Thank you Dave Ketchum and Peter Zbornik for your excellent responses to
my first draft of the "multiple rounds of voting" section! I have tried
to incorporate your requested improvements, while attempting to keep it
short.
Here is what I've got now for this section:
-------------- Multiple rounds of voting --------------
Current elections commonly use multiple rounds of voting in an attempt
to overcome the weaknesses of plurality voting. When any of our
supported election methods are used, just one round of voting may be
sufficient.
Although our supported election methods could eliminate the need for
primary elections (in which political parties choose just one candidate
each to progress to the main election), we support the continued use of
primary elections because they foster political dialogue and the
resolution of intra-party differences.
In situations that are highly controversial, we support the use of two
voting rounds so that voters can focus attention on the most popular
candidates during the second round, without distractions from
less-popular candidates. When multiple voting rounds are used, every
round should use one of our supported election methods. In these cases
it is not necessary to limit the runoff election (the second round) to
only two candidates, because that limit is only needed to accommodate
plurality voting.
Also we agree that "open primary" elections are not fair. In this
approach, the supposedly most-popular candidates, regardless of
political-party affiliation, progress to the runoff (main) election.
This approach fails to consider that a near-majority of voters can end
up with only getting to choose between the two candidates who are
preferred by the majority. Expressed another way, the designation of
"most popular" is ambiguous in the context of choosing which candidates
deserve to progress to the main election.
When choosing which candidates deserve to progress to a runoff election,
we do not offer specific recommendations for interpreting results --
beyond obviously including the most popular candidate. There are various
possibilities for how to choose the second, third, and additional
candidates, and the best approach would depend on which of our supported
methods is used (in the earlier round), and other details. This
complexity overlaps with the complexity of choosing a best method to
increase proportional representation.
Therefore, in this declaration, we are not expressing support for any
specific way to choose which other candidates (besides the most
popular), and how many candidates, deserve to progress to the runoff
election. Fortunately, in the runoff round, any of our supported methods
can produce fair results with three, four, or more candidates -- in
contrast to plurality voting which can handle only two.
-------------- end --------------
Richard Fobes
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