Final Five And U.S. Competitiveness

I’m all for RCV in general elections, but “nonpartisan primary” is a fundamentally oxymoronic concept that betrays ignorance about the purpose of primary elections in the United States. Which is namely to allow partisan organizations to choose their candidates to advance the organization’s political objectives.

Just Say “No!” to misguided good-government attempts to get the politics out of politics.

If that’s what it takes to fix problems such as infrastructure, education, health care, life expectancy, etc, you can rest assured that it won’t be allowed to happen. Because somewhere, there will be someone who has an enormous amount of money who thinks that final five voting or ranked choice would stand in the way of doubling their fortune, or some fossilized politicians in their 80s don’t like it for some reason. No chance, never going to happen.

Now, while it’s hard to resist the temptation of ad homineming someone who seems to have stumbled on ranked choice voting in an article from the Harvard Business School, Cayford’s suggestion is sensible enough.

At the same time, Aardvark Cheeselog @2 makes a key point: party primaries are meant to enable political parties, which collectively track policy implications more closely than do individual voters and have a structural incentive to produce slates of candidates apt to work together, to put their knowledge and incentives to productive use. Of course, in the United States, the Republican party progressively abrogated this responsibility in the 1980s and ’90s when it became the anti-government party, regardless of policy merit, and even more so after 2016, when it put its institutional heft behind producing social legitimacy and legislative majorities for the reality-show star who won their intervalled first-past-the-post presidential primary that year. The Democratic party, for its part, abrogated this responsibility around 1992, when it became the “third way” party, institutionally defining as best policy whatever sat between the policy platform of the political right du jour and that of the principled left (these days, Matt Yglesias acts as the thinking-person’s Virgil to the descending and ascending worlds of the Democratic policy).

There are strategically important questions (like NATO orientation, what policy framework to employ in an increasingly multilateral world, or how to structure spend across the repressive and ideological state apparatuses in such a way as to progressively dismantle the American carceral state without causing social shocks) that quite simply don’t sit within the decisional matrix of your typical voter. (Which is not to say that the Democratic or Republican parties of today have good answers!) And all of this is why Cayford’s proposed reform, while sensible enough and even worthy enough of implementation, is not going solve anywhere near all the things he says it would do.

Matt Yglesias acts as the thinking-person’s Virgil to the descending and ascending worlds of the Democratic policy

Virgil was competent

Alex SL wrote:

I mean, if the only food I had ever tasted in my life was was rice and bananas, I would hopefully not arrogate to give people culinary advice.

But I hope you would feel confident in offering your opinion about the effectiveness of remedies for diarrhea and constipation.

What a wonderful bunch of comments! Thank you! Still, I believe most commenters have missed the central point: Harvard Business School is arguing that ranked choice voting can (and will over time) repair America’s corrupt political system, and no other electoral reform will. This is because, as Katherine Gehl puts it, incentivizing elected officials to serve the public interest is a wholly different task from electing the best people. The spoiler effect is what creates a two-party system and protects it from having to serve the public, and RCV eliminates the spoiler effect. That is the core argument.

Think of RCV as like the secret ballot, instead of like other reforms. Imagine how easy the path to dictatorship would be in an America with today’s instant communications and more guns than people, but no secrecy in voting. The spoiler effect is basically a subtler way to coerce voters than announcing their votes to their employers and their neighborhood Vote Enforcement Militia. There is a logic to what HBS calls “the overlooked but all-powerful rules, structures, norms, and practices of politics,” and the spoiler effect is the keystone of our corrupt politics. Take the logic seriously, and my claims seem less hyperbolic.

Now, of course there are other “well-working voting systems” in other countries, as Alex SL says, mainly parliamentary systems that eliminate the spoiler effect (making multiple parties possible) in some way functionally equivalent to RCV. But none are on the table in America. And of course RCV will not immediately and directly fix our health care system or repair our roads, as D.S. Battistoli correctly points out. The claim by HBS is that it will repair “the root cause of the decades-long inability of our government to make progress on America’s most pressing economic and social problems,” such as health care and roads. I think you knew that. The more important point is that both political parties “progressively abrogated [their] responsibility” to the public interest not due to some inexplicable and tragic historical accident but due to the logic of our voting system. RCV will fix that.

