[Election-Methods] Dopp: 2. “Requires centralized vote counting procedures at the state-lev el"

[Jonathan Lundell]

On Jun 13, 2008, at 8:22 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

>> Nonpartisan? Hardly.
>
> I'd need to see more to be able to agree with that. But that is one  
> election out of many. Most of the IRV elections are for Supervisor.  
> Bill Clinton doesn't typically come to town to campaign for a  
> Supervisor. Are those partisan? I don't think so. And those are the  
> ones going into instant runoff, mostly, because of the large numbers  
> of candidates and more closely contested races.

In California, nonpartisan (which is to say local/city/county) offices  
serve as the minor leagues for the Show in Sacramento and DC. This  
isn't really a matter for dispute; it's just the way it is.

I don't think that the point is all that important wrt ranked voting,  
though. The relevant question is whether there are clones (which  
needn't be perfect clones) in the election. And the answer is that the  
presence of clones is not dependent on the race being de jure (or even  
de facto) partisan.

A case in point is the just-concluded Democratic primary for  
California State Senate District 13. A primary is, for our purposes,  
non-partisan. The election had three candidates with a chance of  
election, a progressive incumbent, a challenger to the left, and a  
challenger to the right who ordinarily would have no chance at  
election in this district, but saw a shot as a consequence of a split  
between the first two. (You'll agree that we can treat a party primary  
as a nonpartisan election, yes?)

In the event, the left challenger pulled out a plurality win, but it's  
easy to see how it might have been otherwise. Under IRV (or approval,  
for that matter), the right challenger's supporters might well have  
elected the incumbent; or the right challenger might have beaten the  
incumbent and left challenger if they had more evenly split the left  
vote.

It's also easy to see how this real-world election could have resulted  
in heavily strategic voting in an approval election, and that either  
IRV or a Condorcet-compliant method would have likely resulted in a  
better result, for some reasonable definition of "better".

All that aside, my point is more narrow. The distinction between  
(nominally) partisan and nonpartisan isn't particularly relevant to  
the question of election method.
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