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I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the
State, with particular reference to the founding of
them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the
baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.
…
the common
and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the
interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
...
It serves
always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration.
It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles
the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and
insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which
finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of
party passions.
...
In offering
to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare
not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I could wish; that
they will control the usual current of the passions, or
prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the
destiny of nations. But, if I may even flatter myself that they may be
productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good; that they may now and
then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs
of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism;
this hope will be a full recompense for the solicitude for your welfare, by
which they have been dictated.
- George
Washington, Farewell Address (1796)
The Need for New Election Systems
Partisan extremism is unhealthy for democracy,
but is fueled in the United States by a two-party system in which
single-party primary elections are usually more important than the subsequent
inclusive general elections. Since party activists have high turnout in
primaries, the selected candidates tend to represent the most extreme views of
each party, and general election voters can only choose between two polarizing
candidates. What is worse is that these single-party primary elections are
funded by taxpayers, many of whom are not members of a major political party
and in some states are not allowed to vote at all in the partisan primary
elections.
The manner of electing public officials should not be
controlled by political parties. Instead, all public elections should be
neutral with respect to political parties. All voters should be entitled to
vote and to have their votes counted equally regardless of the party
affiliation of the voter or the candidates they vote for. All candidates should
be treated equally and face the entire electorate in any public election.
For more information on open primaries, see https://www.openprimaries.org/ .
Several states have reformed elections so that candidates for
public office must face all voters in both primary and general elections, but
these reforms are flawed due to unsatisfactory election methods. Since multiple
candidates might have similar platforms or even belong to the same political
party, plurality voting (most votes wins) in general elections is unlikely to
consistently elect candidates with majority support unless there are only two
candidates. For this reason California, Washington,
and Louisiana use Top-2 elections followed by a runoff. But Top-2 primaries can
nominate two relatively unpopular candidates due to vote-splitting among a large number of more popular candidates. Sometimes both
nominees are from the same political party.
Alaska recently established a Top-4 primary system with
successive elimination (called “instant runoff voting”) using ranked-choice
voting in the general election. This method is more likely than plurality
voting to elect a winner with majority support, but it is complicated to
implement and still flawed. In the August 2022 special election for Alaska's
vacant house seat, the third place candidate, Nick
Begich, was preferred by 52.5% of voters to the “winner” Mary Peltola. This is clearly an undesirable result. The
successive elimination method is so complicated that a programming error in
California's Alameda County was not discovered until 50 days after the
election, by which time the winning candidates had already been certified (https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Alameda-County-admits-tallying-error-in-17682520.php).
This document presents a comparison of commonly proposed
election methods: Comparison of
Election Methods
Here is a comparison of election methods applied to Alaska's
August 2022 Special House Election: Election Methods re 2022 AK
Special Election
How to Elect Candidates with Majority Support
The only way to ensure majority support for the winning candidate
is simply to elect the candidate who has majority support against each of the
other candidates. And if by chance no candidate has majority support against
each of the others, elect the one who comes closest. When applied to voter
preferences on ranked ballots, this method is called “(Condorcet) Minimax”
or “Simpson-Kramer” in academic literature. But there is a simpler way
to elect the best candidate.
First, hold Top-3 inclusive open primaries in which all
candidates compete on equal terms and all voters have equal voting rights. Each
voter selects a single candidate, with the top three advancing to the general
election. Write-in votes could be limited to this primary election since all
voters can participate. By advancing three candidates to the general election,
this method addresses concerns over vote-splitting that plague Top-2 primaries.
In a general election with three candidates, use a Round
Robin 3-way runoff. Each of the candidates appears on the ballot in a
head-to-head matchup against each of the other candidates. Here is a sample
ballot:
Sample general election ballot for 3-way Round Robin runoff.
Voters should express a preference in each head-to-head vote,
but there is no penalty for failing to express a preference in some of the
head-to-head races. The winning candidate is the one who has, or comes closest
to having, majority support over each opponent. Usually, one candidate will win
the election by having majority support over the other two. Otherwise, the
winner is the candidate who would need the fewest additional votes to win both
of their pairwise runoffs. This method guarantees that any losing candidate has
the weakest possible claim that they should have won the election.
Multi-Winner Elections
Ideally, multi-winner elections should elect a slate of
candidates with proportional
representation, meaning that each chosen candidate is elected with votes
(or fractions of votes) from disparate groups of voters. This prevents a single
plurality voting block from electing all of the
winners and leaving everyone else unrepresented. A method for achieving this is
called “Multi-Winner” or “Proportional” Ranked-Choice Voting (P-RCV). This
method is explained here.
The basic idea is that each voter gets a single vote (which might be split
between candidates during tabulation), and any candidate who exceeds a
threshold number of votes is elected. For “N” voters filling “k” positions, the
threshold is N/(k+1). For example, to be elected to one of three positions, a
candidate must receive more than 1/4th of the total number
of votes (it is only possible for three candidates to exceed this threshold). If a candidate exceeds the threshold by more
than one vote, then the excess votes are mathematically attributed as as a fraction to all ballots counted toward the winning candidate, and assigned to the next choice on those ballots.
There are two problems with P-RCV. First, it is quite
complicated to implement, requiring all ballot information to be readily
available for counting, and mathematically splitting votes into fractions when
a candidate's number of votes exceeds the threshold. Second, if too few
candidates reach the threshold, then someone will be elected whose public
support does not meet the threshold.
A much simpler method that approximates proportional
representation is a multi-winner version of Bucklin voting:
1.
Any candidate
exceeding the threshold with only 1st-choice rankings is elected.
2.
If seats are still
open, 2nd-choice rankings are added and then candidates with the most
votes exceeding the threshold are elected in order until either all positions
are filled or no other candidates exceed the
threshold.
3.
Additional rankings
are added until all positions are filled.
If all positions are filled using 1st-choice
rankings, then the result is the same as proportional voting. Minority voting
blocs can still elect candidates. If the number of rankings counted reaches the
number of positions to be filled, then the result is similar
to “vote for many”, in which a majority voting block could pick all the
candidates. Fewer voters would be represented than with proportional voting,
but every candidate elected would have support from more than the threshold
number of voters.
Note that if the number of positions is reduced to one, then
the threshold is 50%, or a majority. The problem with single-winner Bucklin
voting is that ranking more than one candidate can reduce the chances of the
favorite winning. That is much less of a concern when filling multiple
positions, and voters would be well-advised to rank at least as many candidates
as there are positions being filled.