Straw Polls as alternative voting systems

A recent straw poll from Florida was won by long-shot businessman Herman Cain. The candidate had finished near the bottom of several other polls and was not expected to be a major factor in the race, so why the sudden shift? According to a Washington Post article, voters in the straw poll revealed that they had voted for Cain as a way to show their frustration with the performance of the current candidates, not because of their support for Cain. Recent poor performances from the candidates in the debates were the main cause of the frustration.

A straw poll is run by a private organization and doesn’t determine who becomes the primary candidate, but is a way of gauging interest and acts as a measuring stick. We can judge the straw poll through the three criteria for judging alternative voting systems: Condorcet efficiency, the use of ordering information and the minimization of opportunities for strategic behavior. The winner of the poll is whoever gets the highest majority of the votes, not the candidate that would beat all others in pairwise elections, so it is not necessarily Condorcet efficient. Herman Cain won the overall majority, but since the delegates admitted that they didn’t vote for him because they favored him it cannot be conclusively determined that Cain is the Condorcet winner. A way to properly determine the Condorcet winner would be to have each candidate face each other separately within the poll. The straw poll does not use ordering information because voters only get one vote, so there is no ranking or point system. The straw poll does not minimize opportunities for strategic behavior as evidenced by the article. Since the vote does not actually determine who wins the nomination there is an incentive to vote strategically. The delegates clearly voted in hopes of getting the best candidate in the long run, not in a way that showed their true preferences. Most primary straw polls are also closed within the party to prevent strategic voting from other party members who might select the weakest candidates in hopes of making it easier for their parties’ candidate to win. Straw polls should be taken with a large grain of salt because of the opportunities for strategic voting and the lack of Condorcet efficiency.