13 - Antebellum politics concluded

Summary

Introduction

Pairwise comparison, the Borda count, approval voting with two votes, negative plurality, and plurality runoff voting rules all choose Douglas as the most preferred candidate; and all but the negative plurality voting rule arrive at the same ranking: Douglas > Lincoln > Bell > Breckinridge. Yet Douglas was the last-ranked candidate in the electoral college (though second-ranked in the popular vote), and Lincoln won a majority in the electoral college (and was first-ranked but with a 40 percent plurality in the popular tally). How is it that the actual election rule selected Lincoln rather than Douglas? Does the fact that Lincoln rather than Douglas was chosen support Riker's claim that democracy is arbitrary because different voting rules result in different outcomes from the same profile of preferences? Why was the 1860 election so peculiar?

Lincoln beat Douglas because with plurality rule and four major candidates many voters' preferences for Douglas over Lincoln were not counted by the voting rule and because Lincoln absorbed Douglas's votes in the electoral college. Advocates of democracy have no obligation to defend the presidential election system, I argue, which was clumsily designed with antimajoritarian intent. Whether or not the election of Douglas, the median voters' candidate, would have prevented secession and war is impossible to say; I suggest that the South may have seceded anyway.