-
Recent Posts
- Election Night Preview — Part Six (Post-Midnight Eastern)
- Election Night Preview — Part Five — The Local News and the West Coast (11:00 To 11:59 P.M. Eastern)
- Election Night Preview — Part Four — Prime Time Hour Three (10:00 to 10:59 P.M. Eastern)
- Election Night Preview — Part Three — Prime Time Hour Two (9:00 To 9:59 P.M. Eastern)
- Election Night Preview — Part Two — Prime Time Hour One (8:00 to 8:59 p.m. Eastern)
- Exit Polls and Projections
- Election Night Preview — Part I — Pre-Prime Time
Search
Welcome to DCW
Upcoming Events
7/15/24 - GOP Convention
TBD - Democratic Convention
11/5/24 - Election DayTools
Archives
Tag Cloud
2008 Democratic National Convention 2012 Democratic National Convention 2012 Republican National Convention 2016 Democratic National Convention 2016 Republican National Convention 2020 Census 2020 Democratic Convention 2024 Democratic Convention 2024 Republican Convention Abortion Affordable Care Act Alabama Arizona Bernie Sanders California Colorado Donald Trump First Amendment Florida Free Exercise Clause Free Speech Georgia Hillary Clinton Immigration Iowa Joe Biden Kansas Maine Marco Rubio Michigan Missouri Nevada New Hampshire North Carolina Ohio Pennsylvania redistricting South Carolina Supreme Court Ted Cruz Texas United Kingdom Virginia Voting Rights Act WisconsinDCW in the News
Blog Roll
Site Info
-
Recent Posts
- Election Night Preview — Part Six (Post-Midnight Eastern)
- Election Night Preview — Part Five — The Local News and the West Coast (11:00 To 11:59 P.M. Eastern)
- Election Night Preview — Part Four — Prime Time Hour Three (10:00 to 10:59 P.M. Eastern)
- Election Night Preview — Part Three — Prime Time Hour Two (9:00 To 9:59 P.M. Eastern)
- Election Night Preview — Part Two — Prime Time Hour One (8:00 to 8:59 p.m. Eastern)
Recent Comments
Archives
- November 2024
- October 2024
- September 2024
- August 2024
- July 2024
- June 2024
- May 2024
- April 2024
- March 2024
- February 2024
- January 2024
- December 2023
- November 2023
- October 2023
- September 2023
- August 2023
- July 2023
- June 2023
- May 2023
- April 2023
- March 2023
- February 2023
- January 2023
- December 2022
- November 2022
- October 2022
- September 2022
- August 2022
- July 2022
- June 2022
- May 2022
- April 2022
- March 2022
- February 2022
- January 2022
- December 2021
- November 2021
- October 2021
- September 2021
- August 2021
- July 2021
- June 2021
- May 2021
- April 2021
- March 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- May 2020
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- November 2019
- October 2019
- September 2019
- August 2019
- July 2019
- June 2019
- May 2019
- April 2019
- March 2019
- February 2019
- January 2019
- December 2018
- November 2018
- October 2018
- September 2018
- August 2018
- July 2018
- June 2018
- May 2018
- April 2018
- March 2018
- February 2018
- January 2018
- December 2017
- October 2017
- September 2017
- August 2017
- July 2017
- June 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- September 2016
- August 2016
- July 2016
- June 2016
- May 2016
- April 2016
- March 2016
- February 2016
- January 2016
- December 2015
- November 2015
- October 2015
- September 2015
- August 2015
- July 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- April 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- November 2014
- September 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- March 2014
- January 2014
- August 2013
- August 2012
- November 2011
- August 2011
- January 2011
- May 2010
- January 2009
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- January 2006
- December 2005
- November 2005
Categories
- 2019-nCoV
- 2020 Convention
- 2020 General Election
- 2020DNC
- 2024 Convention
- 2028 Convention
- Anti-Semitism
- Bernie Sanders
- Charlotte
- Chicago
- Civil Rights
- Cleveland
- Climate Change
- Coronavirus
- Coronavirus Tips
- COVID-19
- Debates
- Delegate Count
- Delegates
- Democratic Debates
- Democratic Party
- Democrats
- DemsinPhilly
- DemsInPHL
- Disaster
- DNC
- Donald Trump
- Economy
- Elections
- Electoral College
- Federal Budget
- Freedom of the Press
- General Election Forecast
- GOP
- Healthcare
- Hillary Clinton
- Holidays
- Hotels
- House of Representatives
- Houston
- Identity Politics
- Impeachment
- Iowa Caucuses
- Jacksonville
- Joe Biden
- Judicial
- LGBT
- Mariner Pipeline
- Merrick Garland
- Meta
- Milwaukee
- Money in Politics
- Music
- National Security
- Netroots Nation
- New Yor
- New York
- NH Primary
- Notes from Your Doctor
- NoWallNoBan
- Pandemic
- Philadelphia
- PHLDNC2016
- Platform
- Politics
- Polls
- Presidential Candidates
- Primary and Caucus Results
- Primary Elections
- Public Health
- Rant
- Republican Debates
- Republicans
- Resist
- RNC
- Russia
- Senate
- Snark
- Student Loan Debt
- Sunday with the Senators
- Superdelegates
- Syria
- The Politics of Hate
- Uncategorized
- Vaccines
- War
- Weekly White House Address
Meta
Tag Archives: Preferential Voting
Delegate Selection Rules — Nevada
The tour of the draft plans from 2020 caucus states continues this week with Nevada’s draft plan. For 2020, as it has been for the last several cycles, Nevada — along with Iowa — is one of the two caucus states in the “carve-out period” prior to Super Tuesday. Most of the caucus states — other than potentially Washington — are small states which means that, after Super Tuesday, their influence is at the margin with most of the attention going to the large primary states. However, the four carve-out states each have about a week of national attention giving them a significant role in narrowing the field.
