In any primary process with a schedule there will be ‘late’ states that will likely have ‘less’ of a say. How can one propose to fix that? Elimination of a schedule, having a national primary day, would make even starting a campaign prohibitively expensive.
I had an idea about how to make the schedule more ‘fair’. Start with the following premises:
1) We have an interest in making sure that the ‘price of entry’ into the race isn’t prohibitively high.
2) Given (1) above, a national primary day would be out of the question without radical changes to how campaigns get funded are enacted.
3) Given (2) above, any primary process will have to proceed on a schedule.
4) Given (1) and (3) above, there is an interest in making smaller states first.
5) Permenantly enfranchising some states before others seems to violate a sense of fairness.
6) (4) and (5) above, are at odds. We must therefore choose the lesser of two evils.
7) I argue that the interest in keeping the ‘price of entry’ low is the higher priority. This can and should be a point of argument probably.
8) Given (7) and (5) above, the first states in a schedule should be small, but they should also rotate their order year to year.
So thinking about the above, I had an idea to order the states by size 50th largest to 1st largest. States 50 through 46 start the primary process with separate primary days, rotating the order from year to year. States 45 through 36 hold 5 separate primary days in pairs, with a rotating order. States 35 thorugh 1 vote in a super primary day.
I haven’t done a detailed analysis, but my first guess is that this system should keep the price of entry low and allow for campaigns to establish popular momentum. For a campaign to grow enough momentum to successfully do a super primary day at the end, the schedule needs to be sufficiently long. Thus we can’t go too fast from 5 the first 5 small primaries to the super primary day.
Just an idea I had.
So how about it? What do you think and how would you design it?
Did you mean to rank the states by population or by area?
I don’t like either. Let’s find the states that most closely resemble our country’s composition.
I’m assuming (I haven’t looked at it) that if the demographics work out that there is a large state area-wise with a small population, there would still be opportunity to campaign there reasonably easily since what you’d be looking at would largely be travel costs and considerations rather than big media buys.
How about the states with the best voter turnout from the previous GE go first? Ranked by turnout in PDF.
maybe 6 or so cluster of states- so multiple mini-super-tuesdays separated by a reasonable amt. of time.
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p>for instance, first cluster would be a small cluster of small states- IA, NH, NV, SC, and one more state which rotates every primary season.
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p>the point is to dampen the overbearing influence of one or two states on the entire process.
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p>It also limits the big-mo, which is, after all herd-behavior.
… that the first States need to be small and individually run to keep a nice and low cost of entry into a race.
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p>I played around with the idea of (after the first five states) clustering all the other states in groups of 5. When you try to allow for sufficient campaign time between clusters, the calendar wound up being too long overall.
with smaller clusters –> large clusters
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p>would inevitably force out unviable candidates
… the main thing to work out then would be ‘granularity’. I also like the idea of rotation too though… how would that work?
or a ranking by the DNC where important general election states get preference
… I wanted to take Sabutai’s comment about the disenfranchisement of states at the end of the schedule to heart. So a ‘big’ super primary day at the end is, by my figuring, the best way to keep the end relevant. I just regard the ramp up schedule as a necessary evil in the meantime.
… and should have some kind of demographic component so we don’t have all white Iowa and NH having such a big say.
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p>Also ban Super delegates, delegates and caucuses and while were at it have it run by the state using the same rules every where so it is popular vote period. Political parties can participate just not set any rules or so completely dominate it so independent candidates and parties have a real chance of getting somewhere.
I cannot take credit for this, aas it was in the Atlantic Monthly a while ago with keen colored maps, but I really like it as a solution.
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p>The country is divied into quadrants – Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, Northwest. Area and population wise, it was split pretty evenly (for instance, MI and PA were both in the Northeastern quadrant).
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p>For the first one – I don’t know, hold a coin toss. Then, the primaries would be spaced approx. 6 weeks apart, and would rotate clock-wise nationally. Every 20 years, a region would be first, to decide front runners, and last, to decide winners.
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p>It’s clean, easy, fair and doesn’t need any extra money. Which is why I suppose it will never happen…..
