Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It)
352
Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It)
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Overview
In all five cases, the vote was upset by a "spoiler"—a minor candidate who took enough votes away from the most popular candidate to tip the election to someone else. The spoiler effect is more than a glitch. It is a consequence of one of the most surprising intellectual discoveries of the twentieth century: the "impossibility theorem" of the Nobel laureate economist Kenneth Arrow. His theorem asserts that voting is fundamentally unfair—a finding that has not been lost on today's political consultants. Armed with polls, focus groups, and smear campaigns, political strategists are exploiting the mathematical faults of the simple majority vote. The answer to the spoiler problem lies in a system called range voting, which would satisfy both right and left, and Gaming the Vote assesses the obstacles confronting any attempt to change the U.S. electoral system.
The latest of several books by Poundstone on the theme of how important scientific ideas have affected the real world, Gaming the Vote is both a wry exposé of how the political system really works and a call to action.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780809048922 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 02/17/2009 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Prologue
Even when he was Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke felt he was destined for something bigger. The Klan was just one of a number of organizations that Duke had joined, been actively involved with, and discarded when they no longer fit his purpose.
As a student at Louisiana State University, Duke had studied German so that he could read Mein Kampf in the original. Each April 20, he celebrated Hitler’s birthday with a party. He draped his dorm room with swastika flags and wore a Nazi uniform around campus.
Duke was equally comfortable in the uniform of an ROTC cadet. One of his instructors praised Duke’s “outstanding leadership potential.” But then “we started receiving information on him from the Department of Defense . . . Here was a 19-year-old kid getting money from Germany.”
The money was for American Nazi activities. The Pentagon rejected Duke’s application for an advanced-training program and refused to commission him as an officer. That rebuff caused Duke to channel his leadership potential into the Ku Klux Klan. In just a couple of years, he rose to the Klan’s highest post, Grand Wizard, in 1975. This meteoric ascent was a matter of his being in the right place at the right time. The previous Wizard had just been gunned down in a motel parking lot.
Duke stood out in the Klan almost as much as he had at LSU. He preferred to appear in a crisp business suit and tie rather than a hood and robe. He adopted the corporate-sounding title “National Director.” One of his more surprising actions as Klansman was to write a book called African Atto (1973), under the pseudonym Mohammed X. He sold it by mail order, taking out ads in black newspapers with the heading when was the last time whitey called you ? The book was a martial arts manual. Duke told people that its real purpose was to compile the names and addresses of the blacks who ordered it—for Ku Klux Klan records.
In 1980 Duke abruptly left the organization. His story is that he realized the Klan would never be taken seriously as a political force. It was time for the defenders of the white race to get out of the cow pastures and into the hotel suites. People who knew Duke in the Klan have a different story. “We had to get David out,” explained Karl Hand, formerly Duke’s lieutenant. “He was seducing all the wives . . . He had no qualms about putting the make on anybody’s wife or girlfriend, and the flak always came back to me, because I was his national organizer.”
The immediate cause of Duke’s departure was his attempt to pocket a quick thirty-five thousand dollars by selling the top-secret Klan membership list to an enigmatic character named Bill Wilkinson. Wilkinson presented himself to Duke as a Klansman intending to set up his own splinter organization. In fact, he was secretly an FBI informant. Wilkinson videotaped Duke dickering over the price, then threatened to play the tape at a KKK meeting. Possibly the whole thing was an FBI sting—or possibly Wilkinson saw a freelance opportunity. Duke left the Klan after that.
Duke had never held a regular job and was not keen to start. Naturally, he turned to politics. Plastic surgery and a blow-dryer transformed him into something resembling a game show host. Starting in 1975, he began running for local offices in Louisiana. In 1980 he founded his own organization, the National Association for the Advancement of White People. He discovered that there was good money to be made in fringe nonprofits. After Duke and some Klansmen were arrested at a demonstration in Forsythe County, Georgia, he raised nineteen thousand dollars from white supremacists nationwide to pay a fifty-five-dollar fine.
