Why the Borda Count Makes Sense for MLB MVP Election, Not for U.S. Politics

In class we mentioned a few of the rare real world examples of a Borda Count. One of these examples is the Major League Baseball election of the Most Valuable Player. The Borda Count is used in many such sports elections, but this system makes far more sense in sports than it does in politics. Although the Borda Count is the voting system with the highest Condorcet Efficiency, it has some practical pitfalls in the political realm. The United States has one of the lowest voter turnout rates of any country in the world, due at least in part to the high number of opportunities we have to vote. With so many elections, Americans can often plead rational ignorance. The Borda Count, like other forms of Ranked Choice Voting, requires voters to know enough about every candidate to rank them in order of preference. A Simple Majority Vote, by contrast, allows voters to be more selective in their engagement. The MLB MVP is elected by the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWA), a selection of national and beat reporters from across the country. It is part of these writers' jobs to be well informed on the statistics of the best baseball players in the country, so, unlike in the case of American political voters, MLB voters have a high incentive to be informed.

The other issue often raised about the Borda Count is strategic voting: the incentive for voters to put their candidate's rival or biggest threat at the bottom of their rankings, even if this candidate would not actually be their their last choice. In American political elections this is a real danger. It is not hard to imagine Republican voters ranking a Democratic nominee below a third party candidate, or vice versa, even if that third party candidate is clearly unqualified for the job. Again, MLB voting differs. Sportswriters do not have an explicit stake in the outcome of an MVP vote. While an American political voter may risk seeing his taxes raised or rights infringed upon, the sportswriter is simply trying to reward the best player in the league. Sportswriters also tend to have a level of objectivity, a willingness to vote for a candidate that they don't like personally but respect professionally, that is rarely achieved in American political voting.