Aardvark Cheeselog does have a point about primaries, but leans too hard on the word “primary,” which is not really essential here. The only role of the “nonpartisan primary” in Final Five Voting is to winnow the field down to a manageable number. And parties don’t get a free pass to enter the general election (i.e. they can’t winnow themselves in private primaries). It would be technically more accurate, then, to think of Final Five as abolishing state primaries and holding a two-part general election with five candidates from an open part one going to a ranked choice runoff. The parties would still be free to have their own private primaries to choose who would get their endorsement in that part one. (There is a history here of Supreme Court cases—see Jones—limiting the state’s ability to infringe the parties’ free speech rights by pre-empting their primaries.)

I don’t know why Gar Lipow is surprised that the first and second most popular candidates win most races. It takes both a large number of candidates and a strange preference structure among voters for initially ‘meh’ candidates to beat the top two popular ones. I think the claim about tactical voting is mistaken, and perhaps Lipow is confusing standard RCV (Hare system, instant runoff voting) with another counting method. To JD: how to defeat the beneficiaries of the status quo is the great puzzle of our time. Keep the faith. This article is part of my attempt to figure it out. Step one of my plan is in the redistricting article that I link to.

Lastly, Harry CD Underwood’s pitch for proportional representation (PR) brings me back to the main point: there is all the difference in the world between repairing a dysfunctional system and making a good system better. PR in America is multi-member districts (MMD) elected by RCV. So of course it would be good: it implements RCV! My only quarrel with PR advocates concerns how different the two parts are: the RCV part is where all the power is, and the MMD part is a nuanced debate about minority rights in a majoritarian system. MMD is a way, as Gehl puts it, to select “the best winner,” or as you put it, “to fairly represent the population.” That’s nice, but the house is on fire. HBS focuses pragmatically on “what’s powerful and what’s achievable,” and RCV without MMD is both. In contrast, MMD without RCV is actively harmful, and MMD in itself is so difficult to achieve (in America) as to threaten becoming a poison pill that blocks the political path to achieving RCV and rescuing our country. Or so I would argue.

Thank you for all the challenging feedback!

The French presidential election is a better (worse) example of how top 2 runoff works against democracy. A Mélenchon can guarantee a right wing victory every time simply by running in the first round. Although voters should know what they are doing when they vote for a spoiler candidate. You can’t blame it all on the system.

I don’t have any particular positive feelings about Jean-Luc Mélenchon–then again, I don’t know enough about French politics to have particular positive feelings about any individual French presidential candidates. I know who I’d vote against, that’s all.

I also don’t have any particular case to make in favour of or against any particular electoral system, either.

However, if we’re going to refer to spoiler candidates, it seems only fair to consider actual results.

The first time Jean-Luc Mélenchon ran in a presidential election was in 2012. He ran fourth in the first round, which did not prevent Socialist Party candidate François Hollande from running first in both rounds.

The second time Jean-Luc ran in a presidential election was in 2017. He ran fourth in the first round, receiving 19.58% of votes cast. If he had not run, and if (implausibly) everybody who voted for him had voted for Socialist Party candidate Benoît Hamon, then Benoît would have run first in the first round and been included in the second round, against Emmanuel Macron. But Benoît only received 6.36% of votes cast. One might equally well say that if he had not run, and if (again, implausibly) everybody who voted for him had voted for Jean-Luc, then Jean-Luc would have run first in the first round and been included in the second round against Emmanuel.

The third time Jean-Luc ran in a presidential election was in 2022. He ran third, receiving 21.95% of votes cast. If he had not run, and if (still, implausibly) everybody who voted for him had voted for Socialist Party candidate Anne Hidalgo, she would have run second in the first round and been included in the second round against Emmanuel; or if everybody who voted for him had voted for EELV candidate Yannick Jadot, Yannick would have run second in the first round and been included in the second round against Emmanuel. But Yannick only received 4.63% of votes cast, and Anne only 1.75%. If one of them had not run, and all those votes had gone to Jean-Luc, he would have been in the second round against Emmanuel.

So if we’re going to call anybody a spoiler, why should it be Jean-Luc? To repeat myself, I’m not questioning whether there are other things to be said against him, only how fair it is to call him a spoiler candidate.

In retrospect, given the actual voting figures, anybody voting in France in 2017 or in 2022 who wanted the best chance of getting a left-wing candidate into the second round would have been best advised to vote for Jean-Luc.

It seems only fair to add that thing may be radically different in 2027, for all I know. Naturally I’d prefer to see the left unite behind a single candidate, but I make that comment while contemplating the fact that I know of no reason why the single candidate for the left to unite behind (if there be any chance of that happening) should not be Jean-Luc as easily as anybody else. Again, there may be good reason to prefer somebody else; that would surprise me not at all; it’s only the description ‘spoiler candidate’ that I question.

