Moira Madden and Adam I. Ascione D’Elia make the case for standardizing Single Transferable Voting in DSA to ensure proportional representation and prevent opportunistic manipulations of the democratic process.
Over the past half-decade, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has become the largest and most important socialist organization in the United States, with a membership of nearly 100,000 in chapters across the country. This is a tremendous increase from only about 6,000 members prior to the first Bernie Sanders campaign. While such rapid growth is impressive, it has strained internal structures inherited from a much smaller and less ideologically diverse organization.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the conduct of the DSA’s internal elections. Every DSA chapter is essentially given free rein to conduct elections as it sees fit. This has resulted in a chaotic proliferation of electoral systems and procedures throughout the organization, with little consistency between chapters and sometimes even within chapters. This would be bad enough on its own, but the lack of a unified standard for internal elections has also exposed chapter leadership bodies around the country to the irresistible temptation to rig elections by selecting electoral systems that are known to be vulnerable to manipulation and coordinated tactical voting.
If the DSA is going to live up to its democratic ideals, we need to establish a common standard for conducting internal elections.
If we take no action, we can expect the weaknesses of DSA’s internal democracy to become ever more apparent and to weigh ever more heavily on the work of the organization.
To this end, we strongly urge delegates to the DSA’s 2021 National Convention to vote for Constitution/Bylaws Change #7 “Hold All Leadership Elections By Single Transferable Vote.” This would amend the bylaws of DSA to require the use of the Single Transferable Vote (STV) for all leadership elections at the national and local levels, exempting only local committees. CB#7 also establishes a fund to cover election costs for chapters that request assistance with using STV election software. The National staff estimates a budget of $5,581.20 per year covering staff time in developing materials and providing election assistance, as well as costs to help chapters pay for holding their elections.
If this measure is not passed at the convention, DSA will not have an opportunity to standardize its internal elections and safeguard its democracy for another two years.
For A Standard Voting System
Before we consider whether STV ought to be adopted as a standard voting system in DSA, we must first address the issue of whether DSA should have a standard voting system at all. There are two significant arguments against such a measure, one principled – that it is an infringement of chapter autonomy, and one practical – that standardizing electoral systems neglects the differences between the different sorts of elections held in the DSA.
The critics of implementing electoral standardization are correct that implementing a vote tabulating system across the board for DSA would be a limitation on the autonomy of individual chapters. This is not sufficient in itself to oppose the proposed measure. While chapter autonomy has an important role in DSA in allowing chapters to adapt to local conditions, this autonomy must realistically be limited by the functions of DSA as a national organization.
The question of chapter autonomy is fundamentally the question of whether a proposal that limits such autonomy produces some sufficient benefit to the organization to justify the amount of limitation.
For instance, the 2017 Convention passed Resolution 33, standardizing the Harassment Policy of the organization, and in doing so, limited the autonomy of chapters by requiring that they abide by the rules laid out in that resolution, and even requiring chapters of sufficient size to establish a new office for their chapter in the form of the Harassment Grievance Officer. In this case it is clear that preventing interpersonal abuse and abuse of power is a sufficient reason to enact limitations on chapter autonomy.
While the different ways DSA chapters tabulate their ballots does not rise to anything as disgraceful as outright harassment, electoral systems have a central place in maintaining the internal democracy of the organization, and standardizing DSA elections would be a significant step in protecting chapters from abuses of power by existing leaderships.Since DSA is a political environment with significant internal differences and developed factions and caucuses contesting for different visions of the organization, there is a clear opening for leadership, once elected, to seek to undermine further democratic functions of their chapter.
In fact, this very situation arose ahead of the 2019 Convention. East Bay DSA chapter leadership announced that delegate elections would be held by “ranked choice voting.” This is a phrase that, while extremely broad as a technical term, has come to be associated closely with efforts to implement Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), the single winner version of STV in American elections. Leadership proceeded at the last minute to specify that they meant to hold them using the Borda Count, an obscure method so notorious for its susceptibility to tactical voting that its creator, Jean-Charles de Borda, admitted that the method was only intended for elections among “honest men.” This means that honest voters, who are dedicated to ranking candidates in the order that they support them, will always be at risk of being outnumbered by dishonest voters willing to create a ballot that optimizes the chances of their favored candidates winning by utilizing mechanisms in the rules to overrepresent their own position. This was precisely the result of the East Bay election: the chapter’s leadership caucus was able to exploit Borda Count to translate a slight (approximately 53%) majority of the vote into fully 85% of the chapter’s convention delegate seats.
