This seems like a trick question. Of course, free-list has all sorts of complex features. In such a system, the typical rules are that any voter may cast up to M votes (M being the district magnitude) for individual candidates, even across different lists (panachage). A vote for any candidate on a list counts as a vote for that list for purposes of determining proportional seat allocation across lists, as well as for the candidate in competition among other candidates on that list.
However, this system handles votes and seats for lists just like any other list-PR system: It is designed to allocate seats to lists first, and only then to candidates. It thus is “simple” on the inter-party dimension, unlike SNTV or MNTV or STV (where candidate votes do not count towards aggregate party vote totals and seats are allocated based only on candidate votes).
My general definition of a “simple” electoral system is one that is a single-tier, single-round, party-vote system. The free-list could be said to violate that last part of the definition, in that “party vote” maybe should mean a single party vote per voter. My instinct is to keep free list in, because it remains “simple” in terms of how it processes the votes across lists. But I could be convinced otherwise, given that effectively every voter can vote for more than one list–a “dividual vote” in Gallagher’s terms.1
In Votes from Seats, Taagepera and I kept at least three free-list systems in our dataset: Honduras (since 2005), Luxembourg, and Switzerland. The issue came back to my mind because of my consideration of including some smaller countries and non-independent territories in a dataset for some further analysis of key questions. One of the smaller countries that could be added to the data is Liechtenstein, which I believe uses a free-list PR system. My gut says “yes, include” but now I wonder if we already violated our own criteria2 in having those free-list systems in the prior analysis. To be clear, none of our results would be changed if we had dropped them.3 It is just a matter of consistency of criteria.
Questions like this always nag comparative analysis, or science more generally. What things are part of the set being analyzed? It is not always clear-cut.
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Note that there is no question regarding standard open-list PR: Even if there are multiple candidate preference votes cast per voter, as in Peru, only a single list vote is registered per voter.
In fact, on p. 31 of Votes from Seats, we say “Only categorical ballots and a single round of voting are simple, by our definition.” A free-list ballot is dividual and thus not categorical. However, the reason we give for limiting the coverage to categorical ballots is that “other ballot formats… may violate a basic criterion for simplicity in the translation of votes into seats: the rank-size principle” (emphasis in original). For example, the party with the most aggregate votes in a district may not have the most seats allocated in the district (or at least tied for most with the second-most voted party). This violation of the rank-size principle can occur with SNTV, STV, and MNTV, but as noted above it can’t occur in free-list PR (per my understanding, anyway). I note that in a later work, Party Personnel, my coauthors and I seem to adopt a stricter definition. On p. 53 of that book, we say that simple means “a voter votes once, and this vote counts for the entire party list of candidates.” Yet the conceptual point there is somewhat different, in that we are referring to “simple vote” not simple electoral system, and we remove open-list PR from the standard of simple vote because they permit differentiation of candidates within a list in the same district. But as for the vote counting for the entire list, free list still meets that part of the criterion. (A reminder that “voting system” is not a synonym for “electoral system”!)
Although I did not think of this possible issue with free lists at the time, I definitely ran robustness-check regressions with Switzerland dropped. I did so mainly because of its multiparty alliance feature, which also is a complex feature for reasons discussed in the book (mainly with reference to Finland and Chile). Doing so did not affect the results, so we left the case in. There are not enough elections from the other free-list cases, nor are they observably different on our outcomes of interest, that they could affect results. (Switzerland is observably different–far more fragmented than expected for its seat product, and that seems to be mostly due to alliances, even above the impact of its ethnic fragmentation–see p. 269 of Votes from Seats. But the inclusion or exclusion fo the case is immaterial for the overall results.)
On March 24, 2019, Ecuador held sectional elections to elect 23 provincial prefects, 221 mayors, 867 city councilors, 438 rural councilors, 4,089 members of rural parish councils, and seven councilors of the Council of Citizen Participation and Social Control (CPCCS), a social regulatory body. The elections had a little bit of everything: complex electoral rules and a mixture of systems, bickering over how to count votes, and results that reinforce what political scientists know about electoral systems’ impacts on party systems. I was fortunate enough to observe these elections as part of the Organization of American States’ Electoral Observation Mission (EOM). Given that the EOM’s final report was finally presented to the OAS Permanent Council until June 19, 2020, I can now offer some political science-based reflections on the experience.
