[metic(?) status: Totally useless in the near-term. Maybe interesting to develop in the background in case US elections get updated sometime.]
I think most of the readers here are quite familiar with ranked-choice voting as a proposed alternative to the default first-past-the-post voting. Roughly, instead of letting a plurality make their favorite candidate a winner, it would allow the intuition of everyone involved to influence who wins. Typically more relevant to many-candidate races in local politics than to large general elections with two major parties.
I won’t try to argue against ranked-choice here, but I don’t think it addresses the biggest national issues like polarization effectively. In a typical general election, each candidate has only needed to directly appeal to their primary voters, much less to moderates, independents, and voters in other parties. To voters, getting to pick the lesser of two evils may feel like little consolation. General elections are not a reliable filter against extreme candidates when both nominees are narrowly optimized by minorities of voters. Polarized ranked-choice primaries may still result in polarized nominees, and in a general election ranked-choice may be useless or have unforeseen consequences with third-parties. (Maybe many-party ranked-choice systems will turn out to be better, but I don’t think that’s a bet that American voters want to take now. The two-party system is stable and comprehensible. It’s just horribly polarized at the moment.)
So, what might be a better way to address polarized candidates in general elections? Maybe less polarized primary elections would help. Currently, US voters can usually vote in either zero or one primary, totally at their discretion. They can donate money to various campaigns, which has strange side effects, and is not inclusively democratic. Registering for a party has an opportunity cost of not registering for other parties, so it sends a real signal about preferences.
What if each voter had a registration budget of 100 primary points, for example? They could register as an independent to vote in general elections, exactly the same as before, and not worry about it. They could do a “simple” registration for a party and make one full vote, the same as before. But if they want, they could register as say 70 points Democrat, 25 points Republican, and 5 points Green. Then they could vote in all three primaries if they want, with each vote weighted down accordingly: weight = points/100. Implementing to the reliability standards of voting infrastructure would be difficult (Maybe simple votes are tracked as a different type of data worth 100 points each?), but this extra bit of arithmetic is indubitably technologically feasible.
I haven’t found primary-budgets proposed elsewhere, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I missed something. The concept could be compared to a blanket primary or open primary, but it’s less permissive as it still requires registration. Blanket primaries seem to be problematic after California Democratic Party v. Jones, 530 U.S. 567 (2000), because of parties’ freedom of association. Might primary-budgets face similar obstacles? Conceptually, each point is registered for a specific party, so if a party accepts the registration, it seems like they would have freedom of association. Maybe the budget-registration would need to be optional for parties?
Jungle primaries combine candidates from different parties for a single election, seem to have mixed results and properties, and are being tried in Washington and California.
What kind of effects would a primary-budget registration system have? We can’t know, of course, but it would seem likely to weaken the two-party dichotomy. Maybe the primary-budget would increase engagement with third parties and increase spoiler effects in general elections indirectly. A bit worrying, but if the voters with increased engagement are also just moderating leading candidates directly, the impact of spoiler effects may be diminished. If third-party spoiler effects are likely for a primary-budget system, there would be less reason not to use some form of ranked-choice with it in general elections.
With a primary-budget system, an extreme candidate or candidates in one party may prompt enough re-registration to put a moderate ahead of them, with voters trading off only a degree of influence over their more familiar primaries. At worst, maybe that would approach becoming a one-party political system. Not exactly catastrophic or even rare globally, but probably not what Americans would like to see now. In the other direction, divisive polarization may be slowly destroying our civility and reason. Something to think about.
Primary-budget voting registration
[metic(?) status: Totally useless in the near-term. Maybe interesting to develop in the background in case US elections get updated sometime.]
I think most of the readers here are quite familiar with ranked-choice voting as a proposed alternative to the default first-past-the-post voting. Roughly, instead of letting a plurality make their favorite candidate a winner, it would allow the intuition of everyone involved to influence who wins. Typically more relevant to many-candidate races in local politics than to large general elections with two major parties.
I won’t try to argue against ranked-choice here, but I don’t think it addresses the biggest national issues like polarization effectively. In a typical general election, each candidate has only needed to directly appeal to their primary voters, much less to moderates, independents, and voters in other parties. To voters, getting to pick the lesser of two evils may feel like little consolation. General elections are not a reliable filter against extreme candidates when both nominees are narrowly optimized by minorities of voters. Polarized ranked-choice primaries may still result in polarized nominees, and in a general election ranked-choice may be useless or have unforeseen consequences with third-parties. (Maybe many-party ranked-choice systems will turn out to be better, but I don’t think that’s a bet that American voters want to take now. The two-party system is stable and comprehensible. It’s just horribly polarized at the moment.)
So, what might be a better way to address polarized candidates in general elections? Maybe less polarized primary elections would help. Currently, US voters can usually vote in either zero or one primary, totally at their discretion. They can donate money to various campaigns, which has strange side effects, and is not inclusively democratic. Registering for a party has an opportunity cost of not registering for other parties, so it sends a real signal about preferences.
What if each voter had a registration budget of 100 primary points, for example? They could register as an independent to vote in general elections, exactly the same as before, and not worry about it. They could do a “simple” registration for a party and make one full vote, the same as before. But if they want, they could register as say 70 points Democrat, 25 points Republican, and 5 points Green. Then they could vote in all three primaries if they want, with each vote weighted down accordingly: weight = points/100. Implementing to the reliability standards of voting infrastructure would be difficult (Maybe simple votes are tracked as a different type of data worth 100 points each?), but this extra bit of arithmetic is indubitably technologically feasible.
I haven’t found primary-budgets proposed elsewhere, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I missed something. The concept could be compared to a blanket primary or open primary, but it’s less permissive as it still requires registration. Blanket primaries seem to be problematic after California Democratic Party v. Jones, 530 U.S. 567 (2000), because of parties’ freedom of association. Might primary-budgets face similar obstacles? Conceptually, each point is registered for a specific party, so if a party accepts the registration, it seems like they would have freedom of association. Maybe the budget-registration would need to be optional for parties?
Jungle primaries combine candidates from different parties for a single election, seem to have mixed results and properties, and are being tried in Washington and California.
What kind of effects would a primary-budget registration system have? We can’t know, of course, but it would seem likely to weaken the two-party dichotomy. Maybe the primary-budget would increase engagement with third parties and increase spoiler effects in general elections indirectly. A bit worrying, but if the voters with increased engagement are also just moderating leading candidates directly, the impact of spoiler effects may be diminished. If third-party spoiler effects are likely for a primary-budget system, there would be less reason not to use some form of ranked-choice with it in general elections.
With a primary-budget system, an extreme candidate or candidates in one party may prompt enough re-registration to put a moderate ahead of them, with voters trading off only a degree of influence over their more familiar primaries. At worst, maybe that would approach becoming a one-party political system. Not exactly catastrophic or even rare globally, but probably not what Americans would like to see now. In the other direction, divisive polarization may be slowly destroying our civility and reason. Something to think about.