Wouldn’t that effectively neuter(spay) those candidates that can’t afford $50M worth of TV? Here comes President Romney!
One media market at a time, instead of dozens. No more jetting across the country for disparate states. The Atlantic had cost breakdowns which suggested that in fact, it would AID smaller and populist candidates.
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p>If it’s in place for 2012, Pesident Romney will be glad to show you the side-by-side cost comparisons – doubtless on one of his PowerPoints…
Erm… The “Northeast” from Michigan to Maine is much more than one market. I do agree that there’s less “bleed” so total costs should be less, and I think the idea has merit… interesting to be sure.
regional primaries over a several-month long process, then one big giant national primary… which will allow people to take into consideration everything they learned in the months since their candidate stopped campaigning in their state.
the third time’s the charm!
Proposals in the past include the “American Plan” (PDF) aka the California Plan, that uses a regular series of grouped primaries, starting with small numbers of states and leading up to large numbers — basically, Tuesdays that regularly get more Super. On the other hand is the “Delaware Plan” that uses a series of 4 voting days, 1 per month. Each subsequent day has more delegates at play.
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p>Personally, I say the first thing to do is kill the caucus, for reasons I’ve extensively detailed elsewhere. Secondly, move all events to a Saturday for fairness’ sake. Thirdly, limit Supers to Democratic governors, Congresspeople, past and current Presidents, DNC Chair, and State Cte Chairs (total of about 300).
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p>Fourthly, I’m sick of the self-fulfilling entitlement of Iowa and New Hampshire. Sick of seeing the Huckabees and Kerrys getting artificial boosts from cowherders who don’t reflect our modern party. Sick of seeing assistant dogcatchers in Iowa getting more facetime with candidates than the population of Oregon (at least, if some Democrats get their way).
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p>On January 1st, randomly choose 2 small states from a diverse pool to vote on the first Saturday after February 1st. Ideally, the states would be swingish in nature. On January 21st, 2 small and 1 medium state would be drawn for February 21st. By mid-March, we’d have 1/4 of the delegates decided. Do another 20% at the beginning of February. I would want all states decided by less than 5% average over the last two presidential elections to have made their decisions by then.
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p>Then, the remaining 55% of delegates are decided on the last Saturday of April.
As far as I can tell, people who make more money [white collar jobs] tend to have Saturday and Sunday off, whereas people who make less money [service industry] are far more likely to have shifts on Saturdays. How does this tip the turnout?
They tend more towards herding corn and pigs. But your point is well taken.
They need to be done away with immediately, and I will be posting about why with some recent experiences and observations. That said, the current schedule was the result of a year’s worth of study and an almost unanimous vote by the DNC Rules committee. We’ve all witnessed the result. It’s nice to see lots of different ideas, but the reality is that the process for choosing a schedule is as political as the primaries and caucuses themselves. Until the underlying rules for determining schedules are changed, there will be no change.
… I can’t remember where I heard it (altercation I think) but someone once remarked that we are demographically a nation of mostly people that live in near or around cities, but you wouldn’t know it from our electoral process.
I’m ripping this from an information sheet I provided my students in early January. Sources are various Census and other government stats.
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p>
USAIowaNew HampshireSouth Carolina
% of people living in a city with at least
400,000 people14%0%0%0%
% of people who are Hispanic:15%4%2%3%
% of people under 18 years old: 25%22%22%24%
% of people below poverty level:13%11%7% 14%
% of people who graduated from college:24%21% 29%20%
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p>Granted, the inclusion of Nevada corrects some of these defects, but not that many…
holy cow, when is enough enough?! 😉
You do five a week for ten weeks.
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p>How to choose which five for each week? You don’t consider size, either of land or of population. Why should large states be treated differently? You don’t consider demographics either. The country isn’t homogeneous, and that’s a great thing. As such, there’s no state which represents the diversity of housing status, ethnicity, education, religion, wealth & income, or values of all fifty.
