I generally do not moderate comments (although sometimes the blog software holds back a comment for one reason or another). For the time being, at least, I am turning on moderation for first-time commenters.

I would rather not do this, but I have had a few first-timers here just recently who were rude, engaged in ad hominem attacks on me, or otherwise were inappropriate in their comment. So I will screen new comments from first-timers and so how that works.

If a comment gets held up in moderation (for whatever reason), I will not always know for a day or two. But any acceptable comment will be manually cleared. As I say at the “About” page, I have sole authority to decide when a comment can be a part of this blog. Over the years, I have rarely refused permission to comment. But there are now and then those who feel they need to make a statement that they are capable of making only by being rude. Good riddance to that sort of person!

It is never my intention to prevent reasonable debate. I value the community that had been built up over the years at F&V. This decision is only to protect what we have that I cherish–that is, protecting the virtual orchard from noxious weeds.

(Comments are off on this post, but not on the rest, aside from a very few where they were already turned off.)

I bring this up sometimes in conversations online and elsewhere, but I do not think I have ever seen an adequate response. I also do not think I have ever articulated a position on this at the blog. I am very much on the record as favoring PR for the House. However, the Senate is a co-equal body so having it unreformed while the House is elected by PR may have many undesirable and unanticipated consequences.

If you are a PR advocate for the US House, how do you see it working with the Senate? For purposes of the conversation I hope to spark here, let’s set down the parameters that you can’t have more than two senators per state, in any state. We are stuck with equal representation per state, and the constitution itself would have to be amended to increase the number per state to one more friendly to PR.

Obviously, a variant of this question could be asked about PR and presidentialism. All the more so because of the electoral college, as currently operating, for the presidency. This is also a potential obstacle to having a functional PR system for the House. This is a separate–but very important–question. It is at least one that has been addressed. (See for example, the study by Drutman and Mainwaring.) I believe hardly anyone has addressed the Senate in this context. That seems like a problem, so let’s think about how to resolve it.

I would not be asking were I not skeptical there is any such credible theory. I have seen various articles and social-media posts laying out possible options. (One example: Yonah Jeremy Bob in The Jerusalem Post today; there are many others, but I have not saved many of them other than a somewhat outlandish “most realistic scenario” posted a few days ago on an account called Iran Spectator.)

The problem is, you can’t dismantle a repressive apparatus via airstrikes. (Or can you? That is part of the question, I guess.) There is risk of the Iranian leaders escalating attacks on protesters. There is some (unknown, but be prepared) risk they fire missile barrages at Israel again, or at US bases. I lack the knowledge to game this out. I just hope US leaders, including the President, know what they are doing. On that front, I want to be optimistic, but I struggle to be.

So what is the theory they might be working with, and is it in some way plausible? We may be finding out soon. 2026 is only in its 13th day, and already it has been rather too interesting.

The assembly size reduction was part of the coalition agreement between the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Japan Innovation Party (JIP) that was signed last year. As an earlier (26 October 2025) Japan Times article noted that “Small parties that rely on proportional representation seats are on high alert,” because the plan would remove about 50 party-list seats allocated by proportional representation in Japan’s current mixed-member majoritarian system.¹ Yoshihiko Noda, leader of the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, has called for the cut to include a reduction of the number of single-seat districts. As Japan Times notes, this would complicate the electoral “coordination” of the LDP.

The recent (2 Jan.) article on possible electoral system change does not refer to any specific proposal to bring back SNTV, but indicates there is “growing debate in parliament” about doing so. The justification given is:

Advocates for scrapping the current model say a multiseat district system would better allow parliament to reflect a diverse range of views and spur more voter interest by helping to cut down on “dead votes,” or ballots cast for candidates who end up losing their single-seat district race.

This is a specious line of argument. If these were really the goals, there would be better ways to achieve them. The only advantage to SNTV is it is familiar, given its use to elect the House of Representatives for decades prior to the mid-90s. However, better ways to achieve the stated goals would be either to convert the mixed member system to the proportional (MMP) type, or adopt list PR. Given the importance of personal votes in the LDP, open-list PR would be a sensible choice. In fact, half of the House of Councillors is already elected by open-list PR.

