In the shadow of the almost 3-year war in the East, Europe is being torn by increasing turmoil resulting from the excessive obsolescence of the technical tools and mechanisms used in local democracies. The inability to implement reliable remote voting systems or the stubborn use of multi-stage voting, e.g. two-stage voting in the case of presidential elections, promotes manipulative and ad hoc, sometimes even ideologically false electoral alliances, and consequently the dominance of purely marketing, superficial and emotionally exploited pre-election campaigns.
Europe should therefore take a step towards implementing preferential voting.
We know and remember well (or remind ourselves from time to time during election campaigns) all the varieties of emotions related to the elections of the composition of the boards of important social bodies, e.g. boards of associations, organizations, local governments at all levels – from the local to the central and supranational level. Such elections always lead to the formation of various types of electoral alliances. Paradoxically, the main goal of these alliances is to gain a sufficiently broad electorate to allow the largest possible number of members of individual factions participating in the alliance to enter the elected body. Factions and phalanxes differ from official organizations in that their power and leadership in them are formed informally. Due to the mechanism of creating electoral alliances, the suitability and competence of candidates for work in the elected body are relegated to the background. In order to maximize the number of votes obtained, the loyalty and effectiveness of defending the interests of the factions delegating these candidates are prioritized, not the suitability of individual candidates for work in the elected body. In the process of creating electoral alliances, the priority is the merits and cooperation skills of candidates within the faction, not within the newly elected body in accordance with its function. Voters’ sympathies are won by the factions cooperating in the alliance to a much greater extent than by individual candidates themselves.
The tone in such elections is set by the factions, not the candidates themselves. Such a selection of the composition of the elected body means that the body, after being constituted, has a certain factional stigma. After the first period of enthusiastic, spectacular decisions, it falls into stagnation and factionalism, thus unable to develop the efficiency of full-fledged group decision-making processes expected of a given body.
Gaining advantages through the creation of alliances is also justified by the need to gain support. A group of voters may have more opportunities to get their message across to others than individual candidates.
In elections in larger populations, such as nationwide elections, reaching a wide range of voters with a message requires organized, intensive and precise social communication, primarily media. In addition, large election campaigns increasingly often use short-term emotional advertising tricks, which means using advanced and high-cost marketing techniques.
On the other hand, in internal elections in smaller communities, such as non-governmental organizations, there are much more opportunities for candidates to present themselves to all voters and for all voters to become familiar with the profiles of all candidates for a given position or for membership in a given body, e.g. the board of an association. So in these communities of several dozen to several hundred members, where roughly “everyone knows everyone else”, it will be easier for voters, after getting to know all the candidates, to organize their own hierarchy of preferences regarding the selection of the best candidates. In other words, it will be obvious for each voter to establish their own list of candidates by placing the most preferred candidate in first place, and the next ones in succession the less preferred ones. If we now assign each place on this individual voter’s list successive point values, then in this way the voter will assign their candidates the appropriate amounts according to their preferences. Candidates (or candidate) who receive the highest number of points added up from all ballots win the election. For example: if there are 20 candidates running for a 5-person board, and there are 9 places on the ballot that are scored from 9 points for 1st place to 1 point for 9th place, the voter can assign points to 9 candidates. The votes for individual candidates are counted by adding up the points assigned to them on all ballots. The 5 candidates who have obtained the highest number of points summed up by the electoral commission from all valid ballots are accepted into the board.
Such a system of election is all the more reliable, in terms of the preferences of the entire voting population, the fewer the positions to be filled in relation to the number of candidates. For example, a candidate who is preferred lower by a large number of voters may obtain a higher position on the list of results than the candidate who is preferred the most by a small group.
The most important advantage over voting only for a number of candidates equal to the number of positions to be filled is a significant reduction in the randomness of voting for a given person. This is particularly important in the case of quick voting with a short or very short period of presentation and familiarization of voters with the candidates, which is typical for associations and non-governmental organizations. Adding up the scored preferences of voters results in much greater satisfaction of the entire body of voters and a much stronger mandate of the elected than in binary elections, i.e. when the number of positions to be filled is equal to the number of candidates that the voter must distinguish.
In preferential elections, the number of candidates distinguished by the voter must be equal to at least the number of positions to be filled.
The above theses require scientific verification. This is a field for many scientific works and significantly scalable research projects in the field of sociology and related sciences. To start with, these may be comparative studies of the level of trust and satisfaction in various types of conditions and test groups. It seems that both the level of trust and satisfaction of voters and the elected should be higher than in the case of traditional voting (vote for 1 candidate for each vacant seat).
Jacek Gancarson
Warsaw. 2/12/2024
