Hi, it’s been a while since I’ve posted here (but I really am a long-time member, honest!)
I was thinking about third parties and primaries and I feel generally stuck on one basic inconsistency. I wanted to ask the community of thinkers here how they reconcile it, kind of get a summary of what the recent thinking is.
Basically, it seems like Democrats (including kos) are generally in favor of closed primaries, while also being against the existence of third-party candidates due to the spoiler effect.
This seems inconsistent to me, because it seems like a basic recipe for leaving many locked out of the political process — they don’t identify with either party, so they are (ideally) locked out of the primaries, and then they don’t like either nominee, so they feel unrepresented by their choices — so of course they are going to be in favor of third parties. So it is like being in favor of an action (having closed primaries), while being against the inevitable affects of those actions (third parties), which to me seems irrational.
I can think of a few rationales to square this inconsistency, but none of them are very satisfying:
- Citizens should join one of the two parties anyway: I think kos generally subscribes to this view. It strikes me as unrealistic in practice though, since it’s easily possible to have mainstream views that aren’t represented by either party. For instance, being socially conservative but pro-trade — this kind of “Buckley conservatism” is all but rooted out of the Republican Party these days, and none of the top four presidential candidates represent these views. This view also strikes me as vaguely authoritarian, in that just telling people to do this doesn’t actually mean it’s going to happen.
- Citizens should compromise and vote for one of the two major candidates: This is the most widely practiced advice I see — if neither party represents you, go for the lesser of two evils. I happen to agree with this, but it’s not actually a solution, it’s just a prescription on how to deal with the unfairness. Again, unsatisfying.
- Open primaries: Democrats dislike this idea because… well, I forget why, I think partly because it invites Republicans to come in and game the results. That is a good reason, but I don’t know of the other non-strategic reasons. Perhaps too much risk of driving out the more progressive true believers?
- Semi-open primaries: This would prevent Republicans from voting in Democratic primaries, but allow independents and non-affiliated voters. It appears this is opposed too, but why? Is it just about the risk of driving out the more progressive true believers?
- Same-day voter registration: This sounds like an awesome idea and I’m in favor of it, but in practice, wouldn’t this have exactly the same effect as semi-open or open primaries? I suspect those in favor of closed primaries are actually against same-day voter registration.
There’s one other way that I think closed primaries could be made consistent, but it would require a ton of organizing and work. It would basically be about how to make third-party votes costless and eliminate the spoiler effect.
What’s fascinating to me about this is that I see tons of prescriptions out there on how to eliminate the spoiler effect, but they all seem flawed to me, and I’ve never seen one quite like this. It’s not really an original idea of my own as it is a synthesis of a bunch of other thoughts (including some diaries here I googled once and can’t find now — perhaps Kagro, Waldman, or Yossarian?) and the effort of trying to take them to a rational conclusion.
Basically, you have to look at the spoiler effect differently, for the Presidency versus House Representatives. For the House, it may be possible to convince a state to award their federal representatives proportionally, rather than by winner-take-all districts. It may be possible to do this without requiring an act of Congress or a Constitutional Amendment. It would require ranked voting and some counting method that depends on the method of selecting the representatives. There are some Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) variants that are good for multi-winner elections like Single Transferable Vote (STV), and there are also Condorcet variants that can be used.
For the Presidency, this is where it gets really interesting. Because when you’re talking about a single-winner election, the only way to get a single winner without risking a spoiler effect is to use a counting method that identifies a Condorcet Winner — which required ranked voting — if the Condorcet Winner exists.
The Condorcet Winner is simply the candidate that would defeat all other candidates in head-to-head elections, which is about as pure a definition of a Democratic Winner as you’ll find.
It is possible that some elections may not have a Condorcet Winner. But this is rare, and in these cases the Presidency could solve these “ties” the same way it does now — by sending it to the House. (You can find out more about Condorcet Winners by researching Condorcet Voting, but beware — the wikipedia article on this is poorly written by being overly focused on “tiebreaking methods” for when a Condorcet Winner doesn’t exist).
The problem with finding a Condorcet Winner statewide is that it’s incompatible with the Electoral College. Say some state realizes they prefer a third-party candidate to both major candidates — all they do is increase the odds of no one getting to 270 Electoral Votes.
Luckily, there’s a way to invalidate the Electoral College using the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). The problem there is that it would use the popular vote instead, which has the same spoiler problems!
It seems the answer would be to combine the NPVIC with Condorcet Voting. Here’s how it would work.
- States would join a new “NCWIC” (National Condorcet Winner Interstate Compact), where as soon as 270 EVs (or majority EVs of Electoral College) worth of states join it, it becomes binding and the states agree to award their EVs to the national Condorcet Winner.
- Current single-winner ballots are Condorcet compatible! This means that in the absence of ranked ballots, this Compact would be equivalent to finding the national popular vote winner.
- As individual states get used to ranked voting and tire of the spoiler effect, they could allow ranked voting for Presidential Candidates. It doesn’t mean voters would have to fully rank everyone, they could just continue to pick their top choice if that’s all they care about. But if they have preferences among third party and major candidates, they could express those preferences through ranked voting.
- As states report their presidential election results via ranked ballots, these ranked ballots would be taken into account by the Condorcet counting method (which can be described as “Instant Round Robin”).
- Voters in other states that haven’t elected ranked voting would still have to pick only one candidate, but that is not worse than now, and there would be a demonstrated political path for them to improve matters.
- In the rare case where there is no Condorcet Winner, the House would pick the winner from the Schwartz Set (the set of candidates that beat all other candidates head-to-head).
At any rate, if I were to boil down the problem into a simple question that asks for a solution, it would be something along the lines of:
How can we encourage a strong party through closed primaries while protecting the party from spoiler effects?
The answer seems to be a way to find a way to allow closed primaries, while also allowing elections to accurately reflect the full preferences of third-party voters.
There’s one huge counterpoint to all this that shouldn’t be glossed over. There’s a valid argument to be made for not even wanting third party representation, especially on Congress. Multi-party legislative bodies tend to have confusing alliances. They affect change more rapidly, which means change can lurch back and forth between extremes, more than our relatively stable and slow-moving legislative system, where change tends to be more long-lasting.
If we want to protect that, then to be consistent, it seems we should be more in favor of actually prohibiting third party candidates entirely somehow. But again — if we were to truly accomplish that, it would involve reducing the branding power of each of our parties, encouraging a wider spectrum of viewpoints in each of our parties, and allowing at least semi-open primaries. Otherwise, we’re basically in favor of disenfranchising large portions of our society that aren’t represented by either party.
If more people feel represented, then more people will be engaged in the political and Democratic process, and we will end up with results that are more healthily representative of our society as a whole. (Assuming that is what we want as fans of democracy.)
So, assuming you’re in favor of greater third party representation that doesn’t hurt major parties through spoiler effects, here are the action items:
- Learn how to start an initiative in your state that allows proportional representation for your federal House Representatives
- Learn how to convince your state to alter the NPVIC to the National Condorcet Winner Interstate Compact (if they are already part of the Compact), or start/join the NCWIC if they aren’t.