Better Election Rules Start With the Problem We’re Trying to Solve
BC4D executive director Carah Ong Whaley joined Rob Lanphier, Taylor Eigen Risher, and Carlo Estefano on Electorama Weekly for an engaging, if nerdy, conversation about Top Three Elections, head-to-head voting, and why election reform should begin with a clear question: What problem are we trying to solve? They discussed how Top Three would build on open-primary reforms by advancing three candidates to the general election, where voters would evaluate every finalist directly against the others. Because there are no elimination rounds, every preference voters express contributes to a head-to-head contest—and independent, third-party, Republican, and Democratic voters all retain a meaningful voice.
They also explored why the details of election rules matter. Simply offering ranked ballots does not guarantee greater competition, equal treatment of voters, or a realistic path for candidates outside the two major parties. The goal should be a fairer playing field in which candidates must compete for and earn the support of more groups of voters and the winner can demonstrate that they are preferred over each opponent. As Carah said during the conversation, this is an especially important moment to take election reform to the next level: offer voters a genuine third choice and adopt rules strong enough that every voter—and every preference—matters.
Taylor also wrote an analysis of Top Three that is very much worth reading. Here’s the abstract: “I model the system purely in terms of outcomes–a directed graph over the 48 possible outcome states for three candidates, with edges standing in for the only moves a coalition can make–and use it to show that manipulation is extraordinarily narrow: a Condorcet winner can never be unseated by a single move, the system satisfies No Favorite Betrayal when the sincere state of the election has a Condorcet winner, only 2 of 48 states admit any profitable one-step manipulation, chaining moves together never gains more than one preference notch, and intransitive ballots never help at all. Simulations against several voter models confirm these scenarios are either too rare, too small-margin to detect, or too costly to organize in practice. The upshot: just vote honestly.”
