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CES EA Appeal 2021 (The Case For Giving To The Center For Election Science)
13 min readDec 3, 2021
Introduction
This is our updated annual post that makes the case for why giving to The Center for Election Science is an awesome decision. I’ll give a background on our organization, include our updates for this year, and provide some key information to help you with your giving decision. Links in the article will tend to go towards more technical articles on our site. Feel free to ask any questions you have.
Executive Summary
Our organization studies voting methods and works with chapters across the country to implement approval voting. This is important because the voting method we use now is terrible and approval voting does a much better job at winner selection, measuring candidate support, and other factors that make a voting method good. And it does this better than alternative options. The way trillions of tax dollars and government policies are decided are at stake.
We’ve quickly implemented approval voting in two cities already and we now have a campaign in Seattle that has grown out of our chapter system. We’re also doing a large-scale polling project to focus on states next, which will let us target federal offices, their primaries, and presidential electoral votes.
Given that much of existential risk is made up of human-caused events stemming from issues that can be mitigated by policy and better governance, this intervention is even more important. This intervention via ballot initiatives is both efficient and costly at the scale we’re working. Over a 6-year period, we have a budget gap of $250M, though if that funding is accelerated, we may be able to shorten part of our timeline. Using ballot initiatives at this scale may also set a model for other interventions. Because this is a technical area, the FAQ covers many common questions.
Outline
What we do
We empower people through voting methods that strengthen democracy. We do this through research and advocacy with a focus on approval voting.
On the research side, we collect data comparing different voting methods. We publish articles on our blog as well as in peer-reviewed journals, which we make sure are open access. For example, we published an article comparing the impact of different voting methods on the 2016 election. Earlier this year, we hired our Director of Applied Data & Research to enhance our research capability. We’ll be sharing more research in the future.
On the advocacy side, we work with local groups to run educational campaigns alongside ballot initiatives. We give local and state-wide groups the tools they need to involve their communities so that they can implement better voting methods. We do this through a national chapter system that we developed this year. We focus heavily on approval voting due to multiple factors but mainly its simplicity and strong performance.
Why we do what we do
Virtually across the globe, we all use the worst voting method there is—a choose-one voting method—to elect people to executive and other offices. We trust those same people we elect using that terrible voting method to (1) spend vast sums of taxpayer money and (2) execute policies that impact our lives.
Our current choose-one voting method is bad for our democracy. Choose-one voting causes vote splitting between candidates, often creating an inaccurate picture of voter preference. This vote splitting causes spoilers and can squeeze out moderate candidates. Good candidates sometimes don’t even run for fear of being labeled a spoiler, or because of manufactured notions of unelectability. This choose-one approach also incentivizes voters to vote against their favorite candidates if they perceive them as not being viable. In all, this results in inferior government and a poor environment for fresh ideas to be discovered and implemented. It also means a lack of continuity with policy due to wild ideological swings from administration to administration.
There are much better ways of electing these people to office, one of which is very easy—approval voting.
Approval voting is classically a single-winner method that lets voters choose as many candidates as they want. The candidate with the most votes wins. This voting method tends to elect more consensus-style candidates while yielding an accurate reflection of support for all candidates on the ballot, not just the winner. With approval voting, voters can always vote for their favorite no matter what.
These features produce elected officials that have the support of their constituents and a more stable political environment less susceptible to wild ideological swings. This elevated level of support can permit new ideas to develop that otherwise couldn’t under our current choose-one method. Consider that presidential candidates aren’t even allowed on the debate stage to voice their message without polling at least 15%—a feat nearly impossible under our current method for anyone outside the two parties. The approval voting winner also tends toward the middle voter and electorate consensus—which should not be confused with an unopinionated candidate.
What we’ve done and what we intend to do
Over the past three years, we have helped make approval voting a reality. We brought approval voting to its first US city in 2018, passing an initiative in Fargo, North Dakota. Our victory was built on collaboration. In partnership with a local organization, Reform Fargo, our public education campaign helped pass an initiative that was seen as a long shot by local political insiders. The ballot initiative passed with 64% of the vote. All of this was achieved within one year of our initial funding from Open Philanthropy.
After the passage of approval voting, Fargo, a city plagued by vote splitting, elected commissioners in 2020 with over 50% approval with approval voting. This clear support was a first in recent memory.
