What do the readers of this site think of the electoral reform just approved by voters in Alaska? I have mixed feelings about it, and I refer to it as a “beast” only because it combines features that never before have been combined in this manner, as far as I know.
It abolishes partisan primaries (except for presidential nominating delegates) in favor of a two-round system. In this sense, it resembles the “top two” systems now in place in California and Washington. However, it has two significant departures: (1) it is the top four candidates who qualify for the runoff, and (2) in the runoff, a ranked-choice vote will be used to determine the winner.
The unique (as far as I know) system thus will combine two methods that are common for winnowing a field and ensuring a majority. That is, we have runoff systems (usually but not not always top two*) and we have “instant” runoffs such as the alternative vote (AV) that entail ranked ballots. Here we have both in sequence in one electoral process.
I generally am not a fan of combining features in this way, because it is uncertain how features that are normally deployed separately will work together. However, this combo has some things going for it. The first round qualification process will not be as limiting as the California case, thereby making it much less likely than it now is here that only candidates of one party compete in the final round, while incidentally also making it more likely that a small-party candidate might be able to compete in the final round. Yet it makes more likely that the winner will be majority-supported. (Ranks will not be compulsory, so not all voters will give four ranks, thereby meaning a winner could still have under a majority.)
If asked, I’d have advised a different proposal, even if it had to retain single-seat districts. (The new Maine model of AV in each party’s open primary, and then AV in the general, is more appealing to me.) But if I were an Alaskan voter, I am certain I would have voted for this.
For more on this measure and others, see Jack Santucci’s Medium post on the “Principles of democratic reform on the ballot in 2020.”
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*The French National Assembly election rules can allow more than two candidates from the first round to qualify for the runoff, even though most of the time all but the top two withdraw. The German president, under the Weimar constitution, was elected by a two-round system in which multiple candidates–even ones who had not participated in the first round–could participate in the runoff.
Fruits and Votes 
Top two was invented for the purpose of weakening political parties, by people who would support conventional “non-partisan” elections if they thought that was an achievable objective. Top four (or five, or whatever) with AV in the second round was cobbled together by the inventors of top two in order to forge an alliance with supporters of AV, thereby enlisting them in their crusade against the major party organizations.
As someone who believes that the problem with political parties is not that they have too much influence, but rather that there are only two of them, I’m extremely conflicted about this. On the one hand, there is the argument — ably summarized by Prof. Shugart in this post — that top four reduces the worst impacts of top two. On the other hand, I am extremely suspicious of any alliance, no matter how tactical, with those who see political parties as the problem and non-partisan elections as the solution. A top four (or top five) election is just as “non-partisan” as a top two election and I see that as an significant defeat for electoral reform. I’m glad I’m not in Alaska and required to make up my mind about this.
Incidentally, top four almost got onto the ballot in the city of San Diego, California. I can’t remember any details right now, but it is being proposed in various other places.
Footnote 1: I have to put “non-partisan” is quotation marks. The phrase “non-partisan election” is self-contradictory.
Footnote 2: The Albany, California ballot measure to adopt STV for city council and school board, which Jack Santucci described, in his article, won 72% to 28%. STV at the local level is a winnable reform.
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Nailed it.
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Will the step towards preferential/ranked choice voting for single members districts lead to STV in multiple districts? Could Alaska move to STV, perhaps for the House? The districts would be fairly huge.
There would be no need for primaries if a STV and Open Party List is used, except for MMP if the party lists are closed. Winning seats would be winning votes overall not focusing only on the obsession with swing seats.
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My dissent is that I think intra-party hierarchy can and shd be reasserted by recharting $$peech thru the parties instead of PAC$, or $uper-PAC$, IOW, undoing the campaign finance deforms of the mid 70s. But the more critical flaw in the US is not that we have 2 major parties but that they both are tending towards being the major party and thus the GOP had a perverse incentive to attack its very own Romneycare and stir its activists into a frenzy over the recent “stolen” election… Thus, what’s critical is not ending the tendency for there to be two major parties, but rather the tendency for there to be one major party or where the weaker major party is unduly punished, due to the relative import of POTUS and Senate races and Gubernatorial races and how other elections are not perceived as important…
Also, the first stage of top 4 IRV is similar to the 4-seat Largest Remainder PR with a Hare quota. It should end the tendency of the religious right or tea party radicals to dominate the partisan primaries for the GOP. It’s flaws wrt not being good for minor parties are prolly critical for why it was feasible…, since most of the “better” electoral reforms are elite-mass interactions and the bulk of elites in the US are associated with major parties.
I think that multi-stage elections which combine different types of rules are the bees knees! AV or IRV wd work better if the top rankings were initially used as “approval votes” so as to eliminate most of the candidates in one fell swoop, instead of using recursive algorithms that bore people to death.
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I would have voted for it.
I am not a fan of primaries in general, SNTV, or of making low turnout American elections even more complicated. If it were up to me, I would have one round, via RCV/STV, finishing in early November and be done with it.
But I still would have voted for it as vote splitting is now much, much less of an issue in the general elections. Electing one person on a third of the vote is never a good idea.
