I am disappointed that nobody proposed approval voting, which I support. You can read about it at https://electionscience.org/ which is The Center for Election Science (hereafter "The Center"). By letting voters approve of any combination of candidates, candidates are not better or worse off based on how close they are to other candidates. Take California and Washington, which have one primary for all candidates that advance the top two regardless of party. All other things equal, if one party has more candidates, it is harder for those candidates to finish in the top two, and somebody even wrote about if California's 2024 Senate election could have so many more Democratic candidates than Republicans that Democrats could easily win if you add up the votes for all candidates in each party, but Republicans finish in the top two spots because there are so few of them. I am not saying that will happen, and if there was a real risk of that I hope Democrats would drop out, but it is hypothetically possible, and with approval voting Democrats could not lose because there are too many of them. The Center provided an example with people in New York City who voted in the 2012 presidential election. Barack Obama easily won, and Mitt Romney got way more votes than the third place candidate. Later on, a sample of people were allowed to approve of any amount of candidates. Some candidates who got a tiny percent of votes were approved of by more voters than approved of Romney, but those voters voted for Obama and did not have a way of showing they preferred other candidates over Romney. With approval voting, voters never have to choose between their favorite candidate and their preferred candidate who has a chance to win, because voters can approve of more than one candidate. Approval voting might also reduce how much candidates attack each other. In reality, Candidate Y knows that the only votes for him or her are for voters who did not vote for Candidate X (or anybody else). With approval voting, Candidate Y knows that it is possible for voters to approve of him or her and Candidate X, so Candidate Y might give reasons to vote for him or her, rather than attacking Candidate X. The downside of approval voting is that the approvals will add up to greater than 100 percent, which looks strange, but I still support approval voting. Alternatively, the results could be expressed as the amount of approvals without using percentages. Approval voting is used in St. Louis and Fargo, but not any federal or state elections.
Thanks for this useful analysis and history. While your focus was on voting process, I do hope that readers took note of your statement that district and assembly size should also be addressed. You said:
“the most significant conclusions from the research suggest that proportional systems and other structural features—district size and assembly size—that support meaningful multiparty representation are best for minority representation.”
The smaller a district is, the harder it is to gerrymander and the more likely that the assembly will contain a multitude of diverse voices more closely representing the diversity of interests in the community. It is, I think, imperative that we increase the size of the US House of Representatives. My personal preference would be for a Cube-Root Rule that set the size of the House at that number computed by taking the cube-root of the US population as counted in each census.
I have made a similar journey in thinking but turned away from favoring ranked choice voting more than a decade ago. I've documented my journey since then in a series of articles that in some instances analyze the problems of ranked choice voting while other articles examine alternative voting systems. If this interest you, you can find the journal in a series at OpEdNews called "balanced Voting". Another series there called "ranked voting" consists only of the articles that relate to ranked-choice voting.
Closely related to this article is the series here on substack called "Unbiased Elections". The article there on "Ranked Voting" takes a critical deep dive into problems with ranked-choice voting and the other two articles explore an alternative approach to ending the two-party duopoly that has let to the toxic polarization we are now experiencing. More recent articles following up on these topics can be found at OpEdNews.com in the series called "Balanced Voting".l
Way way too complicated for the general public. Fancy schmancy nomenclature and yards of explanatory paragraphs distance many/most people. You are creating dead air space. Sadly.
Surprise surprise. Preferential voting with all its acronyms is just a very complex way of voting with uncertain meaning.
When you place 10 things in preference order, you do not make clear relative importance. Love 9 items and detest the tenth? Love one item detest 9? Whichever of these two you want to express, you mark the voting paper the same way. It gives a result, but does not measure anything useful.
For PR you need multi-member districts. But STV forces you into relatively small MMDs because too many gets too complex.
If you want PR to mean representation of parties proportional to their voter support, you need to measure party support. STV does not do it unless the voter is allowed to only vote for candidates one party and does so. The simple way to measure party support is to allow voters to vote directly for parties, or have a vote for a candidate count as a vote for their party. Then you count the votes. You can even allow voters to distrubute an allocation of votes among candidates/parties. When you do that you can measure the result.
Whether in single member districts or multi-member districts, preferential voting does not help. It is a false notion that seems good because it is complex and mysterious.
You might like STAR Voting, which allows you to express strength of preference and doesn't suffer from the vote-splitting, spoiler effect, and center-squeeze problems of RCV.
