A simpler approval based way of replacing the CA jungle primary
I think that 3-2-1 https://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/3-2-1_voting, though
it's an ad hoc combination system, has something to add here.
-Initially restricting the race to the three candidates with the strongest
top-rating support, as long as that represents at least two parties and as
long as #3 has at least half the support of #1, is sensible. In practice it
prevents dark horse winners, either accidental through "honest" but
poorly-considered voting or through misfired strategic voting.
-Of those three, the two with the fewest strong rejections should be
finalists. This prevents center squeeze. And in practice, assuming the risk
of backfire prevents strategy from reaching critical mass, it resolves the
chicken dilemma by putting it off to the strategy-free third stage.
-Between the two finalists, choosing the pairwise winner is the only way to
prevent strategy from affecting this last step (considered by itself).
The pairwise step could be a separate election, especially if neither
candidate had a majority (or some other threshold) of ballots ranking them
strictly higher. This could then be seen as either a "primary/general"
system or a "election/runoff" system.
2018-08-16 1:40 GMT-04:00 Rob Lanphier robla@robla.net:
Hi Robert,
Lots to think about here. More inline:
On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 11:39 PM robert bristow-johnson
rbj@audioimagination.com wrote:
personally, i really dislike the California primary system that can
potentially lock out a party from the general. in fact, even though i
dislike two-party hegemony as we have in the U.S., i actually believe
that parties in politics can be and are a good thing (this doesn't mean
that there aren't bad parties or bad leadership in any particular party).
parties serve a useful purpose [...]
I think, up to this point, we largely agree. I also dislike locking
out legitimate political parties, and I agree that political parties
provide useful mental shorthand for voters (even for wonks like
myself), but I'm willing to accept the risk of locking out candidates
and/or parties to achieve some of the goals from my earlier mail.
But, I agree, it's not good to lock out political parties (especially
important ones) from a general election.
[....] and, in my opinion, ballot access in the general election should
depend solely on getting enough signatures and the state should recognize
parties only to the extent of contract law to keep some faction in a
party from undemocratically screwing the rest of their party. but every
party should be able to get candidates on the General Election ballot,
providing they get enough valid signatures on the ballot petition.
i don't think the General should be just between two candidates.
Hmmm...I think California made a respectable tradeoff. Maybe not the
best solution, but I (for one) appreciate the simpler ballot.
Moreover, I suspect that reform of the primary election is going to be
way more viable than trying to make a change to the general election
procedures. If the government-funded primary remains an open
competition between all candidates (not just an intra-party affair)
with an improved voting method (like approval, or range, or even a
system that is explicitly-designed to select the Condorcet-winner as
one of the two candidates) and the general election is a final runoff
between two finalists, isn't that an acceptable compromise? Or is it
a non-negotiable belief that all parties should get a candidate in the
general election?
and both the Primary and General Election should be decided with
Ranked-Choice Voting using a Condorcet-compliant method (either
Ranked-Pairs or Schulze) for the single-winner races. STV or IRV is
still sucky.
I've been making a point of trotting out my Perl Journal article from
1996 (https://robla.net/1996/TPJ) at times like these, so as to
credibly confirm my shared desire for a Condorcet-compliant system. I
think that after 22 years or so of an uncompromising push for
Condorcet-compliance, I'm about ready to compromise. There are many
that argue that a well-implemented Approval system will pick the
Condorcet winner the vast majority of elections. That seems credible
to me.
We agree, though: IRV is sucky. Standard STV seems inferior to
CPO-STV (though for filling a large-enough pool of seats, it seems
ok).
for Ranked-Choice voting, the number of candidates appearing on
the ballot should not greatly exceed the number of ranking levels.
when San Francisco has 20 candidates and 3 ranking levels, someone who
voted their heart's select which included none of the real contenders
will feel disenfranchised when they found out that the contender they
hated the most wins and they didn't vote for the second-place finisher
to oppose that hated winner.
Yup. I was happy with the 2018 outcome, but I talked to at least one
activist who abhorred the idea of selecting any of the three leading
candidates. I think one of the big problems with San Francisco's RCV
is that this would have been considered an invalid ballot:
[1] [2] [3]
[ ] [x] [ ] Fringe candidate FCA
[ ] [x] [ ] Fringe candidate FCB
[ ] [ ] [ ] Mainstream candidate MCA
[ ] [x] [ ] Fringe candidate FCC
[ ] [ ] [x] Mainstream candidate MCB
[ ] [ ] [x] Mainstream candidate MCC
[x] [ ] [ ] Fringe candidate FCD
[ ] [ ] [ ] Fringe candidate FCE
i.e. prefers FCD, finds FCA, FCB, and FCC acceptable, and will
tolerate MCB or MCC, and believes that MCA is worse than just about
everyone else on the ballot (including most of the fringe candidates).