In 1988 Duke ran for president of the United States, entering several primaries as a Democrat. No one took him seriously except for writers of offbeat feature articles. He then ran as a Populist and got 47,047 votes.
In 1989, Duke downsized his ambitions to run for the Louisiana legislature. Not only did he win, but he won against former Republican governor Dave Treen. This coup encouraged Duke to run for the U.S. Senate in 1990. He lost. Then in 1991, he decided it was time to try for governor of Louisiana.
Edwin Edwards “plays the system like a violin. He had an uncanny knack of charging headlong to the brink and knowing exactly where to stop . . . and he doesn’t even try to cover his trail, he’s that cocky.” These were the words of U.S. Attorney Stanford Bardwell, Jr., one of the many prosecutors who indicted Edwards and saw him wriggle off the hook. Some called Edwards the most corrupt politician in a corrupt state.
Edwards was born dirt-poor in an cypress-wood farmhouse his father built with his own hands. He attended Louisiana State University and became a successful trial lawyer in Cajun country. Entering politics as a populist Democrat, he made a successful run for governor in 1972, winning on an alliance of the Cajun and black vote. In the governor’s mansion, so close to the flow of money and power (the two great aphrodisiacs), he was like a kid in a candy store.
His plump patrician face, ruddy nose and cheeks, graying hair, and salacious wit perfectly fit the part of an aging roué. “Two out of ten women will go to bed with you,” ran one of Edwards’s maxims, “but you’ve got to ask the other eight.” Edwards inherited the Louisiana tradition of influence peddling and used it to live lavishly. His most expensive habit was gambling. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that Edwards
is granted up to $200,000 casino credit at the stroke of his pen . . . He is classified by his favorite hotel-casino—Caesars Palace—among the 0.25 percent of its customers whose importance as gamblers makes the company unwilling to share credit information with other casinos. Caesars even waives its maximum bet limit when Edwards steps to the table . . . He eats his meals on the casinos’ tab in the Strip’s poshest restaurants. He sunbathes on casino-owned yachts at Lake Tahoe. He glides around town in casino limousines, and he and his entourage stay at luxury suites in the most popular hotels. All for free.
What can Edwards get from the Vegas casinos? “Anything he wants,” a former Caesars Palace employee said.
“I like to gamble,” Edwards admitted. He was able to get away with all he did because of a good ol’ boy charisma that charmed journalists, voters, and grand juries alike. A reporter once asked Edwards if it wasn’t illegal for him to accept a reported twenty-thousand-dollar bribe from South Korean lobbyist Tongsun Park. Edwards replied, “It was illegal for them to give, but not for me to receive.” Or as Edwards asked another time: “What’s wrong with making money?”
One of Edwards’s most puzzling contributions to Louisiana politics was the open primary, more evocatively known as the jungle primary. Candidates of all parties run against one another in a no-holds-barred primordial contest. The two candidates with the most votes go on to a runoff election for the office.
The open primary, proponents say, gives more power to voters and less to decision makers in smoke-filled back rooms. That was the part that mystified the pundits. It defied belief that such a consummate player as Edwin Edwards would have backed a high-minded reform without considering what was in it for him.
In 1972, Louisiana’s registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans twenty to one. That made the primary system used in other states ludicrous. The real fight was for the Democratic nomination. The final Democrat-versus-Republican election was a formality, a waste of time and money. With the open primary, both the primary and the runoff were meaningful, hard-fought elections.
No one believed that this rationale was sufficient to outweigh an obvious negative: Edwards was a Democrat, and his jungle primary would help the Republican Party.
A slew of Democrats would run in each primary. There would probably be only one Republican. The Republican would automatically corner the conservative vote, while each Democrat would have to scratch and claw for a scrap of the liberal vote (and for liberal campaign money). That would almost guarantee that the Republican made it to the runoff. The Republican could spend his campaign dollars where they counted—on the runoff election.
