I’ve been debating the value of “primary elections” versus “general elections” with many people (mainly in the United States) over the years. Some electoral reform advocates believe that we should do away with “expensive” primary elections, and use a system that eliminates the need. Some even believe that political parties could be made obsolete with the right method. I believe those advocates are paying too much attention to the math of the final two stages of the electoral process, and not enough to the psychology of elections.
There are (at least) THREE very important voter-certified checkpoints that unaffiliated candidates generally need to pass through to get to office:
- The signature-gathering process
- The primary election
- The general election
Candidates can sometimes skip the first step if they find an established political party who really likes them (e.g. because they “worked their way up the ranks” within the party or because the political party “drafted” them). Ultimately, though, the value of political parties is to build a trusted brand with voters by being an organization that vets candidates, and doesn’t let crackpots use their trusted brand name. The better the party is at vetting candidates, the better their brand.
As we know, in the United States, we have a duopoly: the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. These days, most voters don’t trust at least one of the parties as far as they can throw them, but most voters have picked one or the other as the “good enough” party. They may not LOVE the candidates churned out by their “favorite” party, but they usually prefer that to letting the nutjobs from the other party have any more power than they already have.
Brands have value, even if all of the big brands in a particular market category kinda suck. Personally, I don’t LOVE the Democratic Party, but I’d generally rather have their chosen candidate for most offices in power than the Republican Party’s chosen candidate. I’m sure that most folks that currently vote for Republicans feel the same way about the Democratic Party’s vetting process.
I bring up this point because some election methods proposed here (and elsewhere) try to tout the benefits of eliminating primaries. Personally, I’d prefer it if we could somehow eliminate (or streamline) the signature gathering process needed for ballot access. I wouldn’t particularly mind being presented with 100 candidates for the county coroner’s office if I didn’t ALSO have to seek out activists on the sidewalk with clipboards that are gathering signatures for alternatives to the two big parties here in the United States in order to ensure “third party” candidates make it on the ballot.
A system that I think would work really well:
1. Make it easier for candidates to get on the ballot. For small, relatively low-stakes offices (e.g. county coroner), have minimal paperwork and vetting process (for minimal qualifications) to get on the ballot. For big offices (POTUS, State Governor), have a state-operated website where minimally-qualified candidates can gather a required number of e-signatures (in addition to allowing for old-school paper signature gathering).
2. Have a “unified primary” (or rather, an approval-based primary). I’m not sure if two, or three, or five is the right number of candidates to advance out of the primary. One could avoid having a fixed number of candidates by having a minimum approval threshold (say, 30% approval), which would (hopefully) make it less likely that candidates would talk about why the other candidates are bad, and instead nudge them focus on earning positive name recognition and approval of 30% (or whatever) of the electorate.
3. Have a general election with (potentially) three or more candidates from the primary, using a system that doesn’t fail miserably when there are three or more candidates seeking a single office.
The three stages above seem like they would both give voters ample time and tools to vet the candidates, while at the same time offers a broader opportunity to become a candidate, and rejects candidates before they distract public consideration of worthier candidates.
UPDATE (2023-12-19): This post is more-or-less copied from a note sent to the election-methods mailing list. Look here to see the replies, which includes some discussion of the eight-ish major-ish political parties in Norway and one participant dredging up some snark I made about the Green Party in the United States months ago:
Perhaps there will be a reddit discussion about this:
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