In looking at the draft plans for the caucus states, there have been two major issues that the states have had to address in light of changes to Rule 2.K of the DNC Delegate Selection Rules. First, what procedures does the state intend to take to increase participation in the caucuses? Second, how are the votes at the caucuses translated into the allocation of delegates?
As to the first issue, the 2016 plan in Nevada — recognizing that casino and hotel employees in Las Vegas form a significant bloc of potential caucus participants and that the 24-7 nature of that business would mean that some would-be participants would be working during the time set for the precinct caucuses — also scheduled at-large caucuses at a different time from the regular caucuses to allow shift workers to attend a caucus at a time that did not conflict with their job along with tele-caucuses for those in the military. The plan assigned each of the at-large caucuses a number of delegates based on expected participation at that location and two delegates to the tele-caucus.
Posted in 2020 Convention, Delegates, Primary Elections
Also tagged 2020 Delegate Selection Plans, caucuses, Nevada
Comments Off on Delegate Selection Rules — Nevada
2018 Midterm Election Preview — New England
Sixteen days left to take our country back from the heirs of the anti-federalists and give voice to the silent majority that the President loves to ridicule and marginalize — women, the children and grandchildren of immigrants, the Native Americans whose ancestors were here before any of ours, those who have worked hard to get a college or professional degree so that their children will have better lives than they did, the LGBT community, those who believe in science, those working hard at a minimum wage job trying to make ends meet, the list goes on and on under a president who only values those with money to burn and believes that there is no solemn commitment that we have made as a country that we can’t break merely because it is inconvenient to his agenda.
Over the next week or so, I will have a series of posts breaking down the election by region. Writing from the dead center of fly-over country, I am likely to miss (a lot of) the interesting local races and local color while trying to identify what seem to be the key races. So I am hopeful that we will get some comments pointing out what has slipped under the national radar.
We start with New England — home to the Patriots, the Red Sox, and a tradition of moderate Yankee Republicanism that is on the verge of needing Last Rites (represented primarily at the national level by the Cowardly Lioness of the Senate — Susan Collins — stumbling desperately in the last two years of her career between the conflicting tasks of keeping a majority of Maine Republicans primary voters happy and keeping the majority of Maine general election voters happy).
Maine is an interesting state because it has opted to adopt the Australian system of preferential voting at least for the federal offices. (Court decisions have barred the implementation of preferential voting at the general election for state offices.) The Australian experience is that it is difficult but not impossible for the trailing candidate to win the race on “second choice” votes. (In both primary races in which preferences came into play, the candidate who led after the first round ultimately won the election.) Obvious factors in whether the trailing candidate win are the gap after the first round and how close the leading candidate is to a majority after the first round. Independent Senator Angus King should be re-elected. At this point, the big question is whether the “official” Democratic candidate will gain enough first choice votes to keep Senator King beneath 50%. Even with preferential voting not applying to the Governor’s race, it looks like the Democrat — Janet Mills — will win ending the nightmare that has been Governor LePage. The race for Maine’s second district (the only Congressional seat in New England currently held by Republicans) could come down to the second choice of voters. Most of the polling shows a neck-and-neck race, and I am dubious that any of the polling companies are polling using a ranked choice system.
