We need to talk about our electoral system

Brazil currently has one of the worst possible electoral systems. In addition to being one of the main responsible for the great party fragmentation, which contributes to the low representation of parties and leads to the need for the formation of gigantic, incoherent and physiological coalitions in order to maintain governability, it also increases the political and social polarization that makes it difficult building consensus and creating a plural and tolerant society.

The Brazilian electoral system is actually the combination of three concomitant systems: one for the election of executive positions (president, governors and mayors), another for the election of senators and another for representatives in the other legislative houses (federal deputies, state deputies and councillors). Executive office holders are elected to fixed four-year terms by majority vote, in which a single person wins after winning more than half the votes in their district (the country as a whole, the state, or the municipality) in first or second round. Senators, in turn, are elected for eight-year terms in an alternating manner (at each election, one-third and two-thirds of the seats are alternately renewed) and by majority vote in a single round in districts (states) of three members, that is, the candidates who obtain more votes than the others win, with each state having three senators. Finally, federal and state deputies and councilors are elected by a proportional system, which gives each district (states and municipalities) a number of seats relative to its population and allocates them according to the number of votes obtained by each party.

The most basic formulation of a majority voting system is quite intuitive: whoever has the most votes takes office. This simplicity is also its main advantage, both in terms of implementation and understanding by voters. Its disadvantages, however, are less obvious but quite significant. One of its main problems concerns the representativeness of the winners and can be easily noticed when it is applied in single-member districts: as there is only one seat being contested and, to be elected, it is enough for the candidate to obtain more votes than each one of their opponents, voters have an incentive to vote for one of the two strongest candidates instead of their real favorites—that is, in order not to waste their vote on someone who would have no chance of winning, voters tend to strategically opt for the strong candidate whose victory would be less unpleasant from your point of view instead of voting sincerely for the candidate you really prefer. In addition to the obvious problem of representation, the zero-sum nature of this system also produces a plebiscitary and adversarial election, dividing the electorate into two clear blocks of winners and losers, exacerbating conflict in society and fomenting a hostile opposition instead of supervisory and constructive.

When the majority voting system is used to elect both executive and legislative offices and there are no strong regional parties (i.e., the same parties dominate politics across the country), it is easy to see how strategic voting tends to create a bipartisan dynamic , due to convergence in the strongest parties. Brazil, however, combines single-member majority voting for executive positions with a proportional system for legislative houses (with the exception of the Senate). This system's principle is to produce, in the legislatures of each district, a mirror of society in all its plurality, allocating seats to each party according to its number of votes—that is, if party A obtains X% of the votes in a given district, it takes X% of the seats. It therefore encourages sincere voting and the proliferation of parties, as it is not necessary to vote strategically to have an elected representative. This ends up creating, therefore, a force contrary to the bipartisan tendency of the majority system, generating elections for executive positions with viable candidates from multiple parties. Without any adjustment, this could end up harming the representativeness of the winner of elections for executive positions by favoring the election of minority candidates — that is, those who have a higher vote share than each of the others individually (thus obtaining victory), but less than the sum of everyone's votes (therefore having a minority of votes). This is especially bad when the number of candidates is very large (i.e., there is high party fragmentation), as it tends to favor those who have a base that, although a minority in society, is more fierce, consolidated and likely to vote—the which is precisely the case of candidates located at the extremes of the political spectrum (note that this does not mean that they are necessarily extremists).

In Brazil, the representation problems of this mixture of majority voting and a multi-party system are manifested both in elections for the Senate and for executive positions. In the Senate, candidates who have more votes than the others are elected, even if they are less consensual than others who were harmed by the dispersion of votes among a large number of candidates—in other words, the elected senators are not necessarily the most representative of the population of their states. For executive positions, the aim is to mitigate this effect through a second round between the two candidates with the most votes when neither manages to obtain a majority (at least one vote more than half of the votes). As it is a binary choice, the second round forces the creation of an artificial majority in favor of the winner, producing (at least theoretically) a mandate with popular legitimacy. What can happen, however, is precisely the two least consensual candidates going to the second round —especially in situations of high fragmentation and polarization—, since those who get more votes than the others are often also the ones with the most votes. rejection by the population. The result of this could end up being second-round disputes in which almost all of society rejects both candidates, but is forced to vote for the “least worst”. Examples of this include the 1989 and 2018 presidential elections.

