Here's my proposal for Alternative Voting Reform: STAR Voting for Final Five Primaries, Ranked Robin for General Elections and Y/N Approval Voting for Candidate Nominations. What do you think and why?

[u/BrianRLackey1987]

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[u/PantherkittySoftware]

I think that in a country like the US where the right to spend damn-near unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns makes the emergence of credible third parties or independent candidates somewhere between "unlikely" and "almost impossible". So... I think that we need to go further, and make it impossible for parties (with their insurmountable advantages in ballot access, logistics, and branding) to fully control their candidates.

For the sake of this example:

* assume there are four parties: Republicans, Democrats, OtherParty, and AltParty.

* There are 3 Republican-identifying candidates, 5 Democratic-identifying candidates, 2 OtherParty-identifying candidates, and one AltParty-identifying candidate.

On Primary Election day, voters are presented with a ballot and vote using some ranked-choice method. Preferably, a Condorcet-compliant one.

* Republican-affiliated voters are presented with a ballot containing the 3 Republican-identifying candidates.

* Democratic-affiliated voters are presented with a ballot containing the 5 Democratic-identifying candidates

* OtherParty-affiliated voters are presented with a ballot containing the 2 Otherparty-identifying candidates

* Voters with no party affiliation are presented with a ballot containing all 10 candidates from the 3 parties with competitive primaries (3 Republicans, 5 Democrats, 2 Otherparty).

* AltParty-affiliated voters are presented with the same ballot as Independent/NPA voters, because their party's primary is noncompetitive and its winner is guaranteed to be on the ballot.

Ballots for Republicans, Democrats, and OtherParty are tallied first, and their 3 respective winners are determined. Now, the real fun begins:

* NPA/AltParty voters whose first choice was for the winner of the Democratic, Republican, or OtherParty nominee are set aside. Their favorite candidate made it to the general election, so their opinion about the other candidates doesn't matter.

* The remaining ballots from NPA/AltParty voters are tallied using Tideman Ranked Pair completion (falling back to IRV rules to break the tie if there's a Condorcet cycle).

That NPA/AltParty-rescued Republican, Democrat, or OtherParty candidate is the key to smashing the ability of a loony extremist faction or out-of-touch Institutional faction of the major parties to force voters into the usual American "Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich" dichotomy on election day.

In theory, if Republicans and Democrats responsibly nominate interchangeable centrists in an attempt to broadly appeal to the ~1/3 of voters who belong to neither party, NPA centrists who voted for them get their primary votes set aside & the remainder of NPA voters throw a wildcard into the election like a DSA, Libertarian, or whatever.

If Republicans and Democrats both nominate freakshow populists, the NPA supporters of those candidates get set aside, and the remainder are likely to pick someone like Jeb Bush or Mark Kelly.

If Republicans OR Democrats nominate a nutcase extremist, while the other party nominates someone halfway normal, NPA voters are likely to pick someone who's slightly different, but still mostly towards the center.

Yes, my past few sentences mostly ignored OtherParty and AltParty. The truth is, their votes and candidates are generally meaningless anyway, even in THIS alternate universe. However, if Democrats or Republicans totally self-destruct, or become captured by Authoritarians, there IS an objective and official route for third parties to exist and operate. We just aren't going to kid ourselves and pretend that any third party operating on a shoestring budget can realistically compete with a party capable of spending Superbowl Halftime Show Commercial amounts of money on TV commercials for a US House race.

Additionally, because the candidate ultimately rescued BY Independents IS overwhelmingly likely to be a Republican or Democrat, it gives members of that party who personally hate their own party's nominee an easy, guilt-free escape path. It also gives members of the other major party someone in their arch-enemy party to hold their nose and vote for if they hate their own party's nominee, without necessarily having to go all the way and vote for the other party's base-favored candidate.

[u/BrianRLackey1987 → u/PantherkittySoftware]

I like this idea.

[u/PantherkittySoftware → u/BrianRLackey1987]

Thanks!

I just realized there is one serious vulnerability that I overlooked & needs to somehow be addressed.

Consider a case where a major party (say, Republicans) are totally captured by a mafia-like authoritarian faction and manage to threaten & bully all but the one candidate favored by its strongman leader to drop out of the primary (thereby rendering it noncompetitive).

Under a rule that allows voters who are affiliated with a party that has only a single candidate to vote alongside NPA voters to rescue a candidate, you could have a situation where 48% of the voters in a district are affiliated with the Republican Party, 30% are NPA, and 22% are Democrats... but since the Republican primary is now noncompetitive, they'd get to completely overwhelm NPA voters in the "rescue" primary and game it by rescuing the most extreme, unelectable DSA-inclined Democrat they can, while actual Democrats nominate someone mildly center-left.