I don’t think this is right. RCV in a MMD lowers the # of votes that an elected official needs to win office, promoting a significantly different sort of politics than a FPTP MMD district. I compare the biographies and campaigns of city councilors in Cambridge, MA (RCV MMD - 9 at-large councilors) vs Boston (hybrid of 13 councilors - district & at-large w/ 4 at-large councilors). Campaigns and candidates aimed at winning 10% of the electorate are VASTLY DIFFERENT than ones aimed at winning 50% of the electorate.
Thank you, Lee, for the courage to change your mind - to review the evidence as neutrally as anyone can, to adjust your overall conclusion, and to maintain nuance - and to announce and explain yourself. (And I'm glad your employer permits such intellectual flexibility, too.)
I agree with Bob Wyman that more emphasis on expanding assembly size under PR is advisable, not only for minority representation but also to facilitate multiple significant parties. This is because I see fusion as useful but limited - somewhat akin to single-winner IRV as a "gateway" to PR, though a bit more powerful. Fusion may have more potential to facilitate slow minor party growth than IRV, but ultimately I wonder if it too leaves a minor party with a cap on its potential at the point it starts transitioning to running its own candidates for higher offices rather than cross-endorsing one from a major party, until the Rubicon of multi-member districts is crossed. Nevertheless, as a Michigander, I appreciate that there may be a move underway here to charter a third party and then sue for the right to cross-endorse - though this seems like a legal longshot and the effort seems to have gone silent as far as I can tell.
I am, however, also intrigued with the distant but seemingly more powerful potential of the national popular vote interstate compact as a way to trigger 5-6 party proliferation. Whether sooner or later, there will eventually be both another R POTUS - seemingly in all likelihood, an autocratic populist elected without a popular vote plurality - a "wrong winner" outcome - and a friendly Congress. Assuming the country and world somehow survives the two years for at least one house of Congress to switch to D control (potentially with a lot of damage done) and begin blocking legislation, NPVIC will get a lot of attention among D elites and, I hope, be adopted by additional states, though I wouldn't expect the object lesson, the learning and the enactment to bring the compact into effect for quite a while. Whenever it comes into effect, the prospects of MAGA control of the GOP as the single right-side party would seem to be toast, unless the authoritarian populists become willing to subordinate themselves to the smaller more centrist traditional conservatives as pre-2010. That plausibly seems to create a (perhaps short-lived) three-party system. It would be hard to tell which of the three would come out on top. This kind of uncertainty in a three-party environment, historically, I am given to understand, has always been a necessary pre-cursor to a political coalition that can bring in and defend PR. Then the parties further proliferate to 5-6 significant ones (New Zealand being the exception, where the transition started by an accident on the part of the Prime Minister - LOL - and the transition from 2 to about 8 was virtually instant on PR adoption).
I don't expect the NPVIC to ever happen. As long as the Electoral College continues to make it easier for Republicans to win the electoral vote than the popular vote. I do not expect Republican legislatures to vote for the NPVIC. According to Wikipedia, it has passed 205 electoral votes worth of states, and is pending in 63 more, which makes 268. However, this includes North Carolina, South Carolina, and Wisconsin, which have Republican legislatures by a big margin, albeit Wisconsin could be un-gerrymandered. Even if it passes, I expect Republicans to challenge it and win in the Supreme Court. The Framers would never have expected states to use votes in other states to determine their electors. I am a Democrat, so I would benefit from the NPVIC, but I do not expect it to happen.
I’m not holding my breathe for NPVIC, as I think I made clear, nor do I think it’s a shoe-in over the long term politically or, with an unfriendly SCOTUS for now, judicially.
But those are not reasons to ignore it. Where opportunities arise from time to time, it should be promoted. Michigan is one of those opportunities right now thru 2024, and would boost the tally to 220. PA and MA are probably the next most low hanging fruit. You’re absolutely right about WI when they can free themselves from their gerrymander. As long as D POTUS candidates sometimes win in the Electoral College, legislative opportunities can occasionally arise in additional states.
But revisiting your pessimism will only be important if and when the issue comes into play in your own state. Sadly, depending on where you live, that may never happen. That’s the way the EC works, after all.