It actually gets worse, in that the recent JT article indicates some of the proposals circulating around would be for the limited vote, not SNTV. For instance, allowing the voter to vote for two candidates in a three-seat district. SNTV is, of course, a special case of limited vote, in the sense of limiting the number of votes to not simply less than the number elected in the district (the district magnitude, or M), but all the way down to one. Both have the basic feature of being pure candidate-based systems where the top M candidates win, regardless of party affiliation. By contrast, open-list PR would first pool the candidates’ votes at the level of the party list, before determining how many seats each party would win.

The Democratic Party for the People (DPP) is said to believe the limited vote “would avoid a concentration of power in a single party and foster a multiparty system.” This is seriously misguided. Most voters could be expected to give their full allotment of votes to candidates of the same party, and thus the limited vote, giving multiple votes per voter, is more favorable to the largest party than SNTV is. (Basic electoral-system theory!)

Readers interested in a discussion of SNTV may want to consult the recent post that started off being about Kyrgyzstan’s adoption of such system, but morphed into a very interesting discussion in the comments about the place of SNTV in the family of electoral systems (and related topics).

Thanks to those who called the first-linked JT story to my attention–Yibo in another thread here and my colleague, Ellis Krauss.

1. One of the articles says it would be a reduction of 25 constituency seats and 20 list seats. It is not clear which proposal actually was voted on. ︎

AB 1227 of 2023 was passed by the state legislature and signed by the governor and explicitly grants to Santa Clara County the option to adopt ranked-choice voting (RCV) for any or all elected county officers. It allows that either the county’s Board of Supervisors or a county initiative may enact RCV.

The legislation further says, “The ordinance [to adopt RCV] shall specify which county officers shall be elected by this method and whether they shall be elected at large or by or from district, as applicable.” The reference to “at large” surely enables the country to elect the Board or other multi-person bodies in the county by single transferable vote (STV), sometimes called (in the US) proportional ranked-choice voting (PRCV). The first section of the enacted state law–the “findings” section–references cities in California that have adopted STV, such as Albany and Palm Desert, although it simply refers to their systems as “RCV” without the important detail. (Palm Desert now has two districts, one of which is a single seat using RCV/alternative vote, and the other of which elects four by STV/PRCV.)

Interestingly, the law applies only to Santa Clara County. Moreover, its third of three sections reads, in full: “The Legislature finds and declares that a special statute is necessary and that a general statute cannot be made applicable within the meaning of Section 16 of Article IV of the California Constitution because of the unique circumstances relating to the County of Santa Clara’s interest in having the option to use ranked choice voting in its elections.” (The cited section states, “A local or special statute is invalid in any case if a general statute can be made applicable.”)

Therefore, we might say that we have here a case “electoral system pork barrel”! Okay it is not a project, which is what “pork barrel” implies, but a measure regarding electoral systems that provides a benefit only to the geographical region represented by its sponsors. The originally introduced bill did not have that third section, although it did already state its applicability was only to the one county. The introducing member was Assembly Member Evan Low, who at the time represented Assembly District 26, encompassing parts of the Silicon Valley, which is to say a large portion of Santa Clara County. Assembly Member Alex Lee later joined as a co-author; his district encompasses other parts of the county, including part of the city of San Jose.

Curiously, the final chaptered amendment to the state code says that an election under RCV in Santa Clara would have to take place at the same time as the statewide “primary” (i.e., the first round under California’s two-round not-a-primary electoral system used for state and federal offices). It is very strange that it would not be held at the November “general” election. This provision changed through the bill’s legislative process, and I will address the apparent reasons for this below. The initial version did not specify the timing of a potential RCV election in the county. The first amended version in the state Assembly added this tortured phrase: “If a proposal would elect an officer by ranked choice voting through a single election with no possibility of a runoff, the bill would authorize the county to hold that election at the first statewide general election following the statewide primary election at which the election otherwise would be held in accordance with existing law.” An amended version in the state Senate said in somewhat more straightforward language that the county could hold an RCV election at either the “primary” or the “general” while adding that third section quoted above.

