Imagine an election that pits Candidates A, B and C against one another. There are 10,000 voters. Candidate A is the clear favorite of 9,999 of them. But Candidate A is nonetheless defeated. How is it possible for Candidate B to beat the other two?
William Poundstone's Gaming the Vote arrives amid unusually high reader interest in equitable voting. And Poundstone is a clear, entertaining explicator of election science. He easily bridges the gaps between theoretical and popular thinking, between passionate political debate and cool mathematical certainty. These dichotomies can be drastic. If politics is a realm in which emotions run high, he notes, mathematics is "one of the few fields where it doesn't matter what other people think."
Social choice theory is a field of scholarship that analyzes voting patterns in the abstract. The resulting election strategies have become so Machiavellian, Poundstone says, that political consultants are as interested in backhandedly hurting some candidates as in helping others.
"Were these new campaign techniques a genetically engineered tomato," he writes of such tactics, which are colorfully illustrated here, "they might command more attention than they have. They have gone largely unnoticed by the public, the media, and nearly everyone except the campaign strategists and their clients." Gaming the Vote provides a lively remedy for that situation.
Poundstone's book asks one overriding question: "Is it possible to devise a fair way of voting, one immune to vote splitting?" The answer requires some historical context: a brief history of elections gone terribly awry.
Poundstone's chronicle of
spoilers concentrates on presidential elections that delivered the opposite outcome from the one most voters seemed to prefer. This goes from explaining how abolitionist vote-splitting in 1844 put the slave-owner James Polk in the White House to showing how a consumer advocate, Ralph Nader, helped to elect "the favored candidate of corporate America," President George W. Bush, in 2000.
Since at least five out of 45 presidential elections have gone to the second-most-popular candidate because of spoilers, Poundstone calculates a failure rate of more than 11 percent for our voting system. "Were the plurality vote a car or an airliner," he writes about this traditional method, "it would be recognized for what it is - a defective consumer product, unsafe at any speed."
As political consultants become as scientific as they are ruthless, Poundstone maintains, "we are witnessing a bipartisan mainstreaming of the spoiler effect as a tool for political strategizing." Regard these manipulators as hackers corrupting a software system, and you arrive at a clear conclusion: The software needs to be changed. Gaming the Vote offers lively explanations of mathematically feasible alternatives.
That idea that voting methods can be gamed has been so warmly embraced that Donald Saari, a prominent theorist, says: "For a price, I will come to your organization just prior to your next important election. You tell me who you want to win. I will talk with the voters to determine their preferences over the candidates. Then I will design a 'democratic voting method' which involves all candidates. In the election, the specified candidate will win." Saari was joking, but some politicians understood this to be a serious offer.
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