Vermont is interesting in a different way. In Vermont, a candidate for governor needs 50% of the vote. If nobody gets 50%, the legislature chooses the winner. There are only a handful of times that the winner has failed to get 50% and, each of those times, the legislature went with the candidate who finished first. However, I don’t know if those past races reflect the fact that the winner’s party had the majority of seats or if legislators acted in a non-partisan fashion. There is not a lot of polling in this race. What is out there suggests that the Republican incumbent is likely to finish first but it is unclear if he will clear 50%. There is likely to be a strong Democratic majority in the legislature; so — if the incumbent only gets 49.5% — the question is whether Democrats in the legislature would choose a Democratic candidate who trailed by 4-5% over the Republican who finished first. You also have Senator Bernie Sanders looking certain to be re-elected. The question is how his refusal to accept the Democratic nomination for Senator will influence his race seeking the Democratic nomination for President in 2020 (where he actually does need that nomination to get on the ballot in all 50 states unlike the situation in Vermont).
The rest of New England seems to be mostly calm. Senators Murphy, Warren, and Whitehouse seem set for re-election. The Democrats seem likely to keep all of the House seats that they currently hold. The only seat that seems like it could even be sort of close is New Hampshire’s 1st district. While Democrats would like to take back the Governor’s mansion in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, the Republican governors in those states are personally popular even if the Republican party isn’t. And in Connecticut, while the unpopularity of Governor Dan Malloy had given Republicans hopes of gaining that state, former Senate candidate Ned Lamont appears to have solidified enough of the Democratic majority in that state to be the likely winner.
Ballot questions in New England include a trio of measure in Massachusetts — one capping the number of patients per nurse in health care facilities, one challenging Citizen United, and one an attempted “veto” of legislation prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity. New Hampshire has a very dangerous constitutional amendment on the ballot. The proposed amendment simply states that “An individuals right to live free from governmental intrusion in private or personal information is natural, essential, and inherent.” The reason that this amendment is dangerous is that it uses very broad terms with no clear limits for courts to apply. As we have seen recently in the First Amendment context in the U.S. Supreme Court, judges can use broad rights to block what most people would consider fair and reasonable legislation.
In short, in New England, Democrats are realistically looking at gaining one U.S. House seat and one Governor position (with a very outside shot at a second).
Posted in Elections, General Election Forecast
Also tagged Connecticut, Instant Runoff, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont
Comments Off on 2018 Midterm Election Preview — New England
Oscars and Politics
When one thinks of experiments in voting systems, you rarely think of motion pictures. About a decade ago (starting with the 2009 awards), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) changed the rules for picking the Academy Award (Oscar) for best picture. They made an additional change several years ago to the nomination process for Best Picture.
For most of the awards, the rules are that academy members belong to a given branch (e.g. actors, writers, etc.) and each member gets to submit a “nomination” ballot for the awards given by their branch (i.e. actors for the acting awards, directors for best director). Potential nominees who meet a certain threshold (up to 5 total) become the nominees. After nominations are announced, a second ballot goes out to all academy members who vote for one nominee. The nominee who gets the most votes (the traditional first-past-the-post system) is the winner.
In choosing the nominees, however, AMPAS has used a “single transferable vote” system for picking nominees. This system is similar to the one used in Ireland and in Australia (for Senate elections). In this system, voters list multiple candidates with a rank next to each candidate. There is a certain number of votes (quota) needed for a nomination (the total number of votes plus one divided by the available slots plus one). If a potential nominee received more than the require number of votes, their excess votes are distributed to the second choice of the voters. There are variations on how the distribution works. Some randomly pick excess ballots. Others assign a fraction of all ballot (i.e. if 10% of your ballots are excess, each ballot counts as 0.1 votes in the next round). For most of the awards, AMPAS uses a fractional system with one catch — surpluses are distributed only if the nominee exceeds the required number of votes by more than 20%. After the excess ballots are distributed, the process moves to the bottom ranked candidates. Those candidates are eliminated and those votes are redistributed to the second choice of the voters. (Or third or fourth choice depending upon who is already nominated or eliminated.) This process continues until all the slots are filled.
Over the past decade, AMPAS made two changes to nomination process. First, in 2009, AMPAS changed the maximum number of nominees for Best Picture to 10. Second, in 2011, AMPAS adopted a modification to its single transferable vote system. Under the modified system, instead, of multiple rounds of reassigning ballots, there is only one round of reassigning ballots. The 20% rule for excess votes over the quota remains. Additionally, a 1% threshold on the first ballot is used to determine which ballots are reassigned. If a movie got less than 1% on the first ballot, it is eliminated and all who voted for that movie as their first choice have their ballot reassigned to their top-ranked remaining movie. After the ballots are reassigned, it takes 5% of the total vote to be nominated. If more than 10 movies have more than 5%, the top ten are the nominees. Since the 2011 changes, there has not been a year in which 10 movies made the threshold with — depending on the year — either 8 or 9 nominees.