MA already agreed to it. If PA has Democrats keep the State House and gain the State Senate, maybe they will join. I still don't think it will get to 270 unless the Electoral College helps a Democrat. For example, if Biden loses the national popular vote, loses most swing states, and wins Florida or Texas by 0.1 to barely win the Electoral College, maybe some Republican states would join.
In terms of my state, I lived in New York for 36 years. The first presidential election I heard about was 1992. I do not know if I supported Clinton then, but I supported Clinton by 1994 when Republicans took Congress, and I have supported Democrats since. The first presidential election I could vote in was 2004, and the first time I voted for the winner was 2008. New York was not competitive for president. The last time a Republican won a New York Senate election was 1992, and the last time a Republican was elected governor was 2002. In 2021, I moved to Nebraska, and now I am in District 2 that is competitive for president with its own electoral vote, and competitive for House.
I’m not expecting any R states to support NPVIC in the foreseeable future (or basically ever, anymore). And it certainly will take a good while for the legislative stars to align for NPVIC passage in all the remaining states that went for Biden in 2020 (or that are leaning toward Biden for '24), so that the compact can thereby reach 270.
Congratulations on living in NE district #2. Not only do you get presidential election attention but you have the state legislature that has been proving to the others for about 85 years that a second chamber isn't necessary. (The chamber is only about 40% the size you deserve, though - should be about 125, instead of 49, to match the degree of representation citizens of democracies with populations like Nebraska's typically have - going by the cube root rule.)
I calculated state legislative seats divided by Congressional districts. For Nebraska it is 49/3 = 16.33. For New York with 63 in the senate and 150 in the assembly, it is 213/26 = 8.19, which is about half of Nebraska.
In addition to being unicameral, the unique things are that it is defined as nonpartisan, and that the minority party can filibuster that takes two-thirds to overcome, so Republicans can have the governor and a majority of the senate but not able to do everything they want. For example, Democrats filibustered to prevent a gerrymander that would have divided Omaha to make all three districts safe for Republicans. Democrats prevent one abortion ban, and a second ban passed with the exact about it needed with help from one Democrat voting for it. Republicans do not have as high a percent of senators as they have in many other easily Republican states.
I am disappointed that nobody proposed approval voting, which I support. You can read about it at https://electionscience.org/ which is The Center for Election Science (hereafter "The Center"). By letting voters approve of any combination of candidates, candidates are not better or worse off based on how close they are to other candidates. Take California and Washington, which have one primary for all candidates that advance the top two regardless of party. All other things equal, if one party has more candidates, it is harder for those candidates to finish in the top two, and somebody even wrote about if California's 2024 Senate election could have so many more Democratic candidates than Republicans that Democrats could easily win if you add up the votes for all candidates in each party, but Republicans finish in the top two spots because there are so few of them. I am not saying that will happen, and if there was a real risk of that I hope Democrats would drop out, but it is hypothetically possible, and with approval voting Democrats could not lose because there are too many of them. The Center provided an example with people in New York City who voted in the 2012 presidential election. Barack Obama easily won, and Mitt Romney got way more votes than the third place candidate. Later on, a sample of people were allowed to approve of any amount of candidates. Some candidates who got a tiny percent of votes were approved of by more voters than approved of Romney, but those voters voted for Obama and did not have a way of showing they preferred other candidates over Romney. With approval voting, voters never have to choose between their favorite candidate and their preferred candidate who has a chance to win, because voters can approve of more than one candidate. Approval voting might also reduce how much candidates attack each other. In reality, Candidate Y knows that the only votes for him or her are for voters who did not vote for Candidate X (or anybody else). With approval voting, Candidate Y knows that it is possible for voters to approve of him or her and Candidate X, so Candidate Y might give reasons to vote for him or her, rather than attacking Candidate X. The downside of approval voting is that the approvals will add up to greater than 100 percent, which looks strange, but I still support approval voting. Alternatively, the results could be expressed as the amount of approvals without using percentages. Approval voting is used in St. Louis and Fargo, but not any federal or state elections.
Thanks for this useful analysis and history. While your focus was on voting process, I do hope that readers took note of your statement that district and assembly size should also be addressed. You said:
“the most significant conclusions from the research suggest that proportional systems and other structural features—district size and assembly size—that support meaningful multiparty representation are best for minority representation.”
