[EM] Primaries?

[Forest Simmons]

On Sat, 27 Mar 2004, Dave Ketchum wrote:

> -------- Original Message --------
> From: Bart Ingles <bartman at netgate.net>
> To: EM List <election-methods at electorama.com>
> Subject: [EM] Argument for Approval Primaries
> Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 09:49:40 -0800
>
> It occurs to me that one place where ranked ballot methods are entirely
> unsuitable is in party primary elections.  Here neither the CW nor the
> SU maximizer are necessarily winnable choices, which seems to moot those
> criteria.  A similar statement applies to any determinate system.
>
> ...
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Disagreed!  If a method is "good enough" to select a single winner in the
> general election, then it must be good enough, and most logical choice,
> for use in related primaries.  While the details are a bit different in
> primaries, the basic issue is to select the best candidate as seen by the
> voters.
>

Suppose that the Democrats use Condorcet to select the candidate that has
the best chance of winning against Bush. ["Any Democrat is Better than
Bush."]

A Condorcet method might well be the best method to pick such a candidate,
if the voters are willing to (and remember to) rank the candidates
according to winnability (over Bush) rather than in order of actual
perceived merit.

It seems to me that any time a general election without a primary would
result in a Smith set intersecting more than one party, then winnability
would be the major issue if there were primaries.

Forest