In 1989, 22 candidates contested the election in the first round and the votes were dispersed among the seven first placed candidates (which included big names such as Mário Covas, Leonel Brizola and Ulysses Guimarães), leading to the second round, to the detriment of more consensual candidates, the unknown populist Fernando Collor de Mello and a then more radical Lula with just 30.47% and 17.18% of the votes, respectively. In 2018, something similar happened: even with less divisive and/or more qualified names, such as Geraldo Alckmin, Ciro Gomes, Marina Silva, João Amoêdo and Henrique Meirelles, the highly polarized voter led Jair Bolsonaro and Fernando Haddad to the second round—both most rejected candidates—because they thought one was the only possible alternative to the other. In these elections, the minority Collor and Bolsonaro were elected in the second round and have already started their mandates with immense rejection from a large part of the population (including many of their own voters, who only voted for them due to lack of option) and, consequently, a huge difficulty in building minimally functional government coalitions.

As if the low representation of Brazilian majority elections were not enough, the proportional system used in legislative elections is also quite problematic. In principle, a proportional system is, indeed, a very suitable way for society to be represented in all its plurality, both of ideas and ideologies and of identity groups. However, it is not the only (and perhaps not the best) alternative and must be implemented with some precautions to avoid both an excessive proliferation of parties and too weak parties—exactly what was not done in Brazil.

In the traditional proportional voting system, called closed list proportional voting, each party draws up an ordered list of candidates according to its own criteria and the voter votes for a party, with a number of seats being distributed to the parties according to their respective votes and delivered by them to their candidates according to their positions on each one's list. As it is the party that defines the order of the list, it can punish or reward candidates with different positions, therefore deciding who will have a better chance of occupying the seats won in an election. This strengthens parties in relation to candidates, encouraging cohesive and coherent parliamentary behavior that facilitates negotiations and governance and helps to create a clear party identity, thus being good for both the government and the voter. Because an excess of parties can make negotiations and coalition building too difficult, this system is typically implemented with an electoral threshold, which states that seats and resources will only be awarded to parties that obtain a minimum vote. In Brazil, however, we opted for another model.

Instead of the closed list model, Brazil adopted proportional voting with an open list , in which the voter defines the order of candidates on each party's list. At first glance, this seems like a good idea, as voters can vote for specific candidates, theoretically increasing representation by creating a greater bond between the representative and the represented. However, that is not exactly what happens. Voting for a candidate serves to define his position on the party list—that is, the voter defines the order of the list by voting for a candidate rather than directly for the party, but the seats still go to the party. In addition to involving indirection that is difficult to understand, this can produce aberrant situations, such as individually well-voted candidates who do not win seats because their parties did not win enough votes or even the opposite: the candidacy and election of “vote pullers”, such as celebrities. and folkloric characters, who win excess seats for parties that have no real representation, bringing unknown, poorly qualified and low-vote people to parliament. In addition to representative chaos, the open list also weakens parties by overly personifying the election, encouraging candidates from the same party to compete against each other and taking away from parties tools that could be used to reinforce their positions and produce cohesion and coherence among their members. Candidates end up with too much power over their parties, hindering the construction of an identity and making party action difficult, as there are fewer ways to ensure that parliamentarians will follow decisions made by leaders in negotiations with other parties or with the government.

In addition to the problems inherent to the open list proportional system, the Brazilian implementation also came with extra complications. In 2006, a barrier clause that would serve to limit the number of parties in parliament would come into force, but the Federal Supreme Court overturned it by accepting a direct action of unconstitutionality brought by a group of small parties, resulting in an uncontrolled proliferation of acronyms. purely physiological. Not only that, but the Brazilian system also allowed the formation of party coalitions for elections—that is, for electoral purposes, a group of parties with not necessarily compatible ideologies and programs came together and functioned as a single party, with the votes being distributed among everyone, so that voters could inadvertently elect candidates with whom they had no affinity. Another problem is that, for some positions, such as federal deputy and state deputy, the districts are too large (entire states), which makes electoral campaigns very expensive and distances representatives from voters.

In 2017, a small political reform was approved that should gradually improve the situation, extinguishing coalitions for proportional elections and gradually restoring a barrier clause. Even so, the damage has already been great (in 2021, 24 parties—most without a clear identity—have representation in the Chamber) and not only will it take time for the situation to be reversed, but this reversal will only be partial, being not only slow and too partial in the face of the population's urgent desire for greater representation and responsiveness, and insufficient to undo the party fragmentation that encourages the practice of corruption and the so-called “give and take” approach to building coalitions. This mini-reform also refers only to proportional elections—elections for the senate and executive positions will continue to have the same problems—and does not resolve other important issues such as people's low connection with their representatives (many even forget who they voted for, despite elections being primarily for specific candidates) and the high cost of electoral campaigns. In addition to these reforms already approved, there has been a lot of talk about changes in the electoral system for models such as “district”, pure district or mixed district.

