This is the latest post in my constitutional design series. It is the quintessential topic of constitutional design, the one that everyone loves to talk about. I hope to show and have shown that constitutional design is far more than just electoral systems, but it’s obviously an important topic and worth discussing. In this first part, I’ll discuss electoral systems for electing a leader, and then
Sorry for not writing out my fuller thoughts earlier. I did have it in the back of my mind, but clearly procrastinating was beneficial, as you've captured a lot of my thoughts in your edits. I certainly agree that ranked Condorcet methods are the best theoretically. Certainly there are some complexity concerns as you say, but I agree that it's an overcomable problem. With a strong publicity campaign, people can understand that the Condorcet winner is the one that beats every other candidate in a 1 on 1. Thanks for the great article, and I think we're much closer to on the same page now.
About score voting, I think you're mostly getting at my concerns with "understanding why we’d expect it to work well is actually very complicated". Put a little differently, I think an important aspect of a voting system is that a voter, if they're well researched and have clear views, feels confident in their vote and understands how their vote is impacting the results. This is the key benefit (despite basically everything else being terrible) of FPTP. FPTP almost always leads to just 2 parties and you vote for the better one. If you decide to throw your vote away, at least you probably did it knowingly. Now it's still the case that in primaries some candidates might win and some might lose, so voting for your favorite is not always best. However, the nature of the system makes this pretty intuitive. The one downside of RCV is that it makes this a bit less intuitive. However, it is basically exactly the same thing. And voters still seem to understand this pretty decently (many people who ranked Murkowski ahead of Chesbro clearly understood this in Alaska). And everything else about RCV is strictly superior to FPTP. In score voting, however, it is not at all clear how you should vote even with a strong understanding of all the candidates and your own preferences. Imagine an election in a 60-40 D district. Since it's a left-wing seat say we get 1 R and 2 Ds running. With one candidate all the R voters unite and give their candidate 10s and the 2 Ds 0s (I know they shouldn't but let's say they have no preference among the Ds). Say the Ds are split exactly 30-30 and the true preferences of the voters is 10 for their favorite and 8 for their second. So a poll comes out and shows a 540-540-400 race. Now supporters of the Ds can see that the Ds are far ahead and it may seem that they should vote 10-0-0 instead of 10-8-0. Whichever D has more of their supporters willing to "effectively lie" will then be the winner. Unless of course way too many people think this way and then even the R could win. The system works better if everyone expresses their true preferences out of 10. However, here the side defecting from that more gets to win. That seems quite problematic. I don't know if scenarios like this would actually occur. However, I do think people would feel betrayed that their own vote was "wrong" and thus directly led to an outcome they don't like in a way they don't with our current system (choosing to give Romney a 0 leading to Trump winning over Harris and Romney in a three way may be no worse than voting for Harris instead of Romney in a Dem primary then leading to a loss that would have been a win, but intuitively it feels different). Don't get me wrong, their are clear big advantages to score voting. Romney has no chance of ever winning a Dem primary, but maybe he could win this three way and save us from Trump. In fact, I've kind of talked myself into thinking some of my objections are illogical (the same things happens with primaries). However, I certainly hate the idea of not knowing who I should vote for, and I think a lot of people would feel similarly. And I think this is a legitimate problem for a voting system. If people don't feel like their vote is pushing in the direction they want it to, I think they will hate the system. Imagine how people would feel if a majority vote Republican, but the Dems win because they're more unified in giving all their candidates 10s.
Another problem is the incentives for the candidate are really bad as well. What should Harris tell people to give Romney? Certainly her own interests don't align well with the country's. For all these reasons, I think, despite the complexity, I definitely favor ranked condorcet methods over score voting. Versus ranked choice voting, I agree score voting is better for primaries, but I think Alaska's top 4 and then RCV I might prefer to score, not totally sure though. Top 4 and then ranked condorcet sounds great though.
Some ways I think RCV is good and you underestimate it a bit as an improvement (although you're certainly right that it's far from perfect:
1. Getting to vote for your favorite candidate is healthy. It's good if people can vote for a Green/Libertarian/Independet/etc without throwing their vote away. Less people will get discouraged and hate the system even if it doesn't change the results.