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Yeah this seems like a mostly harmless set of changes to IRV. The top-four rule will kick some minor candidates off the general election ballot, which is annoying insofar as it restricts voter choice, but such candidates would be obviously unlikely to win anyway. The flipside of this is that voters are guaranteed a fairly simple IRV ballot: US states have so far been unwilling to shell out for OCR software, so IRV ballots which are made to work with existing counting machines have looked rather complex and confronting.
With regard to the political consequences, I don’t claim to know a great deal about the Republican Party in Alaska, but this system does look like it would make it impossible for a repeat of the 2010 Senate primary (where moderate Lisa Murkowski was defeated by a conservative Republican, only to win as a write-in candidate) to occur. Of course, a bog-standard primary and general election setup would not stop Murkowski running as an Independent if she lost the Republican primary, so the gain here also seems to be rather marginal.
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If it’s any consolation, in Australia with mandatory full preferencing candidates would not infrequently win from third place on the primary count, and very rarely from fourth place, and on one memorable occasion (Macmillan, 1969 federal election) from 6th place with 16% to defeat a rival with 48% of first preferences *, but since NSW introduced fully optional preferencing in 1981, only (from memory – I read-ed this at Antony Green’s blog, from memory) has a candidate won who wasn’t first or second on the primary count.
In effect, it’s preferential top-two ** but with the added safeguard/ formality of exhaustively rather than summarily eliminating the third-placed and lower contenders.
So I am dubious if the Alaskan “top four shortlist” rule will make much difference from exhaustive *** elimination. Are US voters (so far) any more energetic about expressing full *** or at least long lists of preferences than Australian voters are?
* This was the 1960s and Labor faced a tight three-way conservative alliance of Liberal, Country (later National) and Democratic Labor Party (an anti-Communist breakaway from the ALP). In Macmillan there was a conservative independent as well. The ideological position of the main “third” party (after ALP and Lib/ Nat) has moved across the spectrum. By the 1970s and 1980s it was the Australian Democrats, who were roughly John Anderson 1980 (centrist “small-L liberals”, as we call them in Australia, to the head-scratching of the rest of the world). Since the 2000s it has been the Greens, to the left of Labor.
** In fact the first iterations of AV used in Australia, “the contingent vote” as it was called, did summarily eliminate all but the top two. Not unlike London Supp Vote but you could still number all the candidates. So maybe NSW has just come full circle.
*** “Exhaustive” elimination = one by one, although not inconsistent with shortcuts like “bulk elimination if the lowest N candidates together have fewer votes than the [N+1]th lowest” or “if the highest N candidates together have more than N/ [N+1] of the votes, eliminate all lower candidates at once”. “Summary” elimination = “eliminate any candidate under Z% or not in the top N no matter how evenly the votes are distributed”.
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**** “full” preferences in a US context means “numbering the maximum number of candidates as the electoral law allows”, eg all seven (?) in San Francisco. In Australia it means “numbering all, or all but one, of the candidates” since Australian electoral laws that ordain preferential voting have never, apart from one exception, that I know of, capped the maximum number of preferences. (That exception was the 1997 postal ballot for constitutional convention or “ConCon” delegates, where “above the line” tickets could preference all candidates but voters voting “below the line” – metaphorically, by writing names or ID numbers on ranked lines, like Italian voters before 1993 – were capped at the number of seats.
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I defer to Jack on IRV elections at the local level in the US, but it certainly looks like candidates who lead on first preference votes generally win, although they are helped by truncated ballots in Minneapolis and San Francisco. Maine generally has fairly low numbers of candidates (since unlike SF and Minneapolis they hold primaries).
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That was 1972 not 1969, the candidate that had won was in third place and had 16.6% of the primary vote which was the lowest ever to win a seat from preferences.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_McMillan
Has there been any elections in Australia Federal and State where a candidate won despite being in 4th place in the primary count after the distribution of preferences? I remember an electorate in Papua New Guinea where a candidate won from 4th place and the only requirement is a minimum of three preferences 1,2,3, so it is possible even with optional preferential voting. I think same thing happened in San Francisco as well.
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http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/a/australia/1972/1972repsvic.txt
Look up McMillan and interesting to see how the preferences flow. Most people do not broke down preferential voting down enough. It would be interesting to see an optional preferential voting and each round where the votes exhaust.
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Thanks, 1972 not 1969. Also 45% not 48% and I misspelled “M[a]cmillan”. But otherwise, point holds.
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As far as winning from outside the top two, I asked that question on Twitter a while back. The consensus of those who follow local elections using IRV in the US was that there was so far just one case of a winner having been in fourth place in the initial count, and just a few winning from an initial third.
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I would add to this by saying that the system is an improvement on the Minneapolis/Oakland/San Francisco method of letting everyone run in the general but giving voters only three preferences. If there’s one polarising candidate with 35-40% and three or four candidates opposing them, a voter who wants to oppose the highly polarising candidate has to guess which candidate will make it to the final round. Under the Alaskan system, it’s much easier for voters to express their opposition to such a candidate. A “put the LNP/Republicans/London Breed last” campaign might be too negative for the tastes of public RCV supporters, but it’s very much what RCV is meant to do.