When AMPAS increased the total nominees from 5 to 10 for best picture in 2009, they also changed the rules for the final ballot. For the best picture ballot, AMPAS now uses alternative/preferential voting (similar to the system that Australia used for its House of Representatives). In this system, voters rank all of the nominees. After the first round, the last-placed candidate is eliminated. For voters who voted for the last-placed candidate, their ballot is reassigned to their second choice. This process continues until one candidate has a majority of the vote.
Part of what makes this process functional is the small number of voters and small number of awards. With approximately 6,000 members, fifteen branches (meaning an average of 400 members per branch, assuming every member votes) and 24 awards, the number of nomination ballots for a given award are not that large (other than potentially best picture). And for the final awards, only best picture is not first-past-the post. Finally, each ballot is a separate ballot making it possible to do a hand count with a limited team of counters. These features make it possible to have a large number of potential nominee candidates (every movie released over a calendar year and every actor/actress who had a role in a movie) with the final field still having a significant number of candidates (5-10 nominees). To replicate this in American elections would require a change from the current system in which we have a limited number of election dates and multiple levels use the same election and everybody votes for every office (meaning that in a typical election, the voter faces five or more county offices, state representative, state senator, three or more state-wide offices, U.S. representative, U.S. senator, and president for thirteen or more races) with voters for many of the offices exceeding 100,000. In the countries that use alternative voting or single transferrable voting, voters only face two or three offices up for election on the same day — allowing separate ballots for each office.
The other significant feature of award shows is that the counts remain secret. It would be interesting to know how the final nominees differed from the candidates who led after the first round. For best picture, it would be interesting to know how the films ranked after the initial round.
We know from regular elections that larger field tend to favor the front runners. For decades (prior to their being a producer’s guild award for best picture — first awarded in 1989), the winner of the director’s guild award tended to be a good predictor for both best picture and best director. (From 1950 to 1988, the winner of the director’s guild award won the Best Director’s Oscar 36 times out of 39 awards, and the film that received the Director’s Guild award won Best Picture 28 times out of 39 awards.) In the 28 years since the Producer Guild began giving a separate award, things have gotten a little less predictable. ( In those years, the Best Directors Oscar has gone to the Director’s Guild winner 25 times, and the Best Picture Oscar has gone has gone to either the winner of the Director’s Guild award or the Producer’s Guild award 24 times out of 28 years. In only one of those years did a movie win both Best Picture and Best Director without winning either guild award (Braveheart beating out Apollo 13 which won the two guild awards for 1995). We also know that alternative voting only makes a difference in a small number of elections. Particularly, if one candidate has a significant lead after the first round of voting, it is unlikely for another candidate to come from behind to win. On the other hand, in close elections, the trailing candidate can come from behind to win. There have even been close races when the third placed candidate can win under an alternative vote system.
Of course, with the actual results (other than the winner) being secret, this process is mostly hidden from the public. Given the attention that awards shows get, having the details of how the process worked made public might make the public more comfortable with different ways of conducting elections. One response to gerrymandering that I have seen being put forward by some interest groups is to move to multi-member districts with single transferrable vote. (Such districts are not completely immune from gerrymandering. As the Democratic presidential primaries show, even multi-member districts have key vote thresholds and it would be possible to draw lines that would switch a district from barely 3-2 to barely 4-1 or vice versa. Even with all districts being 3-2, you can pack the other party into 65% districts while the districts that favor your party are 56% districts.) However, convincing people to change from a familiar voting system to a new system is hard. In 2011, amid a lot of campaign rhetoric that misrepresented how alternative voting worked, the United Kingdom rejected alternative voting by approximately a two-thirds majority.
Posted in Elections
Also tagged Alternative Voting, Oscars, Single Transferrable Vote
Comments Off on Oscars and Politics
Australian Election Preview (Updated 7-2-16)
Australian politics has some similarity to the United States. Seats in their House of Representatives are distributed by the population of the state (with each state guaranteed a certain number of seats). The states have equal representation in their Senate (twelve senators each rather than two) and the election of senators are usually staggered (half from each state elected every three years).
This year, however, is an unusual election (scheduled for July 2). The existence of staggered terms plus the voting system for the Senate creates the possibility that the party that controls the House will not control the Senate. Unlike the U.S. which forces the parties to live with deadlock until the next regularly scheduled election, Australian law contains an out — the “double dissolution” election. Normally, only the House of Representatives dissolves — either through expiration of the term or through the Prime Minister requesting an early election. If the dissolution of the House occurs within the window for a half-Senate election (within the last year of a Senate term), the House and half-Senate election occurs at the same time (but the new Senators do not take office — except for the Senators from the two territories — until the old term expires).
Posted in Elections, Uncategorized
Also tagged Australia
Comments Off on Australian Election Preview (Updated 7-2-16)