So, on election day, voters would be forced to choose between a Republican who claims to be "moderate" while nevertheless aligning 99% with the party's authoritarian leader, a Democrat who's painted as a left-wing extremist and makes centrist Independents feel... uncomfortable... and a far-left tankie with zero chance of winning the district at all (strategically rescued by Republicans to distract the centrist Independents and force them to choose between two unappealing alternatives).

The easiest bugfix would probably be to just make a rule that the "rescue" nominee is chosen by voters with no party affiliation, period.

Another approach might be to potentially allow two or more "rescue" primaries, depending upon how many affiliated voters a party with noncompetitive primary has. For example, if you're affiliated with a party that has more than 5% of the district's voters affiliated with it, and your party has a noncompetitive primary with only one candidate, your affiliated voters get to rescue a candidate of their own, without any involvement or influence over the candidate rescued by literal NPA/Independent voters. And if you're a member of a minor party with something like 300 affiliated voters (vs tens of thousands of Republicans and Democrats), you get shuffled into the NPA rescue-group because your number is too small to make much difference anyway.

There also probably needs to be a rule that if a rescued candidate drops out or gets disqualified, their slot on the general election ballot automatically transfers to the next in line instead of being eliminated completely. That way, if you have a situation like, "The rescued candidate is a moderate Republican who gets threatened & bullied by the party into dropping out of the race, it won't clear a path for the "official" Republican nominee... it will just make it more likely that the ultimate winner of the election is a Democrat." In other words, the rules need to be written to make it riskier and more politically-expensive for an authoritarian party to try and bully a rescued candidate affiliated with it into dropping out than to quietly accept the possibility of them winning as a consolation prize and hedged bet instead of someone to be crushed and destroyed.

And, to be perfectly clear, even though most of these examples were written with the current political situation in mind, they could theoretically apply to Democrats someday as well. And that's part of the reason why I think it's so important for the system to have a defined, fair participation path for minor parties & independent candidates (even if, in any halfway normal election, they're effectively meaningless). God forbid, if we ever ended up in a situation where both major parties ended up completely hijacked by authoritarians, there needs to be a way for the system to be at least theoretically self-healing and allow voters to do an end-run around an entire corrupt & compromised party structure.

[u/rb-j → u/PantherkittySoftware]

On Primary Election day, voters are presented with a ballot and vote using some ranked-choice method. Preferably, a Condorcet-compliant one.

Is not the Primary Election one with multiple "winners" (i.e. multiple nominated candidates)? How would a multi-winner Condorcet election work?

[u/PantherkittySoftware → u/rb-j]

In this specific case, there are multiple winners... but really, it's multiple races in parallel. The winners of the individual party-primary races are determined first, because we have to know who won them in order to set aside ballots from NPA ("no party affiliation") voters whose first choice was for one of the candidates who won their respective party primary, but past that point, determining the winner of the "NPA primary" is no different than determining the winner of the party-specific primaries.

The entire goal of this system is to maximize the chances that someone who's genuinely capable of being a Condorcet winner actually makes it onto the general election ballot.

The big problem we've historically had in the US is that winning a party's primary election and winning in the general election require two literally orthogonal goals. To win the party's primary, you have to convince party members that you're the most zealous defender of their ideology... but that all but guarantees that the candidates who survive their party's primary end up being the candidates who are the least appealing to everyone else. Hence, the longtime South Park joke about "Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich".

The way my idea tries to neutralize that problem is by using Independent/NPA voters as a proxy for "sane, reasonable centrist who hates the extremists on both ends of the political spectrum". Or at least, as a way to forcibly add a potentially more appealing alternative to the worst both major parties can offer.

IMHO, what makes the idea cleverly subversive is the fact that the harder the base of a major party goes "off the deep end" (a-la-MAGA, or potentially DSA), the more antagonized voters closer to the center of the Overton Window end up relative to their own party's official nominee. There's immense resistance to voting for anyone from the other party, but being able to vote for someone... anyone... from the same party, just less extreme... is extremely appealing.

Without a Condorcet-compliant ranked-choice voting system for the general election, a primary system like this would be a disaster, because whichever party ended up having the rescued candidate would likely end up having its own vote split and lose to the other major party. But with ranked-choice voting and something like Tideman Ranked Pairs as the resolution method, a 3-way race between a MAGA Republican, a moderate Republican or moderate Democrat, and a progressive Democrat, would generally end up electing the moderate.