So what was in it for Edwards, a liberal Democrat? The only theory that made sense was worthy of Machiavelli. Under Louisiana law, the governor cannot run for a third consecutive term. Edwards, who was reelected in 1976, was out of the game when his second term expired in 1980. The law did not preclude a third term (or more), as long as it wasn’t three in a row.
According to this theory, by backing the open primary Edwards was looking several moves ahead, to 1984. Believing it would be easier to beat an incumbent Republican than a younger, less baggage-encumbered Democrat, Edwards knew (made sure?) that there would be no heir apparent in the Democratic Party. With the open primary, the Democratic vote would be more fragmented than usual, and Edwards could therefore count on the split Democratic vote to lead to the election of a Republican—someone to house-sit the governor’s mansion for him. Then, in 1983, he would reunify the Democrats and sail to an easy third victory.
If this really was Edwards’s plan, it was a bigger gamble than the ones he was making at the craps tables. No Republican had been elected governor of Louisiana since Reconstruction.
This “theory” describes exactly what happened. In 1979, five Democrats ran, and only one Republican. The front-running Democrat, Louis Lambert, was the most liberal of the group. Under the old, party-controlled system, the Democrats surely would have chosen someone more moderate than Lambert. As it was, Lambert ran in the runoff against Republican David Treen, and Treen won. He became Louisiana’s first Republican governor since 1877.
And in 1983, Edwin Edwards had no problem making sure that Treen’s first term would be his last. He told the press that Treen was “so slow it takes him an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes.” As Election Day approached, Edwards boasted that he couldn’t lose unless he was caught “in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.” He won the runoff with 63 percent of the vote.
Is it possible that Edwards planned all this, back when he launched the open primary? Columnist John Maginnis recalls an enigmatic comment Edwards made in 1978 to a Republican Women’s Club. The club members were pleased that the then-new open primary was helping Republicans get elected. Edwards said, “You are happy with the open primary now, but there will come a day when you will not be.” Without explaining the statement, he left the room.
Excerpted from Gaming the Vote by William Poundstone. Copyright © 2007 by William Poundstone. Published in February 2008 by Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
Prologue: The Wizard and the Lizard 3The Problem
Game Theory 25
Kurt Godel
Adolf Hitler
Albert Einstein
Oskar Morgenstern
Bambi
the U.S. Constitution
Joseph Goebbels
God
Kaiser Wilhelm II
John von Neumann
Kenneth Arrow
Marxism
Alfred Tarski
intransitivity
Harold Hotelling
ice cream
John Hicks
"Scissors, Paper, Stone"
Duncan Black
the "forty-seven-year-old wife of a machinist living in Dayton, Ohio"
the RAND Corporation
Condoleezza Rice
Olaf Helmer
Harry Truman
Joseph Stalin
Abram Bergson
The Big Bang 45
Michelle Kwan
the Great Flip-Flop
Republicans
Democrats
Communists
Sidney Morgenbesser
irrelevant alternatives
Michelangelo
Joe McCarthy
Winston Churchill
Woodrow Wilson
Boss Tweed
Amartya Sen
A Short History of Vote Splitting 59
Spoilers
the electoral college
James Polk
Henry Clay
James Birney
cholera
Zachary Taylor
Martin Van Buren
Lewis Cass
Abraham Lincoln
Stephen Douglas
John Breckinridge
John Bell
James Blaine
moral values
temperate Republican women
Grover Cleveland
John St. John
Benjamin Harrison
James Weaver
J. P. Morgan
Henry Clay Frick
Teddy Roosevelt
William Howard Taft
Woodrow Wilson
Eugene Debs
socialism
Wall Street
Ross Perot
Larry King
nude photos
George H. W. Bush
Bill Clinton
Bob Dole
POWs
Vietnamese
Black Panthers
Ed Rollins
FDR
Harry Levine
