[EM] Primaries?

[Dave Ketchum]

On Wed, 31 Mar 2004 12:14:45 -0500 Adam Tarr wrote:

> I don't think we really disagree about anything meaningful, Dave.
> 
>>> I imagine this is common, but they are really doing the primary on 
>>> behalf of the party.  The party could decide to not have a primary, 
>>> just as the state could decide to not do the party the favor of 
>>> administering it.
>>
>> About 100 years ago NY set up its system, in which primaries are done 
>> BY BOE on behalf of the PEOPLE.
>>
>> As to "party":
>>     Libertarians and Greens are national parties - this cuts NO ICE as 
>> to NY law.
>>     Groups willing and able to conform to NY law get the party 
>> privileges that make obeying desirable.
> 
> 
> Right, this is what I mean by "[The government] could provide very 
> strong incentives".  In the case of the Dems and Republicans, they've 
> been in power so long that the line between those parties and the 
> government has blurred a bit.  They got in power and passed the laws 
> which now benefit their parties.  But still, parties are private 
> organizations, and the BoE is a public institution, so the distinction 
> still exists.  If the Democrats WANTED to use Condorcet in their 
> primaries, they could just not use the primary process and run their own 
> primary.


Agreed the Reps and Dems do the laws.  Still, obeying is both desirable 
and POSSIBLE:
      Conservatives have been a party for decades.
      Liberals were a party for decades, until they got unlucky in 
nominating a candidate for governor.
      Have had up to 8 or 10 parties at once - enough to inspire thoughts 
about making it harder to get in (because having so many strains our 
voting machines - which never expected such) - down to 5 at the moment so 
hearing no talk of such.
      Golisano threatened to come in first or second in governor's race in 
2002.  Reps and Dems ARE NOT mentioned by name in the law - Golisano 
getting those votes would have made Independence one of the two major 
parties, displacing Reps or Dems for shared control of BOE and several 
other facilities.

BTW - the law permits parties to control some details by including their 
decisions in party rules, and filing those rules with BOE (e.g., parties 
define the districts for electing their State Committee members).
      While parties CAN do their own thing, BOE does not have to notice if 
that does not conform to what is permitted by law.

Somebody could do something that looked to you like a primary.  They could 
then do petitions that made the winner officially a candidate.
      Still, if this result was a party candidate, dissenting party 
members could submit competing petitions and force BOE to conduct a real 
primary.

> 
>>     Libertarians are able to get above 15,000 signatures, but unable 
>> to get the 50,000 votes (about one percent) for governor to be 
>> recognized as a party.
>>     Greens became a party in 98, failed to get the 50,000 votes to 
>> continue in 02.
>> They did a new thing - got a judge to direct BOE to continue to 
>> maintain party membership lists.
> 
> 
> Obviously alternate election methods will help them enormously in 
> getting the votes they need.
> 
>>>> Anyway, big deal is that it is good for the voters to understand the 
>>>> method used, and that is more practical if both elections use the 
>>>> same method.
>>>
>>>
>>> Probably true, but as I said before I wouldn't mind multiple winners, 
>>> and the goals of the elections are not exactly the same.
>>
>> One of my reasons for starting this series was that having ranked 
>> ballots in general elections removes one big reason for needing single 
>> winner primaries.
>>
>> Sorting out goals seems too big to solve here.
>>
>>> Well, when you said, "[If] a party is willing and able to move ahead 
>>> - let it", that implied to me that you thought the government had the 
>>> right to not let them.
>>
>>
>> See my words above.
> 
> 
> None of that really implies to me that they have the right to not let 
> them - just that they are providing really strong incentives for them to 
> stick to the current process.
> 
> I think that if you convinced one of the major parties to go with an 
> alternate election method, they would probably be able to force the BoE 
> to help them use it.  Just speculation at this point, of course.
> 

One does not cut it, for we have stumbled into taking advantage of a 
Supreme Court decision in a way that gives Dems control of the Assembly 
and Reps control of the Senate.  However they can agree and then direct 
the BOE to proceed.


>>>>>>      Puzzle:  Assuming the above leads to Condorcet in the 
>>>>>> primary, to select two candidates for the general election - WHY 
>>>>>> NOT?  the arguments are not necessarily the same as related to 
>>>>>> electing two officers for PR.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Not necessarily, sure, but I don't think that Condorcet is clearly 
>>>>> the best method to elect two candidates.  It seems likely that it 
>>>>> would end up picking two candidates from the center of a party, and 
>>>>> nobody from a wing (think Kerry and Edwards, in stead of Kerry and 
>>>>> Dean).  But there have been some stabs taken at Condorcet-flavored 
>>>>> proportional representation.  The best attempt is probably this one:
>>>>> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/election-methods-list/message/10308
>>>>> It's pretty complicated, but worth the read.  Try to sell that to 
>>>>> the public, though...
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> As I said above, we are not doing PR, so almost certainly would not 
>>>> find such complication worth the pain.
>>>
>>>
>>> Probably not, but this does not imply that pure iterative 
>>> single-winner is the best approach, either.  A good compromise (in my 
>>> opinion) would be the sequential variant of the method described in 
>>> the link.  So, first you find the CW, then you find the best 
>>> two-candidate slate with the CW in it, then you find the best 
>>> three-candidate slate with those two candidates in it, and so on 
>>> until you've generated as much of the order as you need.
>>
>> You seem determined to add unneeded complications.
> 

AGAIN, we are NOT doing PR, and it is not clear to me that what might look 
to you like clones have to be a bad thing.

> 
> Well, there's complications, and there's unneeded complications.  The 
> simple fact is that, while Condorcet is an excellent (I would say the 
> best) method for choosing one winner, it is a terrible method for 
> choosing two or more.  It is likely to produce a set of "clone" 
> candidates, all representing the center faction of the electorate.  
> Using some method of PR, no matter how crude, is more likely to get good 
> results.
> 
> I'll happily agree that sequential CFPRM is still really complicated, 
> and probably more complicated then we need.  But how about single 
> non-transferrable vote?  How about cumulative voting?  How about STV-PR?
> 
> All of those are well-understood and relatively simple methods, and all 
> would be dramatically better than using Condorcet to elect two or three 
> people.  As I said, I think Condorcet is the very best single-winner 
> method.  But would a Democrat who supported Howard Dean or Dennis 
> Kucinich be happy if the two Democrats in the general election were 
> Kerry and Edwards?  Because that would be the most likely outcome if you 
> use Condorcet.
> 
> We surely don't need perfect PR in a primary, but some degree of PR is 
> necessary, or producing more than one winner is often almost pointless.
> 
> -Adam

-- 
  davek at clarityconnect.com    people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek
  Dave Ketchum   108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708   607-687-5026
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