A further round of amendments in the Senate saw two members of that chamber join as further coauthors, Josh Becker and David Cortese, both of whom represent–you guessed it–parts of Santa Clara County. However, before its final passage the language to require that any such RCV election in the county be held at the “primary” was included.

The bill’s Assembly Floor Analysis dated 9/05/2023 (available at LegInfo) indicates that the jurisdictions within the state that have so far adopted RCV are all charter cities, but that it is not clear under current law that charter counties would have this authority, because counties are generally given narrower discretion in their election ordinances.

The county itself had determined that it did not have the authority absent a change in state law. Thus what we have here is a change in state law for this one county for the simple reason that only this county had applied for authorization. It did so in response to a countrywide ballot measure that had indicated the county would adopt RCV if it became possible within the capacity of the vote tabulation machinery used by the county. That measure passed in 1998, but only in December 2022 did the county Registrar of Voters declare that it now had the relevant machinery.

It is not clear from the immediately available resources whether there was any debate on making this legislation a blanket permission for counties to adopt RCV. All versions of the bill as it worked its way through the legislature explicitly were only about Santa Clara County.

As for the question of the date on which an RCV election could take place, it seems this is due to the potential incompatibility with state law if it were set to take place in November. This is implied by the report on the Assembly Third Reading, dated April 24, 2023 (also available at LegInfo). It notes that elections for county officers are required to be held at the statewide “primary” with a second round in November only if there was no majority in the first round. Therefore, a county holding no election for such an office at the first round would be in potential breach of state law, and evidently legal counsel said that even the third section added to the bill would not remedy that problem. This is unfortunate, of course. RCV (in the form of the alternative vote/AV) is by definition a one-round solution to obtaining a definitive result that might otherwise require two rounds to obtain a majority. So logically it should be held at the end of what would otherwise be a two-round process, not at the beginning. For sure turnout is higher in November than at the first round. Not for the first time, logic gets tripped up by the law!

The bill ultimately passed the Assembly 67-0 with 13 abstentions and the Senate 31-7 with 2 abstentions. I do not know if there is currently a strong prospect that the county will go ahead and be a pioneer in using RCV for any of its county offices, but possibly that low-turnout Assessor runoff special election will reenergize the debate.

The contest is more interesting than your average special election for a county assessor position. The first round was concurrent with a reasonably high-profile statewide election. Even though that statewide election was itself a special election, it had high stakes. I am referring to Prop. 50, the state’s engagement in the interstate gerrymandering war. 550,315 voters in Santa Clara County turned out for the proposition (393,625 voted yes), while 467,964 voted in the Assessor first round. That is a difference of over 82,00 voters, but as you might image, that nearly 468k would vote for Assessor is a pretty high amount.² The total turnout was 553,637 (in other words, there actually was a slice of the electorate that voted for Assessor but skipped Prop. 50), which was 51.8% of the registered voters in the county.

Advocates of ranked-choice voting will often point to a contest like this one, alleging that runoffs result in low turnout yet the considerable expense of running an election. On the other hand, the election could be complete in a single round when the turnout might tend to be higher. In fact, it was from just such an advocacy organization that I learned about this runoff. So they have a point. A drop-off in turnout from 51% to 20% is substantial.

If there is resistance to adopting ranked-choice voting (the alternative vote, or AV), as there often is, there are other possibilities. For example, one could elect the office by plurality, at least when it is a special election for a lower-profile office like Assessor. Maybe it is not so bad if such a contest produces a winner with less than 50% of the vote.