I’ll describe the array of electoral rules and then highlight three noteworthy factors:
the difficulty in counting null votes in a plurality-at-large election;
the political party atomization that “pluralitarian” and free list proportional representation produced; and
the persistence of ballot order effects in plurality-at-large elections, even with order randomization.
It should be noted that Ecuadorian legislators finally passed a bill in December 2019 to switch from free list PR to closed and blocked lists for multi-member elections, among other changes.
Electoral Systems
Since 1998, elections in Ecuador have been cognitively demanding due to the complexity of the electoral lists and rules governing voting. 2019 was no exception. Despite being a national process, not all voters cast the same number of votes or even used the same number of ballots: voters in urban areas received six ballots to elect representatives at four levels of government (prefect, mayor, urban councilor, CPCCS representatives), while voters in rural areas received seven ballots for five levels of government (prefect, mayor, rural councilor, rural parish boards, CPCCS representatives). Moreover, the National Electoral Council (Consejo Nacional Electoral, CNE) employed three different electoral systems across these five different offices:
Prefects: First-past-the-post
Mayors: First-past-the-post
Urban and rural canton councils: Free list PR (5 ≤ M ≤ 15)
Rural parish councils: Free list PR (M=5 or 7)
CPCCS (three different ballots): Plurality-at-large, Plurality-at-large, First-past-the-post
The free list, which Tom Mustillo and I have written about and which is sometimes called “panachage” or “open ballot”, is a unique variation of the open list where voters can: 1) cast preference votes for candidates; 2) cast multiple preference votes; and 3) distribute preferences across multiple lists. Alternatively, voters can cast a single list vote. To determine seat distribution, votes are pooled at the party list level (an important detail that distinguishes the free list from plurality-at-large). For national legislative elections, only Switzerland, Luxembourg, Honduras, and El Salvador now use this system, although it is more common at a subnational level in Europe. This system presents a number of complexities for voters (since there are so many candidates from which to choose and so many votes to cast) as well as vote counters (because each voter’s number of votes varies by district magnitude and voters are not required to cast all their votes).
There is a lot of “choice” available to voters. Here is a 2019 ballot for urban councilors from a district in Quito with M=5 that demonstrates it nicely. Voters in this district are allowed to cast up to five votes within or across the 22 party lists, or five out of 110 total candidates. It is no surprise that voters often opt for list votes (plancha, in Spanish) or use only a portion of their preference votes.
Figure 1. Ballot for urban councilors from a district in Quito
Still, Ecuadorian voters should have been accustomed to the free list: before legislators phased in out in late 2019 in favor of closed lists, voters had been using it for 17 years in both national and local elections.
Being tapped with the civic responsibility of working a polling station is a lot of work for elections like these. Poll workers had to tally votes manually, recording not just the choices on six or seven ballots, but counting all M votes on the free list ballots and finding the three choices on the men’s and women’s CPCCS ballots as well (something I explain in greater depth below). The four-person team at the table I was assigned to “quick count” took more than seven hours to tally all of their 250-300 voters’ votes (see the photo below as they were just beginning).
Figure 2. Poll workers sorting ballots before counting votes
1. Counting Null Votes under Plurality-at-Large
Despite the complexities of the free list, the most compelling ballot in this election turned out to be the one used to elect CPCCS representatives. After a 2018 plebiscite turned this appointed seven-person body into an elected one, electors were supposed to be given seven votes to be distributed however they wanted across the entire ballot (e.g. plurality-at-large/MNTV/block voting). However, in February 2019, the CNE stipulated that to maintain gender parity and minority representation, it would divide the single ballot into three separate ballots:
A “men’s ballot”, from which voters could cast three votes (plurality-at-large);
A “women’s ballot”, from which voters could cast three votes (plurality-at-large), and;
A ballot with indigenous/Afro-descendent/ex-pat candidates, from which voters could cast one vote (SMD plurality).
How to count the votes—or in this case, the non-votes—dominated pre-election discourse.
The CPCCS is an autonomous entity responsible for appointing authorities of the Ombudsman’s Office, the Office of the Comptroller General of the State, and state superintendencies, as well as influencing the designation of certain electoral and judicial authorities. Many politicians and civil society organizations long decried the CPCCS and argued that it should be eliminated as a political body.
