Has a 'vote against' system ever been attempted or studied? And would it be any good?

Politics & Elections
1

It has been occurring to me for some time that, at least in the current US election system, what we have is functionally a system where at least a significant number of people are not voting for a candidate, but against one. Further, since you need to vote ‘for’ the less-bad candidate, some people behave as though refusing to vote for such a candidate is a good thing in some way, rather than voting against what they themselves perceive to be the worst candidate. We’ve seen that again a lot this year with people who are making a particularly big stink about Joe Biden and the US’s support for Israel - people who acknowledge that a Republican, especially Trump, would be worse, but still didn’t want to vote for Biden. Same applies to the ‘Biden is old’ thing that eventually got him to drop out, presumably. All of this is understandable but nonfunctional in the current system.

But what about a system where, instead of voting for anyone, each person got a vote, not to vote in favor of a candidate, but to oppose one. The vote says ‘this is the worst current candidate, and I really do not want this person - anyone else would be at least marginally better’ and then the person with the least votes against them wins the election.

Not that such a system has the slightest chance of being implemented, but I’m curious as to what it might look like, and what the results might be - whether they would be beneficial or just as bad (or worse) than the current system. And while I know there’s quite a few systems we already know to be better than the current system, this idea tweaks my interest but I’ve never heard it discussed, nor do I know whether there’ve been any actual studies considering it or checking out the math, etc.

Now, important topic: Becoming an actual candidate needs to be something of a hurdle; after all, if anyone can become a candidate, there may be dozens or hundreds and the one with the least votes against them is likely to just be because they got lost in the pile.

So, becoming an actual candidate in the running should require you to get approval from…let’s say between 1% and 5% of the voters in the area you’re trying to become a candidate of. A US representative needs 1-5% of the voters in their district, a candidate for President needs 1-5% of the voters in the nation. Each approval must be on-the-record, not anonymous, and each voter can only approve a single candidate in this way. (Note that the logistics of this is definitely an issue. How would it be done is a big question I don’t really have an answer for, but for the moment, let’s assume it CAN be done.) These limitations should make it challenging enough to become a candidate that we won’t have a completely random person running. Approval can be gained anytime between the last election and some deadline not too far before election day - let’s say 60 days? Maybe 90? Everyone involved in the process of obtaining these approvals must be under public scrutiny as well - this is necessary to make it clear who is supporting the candidate.

It might also be necessary to obligate candidates to participate in a few public events such as debates, or at least interviews, to ensure that there is an official record of the candidates’ positions on things. You cannot be a candidate without it being relatively easy for the voters to figure out where you stand, or at least claim to stand on things.

If this is insufficient, other hurdles could need to be introduced - raising the percentage of voters needed is an option, of course, but other things to limit the candidate pool would also be a good thing to consider. The important thing is to get the total number of candidates below 10. Somewhere around 6-8 would probably be the ideal number. Need a small enough number of candidates that the voters could actually know a bit about all of them and reasonably decide who they actually want to vote against.

So, how would this system shake out? Let's imagine it got implemented in the US immediately following this year's election, so that it is in force in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 election.

The way I see it, in order to get the necessary 1-5% to become a candidate, the candidate needs to have the support of an organization of some sort. But the support of an organization becomes a double-edged sword in this situation. Consider the Democratic and Republican parties. Anyone they are seen to support will be heavily voted against - they will be unlikely to win. Fringe and wacko parties too, will probably be unlikely to win, because there will be enough voting against them that they won’t be the person with the least votes against them.

Which leaves…relatively inoffensive parties who are genuinely middle-of-the-road enough that not many people actually revile them, and just as notably, small, local organizations for many locations. If Republican and Democratic are toxic labels, then maybe House races would wind up preferring not to get attached to those labels, or other similar huge ones, and seek or create some local organizations specific to their districts.

Could this in theory force the polarization to end? Without being able to be affiliated with a massive organization that everyone on the ‘other side’ hates without guaranteeing your loss, government might wind up having to actually discuss things and compromise from here on out.

But I’m sure there’s a lot of issues with such a system I haven’t seen. I also wonder if anyone has seriously studied it; I have been unable to find anything of the sort, perhaps because the search terms that I’ve thought of fail to bring anything up actually related to the topic. I can’t seem to formulate search terms that will find anything about the subject, even though I imagine I am far from the first person to ever come up with the concept.

2

I’ve often thought that we should have a “None of the above” option. If that choice wins the election, you have to have a do-over, and all the candidates on the original ballot are barred from trying again on the new ballot.

