Wondered if anyone had thoughts on more democratic way to conduct primaries? I don't like the idea of ranked voting in elections where there are just a handful of candidates, but it seems like it would make sense for primaries, where there are 20+ candidates. The current process strongly favors the extreme candidates like Trump or more outliers like Bernie Sanders. The majority of the electorate would only vote for one of the (let's just say) seven boring/normal/moderate candidates, but they're all splitting up the votes because there's not a whole lot of differentiation in those candidates. These people would never vote for the extreme candidate over any of the moderate ones. Meanwhile, all it takes is that large but still minority amount of the "crazy" electorate to all vote for the same respective "crazy" candidate, and your stuck with a candidate that the majority of the primary electorate may actually be their last choice. It seems like the Democrats could have ran into a similar fate with Bernie Sanders if it wasn't for other candidates deciding to drop out towards the end. I've heard "ranked voting" mentioned a lot recently, but not really with relation to the primaries. I'm sure there are pros and cons, and possibly even other methods of voting that could minimize the power of the fringe of the citizenry in primaries.
I see no reason to restrict RCV to just the primaries. If you have RCV in general elections you will have a lot more candidates than just the usual two or three, and that's the point.
I should have done a google search before I posted. Four states did this for the democrat primaries in 2020. https://www.fairvote.org/presidential_primaries_2020
Hmm, I may just need to understand the process and how the scores are tabulated. I was thinking of their being 3 candidates with let's say two republican leaning and one democrat leaning. Let's say the state is divided 50/50 between he parties. So, 50% of the conservatives vote 1 and 2 for the conservatives and don't even put a "3rd place vote" for the democrat. Meanwhile, the democrats only vote the for the Democrat and don't even put a second/third place vote. Does a divided vote like that favor one side over the other?
The problem with Republican primaries is that they a lot of their primaries are winner take all. With Democratic primaries there is at least a proportional split of delegates which creates an effect similar to RCV. And I suspect the remaining caucuses will slowly disappear which will remove that element from the equation. But Republicans have a lot of winner take all primaries so someone like Trump was able to win the entire slate of delegates from several states despite only winning a plurality of the vote in each of them.
Thanks for the link. Yeah, I was looking for responses like B-Bob's in that thread. I had a feeling there might be unintended consequences that can show up.
Can you clarify what you think is the negative of it when there are just a handful of candidates? It's basically just an immediate runoff system, and I don't think anyone has problems with runoffs?
Sorry - I hadn't seen this when I responded. If all the GOPers only vote for GOPers candidates and all the Dems only vote Dems (and assuming there are no independents), the eventual winner would always be whichever party is in the majority in that jurisdiction. If there were more GOP voters than Dems, a GOPer would always win, and vice-versa. If it's exactly 50/50 in your scenario, the final outcome would be a tie between the more popular of the two GOP candidates and the lone Dem candidate.
Here in Minneapolis we have RCV for local elections (where you might have 10 or 20 candidates). The rule here is you only get to rank three candidates on the ballot. So you're not stuck ranking 20 candidates. You're just picking your top 3 choices and if your top choice doesn't hit the threshold on a given round, your vote is reallocated to your second or third choice. The system works fine. There's just a lot of confusion about it.
