This started with a description of a primary problem - 5 strong Dem
candidates for gov. in VT. Primaries are a party task, but this one
sounds as if it may include clones, or at least near-clones. Just as
primaries were invented to do such as attend to clones within a party,
perhaps something new could be invented to help this primary.
So Ranked Choice makes sense here and I would argue, as usual, that it
should be Condorcet rather than IRV.
For another day I would promote Condorcet for the general election,
noting that that reduces the value of even having primaries.
What I read below is at times into trying to do good outside of party
primaries needs.
Dave Ketchum
On Aug 26, 2010, at 7:39 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
Raph Frank wrote:
On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 9:41 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
<[email protected]> wrote:
Third, the primary is not open and so
even if a good ranked method were used, it would elect the
candidate closest
to the party's median, not that of the electorate in general.
Not necessarily. The candidates could easily argue (as now), that
they have a better change of being elected if they are closer to the
national median. Party voters would have to trade off getting a
candidate who reasonably represents the party's views with one who
has
a reasonable change of being elected.
That's true, but then the voters are acting strategically. Although
the strategy isn't the familiary selfish sort, they are reporting a
different rank than if they were to just rank by their own preference.
Another option would be to give party members 2 votes and everyone
else 1 vote. This would give a median that is between the national
and party median.
You probably have a continuum here. At one end, you would have the
party leadership just decide upon the common candidate. A little
further, you have an ordinary (closed primary), in effect giving
party members 1 vote and everybody else 0; then you have all sorts
of weighting up to open (1 vote for members and 1 for everybody
else), and if you go even further, no primary at all.
With methods like Schulze and RP, an open primary distorts the final
election less than in Plurality, because these methods fail IIA less
than does Plurality. That is, if you have an open primary and the
voters would vote identically in the real election (with respect to
the candidates running in the primary) as in the primary, then that
primary is closer to having no primary at all and just one election
with every possible candidate than would be the case for Plurality.
The parties still might want to run primaries, though, so that they
have one candidate to unify behind, run ads for, and so on - but on
the scale, you'd expect the open primary and no primary points to be
closer to each other for the advanced Condorcet methods (and
probably cardinal ratings too) than for Plurality.
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