Want a Better Election? Let Us Vote *Against* Candidates
Tired of being stuck in wrong-lizard hell?
(Fine, I’ll paraphrase: Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, a democratic planet where humanoids are ruled by lizards whom they hate, but they keep voting for a lizard to rule them because if they don’t, then the wrong lizard may win.)
So let’s provide a way for people to stop voting for a lizard: anti-voting. Give people the option of voting against a candidate. You can either vote for someone or against someone in each race, you don’t do both. But yeah: each vote against a candidate is deducted from the votes in favor of that candidate. The candidate with the most net votes wins.
Consider the ramifications. A candidate would have to actually be well-liked, without that much of a groundswell against him. An incumbent candidate couldn’t rely on the fact that no one’s ever heard of her opponent, she’d actually have to consider all the disenfranchised people out there in the wilderness who are going to suddenly want to weigh in and boot her the hell out.
It’d also make it possible for third-party candidates to have a chance. Seems like, depending on the election, there’s more net negativity around the Big Two candidates than there is net positiveness. In that case: viva la revolucion! Of course, the Big Two might try and counter this by instructing certain constituents to vote against particular third-party candidates. The press would love this. So many angles to play.
And sure, it could lead to a groundswell of negativity among the electorate — but only in those rare, rare cases where politicians don’t do enough to make people feel positive about them. But it would certainly also empower people to do something in those cases. And that’s a sort of positive thing, right?