Screw primaries - Use a different voting method for the general.

[Kevin Baas]

So there's been discussion about how different voting methods could have changes the results of primaries.

But...

What if we didn't have primaries, what if all democratic and all republican presidential candidates were listed on the general ballot, and we used a more advanced voting method, be it ranked, rated, or allocated.

Once you do that, well as long as the voting system chosen is immune to IIA and IIC, then there's no reason anymore for parties to have primaries, is there?

Seems to me like the global (inter-party) consider winner would be more likely to succeed...

[Kevin Baas]

Sorry for typos... iPhone.

[Warren D Smith]

I agree. Get rid of primaries and switch to score voting.
Or: do that then add an extra runoff round between the top 2 finishers.
The whole idea that only party X voters should vote about party X
candidates is a bad one. The purpose of parties
instead should merely be as a brand name, e.g.
"these 3 candidates all bear the Republican brand name"
but everybody votes about every candidate regardless of brand.
"Enforcing brand loyalty" with current USA rules accomplishes nothing useful
for society as far as I can tell.



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Warren D. Smith
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[Frank Martinez]

I've long been an Advocate for ditching primaries. You'll get no argument from Me.

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[Clay Shentrup]

You don't have to explicitly "get rid of primaries". If you enact Score Voting or Approval Voting, they'll plausibly just fade into general irrelevance.

[Toby Pereira]

Strategy might be a bit weird if you went to score or approval with several candidates from each party. Most X party supporters would probably give zeros to the Y party candidates and vice versa, so even if in principle it's bad that only party X voters should vote about party X, there might not be much coming from the non party X voter ballots to distinguish between the party X candidates.

I think you (Warren) have published stuff before about occasions where insincere approval strategy might be optimal, and it could apply here. A party Y supporter might approve their favourite of the two party X frontrunners in case it turned out that party X generally outperformed party Y in the election.

Unless it caused people to stop caring about party brands generally, and then it could well be win-win.

[Warren D Smith]

On 5/17/16, 'Toby Pereira' via The Center for Election Science

<electio...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> Strategy might be a bit weird if you went to score or approval with several
>
> candidates from each party. Most X party supporters would probably give
> zeros to the Y party candidates and vice versa, so even if in principle
> it's bad that only party X voters should vote about party X, there might
> not be much coming from the non party X voter ballots to distinguish
> between the party X candidates.

--First, that is yet another good reason to want score voting, not
approval voting. (As I suggested.)

But second, the problem is that only the Republicans vote re
Republicans presently
(in primaries) which over time has caused, and continues to cause, the
whole Republican party to get more and more detached from reality and
living in its own isolation bubble. It is a RESULT of that trend that
is the reason everybody else would want to give all Republican
candidates zero, and a RESULT of that (plus gerrymandering) that the
US congress is
now so totally dysfunctional and incapable of compromise or rational thought,
and a RESULT that as soon as primaries end we often see the candidates
hilariously reverse themselves to try to appeal to the non-Republican
voters, thus assuring
victory for the most cynical liars and hypocrites each time...

If, all along, we had not had this trend, because we had not had this
stupid primary system -- then the Republican candidates would not all
be so pathetic, and non-Republicans might well want to give then
nonzero scores.

> I think you (Warren) have published stuff before about occasions where
> insincere approval strategy might be optimal, and it could apply here. A
> party Y supporter might approve their favourite of the two party X
> frontrunners in case it turned out that party X generally outperformed
> party Y in the election.
>
> Unless it caused people to stop caring about party brands generally, and
> then it could well be win-win.

--well Toby, you are from the UK. It seems to me, that the UK's
system is better than the USA's in the present respect. The parties
there have brand identities, but I do not get the
impression they have totally broken into isolated bubbles incapable of
cross-party cooperation and sympathy. And (for example) the
conservative party in the UK, is not nearly as nutty as the
Republicans in the USA have become.
And I do not think that is a mere fluke, I think there is a reason for that.

