This is how you choose the best: Why the favorite is not always the best choice

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It sounds like the best way to choose well. You click through 75 questions and you already know which party and which candidates you should vote for in the National Council and the Council of States. Four years ago, 500,000 people took this shortcut through Smartvote, and there will likely be even more this fall.

Of course there is criticism of Smartvote. The platform is too powerful and the questions are not always neutral. This was recently criticized by Peter Metzinger, candidate for the FDP National Council in Zurich. The fourth question – which related to his field of expertise, pension funds – was, in his opinion, “completely incorrect”; But that didn’t matter to her answer.

For Metzinger, however, it was proof that Smartvote was winning. And since then, his name has become slightly more familiar to NZZ readers, expressing his anger in many words.

Of course, not all candidates participate in Smartvote, but about 85 percent of them is a very good number. Heavyweights such as SVP faction leader Thomas Aeschi and Mitte President Gerhard Pfister have given up – they can afford it.

Smartvote is like Parship. You will find your equals there: those with the same opinion. “But the right people can be the wrong ones, because they either have zero chance or are certain to be elected,” says Lukas Golder of the polling agency GFS Bern. “In the better case, you miss the opportunity to have a say in who goes to Bern. In worse cases, the vote remains ineffective or goes to the wrong people.”

Sounds understandable, but is this more than the theory of an overmotivated political scientist?

Often a handful of votes decide

The analysis of the last elections for the National Council for the cantons of Zurich, Bern and Lucerne, which GFS Bern prepared for The Observer, suggests: the political scientist is exactly on point. Surprisingly, only a handful of votes determine whether someone is elected or not.

For example in the case of Claudio Zanetti, who finished third on Zurich’s SVP list four years ago and was voted out. When fellow party member Hans-Ueli Vogt resigned from the National Council at the end of 2021, it was not he who inherited the seat, but Benjamin Fischer. Zanetti received 108,831 votes, Fischer another 55 votes. A second resignation had not helped Zanetti either: Martin Hübscher was 23 votes ahead.

Bern trade unionist Corrado Pardini also knows what a close election result is. The SP man outperformed his party colleague Tamara Funiciello with no less than 432 votes, but she was still the only one to enter parliament – thanks to the remaining mandate that went to the SP women’s list.

Name connections like a gold mine

Parties sometimes also win seats that virtually no one before them would have thought possible because of their electoral strength. This happened in the canton of Lucerne, where SP, GP and GLP had entered into a list connection. The alliance won three seats, each party got one. And this despite the fact that the SP received 41 percent of the list votes and the GLP only 21 percent. Lucerne’s FDP had made an even better deal with the list alliance with the CVP (today: Die Mitte): with 62 percent of the votes, it won three of the alliance’s four seats, even though the remaining 38 percent belonged to the CVP .

For voters, such close decisions mean that, if they use their vote skillfully, they can sometimes tip the balance. Political scientist Golder therefore says: “Smartvote may be the ideal solution for voters. But if they give their voice to those who have no chance or are unchallenged, they will achieve less impact than could be possible. Because sometimes the right people are the wrong ones.

According to Golder, smart voting works especially well in cantons of a certain size. His analysis shows that the limit is around seven seats. Eleven cantons will participate in the elections on October 22: Zurich (36 seats), Bern (24), Vaud (19), Aargau (16), Geneva and St. Gallen (12 each), Lucerne (9), Ticino and Valais (8 each), Freiburg and Basel-Landschaft (7 each).

Even in these cantons, it is not enough to simply vary and accumulate to give your vote as much weight as possible. This can be achieved if you follow four rules when searching for the right candidates – and take into account one special case:

• Rule 1:Only choose candidates with real opportunities. That is about ten percent, or 500 of the more than 5,000 politicians who are standing for election. They are usually found in the top half of party lists. They are also more present in editorial media.
• Rule 2:Limit yourself to new things. The previous ones even have an advantage if they stayed pale in Bern. Voting for them is only worth it if you consider not voting a big loss. For candidates immediately behind the previous candidates on the list, keep in mind a study from the University of St. Gallen: their chances of being elected are slightly worse than those further down the middle.
• Rule 3: Look at your surroundings. Work best: young, female, rural and urban. If you choose a young middle-class farmer or a left-wing city woman with a nursing profession and at the same time eliminate older lawyers and state employees, the effect is greatest.
• Rule 4: Delete favorites. Very famous people such as Roger Köppel in Zurich and Albert Rösti in Bern in 2019 will definitely make it to the election. If you vote for her, the vote goes to another member of her party – and you miss the opportunity to have a say in who that will be.
• Special case: sympathy votes for people without opportunities. Elections are always about the future. This also includes the elections in four years’ time. If you give your vote to people whose politicians are just emerging, their party might reward them with a better place on the list in four years’ time. It also signals to those elected that they should continue to focus on politics, even if they are not elected. Even between parties and in large cantons, sometimes only a few votes decide. This is due to the principle of proportional representation: in Zurich, a party only needs 2.78 percent of the votes to gain a direct mandate. It is also possible with fewer votes if a party has entered into list and sub-list alliances with other parties. Their votes are added together and then distributed within the electoral alliance.

As a rule, only politically connected parties join. Sometimes, however, the ties are less close and parties enter into marriages of convenience from which they hope to win an (extra) seat. The problem is: “Many parties overestimate their own election chances and underestimate the potential of their list partners. “As a result, part of the votes won actually goes to the competition,” says Lukas Golder.

Martin Bäumle and his GLP controlled the game virtuoso in the last elections. It formed a coalition with the center parties here and with Left-Green there – and promptly won five shaky seats. The media then described Bäumle as an Excel politician. According to Golder, this may have been an incorrect assessment. «Bäumle has certainly calculated well. But he predicted the election results even better and used mathematical calculations to create list connections.

The SVP had the worst hand, because it could only form a few list connections. According to the “Tages-Anzeiger” she lost up to seven seats in the National Council. The party has learned from this and will enter into list alliances with the FDP this year in nine (instead of three as in 2019) cantons.

Voters can also play Martin Bäumle if they take the list connections into account in their considerations. You must follow two rules:

• Rule 1: Only vote for parties with real election chances. Votes given to those without opportunities are a waste. Example Mass-Voll: In Aargau the movement probably has no chance; the threshold for a seat is quite high at 6.25 percent. Critics of the measures therefore prefer to vote for SVP candidates who are critical of vaccinations. In the canton of Zurich, by contrast, the threshold for a seat is only 2.78 percent, and Mass-Voll has joined EDU, Aufrecht and the Swiss Democrats. Vaccine critics are better off with the original here.
• Rule 2: Calculate accurately with list connections. Example GP in the canton of Lucerne four years ago: Only the third seat, which made the list link, was controversial. It was very close to the GLP. At the time, the Left-Greens would have been better off voting for the SP than for their own party and thus prevented the third seat from going to the GLP. More right-wing Greens should have voted for the GLP to ensure the seat ended up in the middle.

When it comes to smart voting, sometimes the wrong ones are exactly the right ones – and the right ones are the wrong ones.

Source:Blick