2. Scenarios like the Montana/Nebraska senate races are much easier. You don't have to clear the entire party or get a candidate to run on dropping out. All you have to do is get more first place votes. I'm confident Bodnar can do that against Bankhead.
3. The primary electorate is effectively much more moderate and much higher turnout. You often effectively hold the primary in the general. If Mills and Platner were on the same ballot in the general much better chances for Mills to win (of course this doesn't work if you still have partisan primaries, but this is largely defeating the purpose, it needs to be like Alaska)
4. It's really crazy when people win primaries with 25% of the vote. Look at the Maine Dem governor primary, would be a disaster with RCV
5. Related to that it allows people to stay in when they're not viable without affecting the race in primaries if you are having them. This has two benefits. One you don't get cases like Porter and Mahan playing spoilers. But secondly voters are smart and mostly consolidate. However, if they don't have to this can really change the dynamics and maybe someone like Mahan wouldn't collapse as people desperately try to consolidate. This can A give you more information about true preferences and B maybe even change who wins if it's a collective action problem.
6. I think the problem of ballot exhaustion is probably a bit less than people say. A surprising number of partisans do in fact vote for candidate A and then don't show up when B wins the primary for the general. I'd like some numbers on this, but I'd bet people are overestimating how many are exhausting because they're lazy and or don't understand and how many just legitimately don't want to vote for the other person.
7. Total unknowns aren't a problem, which they have the potential to be in either score or even ranked condorcet though less so.
I guess I should also reply to the other part as well:
- on it not being clear what the right strategy is in score voting, I do think just putting your genuine relative preferences is usually a pretty good strategy in score voting. It’s not optimal, especially if you there’s good polling, but I think it’s usually close.
I guess separately I also don’t see the correct strategy being obvious as as much of a selling point as you do. The one reason I see it as a clear selling point is that it makes people more satisfied with the electoral system and want a change less, but bracketing actual adoption concerns I don’t think I care that much. As long as what people end up doing makes things go ok, I think it’s fine.
- on specific dynamics regarding voter and candidate incentives, you bring up good points. I remember thinking about this kind of stuff briefly but perhaps not seriously enough; I might edit this post again to include more of that discussion. I guess one thing that helps with coordination is having score voting in addition to primaries rather than as a replacement.
And about how candidates should recommend voters make their ballot. I do always find it weird when candidates tell their voters who to rank second under RCV. Like, I feel like they are not the right people to give signals to voters; better signals would come from other elites that voters know represent their views better, which hopefully they’d listen to more under score voting.
1. Do voters hate FPTP? Clearly not enough to actually push for another electoral system, so I'm not exactly sure what discouraged means. People get discouraged about politics in general, or about their preferred candidates not getting elected (like online leftists with establishment Dems in general elections), but I don't think it has a ton to do with not getting to vote for their favorite in the first round. I don't think being discouraged because your preferred candidate doesn't win the primary is that different from being discouraged that the final round of RCV doesn't include your favorite candidate.
2. I think it's generally significantly easier to get a candidate to drop out than it is to get a majority of that candidate's supporters to strategically rank a different candidate higher. The fact that Montana Dems have not done so is genuinely unusual in my eyes; they very well might in the end, and in the case that they don't, I'm not sure that Bodnar will get more votes than Bankhead.
3. This is true, the reason I didn't get to it here because I discussed it more in-depth in my post on party candidate selection: https://redfishbluefish.substack.com/p/party-candidate-selection. But more generally, RCV clearly doesn't select for moderates more than score voting or ranked condorcet. So from the standpoint of this broader series, where I'm primarily analyzing the question "what electoral system would you choose if you were designing from scratch", the tendency of RCV to select slightly more for moderation in this way is not an obvious benefit; if you really wanted moderates to win, you shouldn't pick RCV. I put more thought into the exact practical effects with adoption constraints in this post because I know a lot of people read this post without reading the broader series, but yeah.
4. Here's where it gets interesting, and I recommend reading my post on party candidate selection (see above) for broader context. Basically, I think the main issue with primaries is not that the electorate is more extreme, but that they are winner-take-all. The biggest bloc in a party can just win everything, as the Trump-loyal wing of the Republican party has done. There is a minority of Republican primary voters who don't automatically vote for whoever Trump endorses, but they always lose.