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I don’t know what equipment Minneapolis and the state of Maine are using, but San Francisco’s new ballots allow voters to rank up to 10 candidates. In, Oakland, Berkeley and San Leandro they can now rank up to five candidates.
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It’s usually not hard in practice to know who’s a safe bet against an extremist candidate in the last week of the election with a Mpls style RCV. And once the polarizing candidates realize they’re chances of winning are way down, they don’t run that way or don’t run…
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It depends on the attention generate in the 1st round when there are 4 winners!!!
3rd parties might have a better chance of spoiling which wd get them more tlc…
and the extremists wd realize that even tho they can make it to stage 2, they can’t win in the 2nd stage because of RCV so their turnout will be depressed or not increased relative to normal typically!
They cd also do the vote counting more locally with only 4 candidates.
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At least the first stage will approximate PR, or 4 seat Largest Remainder PR with a Hare quota?
It’s on par with single-seat RCV in my opinion, and not like the multi-seat RCV rules that imitate single-seat RCV…
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Am I wrong or does the RCV only apply the general election? The top four primary sounds more like SNTV
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U are not wrong, but when the number of seats is low, say k<5, Largest Remainder PR with a Hare quota tends to come close to SNTV or SNTV tends to be more like PR more easily…, which makes for more excitement! Even with top two primary, this past year there was excitement over trying to get 2nd place vs Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco, w. hope of gaining name recognition before when she eventually retires.
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I can’t speak for SNTV approximating PR, but I don’t really have an interest in rating electoral systems by excitement. I prefer they simply produce acceptable results to the largest number of voters possible.
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Mark Roth says, “The top four primary sounds more like SNTV.” Mathematically, it is exactly and precisely SNTV. Politically, the difference is that you are not filling seats on a representative body. You are nominating a field of candidates for a single seat. The California top two statute calls this nomination by the voters to distinguish it from nomination by political parties (or petition in the case of independent candidates). It uses this language in order to rub our noses in the distinction.
I don’t know whether I think the logic of proportional representation applies to the nomination of a field of candidates. One important consideration is the proper role of political parties. Should they be allowed to control the use of party labels on the ballot? My answer is yes. If your answer is no, then you will be a lot more accepting of top two, top four, etc., than I am. Another consideration is whether you think the electoral rules should be used to shape the party system. Top N will have some (possibly weak?) tendency to limit the number of viable parties to N+1. In the case of top four, five parties is a whole lot better than two. But is any artificial limit even acceptable?
If the logic of PR does apply, then top four (or top five or whatever) can be said to have exactly the same defects (and, occasionally, virtue) as SNTV for a legislative body with the same district magnitude.
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I’m cool with giving parties say so over who can use their label, if not immediately then later, as I expect Campaign Finance Regulation that replaces Citizens United to rechannel $peech through the intra-party hierarchy down the road, thereby reducing the sort of political entrepreneurialism that unduly degraded the quality of the US democracy since the mid-70s.
I think the usefulness of PR for a first stage of a multi-stage election is going to be a growing field.
I think many voters have cognitive limits so sometimes quality > quantity. If neither major party cd dominate US politics and we get CFRegs that are enforceable/adaptable, I expect the combination of those two will be greater than the sum of their parts and the duopoly will become contested by minor parties and perhaps complemented by Local Third parties(LTPs) who will either specialize in raising up neglected issues or be vents for extremists/racists in the US.
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While I strongly believe parties should have the right to decide which candidates bear their labels, the problem in the USA is that it is not really clear who “the party” is. With hierarchical parties, there is some central party organ that can make these decisions. But who actually speaks for the California Democratic Party? It is not so clear with non-hierarchical parties.
If California is going to stick with top-2 (or expand to top-4 like Alaska, etc.), I’d actually like to see a liberalization of party names. At the moment, the only parties whose names can appear on the first-round ballot are those that are recognized by the state. Having officially recognized parties is arguably a state interest when it is running partisan nominating primaries for each such party. However, when such primaries have been abolished, why not let candidates choose any party name they wish? (Modified proposal: If there is someone who can speak for a party, let recognized parties deny use of their label, but still allow other labels to appear on the ballot according to candidate preference–perhaps with rules not allowing the incorporation of names of existing recognized parties without their consent.)
My motivation here is to make it feasible for groups of candidates across districts to coordinate on new party names if they so wish, or to form local labels if there is local demand for them.
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Since the Campaign Finance deform of the mid 70s, there hasn’t been enuf intra party hierarchy in the US, as Eugene McCarthy describes in “No Fault Politics”…
sounds reasonable. I would also hope that the next major party that’s effectively locked out of power by a dominant major party would push hard for 3-seat PR for state representative elections, akin to what existed in IL. My hope then is that if we demand the use of 3 seat LR Hare that it’d help encourage LTPs more so than minor parties and thereby mollify those who claim that minor parties growing would be detrimental in a presidential system with powers separated across the 3 branches of gov’t. LTPs wd both help and check minor parties from acting opportunistically!
