Hi Kevin,

Thanks for the reply.  I'm going to quote just a portion of your email
(your response about California's system), and I'll respond with a few
pertinent links

On Sat, Oct 2, 2021 at 6:00 PM Kevin Venzke steak@yahoo.fr wrote:

Okay, I'm guessing that you don't remember our 2018 conversation
(which is okay, because I don't remember THAT much of it).  There's a
link to it below.  Before that, let's discuss something you said in
the mail I'm replying to:

This is true in many parts of our fine nation, but guess what?
Welcome to California!  That's not the way that we do it here.

We have what many others call a "jungle primary" (or, more dryly, the
"nonpartisan blanket primary"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonpartisan_blanket_primary

Everyone gets the same ballot.  That had me scared in February 2018,
because I had been door-to-door canvassing for a political group that
was trying to make sure that a Democrat (any Democrat) beat the
Republican in a nearby U.S. Congressional district:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California%27s_10th_congressional_district_election

Because I was scared little Democrat, and felt that much of my late
2017 and early 2018 effort was going to be wasted, I sent this email
to the EM-list:

http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2018-February/001687.html

That led to our wonderful March 2018 discussion (previously mentioned
in this email):
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2018-March/thread.html#1688

Having a meaty conversation with EM-list around that time was a good
distraction.  I was scared to death about the state of American
politics around then.  As I knocked on doors in the heat of the
California Central Valley that summer, trying to convince people to
vote for Josh Harder, I thought about our conversation about approval
voting, and spoke with many of my fellow activists who didn't want to
think about math.  That was especially true after the June 2018
primary election, when all of the other candidates were eliminated,
and the rest of the work in CA-10 was focused on the head-to-head
contest between Democratic Party Challenger Josh Harder, and
Republican incumbent Jeff Denham.  Since the race between Harder and
Denham was close, most folks just wanted to focus on THIS election,
and not talk about pie-in-the-sky voting reform that wouldn't happen
before November 2018.

The mood started to get pretty glum on election night at the
election-night party held in Modesto by Josh Harder for the
volunteers.  Denham was ahead by a seemingly wide margin.  It took
several days of gathering mail-in ballots before we knew the result:
https://www.vox.com/2018/11/7/18066354/josh-harder-congressman-election-results-jeff-denham

Thankfully, Harder had an easy win.  Even better, just south of
Harder's district, TJ Cox won in CA-21 in perhaps the closest federal
race in 2018.  I had also canvassed for Cox, so I was relieved that
perhaps the bus trip that I took down to the district to help voters
get registered had paid off.

I calmed down a bit after the November 2018 election, and had some
time to write down my thoughts about approval-based election methods:
https://robla.blog/2018/12/09/replacing-the-jungle-primary-december-edition/

What if TWO people won a majority approval in the primary election?
Let's keep using the CA-10 example from above, and take all of the
candidates that received more than 10,000 votes in the primary:

• Jeff Denham (incumbent, Republican) 45,719 votes (37.6%)
• Josh Harder (Democratic) 20,742 votes (17.0%)
• Ted D. Howze (Republican)  17,723 votes (14.6%)
• Michael Eggman (Democratic) 12,446 votes (10.2%)
• Virginia Madueño (Democratic) 11,178 votes (9.2%)
• Others (11.4%)
• Total: 121,757 votes (100.0%)

At least a couple folks I spoke to liked Virginia Madueño, but rallied
around Josh Harder after the primary election.  As I recall, on
election night, Denham and Howze were in the lead, and Harder was a
close third.  It was only the mail-in ballots that swung toward
Harder.  But note: this election was a "vote-for-only-one" (FPTP)
election.  I know that many people that I spoke with in CA-10 were
eager to get ANYONE other than a Republican.  It didn't help that TJ
Cox (who was also polling pretty well in CA-10)  dropped out of the
CA-10 race and entered the CA-21 race  That's the one that he JUST
BARELY won:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California's_21st_congressional_district_election

Cox's wife (Kathleen Murphy) is an emergency-room pediatrician whose
primary office was in Fresno (closer to CA-21 than CA-10) and
Cox/Murphy owned several cheap homes in the Central Valley (in both
CA-10 and CA-21) because Cox and Murphy each individually needed a
place to crash in 2018.  They were both working pretty hard that year,
and I think their kids were attending school in CA-21.  Being able to
consolidate near Fresno probably helped both of them get more sleep
that year.

