: the win did get some media attention, with more expected to follow.
Reading the reported results, though, I was struck with a strange anomaly. On the one hand, the winner received just 26 votes, a clear majority of the 44 ballots cast. However, the runner-up received 22 votes – which added up to more votes than ballots. Intrigued, I added up all the vote totals, and discovered that 140 votes were counted. What happened?
The answer turns out to be the voting system the party adopted, a modified Bucklin Method (BM) ballot. BM is a form of ranked-choice voting, in which candidates are ranked, and lower ranks are counted until a candidate receives a majority. In the most common ranked-choice system, instant-runoff voting (IRV), everyone’s first choice is counted; if no candidate has a majority, then the lowest candidate(s) get dropped, and their voters’ ballots assigned to the remaining candidates on the basis of their second choices; if there is still no majority, another candidate is dropped and his votes reassigned to the remaining candidates; and so on until there is a majority winner.
BM works differently. Again, in the first round, only first choices are counted. However, in the second round, no one is dropped; instead, first and second choices are added together and counted equally; in the third, first, second, and third choices are all counted together; and so on. The modification that LPNH used was to ask voters to rank only first and second choices, and use approval preference for the rest. (Under approval preference, a voter can approve as many candidates as he likes, and the winner is the candidate with the most approvals.)
Since the vote totals were well over 88, the LPNH primary must have had three rounds: in which case, under BM, all the first choices, second choices, and approvals were counted together, in the third round, as one vote each. Such a strange hybrid of two different voting systems seems rife for problems, of which these two leap out:
(1) people’s votes were counted unequally. A voter who merely ranked their two choices got 2 votes; a voter who approved one additional candidate had 3; one who approved 5 additional candidates would have received 7 votes. Since the votes added up to more than 132, we know that some people had more votes than the 3 that everyone would have received using BM.
(2) the winning candidate did not have to be anyone’s first choice, or even anyone’s second choice. In theory, a candidate could win simply by having the most approvals.
(2) appears to be what happened in this case; for the winning candidate turned out to be the infamous Vermin Supreme.
For those who do not know him, Supreme is a performance artist, who has been running in the New Hampshire primary (as a Republican, a Democrat, and now a Libertarian) for decades. His goal is to mock the political process, along the lines of Canada’s Rhinoceros Party. His satirical platform mocks both the Democrats’ big-spending promises (he promises to give every American a pony) and the Republicans’ attempts to control behavior (he promises to make it a federal offense to not brush one’s teeth). And he campaigns wearing a rubber boot for a hat. He appears to be a sincere libertarian, but one with an anarchist bent, whose goal is to discredit politics; not my bag, but more power to him, I’d say.
However, Supreme would not be my first choice as Libertarian nominee – nor, I suspect, was he the first choice of the majority. Or the second choice, either: it looks to me as if he won the primary simply on approvals. Libertarians’ reaction to the Supreme victory on social media – mainly shock and dismay – confirms my suspicion.
As economist Bryan Caplan has argued, any voting process will contain flaws, which can be exploited by the incumbents to manipulate outcomes. Some are alleging manipulaton here. One of the POTUS candidates, Max Abramson, is not only a resident of New Hampshire (as is Supreme), but possibly the only elected libertarian office holder at the state level in the country, and the only one in the Libertarian field. However, Abramson won election as a Republican, which is anathema to a number of Libertarians. As a member of the Libertarian and Republican Parties, Abramson was excluded from the ballot: he ended up receiving just one write-in vote.
I am not alleging that LPNH tried to manipulate the outcome. Whether their intention was to select Vermin Supreme is, frankly, irrelevant.
What counts are not intentions behind an action, but the action’s results. In this case, LPNH used a flawed voting system, which resulted in a flawed – perhaps the most flawed – candidate winning; an absurd outcome that anti-Libertarians in the media are sure to exploit. (Does anyone remember James Weeks?) Whether the LPNH officials wanted to make a mockery of primary voting, or not, a mockery was what they achieved.
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Carl Milsted says
For a side by side comparison of voting systems check this out:
https://www.quiz2d.com/p2020/
At the moment the count is very sparse as I cleared it when adding candidates to the ballot.
Mark Vogl says
Only in America.