In the first round, Neysa Fligor (currently Los Altos Vice Mayor and an employee of the Assessor’s office) had the plurality, which was 37.7%. The runner up, Rishi Kumar (a former city council member for Saratoga), had 24.0%, and two other candidates had 21.3% and 17.0%.³ Yet again, another two-round contest with a closer margin between second and third than between first and second, something that is rather common and potentially a flaw in the two-round system. Maybe the third place candidate could have won the runoff if only he or she had won just a relative few more votes needed to have finished second. In this case, however, that was probably unlikely, as a first-round contender who is 13.7 percentage points ahead of the closest challenger is likely quite hard to beat. In fact, another electoral rule possibility aside from plurality or two-round majority (or AV) is the double complement rule (DCR), first proposed by Shugart and Taagepera (1994). Under the DCR, the first-round leader wins outright if the runner-up has a shortfall from majority that is at least double that of the leader. In this contest, (50–24.0)>2(50–37.7) because 26> 2(12.3). Perhaps 37.7% does not seem like a “decisive” result, but a leader with that strong a lead has a reasonably high probability of being the majority’s preference. And indeed the runoff showed Fligor trouncing Kumar, 65.18–34.81, although we must be mindful that this was in the sharply reduced turnout as already noted. Maybe if turnout had reached 50% or higher in the head-to-head, Kumar would have won. I have to say I find that completely implausible, and most likely the large majority of voters–even those who cast a vote in this first-round contest–either did not care all that much or figured it was a foregone conclusion that Fligor would win.

Perhaps the best reform of all would be to ensure that a runoff is not held right in the middle of the winter holiday season. Another wild idea is that an Assessor really does not need to be an elected position at all, and needs to be one even less when it is an interim replacement for an incumbent who had resigned. In this case, the interim in which the winner of the special election will serve is only about a year, as a regular election will be held in the 2026 cycle.

Or the county could adopt RCV. It has been considered in Santa Clara County before. What do you think? Most of you probably care a good deal less who the Santa Clara County Assessor is than the average Santa Clara County voter did. But the principles of how to ensure effective and accountable government at the local level apply far more widely than this one contest. And a post decided in a runoff with 20% voting hardly seems like good government.

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1. The county includes the city of San Jose. ︎
2. In fact, the last time it was on the ballot was at the first round (“primary”) of 2022, when the incumbent Larry Stone was reelected yet again with evidently token opposition. He got just over two thirds of the vote, so no election was needed that November. In that contest, 302,038 votes were cast. This is obviously a good deal lower than in the first round of the recent special election, but these are not directly comparable given Stone’s easy win vs. an open seat in 2025, in addition to the concurrence of the first round in 2025 with the high-profile statewide referendum. By comparison, the statewide governor first round in 2022 saw 348,647 votes cast in the county. (In November 2022, that would rise to 541,895.) ︎
3. These were current Saratoga Council Member Yan Zhao and East Side Union High School District Board Member Bryan Do. See San Jose Spotlight. ︎

It should not properly be seen as a secession from Somalia but rather a reassertion of past legitimate statehood which is now being recognized (albeit by only one other state so far). Somaliland, with its capital Hargeisa, was a British territory that earned its independence on 26 June 1960. Days later it joined the former Italian Trust Territory of Somaliland in a union known as Somalia, with its capital in Mogadishu. The case for Somaliland (Hargeisa) as a rightful separate state today (and de facto over the past three decades) rests on these distinct colonial pasts,² their separate independence processes, and a claim that the act of union between the two entities was never properly ratified. In fact, the referendum on union was actually rejected by a majority of voters in Somaliland, who were outvoted by the majority in the larger Somalia. (See timeline at Borkena (an Ethiopian publication) or Wikipedia.)

The standard requirements for recognizing this entity as a state would seem to be met, despite the obvious and predictable objections of the government of Somalia. These requirements, based on the Montevideo Convention (see Justia), are generally that the entity in question have “a permanent population and a defined territory,”³ and an “effective government.” Of course, we could say that plenty of entities around the world with existing recognition as states fail one or more of these tests. Including Somalia itself! Sates are rarely de-recognized for falling out of compliance with such conditions and some have gained recognition despite not ever having met them. Yet when an entity clearly passes these tests, as it would seem Somaliland does, it is reasonable to conclude that it merits recognition. Its case seems at least as strong as that of Kosovo, which many (but by no means all) states in the international system recognize, and clearly stronger than that of Palestine (which more have recognized than have recognized Kosovo, and to which I will return below).

