Tentative conclusions on democracy & governance
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A rolling primary?
Inspired by the preceeding and born of the water cooler is this potential solution to two primary season problems:
1) Why does it make sense to stagger elections by state while forcing residents of the same state to vote on the same day?
2) Forcing everyone to vote on the same day presents a problem for strategic voters in early states; they have little idea what the outcomes will be in later states.
An interesting solution would be an extended, nationwide primary with frequent updates of the running tally. Sincere voters have an incentive to vote early to demonstrate the potential strength of their preferred candidates. Strategic voters, by contrast, face an incentive to follow the tally and vote after sincere voters. This is in order to maximize the effectiveness of their votes.
What, if any, constitutional and legal hurdles exist to implement this reform? Would this violate current interpretations of “one person, one vote?”
Would knowing the race were close in advance present an incentive to turn out?
This post is the product of substantial groupthink.
4 responses to to “A rolling primary?”
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No solutions here but another thought to add to the mix.
What about allowing a voter to update their vote later? In this way an engaged voter can change their vote as circumstances change.
Note that would pair well with electronic voting. One of the risks of electronic voting is that voters can be coerced to vote a specific way. But if a voter can later change their vote then the initial coercion was ineffective. I believe that some eVoting countries like Estonia do this and have a final period of time where only secret-ballot voting at the polls are allowed.
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That’s an interesting idea to think about. Of course it would undermine the solution to problem (2), which is to let strategic voters make their decisions on the basis of the previously revealed preferences of sincere voters.
One problem with our proposal is the incentive it presents for candidates to do even more triangulation – to campaign by the polls, as it were. Letting voters go back and change their votes might increase that incentive.
I should note that Jon Soros independently had the same basic idea a month ago in the NY Times. Thanks to an unnamed reader for pointing this out in private.
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I had a strongly negative reaction to the
Soros article in the New York Times. It struck me as almost the same thing as reporting East Coast results before the polls close on the West Coast. I’m guessing that the main effect on strategy would be to reduce overall turnout. As soon as a clear front runner was established, people would stop voting.But now I have a question: would the effect of this proposal differ from one election method to another (plurality, IRV, whatever)?
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Well, staggering primaries by state is almost the same thing as reporting east coast results before polls close on the west coast.
It’s hard to know what the effect on turnout would be. I can see it going both ways. The premise of the blog post is that sincere supporters of non-frontrunners would get to the polls quickly.
If early reporting on the east coast really depresses turnout, I suspect it’s because reporting comes with a running, projected electoral college tally.
You allude to the question of who would turn out if we knew how an election was going. Short answer: those who care about the outcome. Among this group, turnout might even go up, depending on the election. Barring compulsory voting, isn’t that always the case – that those who turn out are those who care?
I don’t know that the net effect – and we are fully in the realm of seat-of-pants conjecture here – would be vastly different under IRV. It is possible to do a natural experiment of sorts using the Demochoice script, however, by letting voters view the running tally. I’ve participated in a few such elections. One thing is certain; social pressure to go vote from those who care does increase.
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