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Washington top-2 allows candidates to write whatever they want as a party preference, with no obvious impact so far (at least that I can recall).
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Yes, SNTV and simple (Hare) quota and largest remainders (“LR-Hare”) are close cousins. If you have LR-Hare, but no list wins sufficient votes for more than one quota or for a quota and a remainder seat, the result is the same as SNTV: top “M” lists each win one seat (where M is the number elected, and where an individual candidate can be conceptualized as a “list” of one).
See Colombia before the electoral reform adopted in 2003, and Hong Kong, both of which have been discussed on this site previously. In both these cases, parties typically would have more than one list per district, just as parties–other than small ones–typically nominate more than one candidate under SNTV.
There is a very important caveat, however: In “normal” SNTV or LR-Hare, you are filling M seats. In Alaska or California, you are ultimately still at M=1, and the initial SNTV-like contest is only resulting in a set of contenders for the second round. So there are important similarities, but presumably the final round (and its rules) hover over the process of candidate-entry and voting in the first round.
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Methinks, when there are 3-4 seats only, SNTV ‘n LR PR w Hare wd be even closer and they’d be more effective at improving proportionality… Major parties will want to foster the growth of spoiler parties dividing the third party vote and going negative on their behalf against third parties that threaten to get 20% of the vote. But that can backfire. And, if the GOP were to be split in two, it wouldn’t matter in Alaska and so it might happen there (or in Maine) first. Esp., if Murkowski were to caucus with the Democratic party in the US senate! As I understand it, her family is very powerful in Alaska, so it’s likely they played a role in the elite-mass interaction that led to the reform happening.
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MSS
At a 1998 St Petersburg city election, opposition candidate Oleg Sergeyev discovered to his surprise that two of the people he was running against were also named Oleg Sergeyev. He lost.
Party names are exactly the same. At the 2013 Australian senate election the Liberal Democrats, who had no connections with the Liberal Party or the Australian Democrats, won a seat in NSW.
If you want Ivanka Trump on your ballot in 2028 as candidate of the Party of California Democrats, abolishing party name regulation is an essential first step.
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Hence the proposed clause about not including the name of an existing party. Remember, I have studied Latin American politics, where what you describe has been rampant in some countries. Paraguay used to have Radicals, Radical Liberals, and Authentic Radical Liberals.
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The Australian legislation managed not to catch the Liberal Democrats with a similar rule to the modified proposal. Rather than leaving the issue to a court, it would probably be better to do controlled random testing on naming conflicts.
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Sure, Enforcement is challenging. I still prefer a more liberalized arrangement than the current restriction (if we are stuck with non-partisan criteria for runoff qualification).
Note that your example of someone who is clearly not a Democrat using a name the implies affiliation is already the issue anyway. Anyone can run and identify himself or herself as “Democrat” or any other approved label. And even in the old primary system, we had a case in San Diego Country of a KKK leader getting the Democratic primary nomination for a congressional seat. There is no vetting beforehand, whether or not we have state-recognized parties. It is not obvious to me that the situation would be worse if we just did away with it. But I will admit this is not something I have thought about extensively.
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Prof. Shugart wrote, “Modified proposal: If there is someone who can speak for a party, let recognized parties deny use of their label, but still allow other labels to appear on the ballot according to candidate preference–perhaps with rules not allowing the incorporation of names of existing recognized parties without their consent.” That sounds close to right to me. Especially in the context of local elections. Given the current legal definition of political parties, it almost makes sense for local elections to be “non-partisan” (which they are in California). This proposal would make it a lot easier for folks to think about local contests in terms of groups of voters and slates of candidates, rather than atomized individuals.
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Prof. Shugart: “Anyone can run and identify himself or herself as “Democrat” or any other approved label. And even in the old primary system, we had a case in San Diego Country of a KKK leader getting the Democratic primary nomination for a congressional seat. There is no vetting beforehand, whether or not we have state-recognized parties.”
Under the old (semi-closed primaries) system, the KKK leader would have to have been a registered Democrat to run in the Democratic primary. Granted, anyone can register as a Democrat (the downside of putting the government in charge of party membership rolls). In today’s top two system, I believe that California does check the voter registration of each candidate. But I believe that candidates can chose to not have their party registration printed on the ballot. What I believe they cannot do is say on the ballot that they belong to a party they are not registered in. I might be wrong.
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Coming back and re-reading this thread… Yes, I believe that is correct, that candidates in California need to be registered with the party that claim as their “preferred” party on the ballot.
This seems like a good idea, and would complicate my “modified proposal” of liberalizing party labels. I think I’d still do it, but perhaps it needs a further modification: If said party has ballot status in the state, its name can be used only by candidates registered with the party [by some date]. But names of parties with no official registration are fair game, provided they do not incorporate either the name of a registered party or the word, “independent”.
(See, I am sneaking in a provision meant to frustrate the American Independent Party, which apparently has a nontrivial number of parties who really meant to register as “no party preference.”)
I am sure there are problems with my modified modified proposal, too.
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So today, from different discussion forums, I have learned that Washington state’s “top two” allows both free choice of party labels by candidates, and write-ins in the runoff.