It is possible that other states will follow suit and recognize Somaliland in the near future, notwithstanding the many statements of condemnation that immediately (and perhaps predictably) followed Israel’s announcement. Taiwan was an exception, with its Ministry of Foreign Affairs issuing a statement that it “welcomes” Israel’s decision, adding that Taiwan, Israel, and Somaliland are “like-minded democratic partners sharing the values of democracy, freedom, and rule of law.”

Taiwan is an interesting case here, as it surely meets every standard of being a “state” worthy of recognition, and yet it enjoys actual formal recognition from few others. That is, of course, due to the demand of China (Beijing) that no state can have formal relations with both, and the fact that most of the countries of the world want formal relations with the People’s Republic. But Taiwan is in any reasonable sense–at least beyond the world of diplomatic “recognition”–a functioning state, and indeed a democracy.

There is some consternation that the recognition upsets regional balances or the complex internal situation in Somalia. These concerns are surely overstated. Somalia has not controlled Somaliland, as noted, for nearly 35 years. Even the African Union, which normally has strong norms against separation,⁴ had a Fact Finding Mission in 2005 that Somaliland had undertaken an effective process of state-building, had defined territory, and a constitution that had emerged from grassroots consultation and a proper ratification. It concluded that the AU should find a “special method” of dealing with the situation and that “Somaliland’s search for recognition was historically unique and self-justified in African history,” noting the facts I sketched above about the improperly ratified and malfunctioning union that existed prior to 1991.⁵

It is also questionable that Israel’s recognition of Somaliland will further destabilize Somalia, as claimed by Lesley Anne Warner in World Politics Review. Somalia is already terribly unstable, with nothing that can be called “effective government” and as Warner notes, there are already internal tensions between the “federation”⁶ of Somalia and its member units over planned constitutional reforms. I doubt Israeli recognition is so powerful that it can make the internal situation of Somalia measurably worse. In any case, is it worth denying recognition to Somaliland, whose leaders and people have been carrying out a process of quite successful state-building for over three decades, to stoke fantasies of an ineffective leadership in Somalia that it will regain territory over which its past control was already of questionable legitimacy?⁷

Speaking of stoking fantasies, it is noteworthy that this development came in late 2025, a year when several western democratic governments announced “recognition” (or intent for near-term recognition) of a State of Palestine, despite that entity almost certainly failing any reasonable application of the test of control over “defined territory” or an “effective government.”⁸ Recognition⁹ is, of course, a political act. It is one government developing a formal relationship with another government, and actions of governments are political more or less by definition. Nonetheless, the various Palestine recognitions were blatantly political acts, mostly motivated either by domestic politics or by a desire to punish and compel Israel, rather than recognitions of actual conditions for statehood having been met. By the latter standard, Somaliland is the far more deserving of the two. I congratulate Somalilanders on achieving this step, and hope many more states will eventually recognize what they have established.

[Note: I turned off comments, not because I don’t welcome calm and rational discussion, but because–perhaps predictably–this attracted a comment that was rude rather than discussion-enhancing, and thus in violation of the comment policy. It was from someone who, to my knowledge, has never commented on this blog before and will not be welcome to do so in the future.]