By standardizing voting systems, this risk to democratic practice is reduced in two ways. First, it creates an even playing field in terms of the membership knowing how elections will run, understanding how the method works, and even, where they may wish to vote tactically, creating a situation in which all voters and factions have equal capacity to know how to do so. Second, by adopting STV, one institutes a system highly resilient to practical attempts at tactical voting.
Since these are directly meant as defenses against the abuses of the autonomy of chapters and particularly the autonomous influence of already-elected chapter leaderships, the charge that the implementation of CB7 would intolerably violate chapter autonomy falls flat: it is a check against entrenched leaderships acting anti-democratically, as well as a safeguard against inexperienced leadership. Such a change therefore must have a level of restriction on autonomy in order to have any effect at all.
Criteria for the Best Voting System
Since we have dealt with the main contention against standardization on matters of principle, let us address the practical matter of whether CB7 would be an inappropriate one-size-fits-all measure that fails to account for the different sorts of elections in the DSA.
To answer this question, we must examine what sorts of elections exist in DSA, how STV operates in those settings, and whether STV reaches a reasonable enough standard of performance across those settings that the democratic benefits and transparency achieved by standardizing to STV outweigh any inherent imperfections (which are mathematically necessary for all vote-counting methods).
Regardless of the voting system, elections are intrinsically factional and competitive in all organizations. DSA is a political organization, both internally and externally, and proud to hold multiple tendencies – but with this comes partisan divides. As a result, any election for leadership in DSA must be treated as a potential political contest, with highly interested and sometimes opposing factions. In order to avoid anti-democratic practices, we must assume that a substantial portion of DSA members will attempt to vote tactically if the opportunity arises in a practicable manner among those members well-informed on the factions and voting system.
However, DSA also has large numbers of relatively inactive members, members who do not follow the broader internal politics or are not aligned with any faction, and “low-information voters” who are unlikely to spend the time to learn esoteric election rules or study massive numbers of candidate profiles.
While any voting system DSA uses for any of its elections needs to be resilient to tactical manipulation in order to deal with factions, it must also be relatively familiar to most DSA members, easy to learn, and capable of handling both highly factional elections, elections with significant numbers of independent candidates, and all elections in between.
Moreover, any standardization must be flexible enough to provide both for multi-winner elections, such as Convention delegations and the NPC, and single winner elections, which many chapters use for their steering committees. Fortunately, STV can address all of these needs.
Why Single Transferable Vote?
Single Transferable Vote (STV) is a type of ranked choice voting. Voters rank candidates in order of preference – as few or as many as they want. In a single-winner election, this is equivalent to instant-runoff voting (IRV). If a candidate earns a majority of first place votes, they win. If not, the last place candidate is eliminated and the voters that ranked that candidate first have their votes reallocated to their second choice. This transfer process continues, until a candidate reaches majority and the winner that best matches the constituency’s preferences is elected. In a multi-winner election, there is a victory threshold depending on the number of seats and voters. Once a candidate reaches that threshold, any first-place ballots for that candidate in excess of the threshold are proportionately redistributed to the voters’ second-choices. The transfer process continues, until a set of winners are pushed over the threshold.
STV not only results in more honest and efficient elections but is very likely to elect multi-winner bodies that proportionately represent the voters. Unless you have a psychic’s crystal ball, there is no tactical advantage to voting dishonestly. Voters are encouraged to highly rank their preferred candidate, knowing their vote will transfer to their next most favored candidate in the event that their first choice is not viable. This eliminates the concern of voting for a “spoiler” or feeling forced to vote for the “lesser of two evils.”
Single Transferable Vote has an embattled history in the United States, and was once widely used in American cities such as New York, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo, and Boulder. The use of a proportional representation system allowed for women, racial minorities, and political minorities like socialists to be elected.
Workers selecting representatives that actually resembled the electorate alarmed chauvinists and the capitalist parties, both of which knew it to be in their interest to suppress the use of STV. 49 ballot initiatives in American cities focused on repealing STV systems between 1920 and 1961, with 21 ultimately being successful. For decades Cambridge, Massachusetts was the last US city standing to use STV for local elections – not coincidentally a city with multiple DSA members as city councillors.