MisterMr 11: The top two advance to the runoff. If the left doesn’t run with a unified candidacy, they are eliminated in the first round (as happened in 2002, 2017, 2022, and almost certainly 2027).

Jerry Cayford,

So, if I understand you correctly, the argument is that there may be much better electoral systems than ranked choice voting with precisely five top candidates (not four, not seven, not everybody on the list like in Australia), but that is the only system apart from the current one that could ever plausibly be implemented in the USA. I suspected that the rationale of that essay pretending not to have heard of any others would, if not ignorance, likely be tactical, but it still seems unwise to take that approach.

For starters, readers may suspect that somebody who pretends never to have heard of the existence of other countries has no idea what he is talking about and is therefore not worth listening to, a conclusion that I find highly reasonable. It would seem more convincing if the existence of several systems was at least briefly acknowledged and then RCV favoured on the basis of insurmountable institutional constraints that make the better systems impossible to implement.

As a side note, my personal hunch is that because of the irrational veneration of the founding fathers, the constitution, and all the other arrangements that are wrongly presumed to be equally holy despite in some cases dating back only a few decades, the voting system of the USA will not, cannot be changed until after a catastrophic collapse and discrediting of the current political system. And if that happens, be it in 2040 or in 2140, be it from civil war or economic collapse or internal displacement of tens of millions due to climate change, better voting systems than final five etc will seem equally feasible. As will warlordism, unfortunately, but the point is, I don’t think that reform is possible for the foreseeable future beyond this or that individual state, and of course the states that need reform the most are for obvious reasons least likely to implement it.

@TM 16 and 17
Ok, but this assumes that (A) Melenchon (or for that matter Le Pen) should not have a shot for the presidency, but in a democracy logically they should have and (B) that there are at least two right wing candidates who have more votes than any candidate from the left, that means that the left already has a lot of problems.

For example, looking at the 2002 french election, first round, we have these numbers:
Jacques Chirac 19.88% (right)
Jean-Marie Le Pen 16.86% (right)
Lionel Jospin 16.18 % (left)
François Bayrou 6.84% (right or center-right)
Arlette Laguiller 5.72% (far left)

it’s quite obvious that the right was going to win anyway, it’s not just a problem that Jospin was spoiled, since the fourth party was also from the right, and anyway Jospin was already full 3.5% points below Chirac.

@Sashas (9) provides lots of good information, and I basically agree with all of it. At the same time, what is so right and so valuable about the HBS report is its insistent focus on the global effects for our whole society of the voting system’s logic. I think electoral reform discussions almost always miss the forest for the trees, but HBS stays squarely focused on the forest. Sashas does an excellent job of describing the important trees, but I want to say more about what reform discussions miss.

FairVote commissioned a postmortem on the failures of RCV referenda across the country in the 2024 election. They have posted a summary of the findings in three installments on Expand Democracy (a FairVote spinoff site where my redistricting article was published). One important finding was that “campaigns made a deliberate strategic choice to emphasize open primaries in paid media while de-emphasizing RCV,” and it backfired. The opposition portrayed this as duplicitously smuggling in evil RCV. The campaigns made that choice because it “seemed tactically sound at the time,” for the sort of reasons Sashas mentions: open primaries soothe nervous incumbents, attract independents, are easier to explain, etc. There is a place for those pragmatic concerns, but not as our guiding principles. They are not the forest.

Those 2024 campaigns dwelt too much on what they thought was achievable, and let the powerful bite them. @Alex SL (18) (and 5) urges the opposite approach: focus on what is most powerful, the best systems. Only after establishing which ones those are, proceed to what is achievable. Another example illuminates that approach.

Two years ago, I reviewed Lee Drutman’s book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop. He does a very good job on the power of RCV to solve our biggest problems, but then shifts to asking what system is best. No surprise, RCV plus some additional benefit rates as better than RCV alone, and he spends the final third of the book on the virtues of proportional representation (RCV plus multi-member districts) and never considers whether it is achievable. He implies that of course it is by listing all the countries that have converted to PR. @Alex SL gives a strange, humorous echo of my criticism of Drutman: with the exception of New Zealand in 1991, every single country that has ever adopted PR did it right around World War I, when they were in almost complete societal collapse. Alex suggests only “catastrophic collapse” will enable America’s system to change. Perhaps the problem is taking best possible systems as the starting point. I suggest distinguishing “systems” only by functionally important differences. I do not agree that there are better systems than Final Five Voting because, as I have argued throughout, eliminating the spoiler effect is the essential reform that RCV accomplishes, and all the candidates for “better” system have some functionally equivalent way of accomplishing that goal.