Paragraph 3 of Article 147 of Ecuador’s Code of Democracy states that elections can be nullified, “when the null votes exceed the totality of the candidates’ votes, of the respective lists, in a specific circumscription, for each office”. Predictably, there was a current of public opinion in these elections that exhorted voters to cast a null vote as a way to protest the body and demand a national plebiscite on its existence. However, counting the null votes for an office where the voter can cast up to seven votes between three ballots turned out to be more complicated than it may first appear.
Specifically, there is no way to satisfy the “one person, one vote” principal stipulated in the Ecuadorian Constitution if electoral authorities count votes instead of ballots. There are two basic scenarios:
Scenario 1 (original proposal): A null vote on a plurality-at-large ballot (M=3) is equal to a single vote, meaning that a null voter is only able to cast 3/7 of a null vote (1/7 + 1/7 + 1/7 on each of the three ballots) while a valid voter can cast 7/7 of a vote (3/7 + 3/7 + 1/7)—effectively disenfranchising the null voter.
Scenario 2 (counter-proposal): A null vote on a plurality-at-large ballot (M=3) is equal to three null votes. This way, both valid and null voters get to exercise a full vote (3/7 + 3/7 + 1/7 in each case). The problem is, the system does not permit cumulation voting, which means a) that the null voter is effectively casting three cumulation votes while a valid voter cannot do the same thing; and b) that anyone using fewer than M valid votes per list ends up using fewer votes than the null voter (e.g. a single blank on the first ballot would give the voter 2/7 + 3/7 + 1/7 = 6/7 of a vote).
Electoral authorities were divided on the interpretation, but eventually settled on the first counting rule. Regardless, the null counting method would not have mattered, since just over 20% of the ballots registered null votes against 50% of valid votes (more than 20% of the ballot for CPCCS were also left blank).
2. Personal Voting and Party System Atomization
Low entrance barriers and guaranteed public financing gave rise to the participation of a whopping 278 political parties, movements, and local organizations. However, all three electoral systems also incentivize the personal vote at the expense of the party. The results were predictable, with extreme party system fragmentation and a lack of mandate for most elected officials.
To just take the FPTP elections, 19 different parties and 10 local political movements split up the 23 prefectures (most of them as part of electoral alliances), with the Social Christian Party winning the most with eight (35%). Eight parties or movements won just a single prefecture.
There was greater atomization at the level of the elections for mayor. There, 42 parties or movements gained political representation in the 221 mayoralties. Sixteen different political parties won ten or more mayoralties, with the most successful party, the Social Christian Party, earning just 43 mayoralties nationwide (19.5% of the national total). The largest party in the preceding twelve years, President Lenín Moreno’s Alianza Pais (“Country Alliance”), managed only 27 mayors nationwide, falling to the fourth position at national level. The excess of municipal and provincial movements led to the formation of various electoral alliances; in fact, multi-party electoral coalitions won 112 of the 221 mayoralties.
These results suggest that without significant changes, the 2021 general elections are likely to be contested by a panoply of parties with weak roots and limited national ambitions, akin to what we see in some other Latin American countries, like Peru.
3. Ballot Order Effects
A third interesting pattern to emerge was a ballot order effect for the CPCCS elections. Recognizing the advantage that candidates near the top of the ballot hold over those placed toward the bottom, the CNE decided candidate placement on each of the three CPCCS ballots in February 2019 via lottery, on national television and in the presence of a public notary.
The 28-candidate men’s CPCCS ballot looked like this, with the women’s ballot and minorities’ ballot organized a similar way:
Figure 3. The CPCCS ballot for men
Despite the lottery, which quite literally randomized candidate placement, there is evidence that candidates towards the top of list enjoyed a distinct advantage over those toward the bottom. The figure below is a scatterplot of CPCCS ballot placement and votes. Red circles represent women candidates (11 nominations), squares are the men candidates (28 nominations), and the diamonds the minority candidates (4 nominations); for each list, I also included the best fit line to show the relationship between ballot position and votes received. In all three cases, there is a clear negative relationship.