Anyway, just painting a picture of a real-world election that I know a
bit about (CA-10).  My hunch is that at least a couple of the
Democratic candidates would have received a majority of approval
votes, and Howze MIGHT have pulled off a majority (though I doubt it;
he seemed like quite a crackpot, as the 2020 election showed):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_California#District_10

My hunch is that Denham, Harder, Cox, Eggman and Madueño could have
gotten over 50% approval.  Maybe even Howze.  As I recall, Eggman
entered at the last minute, just before the deadline (he lost against
Denham in 2016, but had name recognition, so maybe he could have
pulled it off).  Cox withdrew, but I know there were a lot of
heartbroken activists about Cox shifting to CA-21.  Howze was the "Pro
Trump" candidate in the race, and Denham was trying to say "well, I'm
for Trump on most things, but I'm here for the residents of CA-10".
Howze was also a last-minute strategic entrant into the race.

California has an ENORMOUS Latino community in the Central Valley, who
were scared of ICE, because even in the cases where a citizen is a
lifelong resident of the United States (and thus a citizen according
to the United States Constitution), that still didn't prevent
detention for those citizens who didn't speak English very well, and
couldn't prove that they were citizens (because many people don't have
passports here in the United States, and it used to be fairly easy to
cross from San Diego to Tijuana and back without a passport for many
people until fairly recently)  That meant that a lot of people were
afraid to register to vote.  Plus they had day jobs, which were much
harder than any of the jobs that I've worked since high school (I
picked strawberries for part of the summer after I graduated from high
school; my dad was able to find me and my sister a better-paying job
before the summer was over).  I'm guessing many of the Latinos picking
strawberries in California's Central Valley don't have their fathers
lining up better work for them.

My long tangent is why I changed the subject of this mail.  I would
love to use California's CA-10 and CA-21 as example districts, since
the data from those elections is really interesting (at least to me).
If no one wants to use the Californian examples, and instead talk
about candidates A, B, C, D, and E.... well, that's okay.  I realize
that California isn't as interesting to people who don't live here,
but just beware: Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were from California.
The "Rise Above Movement"
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_Above_Movement) is based in
Southern California.  Arnold Schwarzenegger used to be governor of
California.  The TV series MAS*H and "Little House on the Prairie"
were filmed in California.  El Niño comes from just west of
California, and it affects the weather all over the world.  Weird
things happen here.  IGNORE US AT YOUR PERIL!!!!!1!!1!  :-)

Rob

Hi Rob,

Thanks for all this background.

I mostly like the jungle primary, or top-two runoff, but it's true that the finalists might
get chosen arbitrarily, and we're only assured that a Condorcet Loser won't win.

Rob Lanphier roblan@gmail.com wrote earlier:

I knew this, but understood you as being surprised that a two-round system could ever sensibly
end after one round.

But the voters had their favorites. Would they really approve the entire list, if they
knew there would be a second round that doesn't eliminate the alternatives? I don't think
so. So for my method proposal I think it is fine to end the method if there is majority
approval. (For a top-two, some remarks are below.)

My thoughts on the design constraints here, for a second round with two candidates only.

1. I would want to retain the non-partisan nature of the first round. I don't see a way of
   preserving this while having any concept of party included in the method definition.

2. If we advance exactly two candidates to a second round, we want to use a method that is
   good at estimating the two most likely "best" candidates. Your concerns show that
   vote-for-one is inadequate. And I dare say your hypothetical here actually shows why
   approval is inadequate.

If a major party (say 40%+ of the voters) has the stance "let's elect any candidate from
our party, to ensure the winner is not from the other party", they may be able to achieve
this even without majority approval. Two candidates with 45% approval could both advance.

