The office of the Elected President (EP) of Singapore is currently filled using First Past the Post (FPTP). It allows for a situation such as had occurred in the 2011 election, where the president was elected without a majority (35.2%), and with a margin of 7,382 votes or 0.35% over the second runner who scored a total of 737,128 votes.
While this is more than legitimate an outcome in reference to FPTP, there are two issues attending in the minds of citizens: first, given the EP’s limited yet important custodial powers (in relation to the state reserves and key appointments to the public and legal service, for instance), citizens may be concerned by either the small margin of victory or the proportion of voters that voted for the eventual winner; second, with the greater likelihood of increased political contestation and more candidates in an election comes the likelihood that the front-runner will win with ever lower percentages of vote share.
If these are indeed concerns, and there is a desire to anticipate the issues that might arise, this short paper suggests two alternative voting systems that can be used to enhance the legitimacy of the EP without increasing the complexity of the voting process too much.
The holding of a second round runoff election is common in many countries with an executive president, such as France. However, this necessitates a second day of voting, and usually another substantial period of campaigning. However, this is unlikely to be justifiable in Singapore, considering the limited powers of the EP. Therefore this paper suggests that either the Supplementary Vote (SV) or the Instant Runoff Vote (IRV) be considered, rather than a second round runoff.
SV [1] is not currently in use for head of state elections, but is most prominent in the election of the Mayor of London. Voters indicate their first and second preferences among the candidates. Should no candidate achieve an absolute majority of votes in the election, all but the top two candidates are eliminated. Voters who had placed the eliminated candidates as top choice would now have their secondary preference taken into account if they had listed either of the top two candidates at all, and their votes distributed accordingly. The candidate with the most votes at that point wins the election. Ballot slips that had not indicated a preference for either of the top two candidates are ‘set aside’ in this process and in working out the margins of victory.
IRV [2] is currently in use for the election of the President of Ireland, along with numerous smaller elections globally. It is also notable that IRV (or some variant of it) is used to determine the leader of the three main political parties in United Kingdom, although an attempt to introduce a variant system for general elections in the UK failed in 2011. IRV requires voters to rank the candidates on the ballot paper in order of preference (most forms allow for, but do not require, the ranking of all the candidates). Over a number of rounds of counting, candidates with the least votes are eliminated and their voters have their votes redistributed according to preference. The candidate with the most votes wins.
Between the two, it is the authors’ opinion that SV is the preferred choice based on a number of factors. Firstly, SV does not present a significant increase in complexity for the voter. As can be seen by the graphic, which is London Elect’s dummy ballot, alongside the list of candidates, a second row of boxes is added to denote a secondary preference, which a voter will mark in the conventional manner. It would effectively give a voter the same choice as a second round runoff without the added cost and expense of a second election. If contest continues to the second round of counting, the eventual winner will be the result of what is effectively a one-on-one contest.
One pertinent consideration remains: that of when to begin the second round count. There are two options, each of which deals with particular events. The first, to begin a second round count if there is no clear winner (a candidate with over 50% of the vote) may seem more in tune with the traditional method and gives prominence to the idea that an absolute majority is necessary to be seen as legitimate. This is not something that our current system necessitates, nor is it guaranteed by either of the systems recommended here. The alternative is to begin the second count should the leading candidate fail to achieve a 2% margin of victory. 2% is the chosen margin as it is the same margin at which a recount may be requested under our current FPTP system, and thus a practical time to consider a second count. However, at such low margins, there is the possibility that the election result will turn on the second round count, aggrieving the previous front-runner.
To accept either of these systems, or really, make any change to the system at all, is to acknowledge that the current system has limitations. As we all know, all systems have limitations but the goal of any reform would be to enhance the standing of the EP while trying to limit disruptions caused. This proposal anticipates calls for a second round runoff election. Any change will require significant voter education as voting systems with multiple options for the same seat have not, to the best of our knowledge, been done in Singapore before. This is set against the hope that such a change will enhance the electoral legitimacy of the winner, and the level of authority needed to exercise the limited but important custodial powers that the EP has.
Dr Gillian Koh is a Senior Research Fellow at IPS, leading the Politics and Governance research cluster. Tan Min-Wei is a Research Assistant and contributes to IPS research in Politics and Governance.
Photo credit: Flickr
———–
[1] “Counting the Votes”, London Elects, retrieved from http://www.londonelects.org.uk/im-voter/counting-votes, on 14 May 2014.
[2] It should also be noted that Ireland considers its system to be that of a Single Transferable Vote, which is the system in use for its parliamentary elections. However, for single seat elections, the terminology used is that of IRV. Refer to: Community and Local Government. How the President is Elected, Department of Environment: Republic of Ireland, August 2011, retrieved from: http://www.environ.ie/en/LocalGovernment/Voting/PublicationsDocuments/FileDownLoad,1866,en.pdf, on 14 May 2014.