Today, Steve Singiser talked about the "folly" of "open" primaries: specifically, California's "top two" system, which, because of its specific rules, allowed Rep. Gary Miller to keep his seat.
I agree with Steve that it points out a bug in the system. I disagree, however, with his conclusions:
The open primary system was well-intentioned, but as the old saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. If voters are not willing to scrap the primary structure all together, it needs several fixes to it, at a minimum. A party should never be penalized for encouraging multiple candidates to seek an office, so a logical starting point would be to eliminate the possibility of a single party holding both general election positions. Time will tell if the two major political parties, or merely those interested in solid representative governance, will try to put a measure to that effect on the ballot.
Follow me below the fleur-de-Kos and I'll explain why.
The biggest problem with voting is that, with one key exception—namely, a two-person election where the winner gets an absolute majority, there cannot be a perfectly "fair" voting system.
This problem is described by Arrow's impossibility theorem, as shown by Stanford professor Kenneth Arrow (who, incidentally, is the youngest Nobel laureate in history) and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem.
Collectively, these two theorems say that any system involving three or more candidates must be objectively unfair. Since they're rather technical, I won't go into the exact details of the theorems themselves. Rather, I'll point out some of the paradoxical results that various voting systems can produce:
* A single candidate preferred by a majority of voters can lose an election (this can theoretically happen in, say, voting for MVPs in baseball).
* If a majority of voters prefer every member of candidate group A to every member of candidate group B, the winner can still come from group B (this is the "Miller problem," so to speak).
* A candidate who can beat every other candidate head-to-head can still lose an election.
* A candidate who, based on the preferences of the voters, has no chance of winning, can change the results of the election.
* In some forms of ranked voting—including Instant Runoff Voting—a candidate can be helped by having some of his or her supporters abstain from voting. [Obviously, this cannot happen in a non-ranked, one vote-per-voter system.]
So the question is not "How can we remove all the problems?" It's "how can we minimize the problems, and what problems are we OK with?"
My problem is #2 in the list above: I think the single most important result to avoid is a scenario where an absolute majority of voters are left with no candidates from their party.
The other problem is that the current system also encourages, as the other diary noted, the parties themselves to interfere and try and "clear the field." In other words, it penalizes one party for having a large primary field when the other party doesn't.
The way I see it, there are two relatively simple workarounds:
1. Winning party gets one slot. If one party receives at least 50 percent of the vote, then the top candidate from that party receives one of the two primary slots. The remaining slot goes to the top remaining vote-getter, regardless of party.
2. Top two plus one. In this scenario, instead of prohibiting two candidates from the same party from appearing in the general election, should the top two vote-getters belong to the same party, the highest vote-getter not in that party will also advance, making it a three-way general election.
Obviously, neither of these are perfect: both fixes guarantee the possibility of a candidate with fewer votes making the ballot over a candidate with more votes. But I would contend that such a scenario is still preferable to the alternative of a voter finding no general candidate worthy of a vote.
For what it's worth, I prefer solution #2: I feel it does a slightly better job of rewarding candidates who get a lot of votes, without discouraging large primary fields. Yes, there is the possible problem of an Angus King-like result, but I think that could be remedied by allowing one of the top two candidates to withdraw if he or she chooses.
If you have other suggestions, I'd love to hear them below.