Ralph Nader
Hiroshima
Al Gore
LewisCarroll
Tweedledee
Tweedledum
George W. Bush
Michael Moore
John McCain
Karl Rove
Mother Teresa
universal negatives
Tarek Milleron
Cadillac tail fins
George McGovern
Gore Vidal
Ronald Reagan
the fifty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit
Mother Jones
James Carville
"That Bastard"
the devil
Pat Buchanan
Harry Browne
Harry Reid
defective consumer products
The Most Evil Man in America 92
Marcus Hanna
William McKinley
Yiddish
JFK
Richard Nixon
Joseph Napolitan
Lee Atwater
cannibalism
ladies' corsets
Martin Van Buren
the ten commandments
syphilis
slavery
mother murder
Lyndon Johnson
farm animals
television
Rush Limbaugh
Arthur Finkelstein
the {dollar}12 Man
Jesus
Jews
push-polling
electroshock
NAACP
George W. Bush
Jeb Bush
Michael Dukakis
Babe Ruth
Willie Horton
Al Gore
Susan Estrich
Mario Cuomo
heroin dealers
Jennifer Fitzgerald
lithesome Republican women
David Duke
death
apologies
peace
love
brotherhood
the extra-chromosome crowd
thinking outside the box
Run, Ralph, Run! 107
Karl Rove
the "Red Special"
Samuel Gompers
Greens
the Texas "six-pack"
Arno Political Consultants
Wal-Mart
JSM
Sproul and Associates
the Las Vegas FBI office
the Oregon Family Council
Ayn Rand
lie detectors
Captain America
the "Ten Commandments Judge"
the National Guard
Harold See
black holes
three men and a horse
Barbra Streisand
Bob Shrum
Year of the Spoiler 120
Randy "Duke" Cunningham
Brian Bilbray
Francine Busby
Tijuana sewage
William Griffith
mysterious phone calls
feminazi educrats
Tim Kaine
Jerry Kilgore
Rick Santorum
weapons of mass destruction
Bob Casey, Jr.
a Republican in a duck suit
Carl Romanelli
antimatter
eye gouging
nonviolence
insane Democrats
Randy Graf
"Gabby" Giffords
Ken Mehlman
idiots
Rick Perry
Chris Bell
Carole Strayhorn
Kinky Friedman
J. Edgar Hoover
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
trial lawyers
Ted Kulongoski
Ron Saxton
Mary Starrett
Tweedledee, Tweedledum
pennies from heaven
The Solution
Trouble in Kiribati 133
Benjamin Franklin
the Marquis de Condorcet
Thomas Paine
Thomas Jefferson
Louis XVI
Marie Antoinette
Robespierre
omelets
irony
Jean-Charles de Borda
the metric system
Brokeback Mountain
the most repulsive book ever written in the French language
the Marquis de Laplace
"honest men"
corrupt sportswriters
arrogant pushy scientists
Catalonian mysticism
sinners and infidels
the most perfect voting method
Kiribati
James Madison
Napoleon Bonaparte
The New Belfry 149
Charles Dodgson
thrift
stuttering
Henry George Liddell
bad architecture
blogging
committee voting
extraordinary injustice
uncut pages
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
barking up the wrong Tumtum tree
unanswered prayers
paradoxes
dodos
a trick picture
Instant Runoff 162
Edward Gorey
the Good Samaritan
William Robert Ware
sermons
MIT
John Stuart Mill
the moral condition of the working classes
Alexis de Tocqueville
proportional representation
Thomas Hare
Carl George Andrae
Lord Salisbury
H. G. Wells
instant-runoff voting
one-stop shopping
the winner-turns-loser paradox
Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Cycle? 172
Robert Todd Lincoln
the executive branch's Angel of Death
Pullman porters
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
James Garfield
Tammany Hall
"the most un-American, most diabolical system ever devised"
Mussolini
Duverger's law
Ilona Staller's left breast
Bimini
Dodgson's rule
Dick Morris
Bob Dole
Newt Gingrich
Jerry Falwell
Lucifer
William H. Riker
Brown v. Board of Education
Harry Truman
Republican flip-floppers
the Joseph McCarthy of Condorcet cycles
liberalism
Wilmot Proviso
the Journal of Theoretical Politics
Scott L. Feld
Bernard Grofman
Allan Gibbard
Mark Satterthwaite
Amartya Sen
con games
Buckley and the Clones 186
Steven Brams
George Boehm
George and Ira Gershwin
negative voting
Robert J. Weber
Nelson Rockefeller
Charles Goodell
William F. Buckley, Jr.