Given that, the right thing to do is to redesign the primary system in its entirety. But if you're not going to do that, I'd argue that the randomness that FPTP brings in is actually if anything a benefit. Trump-resistant Republicans can occasionally win primaries by luck if their opponents split the field, like Cornyn would have if not for the runoff, which is better than them never being able to.
5. Yeah, I think this is what I mean when I say "People may be less likely not to vote for one of the top 2 candidates than under RCV because they don’t have to rely on polling and are satisfied with their ability to vote for their top choice first"
6. Ok so, ballot exhaustion is by definition irrational. Limiting to the usual definition of not ranking all the candidates, it is always better to rank other candidates below than to just leave your ballot empty. The one potential asterisk is that it can serve as a signal for future politicians/voters to appeal to them, like Reform party voters in 2024, but I don't think that's what you're talking about.
I think what you're saying is that not showing up to vote is also irrational, and a lot of voters who exhausted their ballots would also have not showed up to vote in the runoff/general election anyway. I'd love to see empirical work on this but I don't think this is true; as I mentioned on twitter all the work I've seen suggests that candidate-specific turnout effects are very small. This is especially true for downballot races in presidential years: not many people are choosing to show up or not based on who is on their governor ballot.
Steelmanning your position a bit, maybe you could shift to undervoting, ie that people show up to the presidential race but leave their eg Senate ballot empty. I asked Claude to look into the total senate votes in each state in 2024 (that had a senate race) as a fraction of the presidential votes, I can't paste in the picture of the results but most of them are about 99% (Senate races had 99% of the votes as simultaneous presidential races), the only one below 94% is Utah at 87% (which I find really weird; I'd think if anything more people in Utah would vote in the senate race than presidential cus all the mormons hate Trump). The competitive ones (NV, MI, PA, WI) were all upward of 98.5%; Nebraska at 98.5% too. Claude says this is the norm historically. "Overvoting", voting in presidential races but not corresponding Senate races, happened in 1 state, Montana, at 100.7%.
LOTS OF RAMBLING, sorry
Sorry for not writing out my fuller thoughts earlier. I did have it in the back of my mind, but clearly procrastinating was beneficial, as you've captured a lot of my thoughts in your edits. I certainly agree that ranked Condorcet methods are the best theoretically. Certainly there are some complexity concerns as you say, but I agree that it's an overcomable problem. With a strong publicity campaign, people can understand that the Condorcet winner is the one that beats every other candidate in a 1 on 1. Thanks for the great article, and I think we're much closer to on the same page now.
About score voting, I think you're mostly getting at my concerns with "understanding why we’d expect it to work well is actually very complicated". Put a little differently, I think an important aspect of a voting system is that a voter, if they're well researched and have clear views, feels confident in their vote and understands how their vote is impacting the results. This is the key benefit (despite basically everything else being terrible) of FPTP. FPTP almost always leads to just 2 parties and you vote for the better one. If you decide to throw your vote away, at least you probably did it knowingly. Now it's still the case that in primaries some candidates might win and some might lose, so voting for your favorite is not always best. However, the nature of the system makes this pretty intuitive. The one downside of RCV is that it makes this a bit less intuitive. However, it is basically exactly the same thing. And voters still seem to understand this pretty decently (many people who ranked Murkowski ahead of Chesbro clearly understood this in Alaska). And everything else about RCV is strictly superior to FPTP. In score voting, however, it is not at all clear how you should vote even with a strong understanding of all the candidates and your own preferences. Imagine an election in a 60-40 D district. Since it's a left-wing seat say we get 1 R and 2 Ds running. With one candidate all the R voters unite and give their candidate 10s and the 2 Ds 0s (I know they shouldn't but let's say they have no preference among the Ds). Say the Ds are split exactly 30-30 and the true preferences of the voters is 10 for their favorite and 8 for their second. So a poll comes out and shows a 540-540-400 race. Now supporters of the Ds can see that the Ds are far ahead and it may seem that they should vote 10-0-0 instead of 10-8-0. Whichever D has more of their supporters willing to "effectively lie" will then be the winner. Unless of course way too many people think this way and then even the R could win. The system works better if everyone expresses their true preferences out of 10. However, here the side defecting from that more gets to win. That seems quite problematic. I don't know if scenarios like this would actually occur. However, I do think people would feel betrayed that their own vote was "wrong" and thus directly led to an outcome they don't like in a way they don't with our current system (choosing to give Romney a 0 leading to Trump winning over Harris and Romney in a three way may be no worse than voting for Harris instead of Romney in a Dem primary then leading to a loss that would have been a win, but intuitively it feels different). Don't get me wrong, their are clear big advantages to score voting. Romney has no chance of ever winning a Dem primary, but maybe he could win this three way and save us from Trump. In fact, I've kind of talked myself into thinking some of my objections are illogical (the same things happens with primaries). However, I certainly hate the idea of not knowing who I should vote for, and I think a lot of people would feel similarly. And I think this is a legitimate problem for a voting system. If people don't feel like their vote is pushing in the direction they want it to, I think they will hate the system. Imagine how people would feel if a majority vote Republican, but the Dems win because they're more unified in giving all their candidates 10s.
