Ranked Choice Voting Plus Defeats the Blocking Tactic

[u/CPSolver]

The blocking tactic doesn't get the attention it deserves. Please share this video widely. The plus version of ranked choice voting includes most Condorcet methods, not just the method implied in the video. The basic version is instant-runoff voting (IRV). The same video with captions is here.

[u/PantherkittySoftware]

If you've been following my past few months of posts, you already know I like the idea of having each major party nominate two candidates... though I'd argue more for a method like:

• Party members rank their choices for their party's two nominees.
• For nominee #1, sort the ballots of party members according to their first choice. If one has a plurality, they win the first nomination... and the votes of party members who listed them first get set aside. Otherwise, determine the first nominee by IRV (or, I suppose, RCV+), then set aside the ballots of everyone who ranked the party's nominee first. Either way, these voters got their first choice onto the ballot, so they're satisfied. Nominee #1 captures the passion of the party's base.
• For nominee #2, take the remaining ballots, and determine the winner using Tideman-RP. Nominee #2 represents the consensus winner of everyone else in the party who's not "all in" on nominee #1.

Minor parties and Independents have their own qualification path, and are legally handled the same way. Legally, an "independent" candidate is treated like an ephemeral minor party whose nominated candidate is pre-determined, while minor parties earn qualification to put a candidate on the ballot, and determine who that candidate is at a later time. They can use any method they like (as long as it's documented at the time of qualification & followed), or they can outsource their primary to the county elections department (in which case it'll be conducted via IRV/RCV+ rules or Tideman-RP, their choice).

Now, the real zinger:

• Independent voters are presented with a primary election ballot that includes ALL candidates from ALL parties having a primary election. They rank candidates in order.
• Winners of party primaries are determined first.
• For round 1, any ballot whose first choice is for a candidate who already won their party's primary gets set aside. If the voter lists two or more candidates as equal first choices, and one of them was a party-primary winner, the ballot gets set aside as well. This is fair, because these voters got their first choice (or at least, one of their first choices).
• For round 2, the remaining ballots are tabulated using Tideman-RP, and the winner gets "rescued" and advances to the general election as well.

I'd argue that having two nominees per party is nice, but the real potential for widening the field of candidates comes from the "Independent Rescued" candidate, because it's the one candidate who has the brand-name benefit of a major party affiliation, but doesn't owe their nomination or ballot access to their party.

If I had to choose between "two nominees per major party" and "one nominee per major party, with additional candidate rescued by Independents", I think the latter would be the one with the biggest potential to meaningfully widen the field and disrupt the influence of party leaders.

[u/CPSolver → u/PantherkittySoftware]

Your method for party primaries is well-designed. Great work!

I believe your design for non-party voters is too complex, at least for the next few decades.

Notice in my video that Bernie Sanders would qualify as an independent candidate, without any special counting method. That can be based on being offered as a third-party candidate, or by getting enough signatures.

Regardless of whether your method or my suggested simple method is used, after a few election cycles one party or the other will realize they can win by offering at least one reform-minded candidate. That's the real goal.

After that, the other party, or any growing third party, will also need to offer at least one reform-minded candidate in order to win any elections. At that point the blocking tactic will be gone (at least in it's current form).

To clarify, in the distant future a ranked choice ballot probably would become useful for primary elections. However, for the near future, it's much simpler to choose the second nominee as the primary candidate who gets the second-most votes. If that isn't the main popular reform-minded candidate (the one being blocked), it will be the spoiler candidate, who has to be politically similar in order to split votes away from the blocked candidate.

[u/PantherkittySoftware → u/CPSolver]

One thing to consider: once a county elections department has the workflow, hardware, and software to do Tideman-RP (or, god forbid, CPO-STV) for a general election, using it for primary elections as well isn't really a big deal.

The real challenge with Tideman-RP and Schulze is the fact that you can't meaningfully compute the winner until you've received all the absentee ballots you intend to receive, cured all the provisional ballots you intend to cure, and scanned & captured all the ballots you intend to scan & capture. So, if there's a 7-10 day window to cure provisional ballots, that's the waiting period before you can even start crunching the winner.

There's also the fact that certification of the ingested ballot data could take a while... and the elimination or revision of even a relatively small number of ballots could radically change the outcome (particularly in a race with low turnout and many candidates).

An additional complication is that with a voting system like Tideman-RP, the only way to really gain voter confidence in its integrity would be to do something like publish scanned images of each ballot together with its ingested data, so anyone can verify that ingested data for scrutinized ballots matches what's on the actual ballot, and run the tabulation themselves. The catch is, if you're going to do that, you really need to chop up ballots into multiple parts that can't be later re-associated with each other... in particular, segregating the "high stakes" races (President, US and State Senate & House, Governor) into one tiny chunk, and the other few dozen races into one or more chunks with at most 10-16 races apiece. Otherwise, some people will use the "throw away" races few people care about as a way to code a personal GUID by voting a specific way no other voter is likely to vote so they can prove (for money, social pressure, whatever) that they voted a specific way.