Currently this system is most notably used to elect the parliament of Ireland, where it has secured representation for left-wing parties like Sinn Féin and People Before Profit. It is also used in Australia to elect the federal Senate and some state legislatures, as well as in Malta.
STV Against Alternatives
We must consider STV against its alternatives along impactful and meaningful electoral criteria if we are to determine which system would best serve DSA. This includes the system’s resilience to tactical voting, capacity for proportionality in multi-seat elections without prohibiting or limiting independent candidates, and utility in both multiple-seat and single-seat elections. STV satisfactorily provides for each, and it is the only system among those familiar enough to DSA members to consider as a standard that does so.
Since tactical voting is mathematically possible in any democratic voting system, the question of manipulation is a question of the practicality of such an endeavor. This ultimately amounts to two factors: the amount of information necessary for a faction to determine how to vote tactically, and the relative risk associated with incorrectly tactically voting compared to providing genuine rankings.
For STV, the theoretical ability to vote tactically emerges from its failure of the monotonicity criterion, where in some cases a candidate can benefit from being lowered on some ballots or hurt by being raised on some ballots. While this appears counterintuitive, it results from the fact that if candidate A and candidate B are both strong candidates, and candidate C is a weaker candidate, it may be the case that if C is eliminated, B would benefit enough to defeat A, but if enough A voters falsely support C to promote C to the next round over B, since C is a weak candidate, A can actually win.
Two details of this scenario should be carefully noticed. First, gaming STV requires near-perfect knowledge of the precise way voters will vote and the order of when candidates will be eliminated in advance. Second, an entire faction must vote in at least two different ways in the correct proportion to pull this off.
The only way to effectively implement such a strategy would require detailed knowledge of the final vote totals of the election well in advance, and would have to be able to account for the possibility of similar gambits by other factions.
In practice, the information barrier becomes high enough that truthful votes are much safer and more reliable than targeting monotonicity failures. This criterion is more often fixated on by academics than it is an issue that arises in the many real elections held with STV. DSA members should instead consider the impact of methods that affect voting behavior and produce odd electoral outcomes.
Other systems often used in DSA are subject to much more reliable forms of tactical voting. Borda Count requires voters to complete full ballots and assigns points to each ranking. It fails two critical voting criteria that are more exploitable than monotonicity. First is the majority criterion: that a candidate who wins an outright majority of first-place votes is not guaranteed victory. Second is the later-no-harm criterion: that placing lower choices on a ballot can counteract the chances for a top choice vote to win.
Borda allows for factions to artificially lower their top competitors, rather than the candidates they most oppose, to refrain from giving points that instead go to less favored, but weaker candidates. In order to amplify this effect, factions can use cloning, and increase the number of candidates they run without regard to their relative size.
In this way, factions can take up more places on the ballot and therefore force opponents to give them more points while reducing the proportion of points they need to give away to others. Unlike the monotonicity violations of STV, this process of cloning and dumping only increases the total number of points a faction employing them receives and does not have a substantial risk factor. In fact, the strategy is effective enough that once one faction begins employing it, others are incentivized to follow suit. If only some factions vote tactically, those factions are easily able to dominate, especially over independent candidates who cannot employ cloning.
Not only does this ultimately cause long and confusing ballots which must be filled in full; it also causes bizarre outcomes – the tendency of Borda under tactical voting is towards tied elections, with near-random results based on the success of tactical implementation. In multiseat elections, this can effectively mean seats are awarded as participation trophies.
Recently, some interest has developed in DSA using variations on Score voting, including Approval voting and STAR voting. A Score method is one in which rather than ranking candidates, voters assign a point rating, often from zero to five, or zero to ten, independently of their ratings for other candidates.
Approval gives voters the option to “approve” or “disapprove” of a candidate, effectively creating a Score method from zero to one, and STAR is a single-winner method that uses Score voting to determine the top two candidates who then face each other in a mandatory runoff.
Clearly, any faction which primarily cares to elect its own candidates has the incentive to assign each the maximal rating, and all others the minimum, as to place intermediary rankings amounts to casting ballots against their own candidates. A plurality faction with sufficient discipline can effectively dominate. With STAR, while implementing the required runoff mitigates this, all a faction would need to do to sidestep the matter would be to run an extra candidate and force both into the runoff.
