Borda Problems

At Crooked Timber, John Quiggin points out why the Borda voting system is fatally defective. The Borda system is one of many systems where candidates are ranked in order of preference by each voter. There are many equivalent ways of describing Borda, but one way is as follows. The last choice candidate gets zero points, the second-to-last gets one point, and so on up the line until your first choice gets (n-1) points (where n is the number of candidates). Whomever receives the most points wins. It's a rather easy to use, and to understand method, but as Quiggin points out the major problem is that by running more candidates a party gets an advantage. (Even if you allow only one candidate per party, the solution would be to run independents or create new "similar parties). This is sort of the reverse of the spoiler problem in a plurality system. A better system, in my view, is approval voting. Under this system you don't rank the candidates, but simply vote "yes" or "no" to each candidate. I hope to write more in the future on the advantages and disadvantage of such a system, but for now I'll just note that it avoids both the spoiler problem of our current system, and the reverse spoiler problem of Borda (both problems are examples of "clone-dependency"). If there are two front-runners you might still want to choose between a lesser-of-two-evils, but at least you can also vote for any candidates you like better as well.