However, voters were only allowed to mark exactly one candidate per
column. Just about all Condorcet-compliant ranked tally options don't
have a problem with tie ballots, and of course, score voting has no
problem with ties, but IRV can't deal with this.
but the way to make this happen is not to
put in 20 ranking levels, what is needed is sufficiently strict ballot
access law that makes it harder to get on the ballot. but not so hard
that only one or two can meet that requirement.
California has done a lot to make ballot access stricter. That's just
made it so that:
- Working in downtown San Francisco is awful, because there is
always a paid signature gatherer between the train stop and work
(year-round, every year) - Frequently, the only candidates/initiatives that make it to the
ballot are the ones with big money backing them. - There are rules that make it easy for an official to declare a
ballot petition invalid.
I personally didn't mind that incumbent Dianne Feinstein had 31
opponents running against her for her U.S. Senate seat. I just wish
we had a better method for picking the two candidates that would went
on to the general election.
and, i think that the law should allow a candidate that loses in a
primary
or caucus to have some time after the primary to gather signatures to
run as an independent candidate.
Getting rid of FPTP in the general election is insanely hard. Worse,
the IRV folks have way more momentum than people who like better
systems. There's only one way that FPTP is an acceptable system, and
that is if there are only two candidates. My proposals don't
guarantee that there are only two, but I think they make it rare
enough to be an acceptable risk.
what i am still unsure of is what New York does.
Ditto. Whatever it is, it's weird. :-)
ballot access is weird. in Vermont, because lawmakers didn't anticipate
this problem, a 14-year-old kid is running for governor and appears on
the Dem party primary ballot. ya gotta be at least 18 to vote, but you
need not be that to run. ain't that weird?
heh....that and this was apparently the first election that his dad
voted in :-/
https://vtdigger.org/2018/08/15/hallquist-celebrates-histori
c-victory-trains-sights-scott/
Rob
p.s. Kristofer, I read the Green-Armytage/Tideman paper; more on that
later...
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Hi Jameson,
Welcome to the party! \o/ :-) I've got some ideas for how to get
traction for this in California.
More inline....
On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 10:40 AM Jameson Quinn jameson.quinn@gmail.com wrote:
I think that 3-2-1, though it's an ad hoc combination system, has something to add here.
Hmmmm....a 3-2-1 primary. On one level, I like it. 3-2-1 makes some
cool tradeoffs between expressiveness and simplicity.
Still, in thinking about what seems tractable from an activism point
of view, it seems too complicated. 3-2-1 seems like something that
would work in San Francisco or a smaller municipality in the Bay Area,
but it seems like a big leap for a statewide replacement for top-two.
-Initially restricting the race to the three candidates with the
strongest top-rating support, as long as that represents at least
two parties and as long as #3 has at least half the support of #1, is
sensible. In practice it prevents dark horse winners, either accidental
through "honest" but poorly-considered voting or through misfired
strategic voting.
What mechanism would you suggest for ensuring that at least two
parties are supported in those top three? Any why? For example, what
would be wrong with two Democrats and an independent being the three
finalists, or for that matter, three Democrats who each build very
different coalitions and that (in sum) represent 95% of the
electorate?
My Feb 28 proposal on this list had a more explicit mechanism
involving parties. That proposal tries to use a game theory trick or
two to ensure sincere voting. If you believe that parties should be
an explicit part of this, I'm curious if you think there's a 3-2-1
hybrid that can be combined with that proposal.
-Of those three, the two with the fewest strong rejections should be
finalists. This prevents center squeeze. And in practice, assuming
the risk of backfire prevents strategy from reaching critical mass,
it resolves the chicken dilemma by putting it off to the strategy-free
third stage.
-Between the two finalists, choosing the pairwise winner is the only way
to prevent strategy from affecting this last step (considered by itself).
This is the part that I really like about this over my July 18
proposal. I like the guarantee of exactly two candidates while also
being mindful of the center squeeze.
The pairwise step could be a separate election, especially if neither
candidate had a majority (or some other threshold) of ballots ranking them
strictly higher. This could then be seen as either a "primary/general"
system or a "election/runoff" system.
As I've been thinking about this system over the past day or so, I've
warmed up to it a bit. I like that it would replace the primary stage
of the top two primary, while leaving the general election untouched.
This seems like something to present to an activist working group as
one of a handful of options, which would also include an option with
a simple approval-style ballot. But I think it's important to ensure
a system where there would be little sympathy for a sore loser, while
also not practically guaranteeing Democrats or Republicans a spot on
the ticket. As we learned with Burlington 2009, a good sympathy
generator is "the system is too complicated". I worry that a 3-2-1
hybrid would be vulnerable to that charge.
Rob
"someone who voted their heart's select which included none of the real
contenders will feel disenfranchised when they found out that the
contender they hated the most wins and they didn't vote for the
second-place finisher to oppose that hated winner."