The smaller a district is, the harder it is to gerrymander and the more likely that the assembly will contain a multitude of diverse voices more closely representing the diversity of interests in the community. It is, I think, imperative that we increase the size of the US House of Representatives. My personal preference would be for a Cube-Root Rule that set the size of the House at that number computed by taking the cube-root of the US population as counted in each census.
I have made a similar journey in thinking but turned away from favoring ranked choice voting more than a decade ago. I've documented my journey since then in a series of articles that in some instances analyze the problems of ranked choice voting while other articles examine alternative voting systems. If this interest you, you can find the journal in a series at OpEdNews called "balanced Voting". Another series there called "ranked voting" consists only of the articles that relate to ranked-choice voting.
This is great, thanks for writing it!!
Closely related to this article is the series here on substack called "Unbiased Elections". The article there on "Ranked Voting" takes a critical deep dive into problems with ranked-choice voting and the other two articles explore an alternative approach to ending the two-party duopoly that has let to the toxic polarization we are now experiencing. More recent articles following up on these topics can be found at OpEdNews.com in the series called "Balanced Voting".l
Way way too complicated for the general public. Fancy schmancy nomenclature and yards of explanatory paragraphs distance many/most people. You are creating dead air space. Sadly.
RCV is a SCAM. Minority not majority rule.
Surprise surprise. Preferential voting with all its acronyms is just a very complex way of voting with uncertain meaning.
When you place 10 things in preference order, you do not make clear relative importance. Love 9 items and detest the tenth? Love one item detest 9? Whichever of these two you want to express, you mark the voting paper the same way. It gives a result, but does not measure anything useful.
For PR you need multi-member districts. But STV forces you into relatively small MMDs because too many gets too complex.
If you want PR to mean representation of parties proportional to their voter support, you need to measure party support. STV does not do it unless the voter is allowed to only vote for candidates one party and does so. The simple way to measure party support is to allow voters to vote directly for parties, or have a vote for a candidate count as a vote for their party. Then you count the votes. You can even allow voters to distrubute an allocation of votes among candidates/parties. When you do that you can measure the result.
Whether in single member districts or multi-member districts, preferential voting does not help. It is a false notion that seems good because it is complex and mysterious.
You might like STAR Voting, which allows you to express strength of preference and doesn't suffer from the vote-splitting, spoiler effect, and center-squeeze problems of RCV.
I don’t think this is right. RCV in a MMD lowers the # of votes that an elected official needs to win office, promoting a significantly different sort of politics than a FPTP MMD district. I compare the biographies and campaigns of city councilors in Cambridge, MA (RCV MMD - 9 at-large councilors) vs Boston (hybrid of 13 councilors - district & at-large w/ 4 at-large councilors). Campaigns and candidates aimed at winning 10% of the electorate are VASTLY DIFFERENT than ones aimed at winning 50% of the electorate.
Ireland seems happy with their system. It's a big improvement on ours, that's for sure.
Thank you, Lee, for the courage to change your mind - to review the evidence as neutrally as anyone can, to adjust your overall conclusion, and to maintain nuance - and to announce and explain yourself. (And I'm glad your employer permits such intellectual flexibility, too.)
I agree with Bob Wyman that more emphasis on expanding assembly size under PR is advisable, not only for minority representation but also to facilitate multiple significant parties. This is because I see fusion as useful but limited - somewhat akin to single-winner IRV as a "gateway" to PR, though a bit more powerful. Fusion may have more potential to facilitate slow minor party growth than IRV, but ultimately I wonder if it too leaves a minor party with a cap on its potential at the point it starts transitioning to running its own candidates for higher offices rather than cross-endorsing one from a major party, until the Rubicon of multi-member districts is crossed. Nevertheless, as a Michigander, I appreciate that there may be a move underway here to charter a third party and then sue for the right to cross-endorse - though this seems like a legal longshot and the effort seems to have gone silent as far as I can tell.
