Voting in primaries

[mtbc]

While I have generally voted on everything from if a restaurant should get a liquor license to who should be the county coroner I have never voted in a primary. One the one hand I care greatly about privacy so I certainly don't want to publicly register an party affiliation. (Now that I am registered in Massachusetts I don't actually know if it is known which primary I voted in, at least beyond my Town Clerk's office.) On the other hand, one might reasonably deem me to actually be an independent and, perhaps through having grown up in Britain where the choice of leader is an internal party matter, it feels wrong to me to meddle with the affairs of a party with whom I feel little affiliation.

I rather like the idea of approval voting (vote for as many candidates as one likes) as being a good balance between comprehensibility and expressiveness and immunity from dysfunctions like Arrow's theorem. Could we so vote then I might be tempted to at least turn up and vote for all the candidates who actually seem credible to me, but we can't.

Comments

[mindstalk]

I'm amused that the Tories use IRV internally, while opposing it for the country. I also wonder if Cameron would have won under Condorcet counting.

[mtbc]

Actually I just got wondering about proportional representation. Rather than simply having ordered party lists, I wonder if it would make sense to still have candidate local representatives for each constituency and to make up each party's proportion one picks first their representatives with the greatest local majorities. Or perhaps that's silly or already done or something.

[mindstalk]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_member_proportional_representation
Used in Germany and NZ. Has the potentially fatal flaw of clined partys: "vote party A for local and party A' for list seats."
Scotland uses a variant; Japan uses a further out variant that doesn't try to be proportional in the final result.

There's multiple ways of doing straight PR. Closed party list, where you just vote for the party. Open party list, where you can vote for a person and they jump up the list if they get $THRESHOLD votes. STV, where you get/have to exert more choice, and probably the districts are smaller so you're not overwhelmed. Re-weighted range voting, used by no one.

[mindstalk]

To be clear, I wonder if he'd have won the Tory leadership under Condorcet. British elections under IRV or Condorcet is another matter entirely.

[mtbc]

It might be interesting to try implementing various voting algorithms to get a better sense of how they behave and of what variations they may admit. I hadn't even been especially aware of open-party-list.

I suppose we do have the Scottish Parliament elections coming up in a few months. By plurality our constituency's MSP has a safe seat but I suppose my vote still matters from the point of view of electing my region's additional members.