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1. National elections are restricted to only three parties, with a periodic process of (re-)qualification. They seem to be generally regarded as quite fair, even though most sources would not regard the country/territory as fully democratic. ︎
2. A brief exchange in the UK House of Commons from 25 July 1960 is interesting. ︎
3. There is a portion of Somaliland territory that is disputed and not fully under the central government’s control but Justia notes that under the Montevideo Convention, “boundary disputes do not necessarily prevent an entity from being considered a state.” ︎
4. Not too surprisingly, given it is a union of… states. Yet it has found ways to recognize Eritrea and South Sudan, though these are clearly different in the sense that the larger unions that broke up consented to the recognition (after lengthy periods of conflict). ︎
5. The text of the report was posted as a series of screenshots on Twitter (X) by Rashid Abdi. It is well worth a read. ︎
6. I doubt it qualifies as a case of federalism in a meaningful sense, but that would be a topic for another time. ︎
7. It not worth seriously entertaining the claims from some quarters that the recognition is a precursor to Israeli military bases in the Horn of Africa or to a plan to resettle Gazans there. I find these allegations patently ridiculous (why would Somaliland agree just to get Israeli recognition?). In any case, if they were true I would not know, and my assessments here of the merits of Somaliland’s justification for statehood would not change in any case. ︎
8. We might say Palestine has had two concurrent governments, neither of them effective. The bigger point is that the Palestinian Authority, which serves as a de facto government of Palestine, has not controlled the Gaza Strip, allegedly part of its territory, in nearly two decades, and under the Oslo Accords has actual control over only portions of the rest of its presumed territory. Normally the “state” should pass these fundamental tests before it is recognized, and the reasons why the conditions are not met should not be relevant to the determination of whether the state exists. ︎
9. Some of them said their recognition was “conditional” on various future developments like internal reform of the Palestinian Authority or disarmament of Hamas (by whom?). On the legal standing of conditional recognition and its problems, see Stanley-Ryan. ︎

Beckwith observes that there are “simply too many candidates,” although does not attempt to explain how many is too many. Then he claims that winnowing of the field takes too long (“drags out the process”) when a party uses “an elaborate system of awarding delegates proportionally,” as the Democratic Party currently does (sort of–I will get back to that). Enter RCV as a supposed solution. The idea, of course, is that voters would rank order their preferences over multiple candidates in the field. Then the process of elimination of the trailing candidates and transferring of their votes would go on “until one candidate secures a majority.” In other words, the electoral system he is advocating is the one political scientists would typically call the alternative vote (and is also sometimes called instant runoff voting or IRV).

Perhaps readers already will have spotted the problem here. Although he never makes the implications of favoring RCV clear, evidently Beckwith is proposing to narrow the field down in each state to a single majority winner. That is, unless he actually means to do away with delegates and the state-by-state sequential contests altogether, and use ‘RCV’ in a single-day nationwide primary. That would be a very radical change,¹ and there is no hint in the op-ed that this is what is being proposed. Thus I assume the idea is to keep with something like the current schedule of states or groups of states voting on various different days throughout the “season” of sequential primary contests.²

I have to ask, how would it be an advance if each state awarded all of its delegates to one candidate in a process that starts off with numerous candidates–in fact “too many”? Further, how would it be an advance if the process continued to “drag out” as states late in the process vote when a majority of delegates may already have been allocated to one candidate earlier, perhaps to a presumptive nominee who started accumulating state-by-state delegate majorities on a third of the first-preference votes (hypothetically)?

Most of the rest of the piece simply rehashes the longstanding claims of RCV advocates that voters can be entirely sincere under this sort of system (always vote for your first choice) and that candidates will “play nice” because they want second (and lower) preferences from voters who ranked other candidates higher. These claims can be questioned, of course. In a field with “too many” candidates, not only is it likely much harder for voters to identify their true first choice, let alone rank a large field, but they may also find that candidates they thought they were transferring their votes to got eliminated earlier in the count. If they rank all candidates, this is not likely not a problem (the vote should still transfer to some candidate who remains in the running). But if there are a lot of candidates, most voters will not do so,³ and in any case some states may truncate the number of allowed preferences short of the number in the entire field.⁴

As for the claim about candidates “playing nice,” this has always struck me as wishful thinking. I concede that any given candidate dyad in a multi-candidate field under a system of ranked preferences has a higher potential to be cooperative than under plurality and maybe also relative to two-round majority. However, ultimately these processes all must produce a single winner, there are often intense policy or personal disputes amongst the contenders, and we are talking about winnowing a field down to one of the final contenders for the Presidency of the United States, after all. In any sensible theory of electoral system effects on candidate strategy, the current “proportional” system should be far more conducive to encouraging candidates to “play nice” and yet… they do not.⁵ To claim that RCV will be notably more conducive to playing nice is quite a stretch.