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p>So, here’s how I’d do it: I’d have the five states which were closest in the most recent presidential election by percentage go first. I don’t care if the Dems won all five or lost all five or any mix in between, that’s how I’d do it. The next week? Closeness 6-10. Week 3? Closeness 11-15. Etc. As demographics and candidates change over time, the list will cycle in and out for firstgoers.
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p>I’d also eliminate caucuses altogether.
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p>So, how much do these lists change over time? Consider the states ranked by margin of victory (closest to blowout): (source):
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p>
2004 2000 1996 1992
1. WI FL KY GA
2. IA NM NV NC
3. NM WI GA NH
4. NH IA CO OH
5. OH OR VA FL
6. PA NH AZ AZ
7. NV MN TN NJ
8. MI MI MT MT
9. MN OH SD NV
10. OR NV NC KY
11. CO TN TX TX
12. FL PA MS SD
13. NJ ME IN CO
14. WA MI FL WI
15. MO WA SC VA
16. DE AK MO LA
17. VA AZ OH TN
18. HI WV ND KS
19. ME LA AL WY
20. AK VA NM IA
21. CA CO OK IN
22. IL VT OR CT
23. CT GA PA AL
24. AZ CA NH MI
25. NC IL WI SC
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p>Number of different states with at least one appearance in Top 5: 13 (min 5, max 20)
Number of different states with at least one appearance in Top 10: 20 (min 10, max 40)
Number of different states with at least one appearance in Top 15: 27 (min 15, max 50)
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p>
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p>So, in my proposal, there is considerable churn. There’s typically a mix of small, middle sized, and large states in each Top 5, and they are typically spread by lots of demographic data, although that certainly isn’t guaranteed. What I really like about this is that there is churn, and more importantly since the Dems want to win, they let those states which are the most likely to switch their EVs go first, thereby encouraging [though not requiring] the Dem candidates to make sure they appeal to those voters first and foremost.
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p>What about Guam, Puerto Rico, et al? They don’t have EVs; I see no reason why they should get voting delegates. How about DC? Fair play. With 51 the math gets non-divisible (3×17 is a bad idea), so one week you have 6 contests. Heck, make it the first week, why not.
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p>When to start? I suggest the first Tuesday after the first Monday in April. Things should sort themselves out oftentimes by the end of April, and almost always by the end of May. I’m not so solid on the starting time though, and it may depend on what the GOP is doing.
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p>
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p>P.S. I disagree with “In any primary process with a schedule there will be ‘late’ states that will likely have ‘less’ of a say.” In election cycles where things are over quickly, that’s true… but in election cycles where things are close until the end, and then those late states have a huge role as candidates and their supporters go “all in”.
Holy cow. That’s a ferocious pace. Frankly, I’m for some longer pauses — the debate devolves and candidates make unworthy mistakes when they’re tired. I remember the debate before New Hampshire, looking at the candidates and thinking that they deserved better…and so did we.
perhaps have some “bye weeks” built in? Maybe have an off-week between Vote 1, 2, 3, and 4? By then, some candidates will have dropped out.
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p>The flip side is, the month before the general election is also a ferocious pace, and it seems clear that the primary season is too long… so reducing the gaps between elections (and keeping the number in each session reasonably high) keeps things moving along.
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p>What I think is most important is using my proposed system for the order. The timing isn’t quite so important, but I do think that no state should “go alone” — that they should always be clustered.
… because it directly affects the price of admission. Imagine the moneys required to start an election in CA.
if you can’t raise enough to run, don’t run. Besides, why shouldn’t CA have “as much of a chance” at an early run as other states? Favoring small states may be good for helping unheralded candidates run, but it has serious flaws in fairness if you believe that timing matters. Small states simply don’t have a large impact on the results of the election, given that the number of EVs tied to small states with margin of victory below 10% is really small.
It seems at first glance that the ideal situation for the voter would be that the schedule be done away with. However, when you game that out there are consequences. The consequences are that you’ll be doomed with a system that makes it almost impossible for anyone other than large known national or regional figure to run. The consequences are in the breadth of the choices offered in the election overall.
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p>The impact small states going first can have is to broaden the discussion in a way that large states going first (or a national primary) can’t. Democracy absent opportunities for ‘dark horses’ to raise the bar on discussions and create momentum for otherwise untenable candidacies would create quite a vanilla election.
