Even better are voting systems in context. Voter education, cost of administration, quality of outcomes, cultural impact.
For examples:
- Approval voting has the best balance between simplicity, fairness, and certainty. (For single winner contents.)
- The multiple choice systems reduce partisanship, negativity. Because all candidates want to be your second choice.
- Eliminating primaries will reduce polarization and voter fatigue.
Also another nice thing about primaries is that they're staggered. I think it's ridiculous that Iowa and New Hampshire always go first, but ignoring that it's great that a candidate without a lot of funding only has to focus on a couple of states in the initial stage, and can use success in the early states to gain momentum (and funding). That means you don't have to be some self-funding rich person to run for president, which is a nice property.
If the goal is to reduce costs, the conventional wisdom is to shorten the campaign season. Time box them. Say 4 weeks.
Eliminating primaries reduces one whole campaign cycle. (Candidates consider primary and general election as two separate campaigns.)
> it's great that a candidate without a lot of funding
Third party access to the ballot is crucial. Support proven methods. Public financing of campaigns is probably the most effective. Fair redistricting lowers barriers. Greatly increase the number of representatives by reducing the size of districts. There are many other proposals.
Ages ago, before I burned out, Election Verification Network (EVN) was really good. Bringing together academics, activists, officials. Very low key, low profile. To avoid the outrage machine.
EVN mostly focused on gear and procedures. Not much overlap with adjacent topics.
I organized an every-partisan election integrity group for a while. We had some small local victories. (Prohibit putting serial number on paper ballot linked to voter ID. Delayed adoption of janky new gear.)
But drift into adjacent issues and coalitions fall apart. For instance: Voter registration databases. Correct answer is universal automatic voter registration where everyone is listed and has an eligibility flag, with audit history. But improving data quality is a no go because of misbelief that higher registration (and participation) has partisan advantage. (Spoiler: It doesn't.)
Another fundamental problem is being outside looking in. Asking the establishment to modify the very system that got them their power is really, really challenging. The vetocracy. That's why all these stupid obvious reforms with +70% support languish. Default answer is always "no", with demands for ever more ridiculous standards of proof, because reasons. This is a fundamental trait of all orgs, groups. Why would the public sphere be any different? Sadly, when change does finally happen, it's disruptive. Punctuated equilibrium vs slow and steady progress.
The Center for Election Science doesn't hide their preference* and advocacy:
> Let’s put approval voting ON THE MAP!
* Generally, each organization has some kind of bias, and I appreciate it when they are up-front about it.
My preferred group would have these biases / goals:
1. Valuing a diverse group of people
2. Valuing clear and honest discussion about member preferences in voting systems
3. Valuing understanding among the group members
4. Help group members form alliances with each other, should they desire to organize and do advocacy, because while each of us might have our 'preferred' voting system, we all benefit from moving beyond the 'worst' voting systems
> Valuing clear and honest discussion about member preferences in voting systems
This is a difficult thing tbh. A lot of people learn about voting systems from CGP Grey or Hasan Minhaj and get really passionate, so you get an armchair expertise. Then I think many learn about VSE and see Condorcet methods as the obvious winners (I used to be in this camp). But it often takes awhile to internalize all the nuances in voting. About how to balance VSE, resiliency, simplicity, transparency, computational cost, and more. It is one of those problems that looks easier than it is. A lot of very smart people get into it because it is an interesting problem but it is also easy to convince yourself that your understanding is far better than it is. Every time these threads come up I learn something new and I've been interested in the subject for almost a decade. I think the biggest thing I've learned is to look at the people who have been studying the problem for a long time and see why they are making their decisions. It is difficult to separate the signal from the noise.
In addition to the discord link I also suggest following Clay Shentrup[0]. He's active with Election Science and the co-inventor of STAR (he also typically joins voting threads on HN. Username is his full name). The reason I follow him is because reading his comments and posts have led me to a lot more sources and brought up a lot of the above nuances I didn't understand when I first started getting into the subject.
ranicki: someone on HN claimed that Center for Election Science switched from pushing STAR to pushing approval. is it true that this organization formerly supported STAR, or was it one of the other organizations? I don't remember who was advocating for what
-redacted name-: Center for Election Science has broadly supported cardinal voting methods, score voting and approval voting basically since its inception. From everything I can tell it still is supportive of cardinal methods broadly, but as a political tactic has honed in on approval voting specifically due to its Pareto optimality.
...
-redacted name 2-: I don't think CES ever changed from STAR to approval. IIRC they existed long before STAR was invented
Hmmm... the notion of Pareto optimality is driving political tactics (about what voting method to back)? I know what it means, and it seems strange to me. This suggests that a specialized economic term was used as a motivation for a tactical political decision.
Their forum and Google Group for discussion of voting systems were good resources, but are now being shut down
https://forum.electionscience.org/t/archiving-the-forum-july...
https://groups.google.com/g/electionscience
"This change reflects CES’s gradual evolution from an academic organization to an advocacy organization."
A volunteer-run forum has been created to replace it, but is pretty quiet so far.
http://reddit.com/r/EndFPTP is also a good "non-partisan" resource, as well as https://electowiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
That said, if we adopted something like score or STAR I don't think there would be any problem with parties, nor would they be destroyed. You still get the advantages of pooling resources. Have a strong preference for members of the hippo party? You can donate and campaign for them even while you hash out which candidate best represents the coalition of people at the time. Think the hippo party played dirty and kicked out your favorite candidate Salamander-Gibbon Yack but really don't like the opposing party Tree Trunks? You can still vote your favorite person and not have any determent (system is monotonic). This actually gives less power for the hippo party to determine for you which is your preferred candidate.
Better yet, you get a lot of information! So even if the hippo party's leading candidate wins but you find that Salamander-Gibbon Yack was an extremely close second then the hippo party will have to update their policies (hopefully). By rating, instead of ranking, candidates you have a substantially more expressive ballot and we can data mine and learn from it through this expressiveness. We live in the age of big data and yet in politics we compress data to a point that is almost meaningless.
Cardinal systems won't destroy political parties, but they prevent them from controlling and manipulating the elections.
Parties get candidates elected. It's a form of social validation, vetting. The alternative is more money (buy votes).
Everyone should run for office at least once. Folk theories don't jive with the reality.
Yes, and #2:
Polarization != partisanship. Factors outside of the parties begat our current polarization. Ezra Klein's Why We Are Polarized is a good primer.
But we had parties going basically back to the beginning of the country, and the current two parties crystallized during the 1850s -- long before primaries. Primaries were introduced as a way of reducing the power of party bosses over the parties.
Approval voting is completely inappropriate for common situations in Europe, where you have center-right, center-left, far-right and far-left candidate (e.g. presidental elections in France). Reasonable people should approve both center candidates despite of strong political disagreement with the other side (but still beter than fascists or communists). That essetially eliminates information from them entering to voting (although finding balance between right and left is one of the most important aspect of elections).
But that assumes people would hold common good strategy and not defect to vote only for their preferred candidate (while risking that extermists win). As the side who first defects wins, it is likely that it will just degrade to plurality voting.
In the USA, replace most (all?) all house, council, board, assembly, etc. districts with PR.
I understand that different systems are needed per context.