The current process is a mess and needs reform. We hear various proposals for reform every cycle, and obviously this means that the party continues to fail to come up with a process that is seen as working well. The current “proportional” system actually is not so proportional. It consists of high thresholds and variable and often low district magnitude, with poor information about who is actually in the running for delegates in the voters’ own congressional district. In a multi-candidate field, your first choice may have no chance to get delegates. It is, as I said back in 2020, the strategic voters’ nightmare. While RCV may seem like an obvious solution to difficulties of casting a proper strategic vote (let alone allegedly freeing voters to cast a sincere one), we should be very cautious about claims that such a proposal would either render strategic voting unnecessary (which is hogwash) or simpler for voters.⁶ The solution to this problem is surely not to have every state award all its delegates to one candidate,⁷ regardless of the method used to determine the majority winner in each state. The alternative vote form of ‘RCV’ in presidential primaries is a poorly thought out idea, even if well intentioned. It deserves to be dismissed.

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1. Not to say it would not be a good one. I have some doubts, but also admit to at least a bit of sympathy for the idea. Actually implementing it would not be easy. This all would be a topic for another day. ︎
2. The piece links to an article on Axios, which requires one to register to read, and I didn’t. So perhaps the Axios article has these details and I would not know. (Were I an editor at MSN, I would have told the author these highly important details should not be glossed over, and one should not have to follow a link to get them!) Common Dreams also has an article extolling RCV for presidential primaries, and it also avoids mention of the issues I raise in this planting. ︎
3. Beckwith claims that “ballot exhaustion” will not be a problem in a “high profile presidential primary.” I admire his confidence in voters. I will just insert my own anecdote as a reasonably engaged observer of politics that during the 2020 contest I was very glad that I did not have to come up with a ranking of a field that mostly consisted of a bunch of candidates with obvious flaws but not much differentiating them, other than a few that I actively disliked.
   Besides, aș I note elsewhere in the post, many states are sure to restrict the number of preferences allowed to a number that may often be lower than the total number of candidates. In this sense, ballot exhaustion will be a built-in feature of the rules. ︎
4. I am not going to get into the question of whether states even would agree to pass legislation permitting ranked-choice ballots for presidential primaries. This is potentially a very big obstacle. ︎
5. And yet the losers eventually usually endorse the presumptive winner within their party. Of course, the wounds of a bitter campaign may undermine the winner in the general election. This is a general problem with primaries, and no electoral system is likely to do much to dampen this fundamental problem when the ultimate endpoint is only one can win a highly desirable prize. ︎
6. More limited implementations of RCV could be to use it around the threshold. If your first-choice candidate fails to get more than the 15% threshold (or is otherwise too unsupported to win a delegate in your district), the vote transfers so it can be used by a candidate with enough support to win delegates. Some states have done this already in caucuses. (This seems to be what Unite America had in mind for Democrats in its report from 2020.) It might be a better idea, although when applied to primaries it still has the problem mentioned in an earlier footnote whereby state legislatures and governors must be convinced to adopt it. Moreover, states or the state party limited preferences to five, which is well below the number of contesting candidates in many early states. (On these rules, see New America 2021, a report that is actually sensitive to the issues I raise here.) ︎
7. Despite the fact that that one state in the GOP process doing precisely that in 2024 elicited praise from a pro-RCV group at the time. ︎

I’m fully on board the proportional-representation train for Canada. Canadian governance has dangerously few checks and balances during majority …

Proportional representation for Canada: a proposal for multi-member districts

Introduction of a majoritarian single non-transferable vote system with 30 new three-member districts, a gender requirement per electoral district, while also revising rules on campaigning, financing, and candidate eligibility.

The linked article notes that the organization will continue to have updates on how voters and candidates adapt to the new rules.

And, yes, we could quibble with calling SNTV “majoritarian” but it is better than calling it “semi-proportional” as many folks do.

(Hat tip to Jack for this one.)

Update: as reflected in the new, parenthetical, part of the title, there is also a lively and interesting discussion of how to classify SNTV, and even what it means for a system to be “PR,” in the comments.