Smith Primary to Approval
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@sarawolk I can envision a natural progression as: (1) implement straight approval, (2) eventually indicate the shortcomings of approval in guaranteeing election of Smith set candidates, (3) reform to include a ranked primaries to restrict to the Smith set before the final approval vote.
I agree it is not feasible to implement the kind of change needed for the mentioned kind of system all at once.
If approval were established somehow, the (rational, IMO) debate relevant to (2) and (3) would probably be about majoritarianism versus participation and maybe some tactical considerations.
Your point about tie-breaking is fair. For example, why not use Bucklin voting restricted to the Smith set, adjusting ranks to include only those candidates, which is similar to your suggestion. One major reason in that specific case is because it fails independence of clones.
I’m not necessarily just after a simple tie breaker. My concern is with reconciling majority cycles, which can destabilize the system. Something like approval in a second round enables the competing majorities to compromise more directly with full information. Otherwise a true majority may feel jilted by an arbitrary tie breaking rule.
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@jack-waugh it definitely conforms to Frohnmeyer balance, what is Shentrup balance?
Unfortunately it fails participation as any Condorcet method must. I think Condorcet is also incompatible with favorite betrayal, that may need checking.
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I list both names because Clay said he was involved with defining the balance condition.
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If the proposal were to have a primary and then always have a runoff, I would think to suggest that the primary should be PR. This would tend to give voters a real choice in the runoff instead of two similar candidates. But you are proposing a kind of primary that under some conditions would obviate the need for a runoff.
Approval, Score, STAR [10], other Shentrup/Frohnmayer balance-compliant systems [9]; everything else [0].
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@jack-waugh I agree, PR is probably preferable in many ways to alternatives. Still, I think we’re too entrenched in the way our current system works and it may be most effective to start by modifying single-winner systems, specifically transitioning from choose-one plurality to approval plurality.
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@cfrank I'm still talking about a single-winner system. The winner would be chosen in the general election.
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I list both names because Clay said he was involved with defining the balance condition.
I don't think so, but Clay was involved with the invention of STAR Voting. Maybe that's what you were thinking of or what he meant? I could be wrong. In any case we generally are trying to move away from naming things after people which is why this was named the Equality Criterion and then codified as such in the halls of peer review. Something we all worked very hard to do.
Clay and Mark both deserve quite a lot of credit for their many contributions, but let's help these terms and criteria catch on by being consistent with using their formal names.
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@cfrank - it's odd that you say that "two-stage voting systems seem like a hard sell in the USA". I think one-and-done systems feel risky, especially now that I've been a voter in San Francisco for well over a decade. Ranking 13 candidates for mayor in 2024 was an awful experience, even for a political junkie like me. Moreover, almost every place in the U.S. uses two-stage FPTP. You'll note that FairVote is trying to defend its two-stage "top four" system in Alaska, and generally pushing two-stage reform in other places, rather than pushing the one-and-done system we have here in SF.
I think the next best reform to pursue is approval-top-two primary, and a head-to-head general election. That said, I understand some of the corner-case pathologies that some one-and-done approval advocates warn about. I'm becoming more-and-more convinced that a better system than that is a 40%-approval-threshold primary (with minimum two candidates advancing), and an approval general election. If three or more candidates advance, that's a good problem to have.
Having a fixed threshold (like 40%) means that the candidates have a strong incentive to make sure their approval rating is at least 40%. While over time, that may lead to the slightly polarizing strategy of trying to get exactly 40% enthusiastic support (while alienating the other 60% of voters), it also seems likely that alienated 60% of voters would be likely to advance several opposition candidates.
My "40%" may not be the right percentage. If the two big parties were to still remain "the two big parties" under such a system, they might hire large analytics teams to ensure that both parties advance a sea of clones to drown out the other parties. Perhaps the ideal percentage is "50%" (with a two-candidate minimum). That way, all candidates are incentivized to achieve majority approval. If three or more candidates advance in this system, that's an incredibly good problem to have.
Regardless, it seems to me that, in a world of paper ballots and hand recounts, we need to avoid overly complicated ballots. Given the experience in St. Louis, I think two-stage approval can work really well.
Rob Lanphier
https://electowiki.org/wiki/User:RobLa -
@robla that's a fair point, thank you for your response. In terms of the two-stage aspect in the US, I feel it is more of a de facto party-driven apparatus on top of the actual formal system, in contrast to France for instance where the two stages are the formally recognized method. You're probably also right that ranking more than a handful of candidates is generally pretty unpleasant. In any case I could be wrong about the difficulty of the sell, which would be good.
Approval top-two primary seems like it might be a decent option for single winner, although I figure it doesn't satisfy clone independence, which is pretty unfortunate.
For the fixed approval threshold, you're suggesting that if no candidate obtains the threshold, then the top two proceed?"...under such a system, they might hire large analytics teams to ensure that both parties advance a sea of clones to drown out the other parties." Yes, exactly.
I was also thinking if there is a threshold, 50% should be imposed, since that guarantees some weak level of majoritarianism which seems important and that ordinary approval can lack.In terms of single-winner, I'm on board with 50% approval threshold followed by a final round approval. I think that's really simple and seems to solve many problems.
In principle, it even could let people be lazy and not even bother with the second round if they decide that their first approval ballot is satisfactory enough for them. -
@sarawolk Now Clay responded to me and said he originally proposed the balance condition (and the Frohnmayer name indicates Mark's father; Mark said it was his father who defined the condition).
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@jack-waugh I was reflecting on the balance criterion, and considered a direction for formalization of it that might protect against the adversarial construct I described some years ago.
The idea is to enforce not just existence of “opposite” ballots, which can be too weak, but to demand something like, “There is a public, computationally-tractable ‘reversal’ operation on ballots, induced by the ballot semantics (in some way…), such that every ballot and its reversal cancel under the outcome rule.”
Certain symmetry operations such as permuting/relabeling candidates should commute with the reversal. The above would prohibit the “password attack” mechanism I described, because the ballot reversal operation in that case is neither public nor generally computable.
I’m refraining from demanding additivity in the score-like sense to see whether the property of direct interest can be formalized in some way without it.
Just food for thought.
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@robla The feedback I've heard from various stakeholders and reformers across the landscape is that many people oppose narrowing the field too much, which can prevent minor parties from having a meaningful voice in the general or being seen as viable. Being on the general ballot is an important part of the path to becoming viable for a third party.
For that reason, I think there's more consensus around advancing a set number of candidates to the general (instead of setting an approval threshold). Given that the voting method does fine with multiple viable candidates, I think advancing the top 4, 5 or 6 is totally reasonable. The upper limit is set by voter fatigue.
I think two stage Approval is generally the way to go for Approval elections. Approval Top-Two makes a lot of sense for jurisdictions that already have Top-Two, but all other things being equal I'd recommend Approval Top-5 or Top-4. I'm not sure if an even number is better or not, but that's something that should be studied and modeled for each system.
For STAR I generally recommend having a conditional primary, where the top 5 (or 4) advance. And, if less candidates than that register you just skip the primary all together, which saves a bunch of money.
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