In 2020, we brought approval voting to its second city, St. Louis, MO. Again, we worked with the local community to make this campaign a success. We partnered with organizations including the League of Women Voters and the local SEIU affiliate, among others. The ballot initiative—Proposition D—passed with 68% of the vote. In just two years we replicated the success of Fargo’s implementation and scaled it by over twofold with St. Louis’ population of just over 300,000 people.
In 2021, St. Louis used approval voting for the first time. Unlike previous elections where St. Louis experienced severe vote splitting, particularly among Black and progressive candidates, this election produced winners with consensus support. The old process elected a mayor who doxed protesters in the city. Immediately following the passage of approval voting, this incumbent mayor decided not to run for reelection.
With approval voting (using a top-two system with approval voting in the primaries), the next election went differently. Two candidates advanced to a runoff, with the leader having 57% of the vote. From a geographical perspective, the early leader and eventual winner, Tishaura Jones, received support on both sides of the traditional racial divide in the city, demonstrating the consensus-building effect of approval voting.
In November of 2021, Seattle Approves launched its campaign to bring approval voting to a new jurisdiction. Seattle has a population of over 750,000 and is the 18th largest city in the United States. Polling for this initiative is already at 70% out of the gate.
Our Director of Campaigns has also set up a chapter program that has organized groups across the country. Those chapters, in combination with strategic resources and a request for proposals for funding, will allow us to take a tactical approach to campaign planning in the future.
Our Director of Applied Data and Research has also led a first-of-its-kind polling project that will amass an unprecedented dataset to guide our state-by-state path. In the near future, our goal is to pass initiatives at the statewide level across the country. This escalation means simultaneously implementing approval voting at the federal level and in primaries, including US Senate, US House, and US presidential electoral votes.
Why we need funding
We have been extremely grateful for the funding we received from Open Philanthropy. And we are grateful to Will MacAskill for believing in our ability and prospective impact enough to recommend us to Open Philanthropy. Our past support from the Long Term Future Fund as well as Survival and Flourishing have also added to that foundation for our early success.
To succeed in the next phase of our mission, we need to scale up our funding as we begin to target statewide efforts. Our future plans require having the staffing necessary to coordinate a nationwide effort of multiple concurrent state-wide campaigns while simultaneously doing the necessary research to ensure a data-backed approach.
We estimate this will require an annual budget of $15M. Our current annual budget is only $1.5M. Alongside this funding, we will need to provide financial support for the campaigns through a sister 501(c)4 organization, which does not have a cap on campaign spending. We estimate that we will require at least $250 million in funding over the next 5-6 years to cover all the ballot initiative states and maintain the infrastructure to run this scale of operations.
This number may sound high—and it is a large number—but it’s efficient when you consider the trillions of tax dollars and the scope of the policies at stake. Also, when you consider that the cost to gather signatures necessary for an initiative to merely get on the ballot in a large state like California is $10M, the cost makes sense.
It’s important to note that our work may offer benefits beyond approval voting—though approval voting is the core and most critical impact. In talking to other EA’s, they’ve pointed out that this methodical approach can serve as a blueprint for other EA organizations considering policy change through ballot initiatives. The entire EA community may benefit from our challenges and successes.
Overall, we have an enormous budget gap. We’re creating a large opportunity to fund a movement with systemic impact. We’ve already demonstrated proof of concept and replication while also scaling. Now, we’re ready for the next phase.
Why there is urgency
Achieving voting method reform through legislation is a nonstarter due to the conflict of interest for legislators elected using existing methods. Instead, ballot initiatives are the main tool for pushing approval voting. Only about half the US states permit ballot initiatives. Even fewer have the legal framework that permits initiatives to change voting methods at the city or county level.
Unfortunately, we have already missed opportunities because of our funding limitation. Prospective partners have passed us by for the sole reason of lack of funding, even though they prefer approval voting to other reform options. We have to act quickly to reverse this trend. There are other groups that are open to approval voting and even prefer to work with us. But they will go with the heavily inferior RCV if they perceive that we cannot provide appropriate resources. This means our funding and rapid pace have to continue. This does create some tension [1].