Anyhow, I'm ok with party brands as such.
But it is not beneficial to society to foster this kind of breakup and
non-democracy where only the crazies get to choose the crazy
candidate, only the loonies get to choose the loony candidate, etc.
When that happens, we get the present
problem where the Dems choose Clinton even though the USA as a whole
prefers Sanders, and the Repubs choose Trump even though USA as a
whole prefers Kasich. This guarantees the USA will get an unwanted
president. And unless a miracle happens
in the final end stage (now coming) of the primary, it already
has guaranteed it, with likely large bad consequences for USA and world.

So I'd prefer it if parties WERE merely brands.

But actually at present in USA they unfortunately are a lot more than brands.
They are large corrupt financial and media organizations, which offer
large advantages in election-probability to anybody who joins them.
These advantages include databases of voters, biased ballot-access laws,
the wasted-vote strategy problem, conspiracies among the members of
congress once elected, rigged "debates," etc etc. The net effect of
that at present
is that it is nearly impossible for any third party or independent to win
high office in USA. OK? So the parties, BECAUSE they unfortunately
are far more than merely "brand names," have tremendously
suppressed democracy in the USA, with ruinous consequences for all.
And it keeps getting worse all the time.

[Warren D Smith]

> But actually at present in USA they unfortunately are a lot more than
> brands.
> They are large corrupt financial and media organizations, which offer
> large advantages in election-probability to anybody who joins them.
> These advantages include databases of voters, biased ballot-access laws,
> the wasted-vote strategy problem, conspiracies among the members of
> congress once elected, rigged "debates," etc etc. The net effect of
> that at present
> is that it is nearly impossible for any third party or independent to win
> high office in USA. OK? So the parties, BECAUSE they unfortunately
> are far more than merely "brand names," have tremendously
> suppressed democracy in the USA, with ruinous consequences for all.
> And it keeps getting worse all the time.

--and indeed, the Republicans are not even a coherent brand.
They are an incoherent brand.

The strangeness of the USA's voting system over time, has caused
weird alliances which make no logical sense, to take over.
To put it on a bumper sticker, the Republicans are presently an alliance
between the rich greedy people, and the stupid religious fanatics.
They have few or no common interests. Logically speaking
there ought to be a "rich greedy people's party" and some "religious
morons parties" which ought to be separate.

I mean, until the day comes when rich people think
getting a "degree" from "Bob Jones University" is a valuable life asset.

Meanwhile the Democrats in the USA are somewhat less weird
at present. But if we go back in time to the 1960s, then the
Democrats similarly
were an insane alliance between various actually-opposed groups:
the "white supremacy racist assholes" determined to oppress
blacks in the South, the "corrupt hawks" interested in fostering
the military industrial complex via stupid wars such as Vietnam
and the cold war, and the "liberals" interested in ending oppression of
Blacks.

The reason for these insane alliances which totally blew apart any notion that
it was about any coherent "brand" (versus purely a cynical
political construct) was:
2-party domination made it infeasible for them to split up.

Meanwhile, other ideas, such as "socialism," or the "greens," or the
"pacifists" or the "libertarians" sort of languished in the shadows.
Those actually really were fairly coherent brands, which had
considerable popular support, but were
totally incapable of getting any power.
Again the cause was the voting system.

[William Waugh]

I agree with pretty much everything everyone has posted in this thread, which starts at https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/electionscience/604KAQ4ACyc . Yes, Range Voting in the general with or without runoff, and with all candidates on the ballot (no more special authority to parties in blocking access to the ballot), will make primaries obsolete.

On Tuesday, May 17, 2016 at 12:24:57 AM UTC-4, Clay Shentrup wrote:

You don't have to explicitly "get rid of primaries". If you enact Score Voting or Approval Voting, they'll plausibly just fade into general irrelevance.

I have been expecting this would happen as Clay says. If we can sell even one major party on the advantages of using an advanced voting system to choose the candidate who would have the best chance in the general, eventually people will think about how such an advanced method would work better in the general than retarded methods do. The advanced method will get adopted, and then eventually it will occur to everyone that the primaries are not bringing anything to the party and so can be deleted without any downside.

William WAUGH