Why do most US states use FPTP voting?

March 3, 2017 2:26 AM

So I was recently reading a book that mentions different methods for vote counting and ran into Duverger's Law. This seems to be a major issue with US politics, and so out of curiosity I wanted to learn more about how individual states decide to tally their votes.

I know that Maine and Nebraska assign electoral votes differently than other states so I assume that states could count votes however they want, but I can't seem to find the search terms to find the info in Google.

I am also curious about how the Electoral College votes came to be counted in a FPTP way. Is it in the constitution? I can find a lot of stuff that talks about the why, but nothing about the how. Who decided these things?

Again, I am not interested in why, I am interested in how. Search terms that I can use to find info gladly appreciated as well. Thanks in advance.

posted by Literaryhero to Law & Government (7 answers total)

Best answer: Short answer: because that's how Britain did it. Parliament has always been elected in a FPTP manner (which is a misnomer, by the way - it's a simple plurality system; there is no post), and, the colonies being British* before independence, that was the model they used. Other electoral systems didn't really come to prominence until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By that point, FPTP was well-established in the US. Nobody decided it, because there was nothing to decide. It was the only game in town at the time.

I don't remember which ones, but there are some municipalities in the US that use ranked preference voting in local elections. And there are various campaigns to introduce, say, PR, but they have minimal support. I remember reading an essay in my college library by Arend Lijphart advocating PR in a collection about reforming the House of Representatives. I will also note, for reasons of pedantry, that Maine and Nebraska still assign their electoral votes by FPTP; they just use different (i.e., non-statewide) districts.

*This is tangential to your question, but, since the colonists essentially replicated English institutions, there's a school of thought, influenced by Edmund Burke, that the revolution was not actually a revolution, but rather an attempt to reclaim traditional rights of Englishmen. See e.g., Clinton Rossiter, A Revolution to Conserve.
posted by kevinbelt at 4:18 AM on March 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

Best answer: kevinbelt's data is old; Maine does ranked choice voting for local and federal elections now, due to the referendum that passed in November. This Slate article provides some history of various other attempts to pass non-FPTP voting systems, in the process of giving context to Maine's successful referendum.
posted by nat at 4:38 AM on March 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I assume that states could count votes however they want

Yes, subject to the constraints of the Voting Rights Act. The only states that have indicated any interest in moving away from winner-take-all for electors are Democratic-majority states with Republican governments, where switching would basically mean free GOP electors.

I am also curious about how the Electoral College votes came to be counted in a FPTP way.

You mean how you need 270 to win? That's in the Constitution. It says you need a majority to win, or else the House chooses the President in a weird, fucked-up way and the Senate chooses the VP.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:27 AM on March 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

...but yeah, states can determine their electors however they want, within the constraints of the VRA and some other stuff. The legislatures could just pick them directly with no election. They could hold a lottery where the winners are electors. They could decide the electors by gladiatorial combat or rock-scissors-paper.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:29 AM on March 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

I wanted to learn more about how individual states decide to tally their votes.

I think it's misleading to think of this as a "decision" in the sense of "Alternatives were considered, and this one chosen." The US system has a lot of hacking and tweaking to make sure the outcomes are 'correct' - such as past compromises to give rural areas more representation - but FPP is more or less taken for granted across the board. One person, one vote; the most votes wins. A lot of Americans, I suspect, would be genuinely surprised to learn there are other ways of doing voting, and would find those alternatives to be suspect and "not really democratic." FPP is deeply embedded in the assumptions of the system, and while there are moments of deviation, it's important to remember it's the unquestioned default for the most part rather than a carefully considered choice with a rationale behind it.
posted by Tomorrowful at 7:29 AM on March 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

States that don't do FPTP for electoral votes basically kill their own influence.

Imagine if Ohio did some straight proportional voting. Instead of the winner getting 18 votes, you'd go in with both sides "expecting" 9 and a landslide win would get you 11. In other words, in this scenario if you ignore Ohio completely it'll cost you a measly two votes. You would spend your time pandering in other states instead.

Now if you're doing FPTP allotment by district, with at large reps going to the winner, you can attenuate this effect but this has some of the same problem still. And if it became common we'd be in gerrymandering hell with presidential election.
posted by mark k at 7:46 AM on March 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Note that FPTP and winner-takes-all are two different concepts. (The above answer conflates them). FPTP is a means of choosing who the winner is; Maine has previously had FPTP but done separately for each district, and also for the state asa whole (for the +2 ev's due to senators).

Now they will have ranked choice, but still done per district.

Ranked choice can still result in winner-takes-all, though; so for example if Utah implemented ranked choice, without changing from winner-takes-all, one candidate would still end up with all their evs; it just might not be the same person as a FPTP count would give.
posted by nat at 5:47 PM on March 3, 2017 [1 favorite]