Facundo Cruz is a political scientist, a professor at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and UBA, and a researcher specializing in electoral systems and political behavior. He is the author of Socios, pero no tanto (Eudeba), an analysis of political parties and electoral coalitions between 2003 and 2015, and co-author of Después del terremoto, on the Argentine political system twenty years after the 2001 crisis. He also edits the newsletter La Gente Vota, published by Cenital, and coordinates Pulsar UBA, a project that monitors the media, social media, and public opinion. He co-founded CICaD (Centro de Investigación para la Calidad de la Democracia), a research center focused on citizen participation in electoral processes.
We discussed the imminent nationwide implementation of the single paper ballot and the process of reconfiguring the coalition system in Argentina. Facundo has been closely following both phenomena for years and has the rare ability to make electoral engineering fascinating.
By Lucas Malaspina
The Single Ballot: The Change That No One Fully Discussed
Will we have more work with the new single paper ballot?
I think we’ll have a different kind of work. In the world of consulting, you adapt to the institutional framework you’re dealing with: the number of offices up for election, the length of terms, how candidates are elected in the districts, and the design of the ballot. You have to organize campaigns and position leaders according to their objectives, within an institutional framework. The Argentine institutional framework at the national level is now about to undergo one of its biggest changes. I believe that the implementation of the single paper ballot will be revolutionary for Argentina, because the country has been accustomed to voting on party ballots for decades. It is one of the few countries in the world—there are fourteen or sixteen, I always lose count—that uses party ballots. Argentina and Uruguay are among the few. The fact that we’re in the minority doesn’t mean the party-ballot system works poorly. In Argentina, I think it worked well.
The debate over the single ballot was framed from certain angles that didn’t necessarily address the questions of why the change was being made. The arguments presented were not the strongest ones for that discussion. And above all: switching to the single paper ballot does not lead to the fundamental discussion, which is how easy it is to create political parties in Argentina. If you’re going to change the voting system, you first need to have a discussion about the Organic Law on Political Parties and the campaign finance law.
Most people don’t know how many offices are up for election or when the election is scheduled. They know what the election is like because they’re presented with a ballot. What’s going to change is what people will see when they go to vote. And that will require time and patience for the public to adjust to the new system—which is why I say it’s revolutionary: it will change the entire logic of how we vote, but politics will also have to adapt, because political arrangements, negotiations, and coalitions will change. And that could create a lot more work, because it will alter the way we think about national presidential campaigns.
Could more parties run for office, and wouldn’t that contradict the idea of lower political spending?
That’s where these arguments start to fall apart a bit. I happened to be part of the discussions in the Chamber of Deputies in 2022. That was where Tomás Aguerre, Malena Mañasco, and I met; we went on to found CICaD. We saw that there were some discussions about the single ballot that weren’t taking place in the way we believed they should. Most think tanks and foundations were promoting the inclusion of the single ballot, and we—just the three of us—argued that it could pose these problems. So we left the committee and said: Why don’t we set up a think tank to start addressing these issues from this perspective?
What we saw was that Argentina has been operating under a coalition-based system for ten to fifteen years. There are nearly 700 district parties and between 50 and 60 national parties. It’s an enormous number, but it’s not as if you see 700 ballots when you go into the voting booth, because the parties form alliances and coalitions. These alliances narrow down the choices.
Until the reform, the parties were responsible for printing the ballots, using the funds provided by the government. Now the government will be entirely responsible for printing and distribution. But a single piece of paper will include everyone who wants to run for office. Today, the National Electoral Chamber has 77 district parties registered in the province of Buenos Aires and 49 in the City. Assuming that all of them will want to run with a slate of candidates for the Chamber of Deputies, you’ll need a ballot with 77 columns, because the model adopted is that of Mendoza: the columns represent the parties or coalitions, and the rows represent the offices up for election.
We joke that we’re going to ditch the “sheet-style” list and end up with a “blanket-style” ballot. I didn’t come up with that—it’s from Malena Mañasco and a colleague she works with. Potentially, you’ll end up with a pretty large ballot.
Obviously, not everyone is going to run; there will be coalitions. But since everyone is guaranteed a spot, I think there will be a temptation for small parties that used to join coalitions to say, “I’ll take a chance and go it alone.” And the other question is: how do you decide where each column goes? It’s decided by lottery. So, imagine you’re the Partido Autonomista Bonaerense, which was created last year; you draw the first column, do a little campaigning, and because you’re first, you pick up some votes. With a bit of fragmentation, you could win a seat in the Chamber of Deputies. That temptation will exist.
On top of that, the National Electoral Chamber has the basic design for the single ballot, but each provincial electoral board has the authority to modify and adapt it. You could end up with 24 different single ballots with minor adjustments. That’s going to make everything much more complicated. And here, a public awareness and citizen training campaign will be key—not only for voters, but also for polling station officials and party poll watchers. The preliminary vote count is going to be a major issue.
Where did the idea come from, and what is the rationale behind this implementation?
