[EM] How would you fix California's top two primary?

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 01/11/2017 06:43 AM, fdpk69p6uq at snkmail.com wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 6:56 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
>
>     because it's
>     better than just picking two Approval winners right out.
>
>
> You *should* pick the top two Approval (or Score) winners to go to the
> run-off.  This isn't proportional representation.  The goal of a
> single-winner election is to find the candidate who most closely matches
> (the entirety of) the population.  If there has to be a runoff, then it
> should be between the two people who are most liked, because they are
> closest to the centroid of the population.  This means they will likely
> be moderates from the same party, and that's a good thing because that's
> where the average voter leans, too.  Then voters can then choose between
> the two based on hairstyle or whatever.

But if you do that, then cloning is easy and rewards the party with the 
most disciplined voters. Each party simply fields two candidates who are 
as close as possible to each other, and then the runoff becomes pretty 
much redundant.

Not a good outcome, I'd say!