Friday Interview: Munger on Third Parties

Michael Munger, chairman of the Political Science Department at Duke University, and a Libertarian running for governor of North Carolina in 2008, discusses third parties with Carolina Journal Radio’s Mitch Kokai. (Go to http://www.carolinajournal.com/cjradio/ to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)

Kokai: You recently wrote an opinion piece for a major North Carolina newspaper discussing the interstate vote swap. What’s that all about?

Munger: Vote swapping comes from two problems. One is, we have a first-past-the-post system. It means whoever gets the most votes wins. You don’t have to get a majority; you just have to get the most votes. The other thing that we have is an electoral college. We have a very strange system. Whenever I talk to one of my European colleagues they say, “Why in the world do you have such an odd system for a way to choose presidents because it is often true, and it was true in 2000, the person who gets the most votes doesn’t necessarily win.” So, two problems. One is you don’t have to get a majority, and the other is we have the electoral college. So the vote swap is part of a tradition of people trying to work within the system to make third parties more competitive.

Kokai: Now the specific instance that you have talked about in your op-ed column dealt with Libertarians in different states trying to ensure that the Libertarian presidential candidate could get an accurate number of votes to represent…

Munger: I’d like them to get an inaccurate number. [LAUGHTER] The reflection of the actual level of support is going to be hard because a lot of people would say, “I’d like the Libertarian candidate, or I’d like the Green Party candidate, or some other candidate. It’s just that I know my vote’s wasted if I don’t vote for one of the top two candidates, and I am worried that if I vote for the person that I like, the person that I hate will be elected. So, I will vote for the lesser of two evils.” Vote swapping is basically a way of getting around voting for the lesser of two evils. And it originated in 2000. The 2000 election for Ralph Nader — who people think of as the Green Party candidate, but in 2000 he was the Progressive Party candidate, excuse me, the Reform Party candidate — he was trying to get 5 percent. If you get 5 percent, you get enough money from the federal government to run your campaign next time. But, people didn’t want to vote for Nader because they were afraid that Bush would beat Gore. So the way the vote swap worked was, people in states where there was no chance of affecting the outcome — North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, that Bush was clearly going to win anyway — they said, “We’ll vote however you want. I will cast my vote for a third-party candidate even if I don’t really like that person, provided somebody in a close state, Florida in particular, will not vote for Nader and will vote for Gore.” And probably thousands of people actually did this. So the vote in Florida was much closer, as a result, than it would otherwise have been. Now the legal problem with this comes from … Let me step back a second. People have tried to sell votes on eBay. And there was a place called Voteauction.org that a graduate student in New York started running just as a prank, and it actually became quite valuable. He ended up selling it and making quite a bit of money as a minor dot com — well, a thousandaire, maybe not a millionaire — where he had people sign up, and they were going to auction their votes. And how much would a vote be worth? How much would you pay for someone else’s vote? Is it worth 50 cents? A dollar? A hundred dollars? That’s how we auction things. So that ended up being illegal. Many states have — and I have here a big stack of state statutes which I promise not to read, I could probably go out on a street corner and make money by reading these; people would pay me to stop — but the way that these statutes are written…it’s usually something like anything of value, you can’t give anything of value for a vote because it seems like bribery. And we probably don’t want candidates standing at the corner at the polls, “Here’s five dollars, vote for me, here’s five dollars, vote for me.”

Kokai: Anymore than that is already done. [LAUGHTER]

Munger: Well, it’s done with a little more class than that. Indirectly, sure. Vote for me and I will give you a road in your district is somewhat different. The question comes down to, can I offer you my vote for your vote? I clearly can’t offer you money. Can I offer you my vote for your vote? And there was a recent decision in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, mostly in California, that said it’s unconstitutional, and that’s what prompted me to write this. I think it would be interesting — and it is a more general problem than just something for Libertarians, although that’s why it interests me — but as a political scientist, what interests me is the desire that people have to be able to vote for the candidate they want, and not get the candidate they hate.

Kokai: You mentioned the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in this issue. Is this something that we are likely to see crop up again in other parts of the country?

Munger: People that follow the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals know that these are basically justices who go naked under their robes and play kazoos during court sessions. So, the Ninth Circuit — I’m exaggerating, that is actually not true. [LAUGHTER]

Kokai: As far as we know. [LAUGHTER]

Munger: There is no evidence that that’s true. But the Ninth Circuit is by far the most overturned circuit. But in this case, they made an argument that the actual logic of the electoral college, and for that matter, the First Amendment — one of the rights we have in the First Amendment is freedom from restriction on speech or the press, but we also have petition and right of free association. So, the argument is, and the Ninth Circuit bought this, people get to associate for political reasons, and me exchanging votes is just making both of us better off, and it’s a purely political association because there is no monetary or economic impulse to do it. It is purely political and, therefore, it is protected under the First Amendment. I think a lot of people are going to try it in 2008 if there is some remotely viable third-party candidate. If there is only two, there is no reason to vote swap. All you do is throw rocks at each other.

Kokai: You pointed out that one of the important pieces of this debate is trying to get a third-party candidate to 5 percent of the vote because of the federal funding. If a vote swap were found to work and to remain constitutional and not send people to prison, would this help third parties flourish?

Munger: I think the problem that we have in a first-past-the-post system is, there is such an impulse to vote for one of the first two candidates. And you saw this when Arnold Schwarzenegger was first elected in California. I think there were 230 different candidates, and people were worried he was going to win with seven or eight percent of the vote. But as the polls came out and it became clear that most of the other candidates weren’t really viable, more and more people switched their vote to one of the top two candidates. There were 230 candidates. Original polls had Schwarzenegger at maybe 10 or 15 percent. He got 48 — he got 48 percent of the vote — because this impulse to go up the ballot, to go up the list of polls is just irresistible. But if you had another option — and vote swapping is one — that would mean that more third-party candidates would enter, and they would get more money. It would be easier for third-party candidates to raise funds because all you have to get is that 5 percent in order to qualify for federal funding next time, and more people are likely to vote for you because of vote swapping. There is another alternative that I think would probably work better, and that is instant runoff voting. What really matters here is that I register my preferences over the three. And in instant runoff voting, suppose I vote for some schmo that has no chance — we’ll call him Munger — somebody who I really care about, but there is no way he is going to win. And then two other candidates — we’ll call them D and R. With instant runoff voting, I would say Munger — D — R. Now if Munger isn’t one of the top two, his name is stricken off my ballot. It doesn’t count. All I do is look at the last two. So instant runoff running would solve the problem. We wouldn’t need vote swaps, we wouldn’t need this other folderol. Some states are experimenting with instant runoff voting. Some European countries use something much closer to it. The real problem is that our system is so heavily biased against any kind of third-party candidates. You can say, “Well, they need to try harder, they need to attract more people.” A lot of people would vote for third parties. A lot of people would vote for the Greens if they had a chance. They don’t really have that chance.