How that would work with the US Electoral College would be a problem, but for most other elections, it would work. You can still seat a parliament or a congress, even if a few seats are still open due to the new elections being held.

3

Sounds like a bad idea to me. I want the winner of an election to be the candidate that most people think would be a good president/senator/whatever, not the one that most people think would be slightly less bad than the worst.

I’m imagining a presidential ballot with Harris, Trump, and RFK Jr. on it, and the pain of being forced to vote-for-by-not-voting-against one of those last two.

4

There’s a lot to go over with this idea in comparison to all the possible forms of voting but I think the basic problem is that it diminishes the value of the votes for a particular candidate. A Vote-Against does nothing to help select a representative. If a candidate receives 1000 Votes-For and 100 Votes-Against then 1000 people have lost 10% of the value of their votes. Another candidate getting 901 Votes-For is now the winner of the election. A None-of-the-Above vote would reduce the value of votes for all candidates which could serve some purpose to make an election a No-Contest, but Vote-Against just increases systemic dysfunction.

5

Just to be clear, under this system there would be no votes for a candidate. All votes would be votes against, and whoever has the least against them wins. Unless you’re counting the initial requirements to be a candidate as ‘votes for’.

6

I think it’s a good method for small, close groups. E.g. you collect a list of a bunch of movies that people might want to watch, and you go around in a circle, giving each person the chance to veto a film, each time it’s their turn, until you get down to one. But this works best when you have a list that’s the same size as your group, plus one. Otherwise, some people will get more votes than the others.

But it’s awkward if, say, you have 4 movies and 10 people giving vetoes.

In a large election, where we’re looking at millions of people, voting among a Presidential pool of 5-6 candidates, if you’re removing the single most-hated candidate(s) then, likely, you’ll remove the top party picks and now you’re left with the Green Party vs the Libertarian party. Your only options are the crazies, because people voted poorly. Alternately, everyone votes to kick out the crazies, first, and then you’re just left with the top 2 from the main parties and you’re just doing the negative “for” vote.

Now, in something like the early stages of the primaries, I could envision a process of going through stages of removing and approving to whittle down the candidates to one. But I’m not sure that you really gain anything over ranked choice or other systems that are more straightforward and can also give you a consensus candidate.

7

I think one of my biggest reasons to look at it this way is cause we already have a system where for a lot of people, perhaps even the majority of the electorate, the motivation already is ‘not that guy’. People who vote Democrat because they don’t want Trump. People who vote Republican because they’re convinced Democrats are destroying the country. Etc. But then you have the other ones that are like ‘the Democrats haven’t earned my vote!’ which make me want to slap them upside the head and tell them ‘it’s not about earning your vote, it’s about making sure the worst guy doesn’t get in.’ which led me to wonder if that could be the actual system.

That said, comparing to current parties seems kinda nonfunctional. Even the crazies like the Green or Libertarians have enough people that would vote against them that all of them are likely to have more than the least number of votes against them.

It feels to me as though candidates that are good at getting ‘grassroots’ support might wind up being the most likely in such a system. The ones who can get the necessary support to become candidates with the minimum of attachment to major organizations. Someone who can get endorsement from unions, organizations, and the like.

8

In a two-candidate race, of course, all voting methods are equivalent (aside from squishy irrational things like “I’ll never vote for that guy, but I will vote against his opponent”). So the real test of this is in many-candidate races.

And then, the obvious question is, if there are many candidates running, why only vote against one of them? Why not let voters choose how many candidates they vote against?

And when you do that, you end up with the system called Approval Voting, which I happen to think is the best possible voting method. All methods of voting between three or more candidates have flaws (this has been mathematically proven; Arrow’s Theorem), but approval voting has fewer flaws than most of them, and it also has the essential advantage of being simple: For a voting system to work, the people have to trust it, and people won’t trust what they don’t understand.

9

True dat. I’ve, personally, been curious about a voting system where you give two votes:

  1. The person you would choose (for each position).
  2. The ID of some other person who you trust to vote wisely.

When the vote is taken, you only count the votes of people who are two away from the leaf nodes.

Clearly, this system would never be taken up, even if you built in some way to validate the results.

10

Not quite the same but there are a couple of electorial systems in use that have some elements of the proposed system.

Single Transferable Vote in this system you vte for the person you want to win AND the person you least want to win (and everything in between). You give each candidate an order of preference. The votes ar ethen counted based on first preferance, if no condidate gets more than 50% of the vote the person with least votes is eliminated and their votes are allocated to there most prefered remaining candidate, if a candidate the nhas more than 50% of the vote thet win otherwise the next candidate with the least votes is eliminated and so on. The UK had a referendum on whether to more to STV a few years ago.

