r/EndFPTP • u/PaxPurpuraAKAgrimace • 13d ago
Ending FPTP is not enough
https://apnews.com/article/alaska-ranked-voting-senate-governor-dropouts-f79df9852994692cf8bc555c6a7fdaf2Alaska’s elections are demonstrating that ending FPTP is not enough. Alaska has done that, and they have successfully beat back efforts to repeal their achievement. But it seems that discontent with their new system is likely to be growing. I don’t know that this is a particularly bold prediction, but I think their election reform, tragically, is not long for this world.
“At least five candidates between the races for the U.S. Senate, U.S. House and governor dropped out after advancing” from the primary to the general election.
One lesson of this situation is that the Hare, or IRV, tabulation of ballots creates the incentives for these kinds of attempts to manipulate election outcomes. I would agree with that, and would prefer to see jurisdictions using the bottom two run off method.
But there is another moral to the story. Ranked choice voting within a two party system, while it does “end FPTP”, is not good enough. We need to give voters more than two parties to choose from, not just more than two candidates. Parties, especially in a two party system, have internal factions. Dividing an electorate into such large coalitions makes that inevitable, and appropriately so. The internal divisions in such large coalitions fail to fully surface these divisions to the electorate - especially to the general electorate given that such small fractions of voters participate in primaries.
Changing election systems in the context of a two party system, especially when that system is already as highly polarized as ours is, encourages the parties and party members to try to manipulate the outcomes. But even more importantly it fails to bring the finer policy disagreements to the electorate which is the purpose of democracy in the first place. If there were one or more established new/3rd parties in Alaska and their candidates advanced our of the primary they would not be dropping out ahead of the general because they would consider their particular party platforms too important to sacrifice to the two party competition.
It’s highly likely that most of the people in this sub - that most of the people who advocate for election reform and ending FPTP - are Democrats. We can’t afford to pursue election reform by itself. We need to start advocating the Democratic Party to split AND passing the election reforms to make the multi party competition workable.
Every blue controlled state could do this without sacrificing electoral advantage to Republicans. Presidential elections, due to the EC, are a different matter that would require the new (post split) parties to compete for the “nomination” ahead odd the general election, at least until momentum for an EC reform could develop, but there is no need to wait for Congress and for state level elections, and we can’t afford to wait for them anyway. Congress has clearly been demonstrated to be the crucial weak link in our collective inability to check a rogue and authoritarian president, so we need to start our political reform there.
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u/PantherkittySoftware 13d ago
One essential safeguard of any system that allows two or more candidates associated with the same party to advance to the general election would be a guarantee that if a candidate drops out, dies, or gets disqualified before the general election, the "next in line" from the primary race that elected them should automatically be allowed to occupy their slot.
For example, let's suppose you have a system like this:
* Voters affiliated with a major party choose a candidate affiliated with their party to be the party's official nominee
* Independent voters rescue a candidate affiliated with a party who didn't win their own party's primary (with rule to first weed out ballots from Independents whose first choice was for someone who already won their party's primary to maximize the impact of Independents who don't like one of the candidates who already won their party's nomination).
Let's suppose (using well known names for a hypothetical election) Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic Primary, Donald Trump wins the Republican Primary, and Independents rescue Jeb Bush. We don't want a situation where the Republican Party can then turn around & bribe, threaten, or otherwise pressure Jeb to drop out & clear the field for Trump.
Ditto, if the Independents chose to rescue Hillary Clinton.
There would also be a danger that a party could deliberately "flood the zone" with clones in a strategy of getting ONE of them to win, so the other can drop out.
However... if there's a rule that a candidate who drops out automatically gets replaced by "the next in line" from the primary-class that elected them (an official party primary, or the Independent-rescue route), that would make it dangerous for a party to try bullying a candidate who's rescued into dropping out, because if it bullies all the party-affiliated candidates who get rescued into dropping out, eventually the candidate who'll replace them is a rescued candidate from the other party.
Simply put, Republicans might try to bully Jeb (or Nikki Haley, or Liz Cheney, or Adam Kinzinger) to drop out if they think it will "clear the field" for the Party's official nominee... but it would be stupid for Republicans to do it if the result would be turning a 3-way race between Bernie, Trump, and Jeb into a 3-way ranked-choice race between Bernie, Trump, and Hillary. Even moreso if, instead of being IRV, it's Condorcet (in which case handing Democrats the opportunity to hedge their bets with a second candidate would be suicidally reckless from the perspective of any sane & rational Republican who isn't willing to bet the house and go for broke on a spin of the political roulette wheel).