I am, however, also intrigued with the distant but seemingly more powerful potential of the national popular vote interstate compact as a way to trigger 5-6 party proliferation. Whether sooner or later, there will eventually be both another R POTUS - seemingly in all likelihood, an autocratic populist elected without a popular vote plurality - a "wrong winner" outcome - and a friendly Congress. Assuming the country and world somehow survives the two years for at least one house of Congress to switch to D control (potentially with a lot of damage done) and begin blocking legislation, NPVIC will get a lot of attention among D elites and, I hope, be adopted by additional states, though I wouldn't expect the object lesson, the learning and the enactment to bring the compact into effect for quite a while. Whenever it comes into effect, the prospects of MAGA control of the GOP as the single right-side party would seem to be toast, unless the authoritarian populists become willing to subordinate themselves to the smaller more centrist traditional conservatives as pre-2010. That plausibly seems to create a (perhaps short-lived) three-party system. It would be hard to tell which of the three would come out on top. This kind of uncertainty in a three-party environment, historically, I am given to understand, has always been a necessary pre-cursor to a political coalition that can bring in and defend PR. Then the parties further proliferate to 5-6 significant ones (New Zealand being the exception, where the transition started by an accident on the part of the Prime Minister - LOL - and the transition from 2 to about 8 was virtually instant on PR adoption).
I don't expect the NPVIC to ever happen. As long as the Electoral College continues to make it easier for Republicans to win the electoral vote than the popular vote. I do not expect Republican legislatures to vote for the NPVIC. According to Wikipedia, it has passed 205 electoral votes worth of states, and is pending in 63 more, which makes 268. However, this includes North Carolina, South Carolina, and Wisconsin, which have Republican legislatures by a big margin, albeit Wisconsin could be un-gerrymandered. Even if it passes, I expect Republicans to challenge it and win in the Supreme Court. The Framers would never have expected states to use votes in other states to determine their electors. I am a Democrat, so I would benefit from the NPVIC, but I do not expect it to happen.
I’m not holding my breathe for NPVIC, as I think I made clear, nor do I think it’s a shoe-in over the long term politically or, with an unfriendly SCOTUS for now, judicially.
But those are not reasons to ignore it. Where opportunities arise from time to time, it should be promoted. Michigan is one of those opportunities right now thru 2024, and would boost the tally to 220. PA and MA are probably the next most low hanging fruit. You’re absolutely right about WI when they can free themselves from their gerrymander. As long as D POTUS candidates sometimes win in the Electoral College, legislative opportunities can occasionally arise in additional states.
But revisiting your pessimism will only be important if and when the issue comes into play in your own state. Sadly, depending on where you live, that may never happen. That’s the way the EC works, after all.
MA already agreed to it. If PA has Democrats keep the State House and gain the State Senate, maybe they will join. I still don't think it will get to 270 unless the Electoral College helps a Democrat. For example, if Biden loses the national popular vote, loses most swing states, and wins Florida or Texas by 0.1 to barely win the Electoral College, maybe some Republican states would join.
In terms of my state, I lived in New York for 36 years. The first presidential election I heard about was 1992. I do not know if I supported Clinton then, but I supported Clinton by 1994 when Republicans took Congress, and I have supported Democrats since. The first presidential election I could vote in was 2004, and the first time I voted for the winner was 2008. New York was not competitive for president. The last time a Republican won a New York Senate election was 1992, and the last time a Republican was elected governor was 2002. In 2021, I moved to Nebraska, and now I am in District 2 that is competitive for president with its own electoral vote, and competitive for House.
Typo. I meant Maine (ME).
I’m not expecting any R states to support NPVIC in the foreseeable future (or basically ever, anymore). And it certainly will take a good while for the legislative stars to align for NPVIC passage in all the remaining states that went for Biden in 2020 (or that are leaning toward Biden for '24), so that the compact can thereby reach 270.
Congratulations on living in NE district #2. Not only do you get presidential election attention but you have the state legislature that has been proving to the others for about 85 years that a second chamber isn't necessary. (The chamber is only about 40% the size you deserve, though - should be about 125, instead of 49, to match the degree of representation citizens of democracies with populations like Nebraska's typically have - going by the cube root rule.)
I calculated state legislative seats divided by Congressional districts. For Nebraska it is 49/3 = 16.33. For New York with 63 in the senate and 150 in the assembly, it is 213/26 = 8.19, which is about half of Nebraska.
In addition to being unicameral, the unique things are that it is defined as nonpartisan, and that the minority party can filibuster that takes two-thirds to overcome, so Republicans can have the governor and a majority of the senate but not able to do everything they want. For example, Democrats filibustered to prevent a gerrymander that would have divided Omaha to make all three districts safe for Republicans. Democrats prevent one abortion ban, and a second ban passed with the exact about it needed with help from one Democrat voting for it. Republicans do not have as high a percent of senators as they have in many other easily Republican states.
WIthin five minutes, I could walk to my senator.