Multi Stage Elections after an election if no candidate gets mor ethan 50% of the vote one or more of the leasted voted for candidates is eliminated and there is then a seperate election among the remaining candidates. The French use this for presidential elections and the Conservative party MPs vote this way for a new leader.

11

I had not heard of Approval Voting, so I looked it up briefly; haven’t had the chance to run through all the angles of it. It seems to require more than two names on the ballot, do I have that right?

Unlike ranked choice voting, a voter casts votes for approving as many of the candidates as the voter wishes. The candidate who gets the most approval votes wins. Pretty simple and easy to understand, at first glance.

I haven’t yet figured how the established parties would argue against it, but I’m certain that they would, yes indeedy.

12

Sorry, saw that then got lost in a long post that I edited down to what was actually below the minimum.

13

All voting systems of a certain (very large) class have flaws as proven by Arrow (basically any system that requires that you rank all choices) - but there are voting systems that don’t fall into that class. Those systems also have flaws, but perhaps not as bad as the flaws that Arrow identified.

14

So it’s not exactly what the OP describes but the ancient Greek had ostracism:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracis

Rather than simply not be elected, being voted for ostracism caused you to be exiled for 10 years

15

Most likely, you’re left with the party nobody’s heard of.

Which is probably the looniest of the batch.

(Yes, I know you posited making positions easy to find out. Most candidates’ positions aren’t that hard to find out now – except when they’re contradictory, in which case it’s easy to find that out – and most people unfortunately don’t bother.)

16

Well, not require, per se, but presumably in a two-candidate race, each voter would approve of one and not the other. Like I said, in a two-candidate race, all sane voting systems end up equivalent.

17

There are nuances in every not “first-past-the-post” system. IMHO FPTP only makes sense when there are two candidates. Indeed the very name is to me is a misnomer. The post in an election should be getting a majority. If you can win a FPTP election with 25% because all the others got 24% or less it could better be termed “I got enough”.

What we term preference voting in Australia (instant run-off voting/IRV) was introduced in 1918. So we have some experience.

As a general guideline to the practical intent of preferential voting, when you enter the polling booth with a small chit of paper with between 3 and 10 names listed in random order and take up your pencil there are 3 choices.

  1. Who you want to be elected.
  2. Who you don’t want elected and
  3. Ranking of the other guys.

The real power is in whom you rank last. Indeed it’s not uncommon for voters to nominate their most disapproved candidate last before they pick their #1.

The only guy your vote cannot support after preferences are distributed is the guy you rank last or disapprove the most.

If the presented field is really depressing then putting the minor party candidates at the top and the LIB/LAB say #9 and #10 makes the bastard you ranked #9 really work for your vote. It’s petty but it puts you in a good frame of mind before getting a democracy sausage on the way out.

The electorate votes in the guy who collectively is the least disapproved. It might be #9 on your ballot
In so much as this achieves what the OP is asking this “vote against” system has been attempted, has been studied and has proved to be good.

18

For a two candidate race, as Chronos pointed out, vote against equivalent to regular voting.

For more than two candidates there is an asymmetry between the fact that you only get to pick one candidate to lose but all but one of the candidate will in fact lose. So in order to promote your candidate you must vote strategically and vote against which challenging candidate you guess is likely to have the fewest negative votes so you can knock them down below your choice candidate. This can result in victories for candidates that everyone agrees are the worst.

For example lets say the candidates are GW Bush, Al Gore and animated corpse of Hitler. If you are a Gore supporter you know that Hitler is going to get a huge number of negative votes, so for Gore to win he just has to beat Bush so you vote against Bush. Meanwhile Bush voters use the same reasoning to vote against Gore. If enough people use this reasoning Zombie Hitler wins in a landslide even though he was everyone’s last choice.

Practically no other voting system considered would allow for that as an outcome.

19

This is how voting works in federal elections for the lower house of parliament in Australia, we call it the Preferential System. You must rank all available choices from 1 to X or your vote is invalid. The idea is the winner is the candidate that the fewest voters don’t want, in essence, so to some degree what the OP discusses here. In combination with compulsory voting, it makes for a very credible outcome with few anomalies.

Some state elections have different systems, from MMP in Tasmania to NSW having optional preferential system (where you must vote 1 but can leave other boxes blank if you wish).

20

Not quite.