In the “district” (more formally known as Single Non-Transferable Vote), each voter votes for one candidate and the candidates with the most votes win the seats allocated to the district—that is, it is a majority vote applied in districts of n members, with n being proportional to the size of the district's population. This model is considered for the election of federal deputies and would consider states as electoral districts, thus being analogous to how senators are currently elected. As the vote goes only to the candidate, it is simpler than the open list proportional vote currently used and puts an end to the phenomenon of vote pullers. On the other hand, it is also even more personalistic, further weakening the parties (since they are not even considered), favoring celebrities, well-known candidates and folklore characters and inducing the voter to practice strategic voting (since there is only room for x deputies, it is better to vote for someone who has a chance than to waste a vote on a more representative one), in addition to not eliminating the problems of cost and representation arising from the enormous size of the districts.

In pure district voting, each region (in this case, the states) is divided into a number (proportional to its population) of districts of similar size and one candidate is elected per district by single-round majority vote. Used in the United Kingdom and several former British colonies (including the United States), this system's main advantage is the proximity of the representative to the electorate, which arises from the relatively small size of each district. Its other advantages and disadvantages are those typical of the majority system: it is simple to understand and tends to lead to bipartisanship at the local level, but it encourages strategic voting, can cause underrepresentation of certain groups and ideologies and stimulates division and conflict due to to its zero-sum nature. As Brazil already has many parties and some are particularly strong in certain regions, at a national level the adoption of this model would probably lead to a reduction in the number of parties (or at least to a funneling of the dispute into a smaller number of acronyms), but would hardly result in a two-party or quasi-two-party system like, respectively, the American and British systems—we would probably have a scenario similar to India (even if more attenuated), where there are two main parties nationally, but locally, in the states, they compete in a bipartisan way with strong local parties rather than with each other.

Mixed district voting, finally, is a hybrid system that seeks to get the best of both worlds, producing both representatives who have a strong link with specific communities (as in pure district voting) and representatives of ideas and minority groups (as in proportional voting). . To this end, part of the seats in a legislature are defined as in pure district voting, by a single-round majority vote in small single-member districts with equivalent population, and the other, by closed-list proportional voting—that is, each voter votes for a candidate at the district level and for a party at the regional level (which would be the state, in Brazil). In the German implementation—the one most associated with this system—, votes for candidates are first considered and then votes for parties are taken into account, which gain additional seats, filled with candidates from the party lists, if the acronyms are sub- represented in relation to the vote obtained (i.e., the total number of representatives in the legislature may even vary depending on the compensations necessary to achieve proportionality between the number of seats and the vote for each party). The main disadvantage of the mixed district model is that it is a little more complex than the pure district, making it more difficult to understand and implement. Furthermore, both pure and mixed district systems still have a problem in defining the contours of the districts, running the risk of some actors trying to manipulate their design so that they contain an electorate more favorable to their political group (a practice known as gerrymandering) , distorting thus representation.

Among all these systems, the “district” system is undoubtedly the worst, as it accentuates all the problems of open list proportional voting—the second worst—and also makes renewal difficult (which is why it is preferred by a large number of current legislators). . Pure district voting is more interesting than “district” voting and open list proportional voting because it makes electoral campaigns cheaper and creates a direct link between specific communities and representatives, but it can end up underrepresenting minority views and stimulating social division, in addition that it would hardly end the party salad in Brazil, since different parties have different strengths in different regions even when they have similar ideology. When implemented with a reasonable barrier clause and without the possibility of coalitions, closed-list proportional voting strengthens parties and also tends to produce a faithful portrait of society in legislatures, but it does not produce a very direct link between representatives and those represented. —tends to be a representation more about causes, ideologies, programs and group identities than about concrete, day-to-day problems that the link to specific locations confers. The mixed district system, in turn, is probably the best model, as, if well implemented, it combines the best of pure district voting and closed-list proportional voting, potentially producing legislatures that are both representative and close to the electorate. However, without even going into the political difficulties that would involve adopting any of these models (with the probable exception of the “district”), none of them addresses one of the most essential problems in presidential countries: the election of executive positions.

As we have seen, elections for executive positions (president, governors and mayors) and for the Senate operate based on majority vote systems, which encourage conflict and social division and, in the case of multiple candidates, can favor the election of minority candidates located in the extremes of the political spectrum and/or rejected by a considerable part—if not the majority—of the population. There are good alternatives to majority elections, however, that eliminate or alleviate these defects, but which have not received as much attention in the public debate as the options for reforming proportional legislative elections.