Given how close approval voting came to matching RCV’s momentum in 2020, it’s clear that with funding, approval voting can move faster than RCV. Tens of millions went into RCV campaigns in 2020, supported by organizations with budgets averaging over $4M. In contrast, we had a $1M budget at CES. If that funding discrepancy increases, opportunities for approval voting will get displaced. And we will have offices voted on using an inferior system that doesn’t adequately address the fundamental problems that need to be solved. Switching to approval voting in the future may also be harder to do in places where RCV is used now.
Aside from displacement, we’re seeing the critical nature of electing the right people to office—the pandemic providing the most salient recent example. We are at a crucial point for the life of our democracy, one that requires bold commitment to save it. Approval voting needs to be implemented as quickly as possible.
Benefiting the Future
Approval voting is about the present and the future. This is based on the simple premise that a stable political system populated by elected officials with the consensus support of their constituents will improve policies and government over time. Surely, our current system is not getting us there, and neither are alternatives being proposed.
We are building the case that focusing on approval voting and thus policy will affect the far future. This is because approval voting is more stable compared to other methods and it allows new ideas to grow, some of which are crucial for our long-term prosperity. We have successfully made this argument to support past grants from the Long Term Future Fund as well as Survival and Flourishing.
This is not to say that approval voting accomplishes these long-term goals completely independently. Rather, it creates an environment where stable and responsible policy can take hold. And doing so is time-sensitive because it can take time for policy and systems to change.
According to Toby Ord in his book, The Precipice, the probability of an existential event over the next 100 years is one in six. That number itself is alarming and should get our attention. But it’s worse if you extrapolate the risk over time. For example, if that risk remains a constant, it implies that the probability of an existential event a mere four centuries down the road will be roughly a coin toss.
It’s also worth noting that the substantial existential risks that he identifies are human-caused and affected by policy and government. Looking at the numbers, it becomes critical that we identify multiple approaches to bring this number down. Using approval voting to improve our government is one such approach.
Our ask
Many of you are already familiar with our work. Maybe you heard about the Open Philanthropy grant or its renewal in 2019. You may have heard us speak at EA Global or REACH Berkeley. Or perhaps you listened to the 80,000 Hours episode. Regardless, our team and I are grateful that you take this issue seriously enough to direct your attention to it.
And to those of you in the EA community who have already donated, thank you. It takes a special kind of donor to support this bold, analytical cause. Many of you have reached out to us following your gift to let us know about your interest in this effort.
Please consider a gift that matches both your capacity and your commitment to fundamentally improving government. You can give online through our website. To give by other means or at a significant level, please reach out to me personally. I will be happy to get back to you, even over the holidays. We are a sophisticated team so we can also handle complex assets if you let us know your situation. You may have already seen many of my essays on philanthropy, advanced giving instruments, and tax consequences on my personal website.
Thank you again to those in the community who have already given.
Footnotes:
[1] It’s important to note that we do not oppose RCV campaigns that are off the ground. We do critique different voting methods and form opinions about them because we value making sure that there is a clear assessment of the options. But we do not tell people to vote against an RCV measure once a campaign has started, and nor do we do opposition messaging to target active campaigns.
The same has not always been the case the other way. The executive director from an RCV group in Washington is publicly opposing our Seattle campaign, and an executive director for a national RCV group opposed our St. Louis campaign. There, the executive director falsely claimed that approval voting would disadvantage women and people of color in St. Louis. (Recall that after approval voting was implemented in St. Louis that it advanced two women and the woman of color won.)
FAQ
Q: I heard there was this thing about approval voting that wasn’t so good or that another voting method was better. Also, don’t forget about Arrow’s Theorem.
A: All voting methods have quirks, but we maintain that the quirks of approval voting are comparatively mild compared to the alternatives. You can see this article where we go into all the details about approval voting critiques. Also, I talked with Kenneth Arrow personally for an hour, and he said that our choose-one voting method was bad. Really.
Q: How does IRV/RCV match up to approval voting?
A: Not very well. From encountering avoidable anomalies to being needlessly complex, IRV falls well short of what approval voting can offer. Here’s an article on that topic. And here’s an article on the limits of RCV (which includes its limited merits). Note that IRV and RCV are the same, though RCV is the name commonly used by advocates. This is notably confusing not just because of the multiple names but because there are many different ranking methods.
We have shown repeatedly that approval voting better captures public support compared to RCV. We did this by polling Democratic voters in the primaries using multiple voting methods and compared the results to control measures, both earlier and later in the primaries.
