There are a number of methods for counting ballots.
Le Comte de Condorcet (a French nobleman, mathematician, and philosopher) kicked of the scientific study of electoral systems in 1785, with his Essay on the Application of Analysis to Majority Decisions. John Adams had a strong dislike of Condorcet, who advocated unicameral legislatures and strong democratic principles like universal suffrage. That may be why our constitution is silent on these matters: for sure, Condorcet would not have approved of the bicameral compromise that is our Congress.
Anyway, it seems to me that the minimum we can request of a vote-count system is that it produce a Condorcet winner, if a Condorcet winner exists. (A Condorcet winner is the option that wins all head-to-head contests. Condorcet winners don’t necessarily exist if there are three or more options and preferences are allowed to be intransitive [that is, if A is preferred to B, and B is preferred to C, then allowing C to be preferred to A is an intransitive preference].)
Ranked-choice ballots can be counted in ways that produce Condorcet winners, in part because they force the preference relationship to be transitive. I don’t recall if approval ballots with a highest-count wins produces Condorcet winners or not. If such a system were proposed where I live and vote, that’s where I would start investigating: does this produce Condorcet winners. If the answer is yes, then it’s worth looking into further.
This is fascinating from a game theory perspective, and not unexpected. Tactics which are effective as a minority party are not dependably sound as a majority party. Lockstep voting is one of them. As a group becomes more powerful it’s natural for it to start forming internal factions, and it’s a talented leader that can keep everyone on the same beat.
Republicans continue to think last year’s tactics will work this year. If McCarthy has half a brain he’ll learn from this, and when the troublemakers in his party push too hard he’ll offer two options – keep himself as Speaker, or hand it to Hakim Jeffries, either of which he can deliver on a first vote if he plays it right. But – that’s a change in tactics, and McC may not have the wherewithal to pull it off. He’ll need the help of the mainstream GOP and that will mean cutting deals.
McCarthy has basically already ceded this ground. He’s done absolutely everything he can to cater to the Freedom Caucus’ every whim and they still abused him. Rather than play hardball or reinforce his “moderate” support, he continued bending over backwards for the smallest minority of the majority. He’s already clearly ruling out hashing out any kind of deal with the Dems or even the so-called moderates.
Total dysfunction seems to be in the House GOP’s immediate future.
Seattlite here. My biggest concern with “approval voting” is how do you ensure that voters are actually voting for candidates they approve of? Especially in a jungle (multi-party) primary like in WA. It’s pretty easy to imagine voting for the strongest candidate that aligns with your policy preferences and then voting for the weakest candidate from the other party, in the hopes that those two make it to the general.
Even if you assume voters are acting in good faith (ha!), or are dealing with a single party primary, approval voting could amplify extremism. If ideologues are all “my way or nothing” and centrists are more “well, if we had to”, then the more extreme candidate gets more votes.
I like Alaska’s version: a ranked choice jungle primary from which the top four advance, then ranked choice general. The two-stage filter with a loose initial screen acknowledges that many people can’t rank a field of a dozen or more candidates accurately, and that learning more about the top candidates during the general campaign can unearth valuable information that helps them rank the remaining candidates with confidence
All vote count systems are vulnerable to gaming. Some are more vulnerable than others, and in my opinion, our first-past-the-post system is particularly vulnerable to gaming via third-party candidates.
Kenneth Arrow proved what is now called “Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem” (or “Arrow’s Paradox”), which establishes that there is no perfect vote counting system. What Arrow proved was that three seemingly reasonable requirements cannot all be met by a single voting system. Assume that there are at least two voters and three choices (A, B, C) which must be ordered by the vote. Arrow showed that no vote count system exists that simultaneously meets the following criteria:
Pareto efficiency: If every voter prefers A to B, then the vote count ranks A higher than B.
Monotonicity: If a single voter changes her preference for A to rank it higher, then the vote count cannot change in a way that ranks A lower in preference, that is, an individual cannot game the system to lower a choice’s ranking by increasing their preference for it. (This is amounts to requiring a positive association between the vote count outcomes and individual preference orderings.)
Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives: The vote count ordering between A and B depends only on the voters’ pairwise ordering of A and B, that is, changes in the ranking of C doesn’t change the ordering of A and B.
Nondictatorship: The vote count system must reflect the preferences of multiple voters. It cannot simply reflect the preferences of a single voter. (This ends up being a key to the proof, which shows that a dictator exists for every ordering.)
What Arrow showed is that there is no perfect vote counting system. What that means is that we have to choose our voting system knowing that it must be imperfect whenever there are more than two alternatives. We should choose voting system with knowledge of their flaws and vulnerabilities, and we should monitor our elections for evidence that someone is manipulating the system’s vulnerabilities. If we detect that, we should revisit the choice of vote count method. (Just to be clear, we should live with the results of the election under the previously chosen count rules.)
Incidentally, I also like Alaska’s two-stage process better than I like California’s top-two go to the general election. Of course, California doesn’t use ranked-choice voting in the primary.
There really do not appear to be many true centerists left in the GOP Congressional Caucus. Certainly few with any backbone or ideals. And all of the ones that did have been ousted from the House GOP Conference and from any positions of power in the House.
It’s a microcosm of national trends, a case study in what the Republican Party has unapologetically become post-Trump. The party can’t lose; if it does, the election was stolen.
Stolen from themselves. Republicans rigged the system to keep themselves in power, they ignored the Democrats because they had no power, but didn’t think that one of their own would be willing to cut a different deal for power and control. This isn’t a stolen election- this was politics and Merrin lost the support of some of his caucus.
Doesn’t that mean that the candidate with a plurality wins?
By definition, a plurality is the most votes in a list ordered by vote count, and a majority is defined as 50% plus 1.
Or am I wrong?
In a 3 candidate race there are 3 head-to-head races: A vs B, A vs C, and B vs C. In a 4 candidate race there are 6: add A vs D, B vs D, and C vs D to those above.
Remember that we’re talking about ranked choice ballots, so I can determine every (ideal) voter’s preference between any pair of candidates. Each “vote” in a head-to-head count goes to the higher ranked candidate. The winner of the head-to-head race is the candidate with the most “votes”. (I used scare quotes because head-to-head counts are almost never used. The combinatorial problem is intractable. If they are done, the winner of the election is the candidate who defeats all other candidates, also called the Condorcet winner. Remember that Condorcet winners need not exist. If they do not exist, it’s because there is a cyclical preference ordering among the candidates. It’s kind of like the situation for the game ro-sham-bo [or if you prefer, rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock]. Every choice is beaten by at least one other choice. One problem with real election systems is that they have to cope with the possibility of cyclic preferences in real populations.
