hanging election

[calimac]

California now lives under the regime of the "top two" or "jungle" primary. There are no party primaries (except for President, in years when that's up): instead, all the candidates run on one ballot, and the top two finishers go on to November, whichever party they happen to belong to.

That can lead to interesting results like this.   There are more Democrats than Republicans in California, but a minor Democratic candidate siphoned off just enough votes that the other two, evenly matched, Democrats came out about the same as the two, pretty much evenly matched, Republicans.  It's more luck of the draw, rather than a measure of the support of the candidates, that we're apparently (if these numbers hold) getting one of each party rather than two Republicans, and it's the uncontrollable factor of the number of candidates from each party that dictated that situation.

That's assuming that party labels still mean anything at all in statewide offices, and I think they do.  Here's a blogger who thinks we should repeal this system, but besides writing irritatingly as if Nobody Could Have Predicted This, he gets the premise of the system wrong.  It had nothing to do with attracting votes of registered independents, still less necessarily electing them to office.  It was to attract support towards moderate, rather than extremist, candidates within the major parties.

That's one theory as to why the "moderate" Republican, rather than the Tea Partier, snagged second place in the gubernatorial race.  Democrats who either disliked Jerry Brown or felt he had in the bag might have expressed preference among Republicans.

I don't vote that way myself.  Under this regime, I've still been voting for the candidate I like best, and let the chips fall as they may.  I might consider voting tactically, but I'd have to have reliable polling results to have any idea of what I was doing.  If I were to pick one of the two strong Democrats in the Controller's race on the grounds of keeping the Republicans from claiming both spots, I'd have to have first known that there was a serious possibility of doing that, and then, which of the Democrats do I pick?  Someone would have to tell me who was more likely to win, or who everybody else with the same idea was picking.  Instead, I just voted for the one I thought would do a better job.

And the "jungle" primary can't explain this result. See the third-ranking candidate?  That's the legislator who was arrested for gun trafficking and withdrew from the race, but not soon enough to have his name removed.  Why did he get nearly 10% of the vote and rank above two serious candidates?  There are theories: name recognition without remembering what you recognize the name for.  Sheer cantankerous orneriness (as one blogger put it, "If I'm going to have a crook, why not pick one with a gun?").  Ethnic solidarity and refusing to believe he's guilty.  Could be a lot of things.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Is it not the case that, having over 50% of the vote, Jerry Brown gets the governorship without a further vote in November? Or am I misunderstanding the system?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I believe that applies to local nonpartisan offices like judgeships. It's also the way the jungle primary works in Louisiana. But not for partisan state offices in California.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

I'm not trying to tell you that you shouldn't just vote for the person who you think will do the best job but it seems disingenuous to say that you'd vote for the stronger candidates if only you knew who they were. I suspect that the Democratic party is more than happy to tell you which candidates it thinks have the best chance in a primary of this kind, and newspaper editorials around election time are likely to do the same.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

What I need is a poll, or a news "horse-race" article based on polls. Unfortunately neither tend to exist for a lot of races. The party will tell me who they endorse, but without a public poll, which I could get elsewhere and which I'd trust more not from that source, they can't tell me who's leading. And newspaper editorials are about who the newspaper endorses, not about who they think will win. Indeed, I was surprised to see the two Sec State candidates endorsed by several papers come so low in the results; there was certainly nothing in the editorials to suggest that would happen.

I should add that there's nothing distasteful about "tactical voting", as it's called, voting for stronger candidates. If the best candidate is sure to lose, and you know this, then if the second-best candidate is running neck-and-neck with a terrible one, vote for the second-best. Please! Of course, in Australia you have instant runoff, which eliminates that problem.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

I live in another country and yet I was able to find out who the strongest candidates in the California races were without too much difficulty when I cast my own ballot. That doesn't mean the prognostications were entirely correct but there was guidance available.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

For races like comptroller? For local judgeships? Where did you get this information? Only polls could give this reliably, and no sources I consulted showed polls for these races.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

Sorry, missed that you were talking about more minor races

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I mean anything other than Governor (or Senator, if that were up). Our House race - one of the most closely-watched in the state - was full of maneuverings trying to encourage tactical voting. But nobody had any idea of whether it would affect anything, or if so how, and in the end it turned out that it would have had to be truly massive in order to work. Nobody had expected Honda to win by as much as he did, or for the Republicans to be so far behind either Honda or Khanna.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

ISTR a few years ago reading a (description or abstract of) a mathematical analysis of this and other runoff systems that concluded that there was NO ideal system: all of them could be gamed and could result in people's votes having outcomes that they really didn't want.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I've read this too; it comes up in a number of poli sci works, including one I have called The Geography of Politics. The paradoxes mostly come up in extreme or unlikely situations, but the point is that it's impossible to control for them.