Q: How do you decide what makes a voting method good?
A: We look at the type of winner it tends to elect as well as practical issues from simplicity to implementation. Here’s an article on that topic. Here’s an in-depth article comparing methods using these broad criteria.
Q: Will approval voting increase the number of parties?
A: Probably, but likely not by much. Those parties can, however, get their voice heard (and ignored if they have bad ideas). Here’s an article on Duverger’s Law. (Fun video here). Also, third parties and independents clearly benefit from approval voting. Note that the multi-winner proportional version of approval voting would encourage more parties. But the math is more complicated. We’re focusing on single-winner methods first because we think it will be easier.
Q: Why don’t you go after organizations that do achievement awards?
A: We do, though we limit our resources to high-impact opportunities. Here’s an article about how we worked with The Webby Awards. We’ve also done an article on giving games. I’ve personally encountered some resistance when talking with some large awards organizations. They don’t collect the data to know whether their current voting method is bad. Plus they likely perceive that changing their voting method may reveal that their previously given awards have less value.
Q: The Electoral College is awful. Why aren’t you working to get rid of it?
A: The current actions using an interstate compact to make the electoral college moot would still leave us with that awful choose-one voting method. Approval voting would work with this current approach though (RCV wouldn’t). We wrote a whole article about it.
Q: Why don’t you go after primaries? You should be going after primaries.
A: We go after primaries. We do this at both the local level and in the future will do this at the state and federal level. We target both the general and primary elections. We did that in St. Louis. Local elections in Fargo do not have primaries. We’ve written lots about primaries. Here’s an article. Here’s one, too. Here’s one more. We’ll likely write another one before too long as well.
Q: Why don’t you target third parties to get their support?
A: We target third parties to get their support. Green and Libertarian chapters in multiple states support and use approval voting. The Libertarian Party even uses it for national internal positions. Other third parties use it, too. Many of those folks have already bought the notion that RCV will help them, so we have to explain how approval voting would be better. RCV gives little additional support to third parties. Just look at the minuscule support third-party candidates got in Maine. We’ve also demonstrated experimentally that approval voting is far better for third parties than RCV.
Q: I listened to the 80,000 Hours Episode, but I felt that you didn’t go into enough detail in certain areas.
A: It seems like you always think of things after the fact. Here are some quick follow-up details into areas like voter turnout where I could have given a more complete answer.
Q: How can I help again?
A: Let other people know about our work and invest in a better ballot to improve government. You can also join our chapter system.
(Some background: I have worked with CES on an unsuccessful effort to get approval voting on the ballot in Denver and wrote a grant request for a campaign in Broomfield. Nowadays I mainly work on voting methods with the League of Women Voters and the Equal Vote Coalition.)
I agree with CES on basically every point mentioned here. However, I believe that it’s possible to have a greater impact in the voting methods area by focusing on voting methods other than approval - specifically, STAR and Condorcet methods. Part of this is because I think these voting methods do a better job than approval at electing optimal winners and incentivizing politicians, but I won’t belabor this point since CES agrees with me about STAR yielding slightly better winners than approval. Also, the difference between approval and the best possible single-winner voting method is smaller than the difference between approval and plurality, or even between approval and IRV (probably). The main reason I think we can have more impact by advocating for STAR or Condorcet is that I believe they are more likely to outcompete IRV nationwide if they are given the level of exposure that approval voting has received.
While approval is a better voting method than IRV, I believe that IRV looks better superficially. Ranking is more expressive than up-or-down approval, and intuitively it seems like a voting method that uses more data will yield better outcomes. Also, the argument that approval voting is vulnerable to strategic bullet voting (voting for only one candidate) gets a lot of traction, and voters don’t like feeling that they need to consider candidate viability or that strategic voting will decide elections. These arguments are flawed and Aaron has linked to some excellent refutations of them, but my point is that they are subtly flawed. Unless you dig into the topic enough to learn about things like the Burlington election, IRV is going to seem like the better option.
Such arguments are a lot easier to rebut when talking about STAR or a Condoret method. Both options are far more expressive than approval voting. Bullet voting is clearly a bad idea in STAR, and it takes a rather convoluted argument to make a case that strategic voting matters at all under Condorcet methods.