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p>I can’t really get around the fact that many candidates we’d like to see running probably can’t mount a campaign without the momentum building opportunity having a schedule provides. More than that, if large states go first it will cut off momentum before some people have a decent chance to be heard.
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p>The voter has an interest in the ‘quality’ of their vote with regard to schedule, but there are also issues with regard to the quality and breadth of the field we would like to see battle in the competition of ideas. It’s those ideas, after all, that we need to churn around in our discussion, not merely the consideration of perrsonality.
I’d rather limit the potential candidates than limit some Americans on the magnitude of their voice based on how many other Americans live both near them and within arbitrary man-made lines in the sand.I’d rather limit the potential candidates
… your post script, the phenomenon of ‘late’ state disenfranchisement is limited to contests that don’t last. But isn’t one of the ideas behind a primary schedule for it to act as a ‘weeding out’ process? As such, it seems designed to create contests that don’t last much more than not.
You got a little snarky about PA and MI being in the same media market as NE, but gee – AZ, CA, NH and MI? It guarantees cross countyr campaigning.
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p>A rotating regional primary eliminates this cross-county zooming about.
Of course, President romney may well thank you.
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p>BTW – everybody – there ARE two parties – saying IA and NH ‘don’t represent the modern party’ may only apply to half the equation.
Giving those who most closely chose the last president more power will only continue the previous political direction. IA and NH should still be first, maybe along with DE, RI and WY. IA and NH voters get down and dirty with the candidates. If you don’t show-up and talk to me on my level I won’t vote for you. Advertising is secondary.
Look at their rejects.
After the first group I see 6 regions, North South East West and middle, voting in rotation on a scheduled interval (2-3 weeks). Super days are unnecessary as they tend to debase the debate.
How about some issues in the campaign?
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p>The primary system and the media have legitimized the idea that elections are about “character,” which is code for how candidates TV spots make you feel.
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p>Rather than abolish the so-called super delegates, I’d prefer to see some of them allocated early by extended panels of experts and activists on everything from climate change to nuclear arms control to civil liberties.
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p>I’m thinking of a few hundred people per issue who get to quiz and watch the candidates debate that issue.
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p>They get to make their picks before the ethanol-wrassling contest in Iowa or before the sage Yankees make their wills known in New Hampshire, maybe even jumping the queue in front of the money primary and the whole revolting “electability” echo-chamber.
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p>Who would have won the Climate Change primary back in November, do you suppose?
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p>Don’t bother to explain to me how this isn’t going to happen, but it’s as likely as the other fine ideas in this thread.
‘Extended panels of experts’ – can you HEAR how elitist that sounds?
of course. From the field that the press and pundits have anointed as “front runners” and “second tier” and “electable.” As under the current system.
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p>I’d just like a little reality to be able to influence the process. A candidate who says with straight face that the jury’s still out on climate change, or that Al Qaeda is being directed from Iran, should face some heat for his or her fabrications early in the process.
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p>Wouldn’t have to be experts (and activists, I notice you left that part out though I concede it does not entirely blunt your criticism). How about a “jury” of 250 voters chosen by lot who cast their votes following a debate from the candidates and a panel discussion of those experts & activists?
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p>Not that it matters, it’s not going to happen. Though I suppose that if Howard Dean makes Florida and Michigan stick, and if the nominee goes on to win, that would set the precedent for the party to make some changes.
I’m going to start with a different primary (most important) point: the primary schedule should be fair to all voters and not give anyone a vote worth less than anyone else’s. Everyone knows that in a primary calendar, going earlier is better and going later is worse. Therefore there can be no solution other than everyone voting at the same time.
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p>So, to nullify point 2 (and all the other points fall out if that is done) and address the ‘price of entry’: a publicly-financed or party-financed campaign with good national media coverage built in. I think we might have been approaching that this time with all the nationally televised primary debates that happened before January, and all the other news coverage.