We train each other how to think about and talk about issues. The way “spoiler” is used misleads reform discussions. Roughly, there are two sides: voters who vote for so-called spoilers, and voters who do NOT vote for them, but wanted to. The latter are the important ones, but the talk is mostly about the former. We talk about factions who lose because they split between candidates, or the wrong one of the two leading candidates winning from a spoiler drawing off votes, etc. That’s just froth. Imagine it never happened. Imagine that every single voter always knuckles under and votes strategically for the preferred one of the two leaders. In that case, there are no spoiled elections, no less-than-a-majority winners, just a perfectly accurate selection between the two parties. And it gives us the fully dysfunctional political duopoly that we in fact have. This coercive pressure to vote strategically rather than for our preferences is what HBS calls “the powerful ‘spoiler effect.’”

The spoiler effect enables the two parties to move ANY distance from the public interest, as long as they both do it. This is our problem, not the occasional perverse election result from people voting for a non-viable candidate. I wrote this article featuring the HBS report not just because I like RCV but because that report takes seriously the need to think holistically about systems. It asks how a little coercion applied to billions of votes over time can shape our society. That is how I want the electoral reform community to think.

Scott P.,

Again, there are more than two or three possible systems. Germany and now New Zealand have a system that combines representatives responsible for a district and proportional representation, giving you ‘the best of both worlds’. But because most people only ever know their current system and one alternative that is currently discussed in their local media and never take stock of the entire solution space, they usually don’t realise something like that could be done even in theory. The same unfortunately applies to discourse on health care systems, education systems, tax policy, etc.

Also, any system built entirely around single-member constituencies will effectively disenfranchise minorities unless they are regionally concentrated. If you have 10% greens, 30% social democrats, 10% liberals, 30% conservatives, and 20% neo-nazis spread approximately evenly across your country, political representation will be ca. 50% seats for conservatives, ca. 50% seats for social democrats, and the remaining 40% of the electorate entirely unrepresented or nearly so. Conversely, because such a system actually rewards a regionally concentrated opposition, it fosters regionalist and potentially separatist sentiment. Because the USA currently have a strong taboo against separatism, it takes the form of unhealthy resentment between red and blue states, but the UK is a more typical example with its Welsh and Scottish and Northern Irish political parties.

A first minor step towards making systems built entirely around districts more representative and democratic would be to have five members of parliament elected per accordingly larger district. This is a seemingly random number, as in first five (not six or three!) RCV, so that is certainly open for discussion. But (a) it is what I am familiar with from my own territory, (b) it seems like the minimum number of members per district where minority but still significantly large movements have a chance of getting a handful of representatives elected (e.g., we have Greens in the territory assembly, not only the two major parties), and (c) it seems like the maximum number of members who it makes sense to have represent the same district (certainly when we have twenty per district, it becomes a bit silly and we could just just as well do proportional representation at the state or national level).

@Sashas (9) puts just the right light on nonpartisan primaries (the secondary part of Final Five Voting) with this:

“I would argue partisan primaries exist because a primary needs to exist and it might as well be partisan I guess. Some people want that. Some people don’t. Most people are resistant to change.”

Jerry Cayford,

I do not agree that there are better systems than Final Five Voting because, as I have argued throughout, eliminating the spoiler effect is the essential reform that RCV accomplishes, and all the candidates for “better” system have some functionally equivalent way of accomplishing that goal.

Even if you do mean this and believe in good faith that having single-member districts with Final Five (not seven!) Voting is objectively better than any proportional representation system, this is still a very strange sentence. According to you, final five is better than the German system, better than the Japanese system, better than the Bolivian system, better than the Finnish system, because it has ranked choice in common with the Australian system? (Which has ranked choice but not final five.) That… doesn’t follow.

Let’s try an analogy from religion in the hope of laying out the logic you deployed:

I do not agree that there are better faiths than that [specifically] of the Jehovah’s witnesses because, as I have argued throughout, believing in a single god is the essential tenet that Christianity accomplishes, and all the [other] candidates for “better” faith have some functionally equivalent way of accomplishing that goal [i.e., they also have single god].

I assume you would see the problem in this case? It is a sentence superficially shaped like an argument but lacking an argument, at least as far as I can see. And surely whether a group can find political representation that comprises 10% of the nation’s population but is evenly spread across all electoral districts is a “functionally important difference” to a much higher degree than avoiding spoiler effects in a system that never allows them representation.