[EM] Approval-based replacement for jungle primary

VoteFair electionmethods at votefair.org
Wed Dec 5 15:49:51 PST 2018


A new subreddit (within Reddit) has just been created to get approval 
voting adopted in California primary elections:

   r/ApprovalCalifornia

I strongly support the use of approval voting in U.S. primary elections. 
  The winner will never be from the wrong political party, so the 
imperfections of approval voting are small compared to the huge 
unfairnesses of plurality voting.

The top-two runoff method in California's general election takes care of 
yielding a fair outcome in the general election (in spite of using 
plurality voting).

The fact that only the wording on the ballots needs to change make this 
a much easier reform.

The more people realize that there are other kinds of ballots, the 
sooner the even better reforms can be adopted.

The method recommended in this thread is interesting, and might be even 
better than standard approval voting.  When California starts using 
approval ballots, hopefully the relevant vote counts will be shared to 
allow this method to become either better validated, or not.

On 12/5/2018 1:40 PM, Rob Lanphier wrote:> What I fear: as the system 
becomes routine, sophisticated candidates
 > will learn to optimize their primary candidacies to achieve whatever
 > the minimum percentage required to guarantee them a spot on the
 > general election ballot.  50% is a respectable target.  33% is
 > horrifyingly low target.  With FPTP, we live in a world where each
 > party optimizes for 50.1% inclusion by estranging the other 49.9% that
 > aren't part of the tribe.  I shudder to think about what tactics would
 > emerge to optimize political tribes for 33.4% in/66.6% out.

Reforms of how voting is done within a legislature can fix this 
unfairness.  I created www.NegotiationTool.com to demonstrate how that 
can be done.

Richard Fobes


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