The system, I invented, Binomial STV has bidirectional preference (two
way choice). [The voter does not have to rely on voting for "buffer"
candidates to keep out an undesired contender.] From the total number of
candidates, say twenty, you can number the most hated candidate twenty,
and it will count (weigh in the form of an exclusion keep value) against
that candidate, and the next most hated candidate, 19, etc. That is
because Binomial STV has an exclusion count, as well as an election
count. The exclusion count keep values are inverted to give "second
opinion" election keep values. The two sets of keep values, election and
inverted exclusion, are then averaged with the geometric mean, to give a
more representative result than either. (The geometric mean is one of
four averages, to FAB STV, to minimise the possibility of rogue
results.) An election count thus simply combined with an exclusion count
is first order binomial STV, (There are higher orders, or more qualified
counts.)
from
Richard Lung.
On 14/08/2018 07:39, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Re: [EM] A simpler approval based way of replacing the CA
jungle primary
From: "Rob Lanphier" robla@robla.net
Date: Tue, August 14, 2018 12:36 am
To: "Kristofer Munsterhjelm" km_elmet@t-online.de
Cc: "Election Methods" election-methods@lists.electorama.com
On Sat, Aug 11, 2018 at 1:50 PM Kristofer Munsterhjelm
km_elmet@t-online.de wrote:
I also happened across the following draft paper by James
Green-Armytage
on the question of how to select candidates for a top-two runoff:
http://jamesgreenarmytage.com/runoff.pdf
Thanks for reviving this thread, Kristofer! Also, thanks for pointing
out the Green-Armytage/Tideman paper. I'll queue that up on my
reading list, and I'll be in a better position to respond to your full
mail. Just in my initial skim, it looks like they make some of the
points that match my intuition on the subject. In particular (to
quote the paper):
Thus, one function of a [primary election selecting two candidates]
is to concentrate the attention of citizens on the relative merits of
the two finalists. When citizens know who these finalists are, they
have
greater motivation to acquire information about them, ensuring that the
eventual winner will undergo close scrutiny during the campaign.
This is the reason why I dislike arguments that discount the value of
primary elections. If structured correctly, a primary election
followed by a general election allows us to balance two competing
needs:
a. we want elections with liberal ballot access as the most
democratic way to ensure a diverse selection of candidates.
b. we don't want to overwhelm the electorate (and the press, and our
public debates) with too many candidates
A well-structured primary/general pairing can allow us to have both.
Primary voters can vet a wide field of candidates, and give us a sane
general election cycle. With a more sophisticated voting system than
FPTP, it seems possible to have a field with more than 2 candidates
(e.g. 3, 4 or maybe even 5 candidates). More than 5 candidates
becomes kind of a clown show, as evidenced by the 2008-2016 Republican
on-stage U.S. presidential debates, and the 2004-2008 Democratic
counterparts. When the field narrows to 2-3 viable candidates, the
policy discussions can get interesting
personally, i really dislike the California primary system that can
potentially lock out a party from the general. in fact, even though i
dislike two-party hegemony as we have in the U.S., i actually believe
that parties in politics can be and are a good thing (this doesn't
mean that there aren't bad parties or bad leadership in any particular
party). parties serve a useful purpose and, in my opinion, ballot
access in the general election should depend solely on getting enough
signatures and the state should recognize parties only to the extent
of contract law to keep some faction in a party from undemocratically
screwing the rest of their party. but every party should be able to
get candidates on the General Election ballot, providing they get
enough valid signatures on the ballot petition. i don't think the
General should be just between two candidates.
and both the Primary and General Election should be decided with
Ranked-Choice Voting using a Condorcet-compliant method (either
Ranked-Pairs or Schulze) for the single-winner races. STV or IRV is
still sucky.
for Ranked-Choice voting, the number of candidates appearing on the
ballot should not greatly exceed the number of ranking levels. when
San Francisco has 20 candidates and 3 ranking levels, someone who
voted their heart's select which included none of the real contenders
will feel disenfranchised when they found out that the contender they
hated the most wins and they didn't vote for the second-place finisher
to oppose that hated winner. but the way to make this happen is not
to put in 20 ranking levels, what is needed is sufficiently strict
ballot access law that makes it harder to get on the ballot. but not
so hard that only one or two can meet that requirement.
and, i think that the law should allow a candidate that loses in a
primary or caucus to have some time after the primary to gather
signatures to run as an independent candidate.
what i am still unsure of is what New York does. New York allows a
single candidate to be nominated by more than one party and have that
candidate's name appear multiple places on the ballot (associated with
each party that nominated him/her) and then to total the votes for
that candidate from all of the parties that he/she appears with on the
ballot. George Pataki did this with the GOP and the Conservative
Party nominations. it can't be fair to the other candidates when one
of them appears on the ballot more than one place.
ballot access is weird. in Vermont, because lawmakers didn't
anticipate this problem, a 14-year-old kid is running for governor and
appears on the Dem party primary ballot. ya gotta be at least 18 to
vote, but you need not be that to run. ain't that weird?
--
r b-j rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Election-Methods mailing list - seehttp://electorama.com/em for list info