Maybe the best (eliminative) option is the one mentioned in 2018, to pair the approval
winner with the candidate posing the greatest "approval opposition" to him, meaning that
the same 45% of the voters can't pick both finalists.

In some strange scenarios this could create a bad second round: Suppose that 80% of the
voters approve A and B, and the other 20% approve C. Then C is in the second round. That
would be wasteful.

The right question to ask is a bit elusive. The right question is not "which candidate is
most likely to beat A pairwise?" because that will not actually give a different answer
as far as we can tell from the first round approval ballots. It's going to be the second
most approved candidate.

But should top-two selection always imply a concept of proportional representation; i.e.
that the two finalists "represent" as many voters as possible? I am not sure why,
theoretically. It would help maximize the policy difference between the two finalists,
which might be good for participation rate and the appearance that the vote was worth
holding. But maximizing the policy differences between two finalists is certainly NOT
generally music to my ears: It makes it sound like center squeeze is actually a goal.

The approach of my non-eliminative suggestion, to say it again, is to pick just one best,
and then go to the voters again and check if there's any way to show it was the wrong
pick.

Kevin

Hi Kevin

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.  I'm going to take a moment and give
my hot-take now, and then give your method some more thought later.
More inline below:

On Sun, Oct 10, 2021 at 12:16 PM Kevin Venzke stepjak@yahoo.fr wrote:

Interesting point about the Condorcet Loser criterion.  That's
mathematically true, but I don't know if that actually works in two
successive elections held several months apart.  A candidate can game
the system by avoiding being the Condorcet Loser in the primary, and
then appealing to their base voters in the general election (in hopes
that a weak-sounding candidate is the only other top-two winner)

Kevin, here's what you wrote after my chirpy "Welcome to California!"
comment about how we don't separate Democrats and Republicans in our
primary elections:

Nope.  I was referring to California's system, which only has a
single-round primary, followed by a single-round general election.
Qualifying for the ballot in one of our 53 electoral districts is easy
in California, because the number of signatures to qualify is only a
fraction of the people who voted in the prior election in the given
electoral district.  Qualifying for a statewide initiative (e.g. U.S.
Senator from California) is more difficult (and expensive), which is
why we had two Democrats to choose from in the 2018 race for the U.S.
Senate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_Senate_election_in_California

The Democratic Party here in California is really well-funded, and
both candidates had loyal followings.  One of them became mayor of San
Francisco the day that Harvey Milk and George Moscone were shot in
their offices at City Hall, and many people learned about their deaths
from her.  This was only a few days after my current representative
(Jackie Speier) was shot and left for dead on a airplane runway down
in South America.  A lot of people from San Francisco died (or were
gravely wounded) in November 1978.  We have a lot of history here.

Back to more recent history, the Republican Party had a tough year
here in California in 2018:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California_elections
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_California

The Democratic Party had a tougher time of things in 2020:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_elections
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_California

I suspect it was because the Republicans here in California figured
out how to play Democrats off of each other.  It wasn't difficult.  As
Will Rogers famously put it: "I am not a member of any organized
political party — I am a Democrat.".

Source:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/14365-i-am-not-a-member-of-any-organized-political-party

If I had been voting in that district, then YES, I would have voted
for Harder and Madueño and even Eggman.  I might have even voted for
TJ Cox, because I like the guy and he was on the ballot, as I recall.
I'm trying to avoid profanity when I describe what I think of Jeff
Denham.  Many of the people I canvassed with would not.  Jeff Denham
was (and probably still is) an asshole, and voted like one:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/jeff-denham/

You have to remember, this was a midterm election; Donald Trump was
president, and there was no way to vote against him, other than in the
U.S. House of Representatives and in a third of U.S. Senate races.  In
California (as I pointed out), the U.S. senate race was between two
Democrats, so we couldn't vote "against" Trump with our Senate vote.