CES’s main argument for approval voting over methods like STAR and Condorcet is approval voting’s simplicity. But the simplicity of approval voting has a flip side: it’s also the least sexy of the reasonable voting methods. It’s a whole lot easier to get excited about ranking than about (maybe) approving multiple candidates - approval voting doesn’t feel like as big of a change.
I think sexiness is more valuable than simplicity or ease of implementation when it comes to getting a new voting method adopted. Before Broomfield’s city council debated between approval and IRV, the elections director gave a presentation that portrayed approval as providing basically the same benefits as IRV but at a much lower cost. Not a single council member even mentioned this advantage, and they unanimously went for IRV over approval voting. I expect voters to care even less about implementation costs than city councils. Altogether, approval voting ends up sounding like a cheaper and inferior alternative.
Even if simplicity is important, STAR voting can’t be too complicated to get enacted because IRV isn’t too complicated to get enacted and STAR is simpler than IRV. As for Condorcet, some Condorcet methods are also simpler and easier to implement than IRV. Condorcet methods have a reputation of being complicated enough to be incapable of catching on more broadly, but this reputation is entirely undeserved. As I’ve written here, Condorcet methods are uniquely positioned to take advantage of RCV’s momentum and can be far more acceptable to RCV advocates than approval or STAR.
In the two cities where approval voting is used, Fargo and St. Louis, it wasn’t technically feasible to use IRV. Also, they had some very impressive campaigns; in Fargo, my recollection is that the “Approval Voting Army” was bigger than either the Republican or Democratic campaigns, and St. Louis also had a huge force of volunteers distributing yard signs, sending texts, and doing other kinds of outreach. I think such strong groups of volunteers could have gotten just about any voting method enacted if it was technically feasible and had they opted to pursue it; these ballot measures didn’t succeed because approval voting is uniquely appealing.
Another big point for focusing on other voting methods is that having momentum makes it a lot easier to get a voting method enacted, and this means that there is far greater leverage in advocating for as-yet unused voting methods. If Seattle were to adopt IRV, it would provide a rather minor boost for IRV nationwide. If Seattle adopts approval voting it will be a far bigger deal - but probably not as big a deal as the victory in St. Louis since the difference between “used in Fargo, St. Lous, and Seattle” and “used in Fargo and St. Louis” is smaller than the difference between “used in Fargo and St. Louis” and “used in Fargo”. If Seattle were to adopt STAR or a Condorcet method it would a really big deal for those methods since it would actually put them on the map. The less known a voting method is, the more good we can accomplish by giving it its first victory.
I am not overwhelmingly confident that STAR and Condorcet have a better chance than approval of outcompeting IRV. I believe that it’s quite difficult to predict how well a particular voting method will perform in a statewide ballot measure based on theory and (maybe) a few local results and opinion polls, and CES’s views on the importance of simplicity may be correct. Operating under this uncertainty, I think the best thing we can do is to support all of these better voting methods at once so we succeed both in universes in which approval (but not STAR) can outcompete IRV and in which STAR (but not approval) can outcompete IRV. In addition to funding CES, I think it also makes sense to fund the Equal Vote Coalition. They focus primarily on STAR, but also support approval and Condorcet. I think it’s also important for groups like CES to endorse initiatives to adopt STAR voting when they appear on the ballot and to provide visibility so that local supporters can get involved.
I want to emphasize that I agree with Aaron far more than I disagree with him. While IRV is a real improvement over plurality, it’s still severely flawed and can fall flat on its face when it comes to delivering improvements like decreased polarization and ending the two-party system. I very much hope that approval voting will outcompete IRV; I just don’t think it will.
I feel like this comment falls in this category:
"Q: I heard there was this thing about approval voting that wasn’t so good or that another voting method was better. Also, don’t forget about Arrow’s Theorem.
A: All voting methods have quirks, but we maintain that the quirks of approval voting are comparatively mild compared to the alternatives. You can see this article where we go into all the details about approval voting critiques. Also, I talked with Kenneth Arrow personally for an hour, and he said that our choose-one voting method was bad. Really."