Figure 4. Scatterplot of CPCCS ballot placement and votes
This relationship is statistically significant for two of the three lists (men and women; there were only four candidates on the third list). To test the relationship suggested in the figure, I ran a linear regression of the effect of candidate on electoral performance. Employing list fixed effects, the results are consistent with the scatterplot. For each change in position, the mean CPCCS candidate lost around 18,126 votes (p<0.05), or a total of 507,528 votes (18,126) over the range of the 28 positions on the men’s list. Despite placement randomization, then, this vote is just one more example of the pervasiveness of ballot placement effects; given financial and technical constraints (e.g. inability to randomize candidate placement for each paper ballot), it’s hard to imagine how the CNE could have avoided this problem.
Sectional elections in a small country like Ecuador are not often on the radar of international analysts. However, the multitude of electoral systems, debate over null vote counting, and ballot order effectd make it as compelling a case study as many national elections in larger countries that grab international headlines.
Ecuador will travel a somewhat rare path in electoral reform: Abandoning a highly candidate-centered system in favor of a highly party-centered one.
In recent elections, Ecuador has used a free list system, in which voters could cast up to M votes (where M is the number of seats in the district) for candidates on one or more different party lists. Any vote for a candidate also counted as a vote for the list for purposes of inter-list allocation. Broadly speaking, a form of the “panachage” systems used in Luxembourg and Switzerland, as well as in recent years ElSalvador.
A newly passed reform will switch Ecuador’s list type to closed-list PR.
It is unusual for countries to make a move like this. Japan moved from SNTV to MMM in its first-chamber elections, so that is another example of abolishing intra-party choice. But MMM is still quite candidate-centered, given single-seat districts. (In addition, the optional procedure in the Japanese variant for ranking lists based on district-level performance also preserves a candidate-centered feature, even though candidates on the list do not compete directly with one another for votes.) Colombia moved from de-facto SNTV to a list system, with parties having the option to present either an open or closed list. But I doubt anyone has moved from free list to closed list before. Even a move from open to closed lists must be very rare.
At the same time, Ecuador’s inter-list allocation will move from D’Hondt to “Webster” (Ste.-Laguë).
Even if you do not read Spanish, the linked news item is worth a visit, as it shows a simulation of how the party seat totals would have been different at the last election had Webster already been in place.
I have one concern with the change, if the video also at the linked item accurately portrays what the new ballot will look like. Voters might still tend to mark candidate images in different lists, as the ballot depicted is almost identical. That would make it impossible to tell which one list the voter would favor. But maybe this is not what the ballot really will look like. One must hope not.
Thanks to the really wonderful Twitter feed of La Prensa Grafica, following are some photos of voted ballots from El Salvador’s assembly elections of 4 March.
The ballot format is “free list” under which it is a party-list proportional-representation system, but unlike other types of list, the voter can give preference votes to candidates nominated on different lists (a feature sometimes known as panachage).
Here is one that is marked for candidates in several different lists, but none in the government-supporting parties, FMLN (red) and GANA (orange).
Here is one that marked all of the candidates in the ARENA party.
That’s a lot of work! A voter who wants to vote a straight ticket can simply put an X over the party symbol at the top, and it counts the same as a vote for each candidate on the list.
Now here is one whose vote will count for no one, but the voter had fun making statements.
Under the free-list system, a party’s votes is the sum of all the preference votes its candidates receive (including the label votes counted as one for each candidate on the list). Any preference vote thus contributes to the list’s pooled vote total for purposes of calculating seats per list. If a voter does not cast all M votes (where M is the district magnitude), that voter is sacrificing a percentage of his or her entitled voting weight.
This process also means that calculating national party vote totals is not straightforward. I am not sure what method of weighting votes across the varying-magnitude districts is used in El Salvador’s official reporting of national totals.
Honduras has presidential and congressional elections today. I know essentially nothing about the elections except: (1) There is widespread fear they will not be fair, and (2) The congress is elected by free-list PR.
It is for the latter reason that I share the following image, which I found on Twitter, posted by Pablo Secchi.
The ballot is similar to that in neighboring El Salvador, which also uses a free list. The voter may cast up to M votes, where M is the district magnitude (number of seats elected from the district). The votes may be cast without regard for party, but each candidate vote is also a vote for the list on which the candidate was nominated. Thus it is a party-list PR system, but one in which voters are free to spread their support across multiple parties. It also means that voters are weighted differently, according to whether they cast all their votes or not.