Among the most interesting substitutes for the majority vote are systems based on a ranking of candidates by the voter in order of preference. The variant of this system for elections in single-member districts is called Alternative Vote — also known as Instant Runoff or Ranked Choice voting. In this model, the voter orders the candidates in order of preference and a series of automatic “runoffs” are carried out based on these choices. In other words, voters' first options are considered first. If any candidate exceeds 50% of the votes, he wins the election. Otherwise, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated from the race and the votes that went to him are reallocated to the candidate who was the second option of the voters who had voted for the eliminated candidate as first. This process continues until a candidate obtains 50% of the votes. For districts with more than one member, the analogous system is called Single Transferable Vote and consists of the progressive elimination of the least voted candidates until the number of candidates matches the number of seats available, always transferring the votes of those eliminated to the following options of those who voted for them.

Instead of dividing the electorate between two clear groups of winners and losers, ranking-based voting systems seek to reach compromise candidates among all voters. In other words, these systems seek to elect those who may not be the absolute favorite candidates of many people, but who are at least acceptable to the largest possible number of voters. These systems both encourage politicians to go more to the center, and encourage voters to vote sincerely, since the “backup” votes conferred by the ordering of candidates guarantee that no vote will be wasted. The main disadvantage of these systems in relation to majority voting is that they are a little more complex, making both their implementation and understanding by the voter a little more difficult. Still, they have been increasingly adopted, especially in English-speaking countries. The Alternative Vote is used in countries such as Australia (lower house of the legislature), India (president), Ireland (president), the United Kingdom (mayor of London), and, increasingly, the United States (various local, state, federal, and party elections in some states). The Single Transferable Vote, in turn, is widely used in Australia, which adopts it to elect the Senate and in regional legislative elections, but it is also used by Canada, New Zealand and other countries for various elections.

In single-member districts, yet another possible substitute for a majority vote is the so-called Approval Voting . This system is as simple as possible: each voter can vote for as many candidates as they want (that is, the voter chooses all the candidates they consider reasonable), without specifying an order, and the one who obtains the most votes wins. In addition to this simplicity, by allowing the person elected to be even someone who in a majority election would be discarded or would not be the winner by an absolute majority, this system is an even more consensual option than the Alternative Vote, in addition to encouraging sincere voting. Approval Voting can be easily extended to districts with more than one member, in a proportional voting system (Proportional Approval Voting), in which the candidates with the most votes win the seats. Approval Voting is the “cutting edge” of electoral systems, so it is still little used, but it has already been adopted by some cities in the United States and is also the way in which the UN Secretary General is elected. Organizations such as the Center for Election Science campaign for the dissemination and adoption of this electoral method.

In the case of elections for executive positions in Brazil, both the Alternative Vote and the Approval Vote would eliminate the problems of electing minority candidates and the most rejected candidates going to the second round. Instead of dividing society into winners and losers (something particularly strong in presidential elections), encouraging polarization and radicalization of candidates, and forcing voters to face dilemmas such as choosing between two options they hate, these voting methods encourage the search for consensus and commitment, avoiding scenarios like the 1990 and 2018 presidential elections (as well as the one we will likely have in 2022). Unfortunately, Brazilian municipalities and states do not have the freedom to choose their own voting methods (unlike what happens in the United States, for example, where states and municipalities are true public policy laboratories), so testing these systems locally In a few places it is more difficult. Still, it is possible to start gradually, with elections for mayors, and then expand to choosing governors and, finally, president. Eventually, the adoption of one of these systems could also be combined with a mixed or even pure district system (as they would inherently mitigate many of the problems of the latter as well) for elections of deputies and councilors. Just like any reform, however, these transformations require broad discussion by society and take some time to be implemented, and they would certainly face political resistance. They would, however, be something less drastic than other reforms that have been considered, such as exchanging the presidential system for parliamentarism or semi-presidentialism.

It is also always necessary to emphasize that institutional reforms are not a panacea. As much as they help to solve political problems, institutions depend on how they are used by their occupants so that they function correctly and this involves the consolidation not only of a solid institutional framework, but of a legitimate democratic political culture in society. The democratic experience, with well-functioning institutional mechanics and positive results in terms of quality of life, helps to foster this culture, but is insufficient to truly ingrain democratic values ​​in the population . Whether a political reform is carried out or not, more fundamental—and much more difficult—is the transformation of Brazilians into democratic citizens, eliminating the authoritarian staleness and political intolerance that still permeates a large part of society and creating a sense of common identity that permeates preferences. partisans. Achieving this involves not only the political system and political leaders (many of whom also need to become legitimate democrats, accepting opponents as legitimate participants in the democratic game), but also civil society itself, through its different institutions and organizations, such as family, schools, churches, clubs and other associations.