Where Borda creates a competition for the mathematically conniving, Score methods simply allow for clique domination. While a majority opposing such a clique could coalesce to prevent this, the resulting competition becomes a form of two-party domination, in which any smaller factions which may politically differentiate themselves threaten to spoil the election. Neither Borda nor the various Score systems are in any way forms of proportional representation, as STV is: they are majoritarian systems that yield results much closer to first past the post (FPTP), the deeply flawed system that the US uses in most elections.
Setting aside resilience to tactical voting, STV is not the only method to approximate proportionality. One could argue for a list-based system or additional member system, where proportionality is mechanically inscribed by assigning seats according to the percentages of votes won. But in order to operate a list system, open or closed, DSA would have to severely limit or even prohibit the ability for independent candidates to run. While list systems offer an excellent example of the sorts of voting systems socialists might push for to deepen democracy in government elections, the overwhelming number of unaffiliated members in the DSA would make such a system inappropriate for our purposes.
Opportunists in DSA Hide Political Differences Behind Procedure
Democracy should remain one of the highest priorities of DSA – it is the first letter of its name. Unfortunately, certain elements would have us abandon the mission of a mass organization that strives for vibrant member engagement in favor of a bureaucratic and managerial approach to our comrades.
In chapters around the country, unprincipled cliques have taken advantage of the decentralized structure of DSA to implement undemocratic voting systems that facilitate clean sweeps of entire chapter leadership bodies by a single faction. When pressed to justify their use of such transparently flawed systems as Borda or Approval voting, members of these entrenched leadership cliques will insist, circularly, that the most important consideration in choosing a voting system is to work backwards from what they want the outcome of the election to be, and to select a voting system that will guarantee that outcome.
We ask DSA members to consider: why would we want to grant leadership the right to control the outcome of elections before a single vote has been cast?
With this in mind, DSA should heed the cautionary examples of countless 20th century socialist organizations on the dangers of disenfranchising minority factions and making leadership difficult or impossible to dislodge. This leads to stagnation and a passive and demobilized membership, diminished feedback from the rank-and-file, and intellectual apathy from dwindling debate.
Instead, debate should occur in the open, and electoral systems should be supported based on their democratic merits, not their ability to achieve a particular result at a particular place and time.
In this sense, the arguments against STV within DSA have already begun to resemble those of the capitalists and managers outside our organization. Proportional representation is crucial to the socialist movement’s ambitions to take state power. We should hold it dear as a principle when organizing for class politics both in our chapters and communities.
Conclusion
It is a basic sign of organizational maturity to settle on common rules for internal elections. STV is superior to Borda, Approval, or FPTP in terms of democratic legitimacy, ease of use, and resistance to manipulation. Many major chapters, including Boston and New York City, have used STV without incident for years. The current National Political Committee was elected by STV, and represents a variety of ideological backgrounds and chapter types. Together, they’ve overseen healthcare organizing during a global pandemic, a delegation to Venezuela, mobilization for Bernie Sanders, a massive growth of our membership and more. This year, at their direction, our 1,300 convention delegates were all elected using Single Transferable Vote, bringing the experiences of several new chapters, thousands of new members, and incredible diversity along political, ideological and demographic lines to the debate floor in August.
Why should DSA tolerate electoral practices in our own organization that we would denounce outside of it? Borda and Approval voting would certainly not be embraced by the socialist movement in real-world elections or in internal elections in our peer socialist parties abroad – and this is to say nothing of the practice of swapping between different electoral systems in pursuit of short-term political advantage.
We know the electoral systems that work and those that don’t. DSA has no need to reinvent the wheel and no reason to delay. Those opposed to this standardization are gambling with DSA’s future. We can’t afford to risk declining into yet another bureaucratic sect where leadership is empowered to change the rules of the game on the fly to stifle internal democracy. Adopting STV will guarantee the right of rank and file members to compete on a level playing field with entrenched leadership factions in their chapters.
Constitution/Bylaws Change #7 “Hold All Leadership Elections By Single Transferable Vote” is scheduled to be debated and voted on the evening of August 6th. It is imperative for our internal democracy to establish consistent internal election rules. We urge delegates to vote in favor of this proposal.