I put together a detailed article where I compare different voting methods (including STAR). Some relevant details there are that STAR had its chance on the ballot in the city of Portland and failed. Note that voting methods poll much, much better in cities. So that it failed in Portland where STAR advocates are centered is a particularly discouraging sign. We also find that methods involving scoring (like STAR does) simply do not poll as well. This isn't that big of a deal because they're only slightly better in winner selection. And we have other methods that perform very nearly as well (approval voting, in the same cardinal family) that do poll well.
Recall also that approval voting passed by over 60% in both cities it was on the ballot for. I would disagree with the claim that our forces in St. Louis and Fargo were so large that they would have passed any voting method. Our forces were so large in St. Louis and Fargo because it was approval voting. I know because they considered other options. STAR folks even reached out to our key person in Fargo, and they still decided on approval voting. IRV folks reached out to the same folks we partnered with in St. Louis and they still went with approval voting. I feel like to say that our forces were so strong that we could have passed anything misses the causality of why our forces were so strong to begin with.
I also find it a bit hard to take seriously the idea of putting energy behind Condorcet methods. Condorcet methods are a class of ranking methods that elect a "beat-all" or Condorcet winner. The math involved to select the winner when there is no Condorcet winner is quite complex (more so than STAR or IRV). That alone seems like a large barrier. Even I have to look up the algorithms to remember how they're computed. And there's no doing these by hand.
I feel like those two rationales help to explain why we continue to get behind approval rather than splitting our focus.
It's also worth noting that CES explored the possibility of approval voting in Denver and to a lesser extent in Broomfield. We did this by talking with the Denver city council who invited us and talking with advocates in Colorado. We did not support signature gathering in Denver, and we did not submit it to be on the ballot (though there was an individual who did it on their own and abandoned it). We did not think that we had an adequate team of people who physically lived in Denver during the window that we were focused on. And so we decided to look at other opportunities. We're data-oriented and cautious about how we spend limited resources. These are hard decisions, but saying no to Denver also meant that we got to say yes to our partners in Seattle. Seattle is polling at 70% and we have great partners who live there.
Also, the question is not whether approval voting will outcompete IRV—though with proper funding it very well may. The bar is actually lower. Perhaps a better rephrasing of the question is whether approval voting can thrive as a candidate and be implemented so that it may be tested alongside IRV. And to that question, I'm confident that it can. We've evidenced that. And we will surely get more cities with proper funding. And we are currently exploring our plans with states. I can't say exactly where we're targeting and when just yet (we have to keep some aspects of our strategy confidential). But we will target states as our strategic opportunities align with our operational capacity—which is determined by funding.
Consider also that there are only two states that use IRV. Both won by slim margins. One of those states (Alaska) failed the first time it tried. IRV also failed by 10 points in Massachusetts. And it's been repealed by voters multiple times in cities across the US. This is not a runaway for IRV. And it took them multiple decades to get this far. There's enough reason for concern that it's worth supporting approval voting as a viable alternative—particularly given that approval voting does substantially better at its job as a voting method.
Plus our team at CES that is pushing approval voting is amazing. I feel very lucky to work with such talented staff. Each of them went through a very challenging blind hiring process, and now they get to continually flex their muscles at work. We're really just starting to show what we're capable of.
I fully agree with CES's decision not to commit any more resources in Denver or Broomfield. I also agree that "approval voting can thrive as a candidate and be implemented so that it may be tested alongside IRV", though I expect that most of this thriving will occur in places like Fargo where technical challenges prevent the implementation of IRV (or even STAR).
However, it's far too soon to dismiss the chances of STAR voting catching on. Getting it adopted in the first city will be the hardest since it doesn't have much of a track record. Portland didn't actually get to vote on it (they failed to get it onto the ballot due to a lack of funds), and the election where it was rejected occurred in Lane County, OR, where it still got 47.6% of the vote. Had they only tried to get STAR voting in the city of Eugene (the largest city in Lane County) they would have almost certainly succeeded; as you noted, "voting methods poll much, much better in cities", and it received over 70% of the vote where STAR advocates had done most of their campaigning (mainly in Eugene). Subsequent efforts to get STAR voting on the ballot in Eugene have been stymied by the pandemic and by some of the signatures they collected being wrongly rejected, but it's going to happen sooner or later and STAR voting is highly likely to pass when it does.
I don't blame you for dismissing Condorcet though; I'm in a very small minority in viewing it as politically viable and I don't know of anyone else who has written about why it can catch on.