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With so much confusion about Measure 2, I thought I’d post the official summary:
It strikes me that voter education is going to be a bit of a challenge with using an X in the primary and numbers in the general election. On the other hand, because it is top-4 and not top-2, the field of candidates in the general will mostly include people who would have been nominated by RCV in the primary.
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Alan (or anyone who knows the answer), does the new Alaska law enable political parties to control which candidates can use the party’s name on the ballot?
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Full text here
I can’t copy from the document. The relevant provision is Section 66 which does not give a party control of who uses the party label.
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Pingback: Good piece on anti-party RCV – voteguy.com
I have a strange request and I’m sorry if it’s out of place here. I’m part of a group trying to build a timeline of all events in the capitol insurrection. It looks to us like the first Pentagon unit to arrive at the capitol was the DC National Guard which arrived, according to the Pentagon’s timeline at 5:40 pm. The DC mayor requested Pentagon assistance at 1:34 and the Capitol Police asked for the DC National Guard at 1:49. That is a very long delay when congress is under siege and the vice-president, speaker, president pro tempore and vice-president-elect are all at risk.
It is fairly alarming that the Capitol Police just happened to leave the capitol vulnerable and that the Pentagon just happened to take over 4 hours to defend congress. That’s one hell of a coincidence.
Does anyone know when the Virginia National Guard were despatched to Washington and when they reached the capitol?
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It’d be interesting to connect Murkowski independence from the US GOP / PoTrump with this change in the voting rules…
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Pingback: RCV plus NPTRS, a.k.a. Final Five Voting – voteguy.com
I added a clarification that this rule will not ensure a majority winner. This is an important point that I neglected when posting this months before. When ranked preferences for all candidates are not mandatory, ballots may “exhaust” and a winner can have less than a majority.
Advocates of instant runoff (single-winner ranked-choice voting) often overlook this important point. And so did I.
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It’s a matter of perception. Bullet voting is just like not voting on a subsequent round. But if 25% of those who voted in the first round didn’t show up in the second round (assuming no one turns out just for the second round) and the winner won 55-45, no-one would say they’re not a majority winner, even though they won only 41% of votes when using the first round turnout as the denominator.
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I agree. It may be technically correct to say that the winner in an RCV count is the candidate with more votes than all other continuing candidates combined. But that is still just as legitimate a majority as any other, in most cases. The right to vote should really include the right to voluntarily say I like A then B then I don’t care.
Of course if people aren’t aware that they can rank all four candidates or someone is running a Just Vote 1 campaign, then you can argue that a winner may not have a majority.
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The ballots don’t tell us why the voter did what she did. An exhausted ballot might mean (1) the voter was opposed to both finalists and unwilling to rank either of them, even in last place, (2) the voter was lazy or indifferent or (occasionally) confused about RCV, or (3) the ballot design didn’t allow the voter to rank all the candidates. These reasons have different implications for whether the winner’s total in the final round should be considered a majority of the votes cast.
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The Alaskan system got its first real test on 14 May, with a first round being held in the special election to replace long-serving Representative Don Young. 48 candidates ran, most of whom were independents. So far, the system does indeed appear to be largely top-two without the most absurd features, as Shugart thought it would be. The (non-instant) runoff in August will include two Republicans (Sarah Palin, who was endorsed by Donald Trump, and Nick Begich, who was endorsed by the state Republican Party), one Democrat-leaning independent (Al Gross) and likely one Democrat (Mary Pelota), giving voters a reasonably broad selection to choose from. The system leaves the door open to Democrats possibly electing Begich in August, if they view him as more moderate. The fact that there will be Democrats on the ballot seems like it would have some positive effect here-Gross or Pelota will actually be running a campaign and will be able to more widely spread a “put Palin last” message.
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48! But Alaska is not part of the lower 48, so shouldn’t there have been 49? Dumb joke. Thanks for commenting on this contest. It somehow had escaped my notice.
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In another thread, Ryan Matthew Campbell notes:
The Green Party of Canada’s leadership race rules may be of interest to folks here. They’re basically doing the two-round Alaska-style final four preferential ballot thing, but with the twist being that the final four in the first round is being decided by STV rather than SNTV.
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In the Canadian GP’s method, isn’t the second round completely redundant? Other than voters changing their minds between rounds, is there any combination of ballots such that the winner of the second round would not have won an IRV/AV count of the first round? In other words, what am I missing here?
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It does seem like this is the case. It’s possible that the party views that element of the process as useful for informational purposes, though – a leadership election like this doesn’t necessarily have clear ideological distinctions that normal elections do, and giving voters a second look at a smaller section of the more plausible candidates might be a good idea.
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STV can lead to very large ballots. The ballot paper for the NSW legislative council is usually the size of a table cloth. That is not a metaphor. I once numbered each and every one of 251 squares out of a bloody-minded desire to vote a particular candidate last.
It’s therefore not an unreasonable idea to shortlist the top 4 candidates.
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hschlechta and Alan, how many candidates does a party leadership contest usually have? Isn’t the concern about the length of the ballot usually irrelevant in this context? Also, if the first round ballot is “too long”, how does this procedure solve that problem?