It appears that voters can simply cast a list vote. I believe that doing so is equivalent to casting votes for as many candidates as are nominated on that list (presumably always M).
El Salvador held its legislative election on 1 March, using a modified electoral system. The country had already left behind the closed list in 2012, replacing it with an open list. This year the country moved to panachage, the variant of open list in which voters may vote for candidates on different lists (sometimes called “free list”).
El Salvador is one of the few pure presidential systems still using an electoral cycle (a long-term interest of mine) consisting of all non-concurrent elections, with presidential terms of five years and legislative terms of three years. This election is in the first year of the incumbent president’s term, and offered neither “surge” nor decline in his party’s legislative support.
I was first tipped off to the change to panachage by a remark in a Tico Times article just before the election that said:
For the first time, voters will be able to select individual candidates from any party rather than being forced to vote for a single party with an established list of candidates. Voters can still opt to simply choose a party.
This is definitely far more detailed than your average journalistic note about an electoral system. But to be sure, I checked with the Tribunal Supremo Electoral, which has a very useful gallery of ballot images and instruction cards. Below I post an image of the instructions for the district (department) of Cabañas.
It offers the voter five options:
1. Vote solely for the list of a party or coalition;
2. Vote for a list and mark the photo of “one, various, or all the candidates” on that list;
3. Mark the photo of “one, various, or all the candidates” in one list (without also indicating a list vote);
4. “Mark candidates of distinct political parties or coalition” or candidates of distinct parties and a non-party candidate”, not exceeding the total number of deputies elected from the district.
5. Mark the photo of a non-party candidate.**
It is option 4 that clearly establishes panachage.
By contrast, in 2012, the options excluded any mention of marking candidates across different lists.
See also images of a portion of the ballot from 2015 or 2012.
For a long time the only panachage–or free list–systems in use at the national level (to my knowledge) were in Luxembourg and Switzerland. In 2005, Honduras adopted such a system, and now one of its immediate neighbors has followed suit. (I believe Ecuador still uses a panchage system adopted several years ago; Venezuela used one at least once, but only at the municipal level.)
As for the election itself, there was a considerable delay in reporting the results. It does not seem that the panachage system had anything to do with the delay.
Preliminary results suggest that the opposition ARENA will have a plurality of seats, with 35 (of 84). That would represent a gain of two seats from the 2012 legislative election. The governing FMLN is likely to have 31 (no change) and its ally GANA 10 (-1). The PCN (the pre-1979 ruling party, still just hanging on) is expected to have 6 (-1) and the PDC would have 2 (a doubling of seats for this party that was the main alternative to the right before the civil war ended).
El Salvador hence essentially maintains its long-term relative stasis and close left-right division. The incumbent president, Salvador Sánchez Cerén of the FMLN, was elected by a very narrow margin a year ago. This election barely changes the balance of power, even though it occurs within the first year of a president’s five-year term and hence could qualify as a “honeymoon election”. In Salvadoran politics, there really isn’t much of a honeymoon, or any near-term prospect for the much-anticipated realignment. The big swing to the FMLN in the 2009 legislative election looks, in retrospect, like a blip within what is otherwise ongoing stasis.
It will be interesting to see if the move to an electoral system allowing cross-party voting for the first time begins to break down El Salvador’s remarkably rigid partisan lines.***
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* Elections could be concurrent every 15 years, as they were in 1994. However, in 2009, the legislative election was shifted to the “counter-honeymoon” and held in January, with the presidential election, as usual, in March.
** In both options 4 and 5, the reference to independents is singular; logically if voting for an independent is an alternative to voting for a party, one could vote for only one independent just as one can vote for only one party. On the other hand, in a panachage world, one actually can vote for more than one party (assuming a vote for any candidate also counts for the party on whose list the candidate was nominated), so why would there need to be a restriction on the number of votes that a voter may give for independents? (Note that it is probably quite difficult for an independent candidate to be elected in any case.) [I edited this footnote shortly after posting.]
*** Whether the partisan lines over El Salvador can ever be broken down in the United Statesis another matter.
Fruits and Votes 