My name is John Chamberlain. I'm a professor emeritus of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and I'm a long-time student of election methods. The same is like primary seasons generating some mysteries in that. Most of the states use plurality voting. That is you get to vote for one and we count the number of first place votes and we allocate delegates that way. Caucuses is in a few states work differently, and there's a sequence of vote status. You vote with your feet. You have to show up at the local meeting. You stand in the corner presumably as somebody who has a sign that says, this is the Barney table or whatever, and people divide themselves up after talking for awhile. Then if your group doesn't have at least 15 percent of the people in the room standing in it, your candidate is eliminated and you have the opportunity to go stand with another group. This continues until every group that's still alive in this process has at least 15 percent of the vote, and then the voting is over. They count heads and they report that result to the state party. This time around, we're also seeing at least two states use ranked-choice voting. Hawaii and Kansas have received permission from the National Democratic Party. They use ranked-choice voting, in which at the polls you can list usually up to five people in order. So your favorite, your second, and your third, and then a process similar to what happens in the caucuses goes on that if candidates don't have at least 15 percent of the vote, they're eliminated and you move to their second choice on their balance and you allocate those, and you keep that process going until the only candidates still in the running have at least 15 percent of the vote, and you use those percentages to allocate delegates. So it's a variant on the caucus in the sense that you don't show up, you can vote via mail, and in some cases you can vote on election day. It's actually add in some interesting twist on traditional ways of doing things. This is the first time, in my knowledge, anyway, that they have been used in presidential primaries. They are used in local governments around the country, particularly in the bay areas has used them for a generation or so. They've been used in municipal elections. [inaudible] used them in 1975. I think it was in a mayoral election and then the system was tossed out the following year. New York City adopted ranked-choice voting for future elections, where they'll use them in primaries and in the regular election. Maine became the first state last year to use them in congressional elections and it made a difference in one of the races. So it's an idea that is gaining in popularity. There are a couple of bills in the Michigan legislature which would allow ranked-choice voting to be used in local elections. There may be some states that will follow Maine in using ranked-choice voting at the state level. Well, those of us who studied election systems over the years would probably almost unanimously say it's not a sensible way to do it. Because you're only looking at people's forced preferences, and some percentage of the population who's voting is going to vote for somebody who doesn't get very many votes, and that could be half of the voters who have voted for people who are now eliminated. The question naturally comes up, "Well, I wonder what their second choice would have been?" But you didn't ask for that information so you don't have it. Ranked-choice voting, you do ask for that information. Plurality has also got a problem if you have left, center, and right groups of candidates and you have different numbers of candidates so that there might be six centrist and two people on the left and three people on the right. It may well be that most of the voters prefer a centrist, but they split their votes across a whole group and those folks get depressed vote totals and get eliminated. So I think that again that sense of, well, what if we asked about their next two preferences or the next three preferences that somebody might be nearly everybody's second choice, but the first choice are very few and that person's going to be eliminated and a lot of people, if you've asked, would have said, "I really like that person, it would have been my next choice." So in plurality voting, if your real favorite candidate is somebody who the polls are suggesting doesn't have a chance, there's a question of, "Well, should I vote for somebody who doesn't have a chance?" Which means that the votes you actually get on polling day may not be people's real preferences. They may be casting a strategic vote for the lesser of the two evils or something like that. So the logic at the individual level is hard. The structure of the candidates makes it difficult. In a sequence of primary elections that we're seeing about the start on here, the idea of who was the winner in Iowa or who's the winner in South Carolina feeds information forward to what's the next set of primaries. So if we had a better sense of what are people's full preferences in Iowa and full preferences in South Carolina, that might change what happens in Super Tuesday. So there's a lot of things to be said in favor of something other than plurality, but it's the one that most people still use and the question is, this time around, plurality results are probably going to drive the process. Well, I think that in terms of what do you do when you walk into the polling place? There's the two, ones that have any real history are plurality voting and ranked-choice voting. In plurality, we got loads of experience with and ranked-choice, not so much. There are other ways people have proposed, but I think those are the only two horses in the race at this point. The question of how do we structure our set of primaries, there's a lot of alternatives. There's why Iowa and New Hampshire go first. What's with the Super Tuesday? The sequence matters. That's why Iowa wants to go first because then everybody not only comes to Iowa and that's a lot of hotel rooms and buys a lot of meals. They get to cast the first eye. It's not clear why if you were holding a constitutional convention to set this up, you'd say, "Oh, why don't we start with Iowa every time and then move to New Hampshire?" So you could decide which states can put their names in a hat and we'll draw them out in order and each time we'll do it differently. There have been proposals of regional primaries. Divide the states up into and or pick a favorite number, 6, 8 regions and randomly decide where you start. You could have a national primary. That's probably not a good idea because only certain candidates are going to be able to afford to participate in that. One of the nice things about doing it state-by-state is that you can be a candidate who's struggling, but you can still attract enough attention and enough money to give it a shot and maybe you'll do better. So there's something to be said for not jumping into everything all at once and regional primaries would be one way you could go in by television time that goes into a couple of states rather than one state. You can have on the ground people who can move around among the states. We haven't tried that so we don't know whether it'd be better or not, but it seems like it addresses some of the issues that people have with the current structure. I suppose to go back to the ranked-choice voting, which I think is it's the innovation this time around and we'll learn something from it. It is, I think, a better way than plurality voting to do this that plurality voting is pretty unreliable for choosing the person who's most popular, ranks on average highest and people's preferences, and the more candidates run, the worse it is. I think that ranked-choice voting, it turns out that voters can use it. They don't feel confused. Pulling [inaudible] afterwards suggests people feel better about that than about plurality voting when there are multiple candidates. So I think the experiment that's going to be run with Kansas and Hawaii is probably going to teach us something. I think the fact that it operates rather like the caucus system is interesting. That is, you show up, you vote for whoever you want, and if your preferred candidate isn't doing well, you can move on to somebody else. It has the advantage that it's easier for people to cast votes. That there's something charming and old-fashioned and nice about caucuses and my neighbors get together in the precinct and they talk to one another. The other thing about caucuses is you get to see what your neighbors are doing, who they want. So it's not a secret ballot, and we generally believe in secret ballots. The question is, do you want to go, have your boss see where you're standing. But there's something about the New England Town meeting transferred to these caucuses. People show up, they know one another, they talk to one another. Maybe somebody changes their mind and you get to see people move around to different groups. You get to see who their second choice is, who their third choice is. I think ranked-choice voting, it is a secret ballot if you really like those. It's not obvious, which our communities doing the way you have with the caucuses. But it enables a lot more people to participate. There are people who have jobs in the evening and can't get to their caucus. There are people with little kids who they need to take care of and there are people who don't like to go out once the caucus coming up a February night in Iowa, if there's a foot of snow on the ground. So it's a move towards opening up the process and allowing more people to participate and that's almost always a good thing.