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p>The ‘price of entry’ would still include the candidate’s own fundraising for trying to buy national media, unless it were forbidden. The party can make whatever rules it wants, and it can say that to be the nominee for the Democratic Party, you have to play by its rules. If 1/4 of the money that all the candidates raised this time was all we got and the DNC spent it on a grand-unified-media-strategy that pushed all the candidates through the primary process, it could be money well spent. Build the brand! Go Democrats! Woo!
(There could also be some of the some central pot of money that gives a stipend to each campaign for them to use as they see fit. This still levels the playing field. I’d give $100 to the DNC to run a good show this way. Who’s with me?)
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p>One more thing is required to make this work, and that is a rankings ballot. “Pick One” is not sufficient to properly vote on a field of 5-10 primary candidates. For example, I might have voted: 1 Kucinich, 2 Edwards, 3 Dodd, 4 Richardson, 5 Obama, 6 Clinton, 7 Biden, 8 Gravel. No premature compromising. No votes ‘thrown away’. Just voting for what I want the way it’s supposed to be.
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p>My solution: National Primary with public-or-party financed campaigns and party unified campaign, and rankings ballot.
This campaign cycle has been annoyingly long. Start the pre-campaign in January, debates start in March, vote in June or July. Done. Have a break, have a convention, blaze on to the general.
… enfranchisement for ‘late’ staters, I came to the same conclusion you did… that a national primary seems like the only option. The problem as I see it is that there is no getting around how much a national campaign costs. The reason I rejected it is that even in a party subsidized campaign, the natural tendency will still be for rich or very very connected candidates to be the only choices available. To let the national parties figure it out would solidify the process of becoming a candidate to an insider’s game. It seems to me that this would necessarily result in a more limited list.
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p>Now the weeding out process of a schedule certainly does the same thing (limit the list), but only after at least some voters were able to exercise there consideration of the merits. The potential denial of choices outside of he traditional power structure would also be bad for the voters enfranchisement.
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p>”Everyone knows that in a primary calendar, going earlier is better and going later is worse. Therefore there can be no solution other than everyone voting at the same time.”
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p>Unless you accept it as the lesser of two evils.
Everyone says minor/small/breakthrough candidates can’t go up against the big boys in a national campaign. Screw that, let’s make it possible. We’re talking about changing things here, right?
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p>How do diverse non-insider party-machine candidates manage fundraising and going up against rich insider candidates? By not fundraising. Put everyone on equal footing with a publicly financed campaign scheme (though I’m kinda leaning towards party-financed because it might be more flexible). Everyone gets an equal piece of the pie.
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p>” the natural tendency will still be for rich or very very connected candidates to be the only choices available”
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p>Why? I disagree. What do ‘connected’ candidates get? Endorsements? What keeps voters from considering other candidates? (The pick-one compromise-now ballot?)
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p>Is it in the party’s interest to field good candidates or not? We should have a process that picks the best possible.
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p>Rich? Ok, so we’ve take money out of the equation.
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p>“To let the national parties figure it out…” is bad and should be avoided, but I don’t think it follows from a well designed national primary system. In my fabulous opinion, a well designed primary has debates that give equal time to the candidates and isn’t hosted by people who have already decided who the presumptive contenders are.
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p>“Unless you accept it as the lesser of two evils”
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p>I don’t accept evil. I believe Good is possible.
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p>I completely disagree. I’d rather my state vote 50th than 40th for example. The odds that 40th matters is low, as is 50th. But, 50th is the last state, all chips are in.
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p>Earlier states are more likely to have an impact, but given that there are states right before and after them, their impact is relatively small. Going at the end rarely has an impact, but when it does the impact is quite large.
I don’t know about the laws here or in other states, but when I lived in CA I read the laws there and there’s about a hundred pages of law governing the functions of the Democratic and Republican parties there. Specific law, specific to the parties. Primaries and such are in the law. Depending on how entangled the parties are in other states, it will take a new act of law by the state legislatures to change anything. Of course, we’ve seen that happen a dozen times lately with all the primary date moves that have happened. If it’s just another primary date move, they could do it. If it benefits one party more than the other, you could have a problem.