I’m afraid I think this contains echoes of the common argument in favor of two-round runoff and against IRV/AV. The voters can’t evaluate “too many” candidates, so we have to narrow the field for them. Which in turns echoes the usual argument for a two-party system. Voters need to be given a clear choice between the thugs they already have and exactly one set of replacement thugs.
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I was under the impression (and please correct me if I am wrong) that Australian ballots look the way they do because of the group voting tickets. Presumably there would be no tickets in a party leadership election. Candidates could just be listed in a straight line. Or if there are lot in just two or three columns.
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Assume the average candidate name occupies a space 20*5 centimetres. If 10 candidates are in a single row you will get a paper 200 centimetres wide and 5 centimetres deep It’s not immediately obvious why such a ballot is easier to use than a vertical list that is 20 centimetres wide and 50 centimetres deep. A horizontal ballot with 259 candidates would be 5,180 cm wide and 5 cm deep. A ballot with 259 candidates is going to be big under any system.
Only one Australian jurisdiction, the Victorian legislative council still uses GVTs.
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I don’t know if Alan’s concern is the overriding one here – there were only eight candidates at the last Green leadership election, which is well within the realm of manageable ballot sizes. But it’s worth pointing out that an internal party election is a considerably different information environment to a general election. This is particularly so for the Green Party of Canada, given that most (if not all) of their candidates won’t have the public profile and record that comes with being a Member of Parliament. Candidates will have limited resources for campaigning, there will be fewer public events, and the electorate is a widely geographically dispersed one. In this context, there seems to be more of an argument than usual for shortlisting a set of the “serious” candidates.
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I am not a math guy, so please correct me. My gut tells me that they will probably be mathematically identical and this, as others have said, is probably just to give the voters a second chance to think about things. I can’t imagine the party wanting to do this again in another year or two. Building consensus may be easier around the winner of a four candidate vote than around the winner of a 24 candidate vote.
But…
Is the result guaranteed to be mathematically identical? If there is no surplus transfer and they simply eliminate candidates until only four remain, the result only changes if people change their mind. But if they transfer surplus votes…
In a straight single winner election with at least six candidates, there is a mathematical possibility that enough transferred votes could push the fifth place candidate above the top four and on to victory. But, in a scenario where some of the higher placed candidates reach a threshold and move on, transferred surplus votes may not be enough for a leapfrog and the fifth places (or even lower) candidate is excluded.
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The rules specifically state that “The four highest-ranking Contestants of this single transferable vote [the first round] will remain in the Leadership Contest”. It doesn’t seem like it’s an STV election for the top four places but it’s a bit vague.
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The party constitution, which overrides the leadership contest rules, provides that:
I’ve seen clearer drafting in my time, but party rules have a marked tendency to be badly drafted.
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Peltota has won 51.5-48.5. Preferences from Begich and write-ins split 50% to Palin, 30% to Peltota, 20% to exhaust.
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I was hoping someone would comment on this so I did not have to.
So the plurality winner was still the winner after RCV, but the ranked choices allowed GOP to re-consolidate after its first-preference split–just not quite enough to win.
And as “someone” said in response to my saying the above on a certain bird-site, the GOP will blame RCV for losing the seat.
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Some interesting comments related to why the Democrats have less trouble with RCV than the Republicans here:
https://midnightsunak.com/2022/08/30/ranked-choice-voting-is-a-dagger-in-the-heart-of-party-control-no-wonder-the-gop-wants-it-gone/
Also, Jack Santucci’s brand new book, “More Parties or No Parties” includes a lot of background relevant to any discussion of how the major parties differ in their responses to electoral reform.
Speaking of which, once some of us have read some of it, this book seems like a very good topic for a discussion here. (Hint, hint.)
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Some interesting comments bearing on why the Democrats have less trouble with RCV than the Republicans in this article: “Ranked Choice Voting is a Dagger in the Heart of Party Control”.
Also, Jack Santucci’s brand new book, More Parties or No Parties includes a lot of background relevant to any discussion of how the major parties differ in their responses to electoral reform. Speaking of which, once some of us have read some of it, this book seems like a very good topic for a discussion here. (Hint, hint.)
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I posted this on the thread about the Constitutional vote in Chile, not knowing about this thread at all (sorry, I could have looked for one but didn’t):
I know this is off-topic but if anyone can make sense of this situation for me, it’s one of you all.
The Alaska ranked choice ‘primary’ for its single congressional seat was also a ‘special’ election for the remainder of the
term of Don Young, who died months ago? The four top vote-getters were supposed to move on to the general election in
November (without any ranking) and then the top four, using the same results, were to be subjected to the ranked choice
process until a majority winner was found? Oh yeah, and then the fourth place finisher dropped out of the running and the
fifth place finisher wasn’t advanced, they decided to just go ahead with the three remaining candidates? Have I got this right factually so far? I just can’t think of another similar instance of ‘two elections in one’. Can you help, because the media hasn’t?
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Isn’t what became a top 3 “primary” similar to a top 2 “primary”, as is used in CA, WA, LA?
