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Category: Politics

All posts related to politics.

Is “more voter education” the solution?

I have been mentioning this article a lot lately, so I figured I’d blog it. Here are some key excerpts:

More than one in 10 votes were ruled invalid in the multicultural seat of Fowler, raising serious questions about whether explanations of Australia’s compulsory preferential voting system are getting through.

Fowler, in Sydney’s south-west, has one of the highest non-English-speaking populations, many of whom have come to Australia as refugees from countries with very different political systems.

And:

She said the centre had just run a campaign, Civic Spotlight, that aimed to educate migrant communities about the voting system, but more needed to be done.

“The AEC, they are not doing enough to address it. They have resources online and they provide information in several languages but it’s not just about addressing community leaders, it needs to be one-on-one,” she said.

I recently referred to the AEC (Australian Electoral Commission) as one of “the sorts of agencies that like running STV elections.”

The number of candidates if Final Five Voting were applied to STV

Voters’ ability/willingness to rank candidates is an issue in ranked-ballot systems. Final Five (Four) Voting (FFV) aims to solve this problem with a plurality winnowing round. Voters are asked to consider only five (four) candidates at the ranking stage. What does this look like in STV?

The minimum number of decisive-round candidates is district magnitude. It cannot be less than 5 in a 5-seat district. So, for two slates of 3 that run in a competitive 5-seat district, voters are asked to consider six options. (I chose that scenario because it feels like an equilibrium.)

This number grows or shrinks in response to the number of slates, the sizes of slates, the number of independents, and the number coming out of an FFV winnowing round.

Someone should make a graph.

What does Philly suggest about the future of the party system?

I am keeping an eye on Philly for what it may say about the future of the Democratic Party and/or institutional change.

Philadelphia Magazine has a good story on Sen. John Fetterman’s (D) endorsement of two Working Families (WFP) candidates for city council. (Gov. Josh Shapiro [D] also has endorsed one of these candidates.) Does this reflect a broader willingness within the Democratic Party to empower WFP as a coalition partner?

It is worth remembering that Fetterman did not have to make endorsements.

The backdrop is an upcoming election to seven ‘at-large’ council seats. By law, a party may not nominate more than five candidates. This had the effect, until 2019, of reserving two seats for the Republican Party. Now the party is down to one, and November’s election may reduce that to zero.

As of late spring/early summer, three potential approaches to the situation were apparent.

One was to go to nonpartisan elections, potentially with instant runoff or Approval Voting. That buzz surrounded the mayoral nominating primary, but it reasonable to believe there is a constituency for similar reforms of the council electoral system.

Another was to try to remove WFP from the ballot. That effort was unsuccessful.

A third approach was along the lines of what Fetterman (and Shapiro) are now doing.

One might add a fourth approach, which I have not seen discussed: increase council size, and impose some form of proportional representation (PR). ‘At large’ elections are often thought to shut out numerical minorities, but they also let groups (like parties) aggregate their votes over larger areas than what a single-seat district typically encompasses. A greater number of at-large seats could help the GOP if this were twinned with PR, such that the threshold of exclusion were brought down to the party’s share of voters.

Thought experiments aside, this is an interesting situation to watch. Parties are not unitary actors. One often finds different views within them on how to approach situations like the one in Philadelphia.

Can independents run in open-list PR?

Short answer: it depends entirely on rules about ballot access.

Here is what I said when the question first came up two years ago:

Does this system exclude independents?

Not necessarily. Independents might run as individuals and win seats in their own right. They’d just need to clear the bar for a seat under proportional representation (roughly the number of votes cast divided by the number of seats in the district). Or they might form a joint “independent” list, which my colleague Mike Latner has seen under STV in Australia.

And the following should not be read to mean that one must be on a list to run. Again, this depends entirely on ballot access.

Who makes the lists? Rules vary. Party leaders might draw them up in a “smoke-filled room.” Local party committees might send delegates to a nominating convention. Multiple parties might negotiate a “joint” list. A single party might even field multiple lists. The point is that these lists exist in advance of a general election.

Magnus Jonsson also provides this resource, which has discussions of independents in Australia and Belgium.

Los Angeles, 1913: STV or OLPR?

How we understand Los Angeles matters. I claimed in a recent piece that the 1913 defeat of open-list PR there was a critical juncture for American PR advocacy. (I recently learned of a similar event in Western Europe, with the opposite effect. More on that another time.) Recently, there appeared two articles saying that the referendum was on STV. So, which was it?

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