James Buckley
Richard Ottinger
clones
dummies
Spiro Agnew
Richard Nixon
Ithaca
game theory
approval voting
John Kellett
Kenneth Mott
Richard A. Morin
Guy Ottewell
good guys
bad guys
Nobel prizes
the Serene Republic of Venice
popes
the Soviet Union
the United Nations
Good Morning America
the most dangerous system ever invented
Bad Santa 201
Donald Saari
Kris Kringle
the n-body problem
rigged elections
Peter Fishburn
Samuel Merrill III
Jill Van Newenhizen
indeterminacy
rebuttals and counter-rebuttals
Unsophisticated Voter System
unmitigated evil
symmetry
polyhedra
behavioral assumptions I find to be very dangerous
Mr. Mediocre
Thomas Edison
electrocuted dogs
"President Perot"
Alexander Tabarrok
"Buddy" Roemer
how to buy kitchen cabinets
"wherever you go, there you are"
polls
chameleon on a mirror
bandwagon effect
Jesse Ventura
Roger B. Myerson
John Nash
self-interest
bullet voting
Terry Sanford
air bags
Burr's dilemma
Last Man Standing 219
Orange County
John Wayne
American machismo
the Condorcet winner
Linux
Markus Schulze
CSSD
Wikipedia
trolls
Queen Elizabeth
Kim Jong Il
sarcasm
simplicity
Ka-Ping Yee
Microsoft Windows
manipulative behavior
how to prevent carjacking
Mathematics Awareness Week
Iain McLean
permanent pointlessness
Hot or Not? 231
Hanging out
James Hong
Jim Young
gene survival
speed dating
Silicon Valley
Slashdot
Playboy
Michelin ratings
range voting
the Internet Movie Database
The Seventh Seal
Jennifer Aniston
cheating
Warren D. Smith
Bayesian regret
ignorance
honesty
guilt
quasi-spiritual acts
honeybees
Jan Kok
number phobia
pop culture
Present but Not Voting 250
This Is Spinal Tap
Jeremy Bentham
faulty embalming
Lionel Robbins
eBay
Claude Hillinger
socialism
John Harsanyi
fiddling while Rome burns
what the impossibility theorem really means
The Reality
The Way Democracy Will Be 261
Unhappiness
the Center for Voting and Democracy
Rob Richie
George Hallett
Cynthia Terrell
Cincinnati
John Anderson
Lani Guinier
cumulative voting
David Gergen
George Soros
the Muppets
alienation
Howard Dean
Barack Obama
USA Today
the Sierra Club
spirochetes
penicillin
Jesse Jackson, Jr.
the Prius of voting systems
heretics
zealots
a one-word answer no one understands
regret in Peru
a car with Kennedy and Nixon bumper stickers
minimal coalitions
third parties
nursery effect
moderates
the universal political fantasy
a mission from God
Blue Man Coup 279
Karma
George Allen
YouTube
Glenda Parker's vacation money
the Blue Man from Bozeman
Y2K
the Heimlich maneuver
Smurfs
little microchips inserted in our brains
conspiracy theories
Glossary 285
Addresses 291
Notes 293
Sources 313
Acknowledgments 325
Index 327