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p>This almost makes me want to pretend Libertarian wonkery and complain about how the government and law should have almost nothing to do with these ‘party’ things and it should almost be a Constitutional issue about ‘establishment’ of various organizations.
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p>In a sense it’s all about ballot access for the general election. “Major parties” (often >5% previous election’s vote) get a spot on the ballot, and everyone else has to petition on with signature drives and/or fees. It might be simpler to just make the ballot access rules uniform and deregulate the parties.
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p>And of course, if you’re going to have ballot access, you need a ballot worth voting on. You need a rankings ballot so you can actually vote how you want and not worry about ‘throwing your vote away’ or compromising for the candidate you imagine more people like vs the candidate you like better.
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p>Hey, what if we settled this year’s competition by having Clinton and Obama both on the ballot for the general election? What if they still had to be nice to each other so they could compete for the 1st place vote of the democrats vs the 2nd place vote, and they had to look nice together and not trash each other vs McCain?
I disagree with the conventional wisdom on this thread that small states should go first. Larger states are more representative and if CA goes first, for example, more candidates would have a shot on the bigger prize. Of course we need to keep proportional representation, but it should be based on statewide percentages rounded to the nearest whole delegate. I agree with doing 5 a week for 10 weeks. The 5 that are in each group should collectively be diverse: an urban state and a rural state, a northern state and a southern state, a homogeneous state and a diverse one, etc. Congress should just step in and set the calendar by law. The whole idea that the federal government shouldn’t oversee an election for national office is ridiculous.
… that representative-ness is a very desirable quality in an electoral system. I question, however, the notion that “more candidates would have a shot on the bigger prize.” The biggest prize, of course, is the overall election. There exist candidates that couldn’t possibly ride the whole calendar without the opportunity to start small and build momentum. Especially with the price of large state media markets.
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p>Of course I’m open to ideas… how would you solve the problem? Or do you just find that ‘higher price of entry’ is the lesser evil over ‘small state schedule advantage’?
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p>I agree completely with “The whole idea that the federal government shouldn’t oversee an election for national office is ridiculous.” Have to be careful though in defining the Federal Government’s role to guard against ‘the shenanigans of the majority’.
…although I’m not 100% sure who pays for the general and that date is set by federal law. Congress can just invoke its “time, place, and manner” prorogative and let’s stop pretending that parties are anything other than agents of the government when it comes to running elections.
FixThePrimaries.org is a project of the electoral reform group FairVote that explores alternative primary systems. FairVote is most partial to the “America Plan“, but open to others. Hearst-Argyle produced a great program, with a series of videos, explaining the problem and potential solutions.
because they’re blindly pursuing Instant Runoff Voting despite its flaws when there are better options. They won’t even acknowledge that the debate exists and for that intellectual dishonesty I can’t have any respect for them.
… the idea of using some variation of Range Voting (from your link).
I understand why you like the sound of Range Voting, but in practice it just wouldn’t work. In his recent book on voting systems, one of the world’s leading voting system theorists and scholars, Nicolaus Tideman grouped RV amongst the most “unsupportable” of voting systems, because of its vulnerability to strategic voting.
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p>Amongst other problems, RV has the really bad property that 90% of the public can prefer candidate X to Y, and yet Y can win. IRV, and not even our current plurality system, has that problem.
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p>For the most part, any system in which voting for anyone beyond one’s first choice jeopardizes the chances of that first choice, I think will be unworkable and devolve to bullet voting in practice. IRV does not have that property.
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p>The only single-winner systems used for public elections in the world today are plurality, top-two runoff, and IRV. Of these, there is consensus that IRV is the best. It has a track record of success around the world, and all of bolson’s “better options” does not.
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p>IRV is also the system used internally by the American Political Science Association, who should know a thing or two about these things.
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p>There is a reason why every major voting reform organization has decided IRV, and the Single Transferable Vote generally, is the best bet. FairVote, Common Cause, the Electoral Reform Society in the UK, MassVOTE, the New America Foundation, League of Women’s Voters chapters . . . on and on. No major organization has arrived at any other conclusion.
