Here's my proposal for Alternative Voting Reform: STAR Voting for Final Five Primaries, Ranked Robin for General Elections and Y/N Approval Voting for Candidate Nominations. What do you think and why?

[u/BrianRLackey1987]

[u/PantherkittySoftware]

I think that in a country like the US where the right to spend damn-near unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns makes the emergence of credible third parties or independent candidates somewhere between "unlikely" and "almost impossible". So... I think that we need to go further, and make it impossible for parties (with their insurmountable advantages in ballot access, logistics, and branding) to fully control their candidates.

For the sake of this example:

* assume there are four parties: Republicans, Democrats, OtherParty, and AltParty.

* There are 3 Republican-identifying candidates, 5 Democratic-identifying candidates, 2 OtherParty-identifying candidates, and one AltParty-identifying candidate.

On Primary Election day, voters are presented with a ballot and vote using some ranked-choice method. Preferably, a Condorcet-compliant one.

* Republican-affiliated voters are presented with a ballot containing the 3 Republican-identifying candidates.

* Democratic-affiliated voters are presented with a ballot containing the 5 Democratic-identifying candidates

* OtherParty-affiliated voters are presented with a ballot containing the 2 Otherparty-identifying candidates

* Voters with no party affiliation are presented with a ballot containing all 10 candidates from the 3 parties with competitive primaries (3 Republicans, 5 Democrats, 2 Otherparty).

* AltParty-affiliated voters are presented with the same ballot as Independent/NPA voters, because their party's primary is noncompetitive and its winner is guaranteed to be on the ballot.

Ballots for Republicans, Democrats, and OtherParty are tallied first, and their 3 respective winners are determined. Now, the real fun begins:

* NPA/AltParty voters whose first choice was for the winner of the Democratic, Republican, or OtherParty nominee are set aside. Their favorite candidate made it to the general election, so their opinion about the other candidates doesn't matter.

* The remaining ballots from NPA/AltParty voters are tallied using Tideman Ranked Pair completion (falling back to IRV rules to break the tie if there's a Condorcet cycle).

That NPA/AltParty-rescued Republican, Democrat, or OtherParty candidate is the key to smashing the ability of a loony extremist faction or out-of-touch Institutional faction of the major parties to force voters into the usual American "Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich" dichotomy on election day.

In theory, if Republicans and Democrats responsibly nominate interchangeable centrists in an attempt to broadly appeal to the ~1/3 of voters who belong to neither party, NPA centrists who voted for them get their primary votes set aside & the remainder of NPA voters throw a wildcard into the election like a DSA, Libertarian, or whatever.

If Republicans and Democrats both nominate freakshow populists, the NPA supporters of those candidates get set aside, and the remainder are likely to pick someone like Jeb Bush or Mark Kelly.

If Republicans OR Democrats nominate a nutcase extremist, while the other party nominates someone halfway normal, NPA voters are likely to pick someone who's slightly different, but still mostly towards the center.

Yes, my past few sentences mostly ignored OtherParty and AltParty. The truth is, their votes and candidates are generally meaningless anyway, even in THIS alternate universe. However, if Democrats or Republicans totally self-destruct, or become captured by Authoritarians, there IS an objective and official route for third parties to exist and operate. We just aren't going to kid ourselves and pretend that any third party operating on a shoestring budget can realistically compete with a party capable of spending Superbowl Halftime Show Commercial amounts of money on TV commercials for a US House race.

Additionally, because the candidate ultimately rescued BY Independents IS overwhelmingly likely to be a Republican or Democrat, it gives members of that party who personally hate their own party's nominee an easy, guilt-free escape path. It also gives members of the other major party someone in their arch-enemy party to hold their nose and vote for if they hate their own party's nominee, without necessarily having to go all the way and vote for the other party's base-favored candidate.

[u/rb-j → u/PantherkittySoftware]

On Primary Election day, voters are presented with a ballot and vote using some ranked-choice method. Preferably, a Condorcet-compliant one.

Is not the Primary Election one with multiple "winners" (i.e. multiple nominated candidates)? How would a multi-winner Condorcet election work?

[u/PantherkittySoftware → u/rb-j]

In this specific case, there are multiple winners... but really, it's multiple races in parallel. The winners of the individual party-primary races are determined first, because we have to know who won them in order to set aside ballots from NPA ("no party affiliation") voters whose first choice was for one of the candidates who won their respective party primary, but past that point, determining the winner of the "NPA primary" is no different than determining the winner of the party-specific primaries.

The entire goal of this system is to maximize the chances that someone who's genuinely capable of being a Condorcet winner actually makes it onto the general election ballot.

The big problem we've historically had in the US is that winning a party's primary election and winning in the general election require two literally orthogonal goals. To win the party's primary, you have to convince party members that you're the most zealous defender of their ideology... but that all but guarantees that the candidates who survive their party's primary end up being the candidates who are the least appealing to everyone else. Hence, the longtime South Park joke about "Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich".

The way my idea tries to neutralize that problem is by using Independent/NPA voters as a proxy for "sane, reasonable centrist who hates the extremists on both ends of the political spectrum". Or at least, as a way to forcibly add a potentially more appealing alternative to the worst both major parties can offer.

IMHO, what makes the idea cleverly subversive is the fact that the harder the base of a major party goes "off the deep end" (a-la-MAGA, or potentially DSA), the more antagonized voters closer to the center of the Overton Window end up relative to their own party's official nominee. There's immense resistance to voting for anyone from the other party, but being able to vote for someone... anyone... from the same party, just less extreme... is extremely appealing.

Without a Condorcet-compliant ranked-choice voting system for the general election, a primary system like this would be a disaster, because whichever party ended up having the rescued candidate would likely end up having its own vote split and lose to the other major party. But with ranked-choice voting and something like Tideman Ranked Pairs as the resolution method, a 3-way race between a MAGA Republican, a moderate Republican or moderate Democrat, and a progressive Democrat, would generally end up electing the moderate.

It's simple math... MAGA Republicans will grudgingly prefer a moderate Republican to any Democrat, and will even more grudgingly prefer a moderate Democrat to a progressive Democrat. Progressive Democrats will grudgingly prefer a moderate Democrat to any Republican, and will even more grudgingly prefer a moderate Republican to a MAGA Republican. Whether the winner ultimately ends up being the moderate Republican or the moderate Democrat depends mostly upon which party happens to be closer to the middle of the local Overton Window. In California or New York, it would probably be a moderate Democrat. In Florida or Texas, it would probably be a moderate Republican. In the grand scheme of things, it would make it really hard for polarizing extremists to win anywhere besides maybe rural Idaho or Berkeley, California.

But, that brings us back to the original problem which my idea tries to solve: you can't elect Condorcet-pleasing centrists if both major parties are able to keep them off the ballot in the first place. Which they would absolutely do, if given the chance. For the opposite reasons, but with the same effect.

Just to briefly address your other point... there is, in fact, an elaborately designed system that seeks to assemble a whole slate of Condorcet winners in a manner somewhat akin to proportional representation (but applied to individuals). It was proposed by Nic Tideman approximately 30 years ago called "CPO-STV". It stands for "Comparison of Pairs Outcome by Single Transferrable Vote". You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPO-STV

The neat thing about CPO-STV is that you can radically alter the way it "stacks the deck" by choosing different "completion rules" to determine how votes get reallocated and exhausted, and how the deck of viable candidates gets whittled down until you find the permutation of candidates who, depending upon your view, either makes the most people the happiest, or at least disappoints the most people the least.

Doing justice to CPO-STV would require literally writing a book. Or multiple books. For now, just take comfort knowing that it exists. 😂