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dlwetz asks, “Isn’t what became a top 3 “primary” similar to a top 2 “primary”, as is used in CA, WA, LA?” Similar, yes. I don’t doubt that the proponents of these “non-partisan” quasi-primaries have expanded the number of “voter-nominated” candidates from two to four or five primarily in order to co-opt RCV advocates into supporting their attack on political parties. But — this is speculative — it might turn out to be a lucky accident from their point of view. By that I mean that RCV with more than two finalists might do an even better job of weakening parties than Top Two itself.
Important note: I don’t (yet) believe that anti-party bias is built in to RCV itself, since it is equally compatible with party control of nominations.
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What I just wrote is potentially misleading Change “RCV with more than two finalists might do an even better job …” to read “RCV with more than two finalists combined with non-partisan primaries might do an even better job ..”
(I wish WordPress let us edit our comments.)
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There is absolutely no sign from Australia’s electoral record, where we have legislative bodies that have used RCV in both single and multimember districts for over a century, of any weakening of political parties. If anything, at least until the 2022 federal election, Australian political parties have been too powerful and too entrenched.
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Alan, does the requirement that the voter rank all (or some minimum number) of the candidates have anything to do with the continued strength of the parties?
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It would be a stretch to say that New South Wales, where optional preferences have been used in 1979, has shown any signs of having weakened parties. I think that insofar as RCV’s adoption in Alaska is going to have an impact on the strength of parties there, it’s likely to have more to do with the fact that parties have been deprived of their ability to select candidates.
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There is no discernible difference in party control between legislative bodies where preferences are optional or or compulsory, except for Tasmania, where the electorate has a habit of voting a different order of presences from the parties’ how-to-vote cards. Tasmanian parties are very careful about who they nominate, but that’s as it should be.
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RCV is a bit like an abstract painting. Your an read into it what you want.
No2AV in the UL ‘mew’ that RCV leads to hung parliaments and parliamentary chaos.
Canadian RCV opponents ‘knew’ that RCV leads to a dominant centre party.
Now apparently we are to ‘know’ that RCV leads to weak parties overall.
It’s q
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(Slip of the mouse)
It’s quite hard to theorise how the same system could have such diametrically opposite effects, none of which have ever happened in Australia, but I’m sure there is a logic somewhere.
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Alan writes, “It’s quite hard to theorise how the same system could have such diametrically opposite effects, none of which have ever happened in Australia, but I’m sure there is a logic somewhere.”
I’m persuaded by Jack Santucci’s argument in More Parties or No Parties. Introducing RCV into a two-party system like the United States does indeed have different effects. The most important reason appears to be that in a two-party system the only available reform allies are proponents of (so-called) “non-partisan” elections. That gives us Alaska and proposals for Final Four/Five in a number of other places. As hschlechta put it earlier, “insofar as RCV’s adoption in Alaska is going to have an impact on the strength of parties there, it’s likely to have more to do with the fact that parties have been deprived of their ability to select candidates.”
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And yet Tasmania maintained a pure two party system, under STV no less, from the general election of 1912 until the Greens first entered the house of assembly in 1983. I agree with Henry, but that is not an effect of RCV but of the particular nomination system adopted in Alaska.
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Under AV, what are the chances of a new party coming to hold power, or at least the balance of power? Results in the Australian federal parliament could lead outside observers to conclude they were slim to none. If introduction of AV is believed to fix a political landscape, you would expect hung parliaments based on the 2011 UK landscape, but a dominant party of the centre based on Canada in 2016.
Against the frozen-in-amber model: introduction of AV in British Columbia in 1952 resulted in a new party, Social Credit, smashing the Coalition parties that brought in AV. In 1953 Socreds gained a majority and scrapped AV.
But can either Australia or BC say much about the future of AV in Alaska? ?
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List of minority governments in Australia
Note the Tasmanian lower house and the ACT unicameral legislative assembly are elected by STV.
The list dates from 2010 and does not include the federal Labor minority government 2010—13.
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Indeed, there is (responding to Alan at 06/09/2022 at 2:58). As I always say, RCV is just a ballot format. It becomes an electoral system when you combine it with a set of other features. And the Alaska (and proposed-elsewhere) model is combined with other party-weakening features. It is hard for me to see how RCV/AV would NOT weaken parties if it permits a party to have two or more candidates for a single office. And having intraparty competition for the final contest is the explicit goal of the “final four”/”final five” system.
Also, when adopting a new electoral system (or even when not), context matters. The claims Alan cites about UK and Canada could both be true. I am not saying they are (I’ve expressed skepticism on this blog before re the Canadian claims about Liberal dominance). But there is no reason why such claims are inherently illogical.
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A Labor/Green coalition has formed the government in the ACT since 2011 where M=5 or 7.
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I took Bob not to be saying that RCV generally weakened parties, but that when combined with non-partisan qualifying rounds (which might qualify more than one candidate of a given party), and more generally in the absence of party-controlled nominations, it would have that effect.
Assuming I got that right, I agree. The Australian experience is obviously quite different on these points.