I meant:
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p>Amongst other problems, RV has the really bad property that 90% of the public can prefer candidate X to Y, and yet Y can win. Neither IRV, nor even our current plurality system, has that problem.
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p>Sorry for the typo.
I can see where that could be an issue. I wonder if there are RV systems that mitigate it.
Thank you for the link. I now better understand the arguments against IRV.
The first time I learned that every voting system is in fact imperfect, I felt a bit disconcerted. But every major organization, after comparing and contrasting the benefits and drawbacks of various voting systems, has concluded that IRV is the best bet. See my comments here and here for more information.
and I understand that many progressives believe IRV is the best option (many being my friends). I’ve never spent a lot of time investigating, so it was nice to see the options spelled out. However, as I noted above, all of this is pie in the sky until the argument is made and accepted that we must change the existing rules and process for making such decisions.
Yes, very good point. Fortunately, there are people working across the country, with impressive success, convincing people the system needs change. Since 2000, IRV has been passed in over a dozen jurisdictions around the US. It would have been passed by the Vermont for their US Senate and Rep seats had the Governor not vetoed it, and if he loses re-election in November, VT will soon be the first of many states to use IRV for federal offices. So yes, there’s a lot of work to be done, but I’m optimistic we can continue the successful record.
As you know, every voting method can theoretical flaws. Unlike your “better options”, IRV has a tract record of success in public elections in jurisdictions around the world. One reason is that the theoretical flaws of IRV are vanishingly rare in practice. Look at any of the public data from IRV /STV elections in San Francisco, Burlington, and right in Cambridge, and you will see that these theoretical flaws have never manifested themselves once in those elections.
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p>In comparison, the “better options” you advertise on your site all the property that voting for anyone beyond your first choice jeopardizes the chances of your first choice. Such systems run the risk of devolving into bullet voting if used in public elections over a period of time. Condorcet’s method is vulnerable to the most common type of preferential voting strategy: burying the chief opponent of one’s favorite candidate. IRV is resistant to burying — one of its salient features.
“In comparison, the “better options” you advertise on your site all the property that voting for anyone beyond your first choice jeopardizes the chances of your first choice.”
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p>At least some variations of Ranged Voting do not suffer this flaw you describe.
Under Range Voting, every point I give to a candidate who is not my first choice in fact hurts the chances of my first choice. This is true of every variation on RV.
… If you were forced to choose ranks for all candidates and each rank had a set ‘point’ total the result would be Ranged Voting system without the flaw.
Range is not a ranked system. I think you might be referring to Borda count, which has it’s own host of problems, and is generally opposed by advocates of Range Voting.
Run-off election to get 50 plus 1.
… about the points I raise above favoring a schedule with small states first?
… in that they are small states (IA? not sure) and go first… but I would rotate the small states in the front of the schedule so as not to ‘permanently’ enshrine any particular state as 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc. See above.
People get their information about candidates from the media. Most people don’t get to “hear” a real stump speech, even in small states, and I don’t really see the point of giving their votes more weight than they deserve. The minor candidates get their exposure through the debate process, anyway, so I’m not concerned about advantaging candidates with more money.
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p>In reality, not much would change except the time frame would be compressed and everyone’s vote would really matter.
… I have to say you’d be surprised just how much access you can have if you want it.
But you’re not really suggesting that voters in the rest of the nation–outside of Iowa–have similar opportunities, are you?
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p>I’m in favor of restoring the value of each vote over preserving the historic campaign style we’ve come to know. Were a national primary day instituted, campaigning as we have known it will evolve as a result. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that.
… but I do suggest that in a schedule where small states go first, such opportunities would continue. All campaigns, from dark horse to incumbent re-election, start small in NH and IA and ramp up from there. I do think that an inevitable part of the evolution of campaigning in its focus on day one, the access opportunities above will disappear not just for small staters, but for everyone.
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p>My main fear though isn’t access… its price of entry and quality of field.
get their candidate information from televised debates. Candidates with no money–Kucinich, Gravel, etc., are able to maintain visibility and access to voters this way, not through face-to-face encounters or stumping. As for the quality of the field, well, the voters will take care of that.