Another problem is the incentives for the candidate are really bad as well. What should Harris tell people to give Romney? Certainly her own interests don't align well with the country's. For all these reasons, I think, despite the complexity, I definitely favor ranked condorcet methods over score voting. Versus ranked choice voting, I agree score voting is better for primaries, but I think Alaska's top 4 and then RCV I might prefer to score, not totally sure though. Top 4 and then ranked condorcet sounds great though.
Some ways I think RCV is good and you underestimate it a bit as an improvement (although you're certainly right that it's far from perfect:
1. Getting to vote for your favorite candidate is healthy. It's good if people can vote for a Green/Libertarian/Independet/etc without throwing their vote away. Less people will get discouraged and hate the system even if it doesn't change the results.
2. Scenarios like the Montana/Nebraska senate races are much easier. You don't have to clear the entire party or get a candidate to run on dropping out. All you have to do is get more first place votes. I'm confident Bodnar can do that against Bankhead.
3. The primary electorate is effectively much more moderate and much higher turnout. You often effectively hold the primary in the general. If Mills and Platner were on the same ballot in the general much better chances for Mills to win (of course this doesn't work if you still have partisan primaries, but this is largely defeating the purpose, it needs to be like Alaska)
4. It's really crazy when people win primaries with 25% of the vote. Look at the Maine Dem governor primary, would be a disaster with RCV
5. Related to that it allows people to stay in when they're not viable without affecting the race in primaries if you are having them. This has two benefits. One you don't get cases like Porter and Mahan playing spoilers. But secondly voters are smart and mostly consolidate. However, if they don't have to this can really change the dynamics and maybe someone like Mahan wouldn't collapse as people desperately try to consolidate. This can A give you more information about true preferences and B maybe even change who wins if it's a collective action problem.
6. I think the problem of ballot exhaustion is probably a bit less than people say. A surprising number of partisans do in fact vote for candidate A and then don't show up when B wins the primary for the general. I'd like some numbers on this, but I'd bet people are overestimating how many are exhausting because they're lazy and or don't understand and how many just legitimately don't want to vote for the other person.
7. Total unknowns aren't a problem, which they have the potential to be in either score or even ranked condorcet though less so.
I guess I should also reply to the other part as well:
- on it not being clear what the right strategy is in score voting, I do think just putting your genuine relative preferences is usually a pretty good strategy in score voting. It’s not optimal, especially if you there’s good polling, but I think it’s usually close.
I guess separately I also don’t see the correct strategy being obvious as as much of a selling point as you do. The one reason I see it as a clear selling point is that it makes people more satisfied with the electoral system and want a change less, but bracketing actual adoption concerns I don’t think I care that much. As long as what people end up doing makes things go ok, I think it’s fine.
- on specific dynamics regarding voter and candidate incentives, you bring up good points. I remember thinking about this kind of stuff briefly but perhaps not seriously enough; I might edit this post again to include more of that discussion. I guess one thing that helps with coordination is having score voting in addition to primaries rather than as a replacement.