(Also, Bob, I wish edits were allowed, too. At one time when I was managing the blog instead of letting WordPress do it, I had such a plug-in. I can check to see if there is now an edit-comment option for blogs hosted at the WP site. Last time I checked there was not.)
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An interesting list of minority governments. Easy for an outside observer to miss the role played by Independents. Greens got a sniff of power only in M=5 Tasmania. Thanks.
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Don’t forget that when predicting how many parties we would get from RCV (whether the M=1 version often known as AV or the M>1 usually called STV), we need to consider assembly size.
AV in Australia has about the party system we should expect to have, if it were FPTP, given the assembly size. AV in Canada would be expected to be more fragmented than Australia; Canada already has about the level of fragmentation it should have, for its assembly size, even for FPTP. As for the UK, it is possible that AV would finally unleash the party system to be what we’d expect for such a large assembly, rather than being under-fragmented relative to expectation as it currently is. That would be my best guess, in any case.
And then there’s the set of nomination rules to consider, as already much discussed in this thread. And ballot access laws for other parties, etc.
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It was not unknown in Queensland for parties to nominate 2 candidates in a single district. It was invariably rural district and the candidates would come from say, opposite ends of the district, or perhaps 2 different towns. Intraparty competition among Republicans in Alaska weakened the party as much because of the extraordinary divisions within the party as anything else.
I saw that you tweeted that Peltola would have been the plurality winner. She would not have been the open list winner. Palin would have been elected as the leading Republican candidate where republicans secured 63.2% of the vote. Strengthening party influence at the cost of electing someone who could not secure a majority in her own right strikes me as problematic, and would bear a marked resemblance to the bad old days of the GVT in Australia.
I’m aware that top two and top four raise problems for freedom of association. However, there is also the problem of the freedom of electors to associate with each other by deciding their own preferences rather than having what is effectively a second preference automatically awarded to the party’s leading candidate.
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Alan: “It was not unknown in Queensland for parties to nominate 2 candidates in a single district.” Parties deciding that, in specific circumstances, it’s in their interest to nominate two candidates for the same seat is very different from parties being prevented from nominating any candidates at all — indeed even prevented from controlling who uses their party’s name and for what purpose.
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I don’t support parties not controlling their own labels. I made that point to MSS some months ago when we were discussing the top two system in California. I was merely establishing there can eb situations where it is advantageous to party to have more than one candidate.
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Alaska’s Elections Division has released cast-vote records. These are metadata-heavy and difficult to analyse, but a number of different analysts on Twitter have come to the conclusion that Begich would have defeated either Palin or Peltola had he come second, making him the Condorcet winner.
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My website now has frequency counts for all 554 tallied preference combinations in the Alaska special election, available here. However, I should caution that I’ve been unable to replicate exactly the official results after write-in candidates and then Begich were eliminated, and their second preferences redistributed among continuing candidates: I end up with an extra vote for Palin after the elimination of write-ins, and with 17 additional votes for her and an extra eleven for Peltola after Begich is eliminated. One possibility is that Alaska didn’t consider fourth preferences after adjusting for single skipped preferences in either stage; if I disregard them I have the same result as the official figures after write-ins are eliminated, and I’m off by just a single vote for both Palin (-1) and Peltola (+1) after the elimination of Begich.
I can also confirm that Begich would have defeated Peltola had he managed to come up in second place after write-ins were eliminated.
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My own attempts to parse the results were off by thousands, so you could have done worse Manuel!
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And as noted yesterday on Twitter, I have finally found out the actual cause of the Alaska RCV count discrepancies I was coming across in both the special election and the subsequent general election: ballots with duplicate rankings for a candidate. In a nutshell, in such cases the highest ranking for that candidate will be counted, but the lower duplicate rankings are treated as skipped rankings i.e. undervotes, which in turn can result in cases with two or more skipped rankings in a row, and at that point the ballot is deemed exhausted.
For example, the extra vote for Palin after the elimination of write-ins came from a ballot in which write-ins were given the first three preferences and Palin the fourth. But treating the duplicate second and third rankings as skipped or undervoted caused the ballot to exhaust after the third ranking, so Palin never got that vote.
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Not relevant to Alaska but definitely relevant to the Condorcet criterion, election nerds are claiming that a city council race in Minneapolis, MN, resulted in a Condorcet “cycle”. that is A beats B, B beats C and C beats A in head-to-head tallies. The cast vote record is here: https://vote.minneapolismn.gov/results-data/election-results/2021/council-ward-2/. The link is at the very bottom of the page. I have analyzed these myself and won’t be able to any time soon.
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That should be “I have NOT analyzed these myself …” Sorry.
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They don’t mention a 3rd candidate at the link. I know that Muslim African-born Black Americans in Minneapolis, not unlike US Rep Ilhan Omar, are an important demographic with some distinct preferences that might lead to a violation of the transitivity of preferences of voters over candidates.
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The whole point of the Condorcet paradox is that the collective result can be intransitive even though each individual’s preferences are transitive. (Individual preferences as recorded on the ballots are required to be transitive.) Demographics might well play a role here but that role would be more complicated.
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