By Warren D. Smith, July 2013
Score voting is a better voting system than the stupid ones used by most world democracies. The main reason Egypt is in trouble (also a big reason many world democracies perform poorly) is because of their bad voting systems. This problem is easily repaired.
SCORE VOTING is like olympic judging:
- Each voter gives a numerical score in some fixed range (e.g. 0 to 9) to each candidate. (Also permitted to leave some candidates unscored.)
- Greatest average score wins.
Egypt adopted plurality plus 2-man runoff as its presidential election method, i.e. emulating France instead of the USA. This is superior to plain plurality voting, but as the 2007 French Presidential election illustrated, it is not good enough, and not as good as score voting.
The Egyptians, even though strongly against Mubarak and his former regime, suffered a vote split among all the anti-Mubarak candidates. That allowed the Mubarak-old-guard candidate's Ahmed Shafik's unsplit 23.7% vote to get him into the 2-man runoff.
PEW 24 March - 7 April 2011 POLL:
In your opinion, was it a good or bad thing that Hosni Mubarak resigned?
|
Also, although Egyptians overall favor a secular government like Turkey's, another vote split among the secular candidates – versus the one official Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohamed Morsi – allowed Morsi's 24.8% vote share to get him into the runoff.
PEW 4-10 May 2012 POLL: Which of the following models (Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Tunisia, Morocco) is closest to your aspiration in thinking about the role Islam should play in the Egyptian political system? |
With score voting, "vote splitting" does not exist and probably a liberal secularist would have defeated either. E.g. Sabahi+Moussa+Ali's combined 20.7+11.1+0.6=32.4 exceeds either Morsi or Shafik's votes. (And if Shafik were gone presumably his votes would have gone both ways, while if Morsi vanished presumably his votes would mainly have been anti-Shafik. This May 2013 Zogby poll which found Morsi's approval had dropped to 28% also found Morsi had narrow support, almost entirely from Muslim Brotherhood or Al-Nour Islamists.) When we combine this with the pairwise and score-style poll data below, it all indicates that the plurality+top2 system malfunctioned in both France 2007 and Egypt 2012. Meanwhile score voting would have elected candidates both countries wanted.
Every time that happens to a country it damages it. Egypt also had to contend with:
ZOGBY 4 April-12 May 2013 POLL:
Do you support or oppose the constitution passed in the last referendum?
|
Countries with better political designs experience less such damage, hence succeed and grow better, eventually accumulating enormous advantages.
The Muslim Brotherhood's initial stance had been that they were not going to run a presidential candidate. However, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh defied that by running as a prominent Muslim Brother, whereupon the Brotherhood
Morsi then defeated Shafik 51.7 to 48.3% in the runoff to win the presidency.
This seems to have been an undemocratic result caused by the voting system. Egypt missed a golden opportunity to improve versus the design of other democracies, by adopting a better voting system, score voting, instead of the poor single-winner voting systems used in every other present democracy. Regard it as a matter of national pride as well as common sense. Why should Egypt merely try to emulate Western democracies that are doing a poor job, when they could actually jump out in front with a superior democracy? Reformers have been failing for many years to change the USA to score voting.
At the time of the Arab Spring, I desperately attempted to notify prominent Egyptians that all (1) this was going to happen, (2) score voting was the cure, and (3) this was their opportunity to make a breakthrough for world democracy. But even though I correctly predicted essentially everything, I failed utterly in preventing the train wreck.
Egypt: Lead the world, don't just make and repeat old errors.
|
|
|
|
| Sarkozy Approval Rating during term 2007-2012 | Morsi Approval rating during his 1 year (abbreviated) term |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
ScoreVoting.net – learn more about score voting (English)
Vote de Valeur – French score-voting organization