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.  Continue Reading...

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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).

 

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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.

 

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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).

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