The single-ballot system is one that began to be implemented in the West decades ago. When countries undertake reforms, they don’t try to reinvent the wheel; there’s always a team tasked with conducting benchmarking. In Argentina, the discussion has been going on for several years, with two arguments that are the strongest in convincing political actors—who, in the end, are the ones who have to agree on how voters will cast their ballots for them.
A few years ago, concerns began to arise that there was widespread ballot theft and that party ballots imposed a high cost on the government. And neither argument is as solid as it seems.
The issue of ballot theft was something that La Libertad Avanza used extensively in last year’s general election.
It was a very strong argument. There was also skepticism regarding the preliminary count, because doubts were raised about the tally sheets showing zero votes. We at CICaD conducted a study: what we found was that Sergio Massa, Patricia Bullrich, and Javier Milei had all had the same proportional number of tally sheets showing zero votes. If this happens to all political parties in many elections, it doesn’t mean the system is lacking in transparency or that someone is stealing votes. It’s something that tends to happen repeatedly because the preliminary count is for informational purposes, and the incidence of those uncounted votes is statistically insignificant.
There was a whole movement to question last year’s electoral process. The National Electoral Chamber was concerned because at one point the accusation was that the Chamber was rigging the election and that people needed to surround the building. It all smacked a lot of what had happened in Brazil and the United States. Finally, when the runoff results came in at 6:10, Guillermo Francos said, “The election was fair.” And that put an end to the fears.
The thing is, this narrative takes hold that ballot theft is happening all the time. It may occur in some places, but there’s no conclusive study showing that it has an impact. The problem with studying fraud is that, if you want to study ballot theft, you have to access the evidence of the fraud, and if someone is committing fraud, they’ll destroy it. You have no way of accessing the information. And the other option is to interview the perpetrator, but no one is going to give you a statement for an academic paper.
A clear example: Javier Milei won last year in Santa Cruz and La Pampa without a district party, without an activist structure to safeguard the vote. If no one was monitoring the ballots—if no one is monitoring them—when you conduct the preliminary count, party poll watchers know exactly how to act if someone tries to pull a fast one. But that didn’t happen. And that suggests that the impact of ballot theft on the final distribution of the vote is marginal.
Regarding the cost argument: Diana Quiodo, who served as national electoral director before Marcos Schiavi, presented to the committee a comparison of the cost of the single ballot in Santa Fe for the 2019 election versus the party ballot. The cost per voter for the single ballot in Santa Fe was higher than that of the party ballot. Furthermore, the single ballot includes security features: double-sided printing, thicker paper, and security mechanisms. Only five printing presses in the country are capable of producing this type of ballot, one of which is Casa de Moneda.
Coalitions in Transition: From a Two-Coalition System to a Three-Way Game
What do you see in this reconfiguration of the coalition system that still seems to be unfolding, with the chapter not yet closed?
Argentina was always said to be a two-party system, with Peronists and Radicals. Then came the ’90s, FREPASO, the hope for the Alianza, and in 2001, it all fell apart. Traditional party structures began to break down: Radicalism fragmented, while Peronism took three different forms, then became one again, and now we do not know how many there are. That breakdown led to the emergence of coalition dynamics as a way to form agreements in order to win elections and govern.
Argentina entered a coalition dynamic a couple of decades ago. What happened was that this dynamic became a two-coalition system during the 2013–2015 period. Two major blocs began to emerge. In 2019, this consolidated into a two-coalition system, with Frente de Todos on one side and Juntos por el Cambio on the other.
What do you have now? You’re back to a three-way race. That applies not only to the electorate—which today faces a three-way contest with the Juntos por el Cambio camp, the new La Libertad Avanza camp, and the Peronist camp—but also to the political leadership, although at the elite level, for the moment, it feels as though we have 700 parties.
What used to lean toward two is now closer to three. And every day we sense that these three major political blocs are fracturing from within. There are two ways to look at it: you can wait to see what the political leadership does and what proposals it puts forward, or you can wait to see how the electorate behaves.
In terms of the political leadership, I think that three-way race is going to start to break down a little, but it depends on each district. In the City of Buenos Aires, you might have either a two-way race or a five-way race. The same goes for the Province of Buenos Aires. You might go to La Pampa and have a two-way race. You go to Córdoba and have a five-way race. Next year is a legislative election, so you’ll have 24 different provincial races. You won’t really know for sure until 2027.
Don’t you think it could go up to five competitive options?
I think that if we move to five, we will be in a moment very much like 2001–2003, and that will be for reasons far more worrying than how many effective parties we have. If the electorate is stable, no one is going to break ranks; they will try to stay more or less where they are and negotiate from within. But if the electorate is volatile, it is because voters see that no one is offering them solutions and that the economic situation is not very stable, and that can lead the political leadership to make decisions that result in splits. If we reach a five-way contest—with La Libertad Avanza, PRO on its own, what remains of UCR and Coalición Cívica, a centrist bloc, and two or three different Peronist currents—we would be very close to Peru’s current political system, or to our own in 2001.