And about how candidates should recommend voters make their ballot. I do always find it weird when candidates tell their voters who to rank second under RCV. Like, I feel like they are not the right people to give signals to voters; better signals would come from other elites that voters know represent their views better, which hopefully they’d listen to more under score voting.
Ok, in order:
1. Do voters hate FPTP? Clearly not enough to actually push for another electoral system, so I'm not exactly sure what discouraged means. People get discouraged about politics in general, or about their preferred candidates not getting elected (like online leftists with establishment Dems in general elections), but I don't think it has a ton to do with not getting to vote for their favorite in the first round. I don't think being discouraged because your preferred candidate doesn't win the primary is that different from being discouraged that the final round of RCV doesn't include your favorite candidate.
2. I think it's generally significantly easier to get a candidate to drop out than it is to get a majority of that candidate's supporters to strategically rank a different candidate higher. The fact that Montana Dems have not done so is genuinely unusual in my eyes; they very well might in the end, and in the case that they don't, I'm not sure that Bodnar will get more votes than Bankhead.
3. This is true, the reason I didn't get to it here because I discussed it more in-depth in my post on party candidate selection: https://redfishbluefish.substack.com/p/party-candidate-selection. But more generally, RCV clearly doesn't select for moderates more than score voting or ranked condorcet. So from the standpoint of this broader series, where I'm primarily analyzing the question "what electoral system would you choose if you were designing from scratch", the tendency of RCV to select slightly more for moderation in this way is not an obvious benefit; if you really wanted moderates to win, you shouldn't pick RCV. I put more thought into the exact practical effects with adoption constraints in this post because I know a lot of people read this post without reading the broader series, but yeah.
4. Here's where it gets interesting, and I recommend reading my post on party candidate selection (see above) for broader context. Basically, I think the main issue with primaries is not that the electorate is more extreme, but that they are winner-take-all. The biggest bloc in a party can just win everything, as the Trump-loyal wing of the Republican party has done. There is a minority of Republican primary voters who don't automatically vote for whoever Trump endorses, but they always lose.
Given that, the right thing to do is to redesign the primary system in its entirety. But if you're not going to do that, I'd argue that the randomness that FPTP brings in is actually if anything a benefit. Trump-resistant Republicans can occasionally win primaries by luck if their opponents split the field, like Cornyn would have if not for the runoff, which is better than them never being able to.
5. Yeah, I think this is what I mean when I say "People may be less likely not to vote for one of the top 2 candidates than under RCV because they don’t have to rely on polling and are satisfied with their ability to vote for their top choice first"
6. Ok so, ballot exhaustion is by definition irrational. Limiting to the usual definition of not ranking all the candidates, it is always better to rank other candidates below than to just leave your ballot empty. The one potential asterisk is that it can serve as a signal for future politicians/voters to appeal to them, like Reform party voters in 2024, but I don't think that's what you're talking about.
I think what you're saying is that not showing up to vote is also irrational, and a lot of voters who exhausted their ballots would also have not showed up to vote in the runoff/general election anyway. I'd love to see empirical work on this but I don't think this is true; as I mentioned on twitter all the work I've seen suggests that candidate-specific turnout effects are very small. This is especially true for downballot races in presidential years: not many people are choosing to show up or not based on who is on their governor ballot.
Steelmanning your position a bit, maybe you could shift to undervoting, ie that people show up to the presidential race but leave their eg Senate ballot empty. I asked Claude to look into the total senate votes in each state in 2024 (that had a senate race) as a fraction of the presidential votes, I can't paste in the picture of the results but most of them are about 99% (Senate races had 99% of the votes as simultaneous presidential races), the only one below 94% is Utah at 87% (which I find really weird; I'd think if anything more people in Utah would vote in the senate race than presidential cus all the mormons hate Trump). The competitive ones (NV, MI, PA, WI) were all upward of 98.5%; Nebraska at 98.5% too. Claude says this is the norm historically. "Overvoting", voting in presidential races but not corresponding Senate races, happened in 1 state, Montana, at 100.7%.
7. Not sure what you mean by total unknowns.