In each of the hundreds of House districts all over the United States,
most Democrats (myself very much included)  would have voted for a
department-store mannequin wearing a "TRUMP SUCKS" t-shirt in the 2018
election, if their opponent was a Republican.  In CA-10 in particular
(where Republican Representative Jeff Denham was running against
Democratic challenger Josh Harder), the Democrats were desperate.
Jeff Denham was a three-term incumbent.  I really, sincerely do not
like Jeff Denham, and it seemed many people in CA-10 didn't either.
Apparently, according to Wikipedia, he's a lobbyist for the law firm
that Bill Gates' dad practiced at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Denham

I don't think that's possible in a real-world election.  Technically,
the first round of California elections are "non-partisan", but the
candidates are allowed to state what their "preferred" party is on the
ballot.  That was a workaround to prevent a well-funded party from
running a lot of candidates with confusing names.  For example, did
you know that John Kennedy was a Republican?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kennedy_(Louisiana_politician)

Things like ^that happen a lot in the United States.

After seeing the results in St Louis I've come around to the idea that
approval voting may actually be okay for primary elections:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_St._Louis_mayoral_election

I know very little about local politics in St Louis, and know almost
nothing about whether the national gender and race politics during
2020 and early 2021 played a role in that election.  I have a hard
time believing that they didn't.  That election took place less than a
year after George Floyd's murder up in Minneapolis (less than 500
miles away in a city that is also on the Mississippi River and is
culturally very similar to St Louis) and in the living memory of the
shooting of Michael Brown in a convenience store between St Louis and
its airport (which is named after an idiot white guy who flew his
airplane across the Atlantic Ocean).  Michael Brown's death also led
to protests:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_unrest

...but unfortunately, Michael Brown's death didn't lead to much
justice for black people here in the United States.  I'm hoping that
George Floyd's death was enough of a wake-up call for this country.

Anyway, after seeing how the election went in St Louis, I'm going to
say that I "tentatively approve" of approval voting as a top two
mechanism.  Perhaps the St Louis Airport ("STL") should be named after
Michael Brown, even if Brown's most memorable moment (for the rest of
us) was just as a dumb kid who possibly stole some Swisher Sweet
cigars from a suburban convenience store.  18-year-olds do some stupid
things, and perhaps they shouldn't get airports named after them.  But
I digress....

Well, this could be true, but lets say that we have two dominant
political parties in the United States (because.... well.... we do).
An approval-based primary election campaign is going to be all about
name recognition.  That's part of the reason why I'm saying that all
candidates who get 50% (or more) should advance, even if that means
three (or more) candidates.  My hunch, based on the approval-based
results in St Louis (for the election on 2021-03-02), is that getting
over 50% approval is incredibly difficult:

• Tishaura Jones -- 25,388 votes -- 57.0%
• Cara Spencer -- 20,659 votes -- 46.4%
• Lewis E. Reed -- 17,186 votes -- 38.6%
• Andrew Jones -- 6,428 votes -- 14.4%

Total ballots 44,571

Perhaps.  Back in 2018 when I was really thinking about the elections
here in California, that's when I came up with my complicated systems
("MATT" and "MAF")
https://electowiki.org/wiki/MAF
https://electowiki.org/wiki/MATT

Back in 2018, I preferred MAF, even though it was more complicated.
However, if I had to choose today, I'm not sure which one I would
choose.

Yeah, that scenario is pretty bad for both MATT and MAF.  MAF has
better safeguards, and would advance A and B (and drop C), but MAF
seems to be too complicated to evangelize.  I've tried to explain MAF
to many people for the past few years (tweaking the rules as scenarios
were described to me), and I eventually gave up on it.

Not necessarily.  Elections involve humans, and humans are
complicated.  There truly is no telling which candidate is the most
likely to "beat A pairwise"

I'll have to write some code for your method at some point for my own
analysis.  My hunch is that we're going to have to see how things go
in Fargo and in St Louis after a few elections, and hope that we get
more real-world elections using approval voting in order to do more
trustworthy analysis.

Rob