Argentina’s institutional system today compels you to seek out those agreements. Political leaders have already grown accustomed to the fact that they must form coalitions to compete and to govern. There’s no other way. We’re seeing this with La Libertad Avanza: it’s a political movement that did not want to embrace conventional political practices, but in order to make any decision in Congress, it had to build coalitions—at least temporary ones, at least transient legislative alliances. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been able to sustain its veto of the university funding bill or its veto of the pension reform.
Election data, cartography, and what politicians don’t want to hear
What does historical electoral analysis contribute to the practice of political consulting?
It’s often very difficult to get prospective candidates to accept as valid an analytical approach that differs from what they’re used to. The prevailing view is that with a public image survey, a few focus groups, and a bit of social media, you can more or less hold your own. The thing is, behind all that, there are people you have to convince to vote for you.
You can look at a forty-year historical time series and realize that 90% of that town has always voted for whoever identified as a Peronist or for whoever was a Radical. And you’re going to tell the candidate: your chances are extremely slim. That’s what historical-electoral analysis provides, and it’s hard to convince people of it, because political leaders also have that energy, that drive to charge ahead like a bulldozer and sweep everything in their path. That’s valuable in and of itself. But there are contexts where that works and contexts where it doesn’t.
I had two specific experiences. One was a series of meetings to see if I could work on a campaign in Uruguay. They asked us for advice on how to retain the number of deputies and senators they held. In some places, they told us, they wanted to run alone. What we did was take the results from the last three elections, tally the total votes, and calculate how they had fared in places where they’d run in an alliance and then ran alone in the next election. In every place where they’d run alone, they’d lost votes. Every time they ran alone—especially in the large departments—their vote share dropped significantly. The suggestion was: don’t run alone; form an alliance. In the end, they said they were going to work with other people, but in many places they decided to run alone anyway. Recent history—the last three elections—showed that the best course of action was to form an alliance. Well.
The other experience was when I took a graduate course in Big Data and Territorial Intelligence at FLACSO, directed by Marcelo Escolar. I fell in love with electoral cartography, which basically involves making maps, collecting election data, and coloring municipalities, provinces, and countries. A map tells you: in this municipality, you’re doing well; in that one, you’re doing poorly. But you also have statistical analyses that allow you to explain the overall behavior of a group of municipalities.
When the 2021 PASO primary election took place, it occurred to me to apply that explanatory statistical analysis to see why Cristina had published her letter—that first letter that many considered the first stab at Alberto Fernández’s presidency. I applied that analysis, and what I saw was that in the heartland of Cristina’s electoral base—the suburbs of Buenos Aires Province—the Frente de Todos had received fewer votes than Unidad Ciudadana had in 2017. In those areas, everything was painted red. And where had it grown? In the Fourth Electoral District, in the northern part of the Second, in the Sixth, in the Fifth: in all the places where Cristina hadn’t managed to build her own campaign structure in 2017, because Massa and Randazzo had competed there. In those municipalities, Cristina had even come in fourth. But in 2021, she had grown significantly because the entire Peronist movement had united within the Frente de Todos.
The letter could be explained because, statistically and geographically, you could see how support in the heartland of Cristina’s base had declined compared to Unidad Ciudadana in 2017—which had been a solo gamble by Cristina on her own initiative, competing against Cambiemos at a time when it was very strong, before the debate over pension reform. She didn’t need that analysis; she had a gut feeling and knew it was a disaster. I looked for a slightly deeper explanation and found it by conducting that kind of analysis. We published it in Cenital. There, I found a mathematical explanation for a decision a politician had made.
To wrap things up, what two or three books would you recommend right now?
I’m going to recommend two, and I have yet to start either of them. The first is El libro de los abrazos, by Eduardo Galeano; I received it as a birthday gift and plan to start reading it this week. It’s Galeano being Galeano—it looks really lovely.
The other is Juan Elman’s book on Chile. Juan spent so much time trying to understand what was happening there; we exchanged many messages while he was there. He was very happy with his first book, and I need to do him justice and read it right away. Because Juan always had a different and complementary perspective on how the rest of us were viewing the uprising. I think it contributes a great deal to understanding what can happen when a country reaches that breaking point. He explained it while he was there and connected with the people—which is his way of writing.
Yes, Juan’s book takes on new significance for next year, with elections in Chile. When you read it, you see that this wasn’t a leftist uprising but something else.
And now, if you look at the polls, the two frontrunners are Evelyn Matthei and Democracia Cristiana—one of the parties hardest hit by the social unrest—and Michelle Bachelet of Partido Socialista. The shift was toward anti-establishment candidates, with Boric and Kast in the presidential runoff. And after that experience, the electorate is saying: well, let’s see what happens with traditional politics, because the new approach doesn’t seem to have worked very well. There’s a shift back toward the traditional.
Facundo Cruz publishes the newsletter La Gente Vota on Cenital and coordinates the project CICaD. You can also follow his work through Pulsar UBA.