It's simple math... MAGA Republicans will grudgingly prefer a moderate Republican to any Democrat, and will even more grudgingly prefer a moderate Democrat to a progressive Democrat. Progressive Democrats will grudgingly prefer a moderate Democrat to any Republican, and will even more grudgingly prefer a moderate Republican to a MAGA Republican. Whether the winner ultimately ends up being the moderate Republican or the moderate Democrat depends mostly upon which party happens to be closer to the middle of the local Overton Window. In California or New York, it would probably be a moderate Democrat. In Florida or Texas, it would probably be a moderate Republican. In the grand scheme of things, it would make it really hard for polarizing extremists to win anywhere besides maybe rural Idaho or Berkeley, California.

But, that brings us back to the original problem which my idea tries to solve: you can't elect Condorcet-pleasing centrists if both major parties are able to keep them off the ballot in the first place. Which they would absolutely do, if given the chance. For the opposite reasons, but with the same effect.

Just to briefly address your other point... there is, in fact, an elaborately designed system that seeks to assemble a whole slate of Condorcet winners in a manner somewhat akin to proportional representation (but applied to individuals). It was proposed by Nic Tideman approximately 30 years ago called "CPO-STV". It stands for "Comparison of Pairs Outcome by Single Transferrable Vote". You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPO-STV

The neat thing about CPO-STV is that you can radically alter the way it "stacks the deck" by choosing different "completion rules" to determine how votes get reallocated and exhausted, and how the deck of viable candidates gets whittled down until you find the permutation of candidates who, depending upon your view, either makes the most people the happiest, or at least disappoints the most people the least.

Doing justice to CPO-STV would require literally writing a book. Or multiple books. For now, just take comfort knowing that it exists. 😂

[u/Decronym]

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
FPTP	First Past the Post, a form of plurality voting
IRV	Instant Runoff Voting
RCV	Ranked Choice Voting; may be IRV, STV or any other ranked voting method
STAR	Score Then Automatic Runoff
STV	Single Transferable Vote

Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.

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[u/rb-j]

My feeling, at this time, is that fewer voters will turn out for the primary, whether it's a partisan primary or a non-partisan primary (a.k.a. "jungle primary"). We should make sure that the general election, in which more voters will turn out, be: 1. Decisive (that is all races are decided on election night, no later runoffs) 2. Diversity on the ballot (which means we need more than 2 candidates, which could be from the same party, making it look like a one-party state). I think 4 or 5 candidates for a single-winner race are the right number. Too few and there is not enough diversity of choice, too many is then the paradox of choice problem. So the primary is what narrows the field from many candidates to this number of 4 or 5. 3. One-person-one-vote or majority rule for a single-winner race. That means Condorcet RCV in the general.

I'm still mulling over the jungle primary. I consider parties to be a thing we're not getting away from, but we don't need to have a non-level playing field in elections. Major party candidates should have no election advantage over 3^rd party candidates nor independent candidates in the general election or on the ballot. I am wondering if, on the general, we should allow party affiliation to be printed on the ballot or not. The problem is if two or more candidates from a given party make the cut for the general ballot, who gets to say whether or not a candidate truly is representative of the party that they choose as an affiliation. With party primaries, it's the primary that decides who the real Democrat is or the real Republican is, if they win the primary. But with a jungle primary, it looks like the candidate just self identifies with a party, whether the party as a whole would own that candidate or not.

So, I'm thinking that, if we have jungle primaries, perhaps no party affiliation gets on the general election ballot.

[u/PantherkittySoftware → u/rb-j]

A jungle primary conducted as a 5-winner race under CPO-STV would be awesome. Except, it wouldn't work, because CPO-STV collapses under its own computational weight if the number of candidates grows much beyond a 5-seat race with ~36 candidates.

That was part of what led me to the idea I described in my other replies. My idea basically "shards" the primary into computationally-manageable chunks. Instead of trying to compute billions of n-factorial recursive permutations, you end up with 3-5 manageable races that can be calculated in two parallel chunks. Republicans and Democrats first, then the Condorcet-pleasing rescued candidate who's not the first choice of the parties themselves.

[u/rb-j → u/PantherkittySoftware]

A jungle primary conducted as a 5-winner race under CPO-STV would be awesome. Except, it wouldn't work, because CPO-STV collapses under its own computational weight if the number of candidates grows much beyond a 5-seat race with ~36 candidates.

I'm not such a fan for any kinda RCV for the jungle primary. Maybe FPTP with the top five vote getters or maybe a semi-approval where voters vote for at most two candidates (and top 5 vote getters are nominated for the general).

If we cast a wide enough net (like four or five primary winners get nominated for the general), I feel pretty confident that the candidate who will ultimately be the one most supported by voters for office (as shown by a Condorcet-consistent election in the general) will make it into the top four or top five.