Can you be a little bit more specific about the exact implementation of approval voting that would be implemented here? Specifically I’m wondering:
Would party primaries be banned? (My personal view is that most of the harm of FPTP in the current US context is that it selects relatively extreme candidates in the primaries, as primary voters for each of the major parties tend towards one side of the political spectrum, and I’d worry that approval voting in our current context without banning party primaries would have much smaller impact than if party primaries are also banned.)
Would there be a runoff election of the top n candidates? (IIRC, some approval voting in the past has had top-2 runoff, while others haven’t.)
The implementation keeps the primaries throughout the state as-is.
Right now, Missouri’s primaries are “open” in the sense that you must vote within a party, but you can choose which party at any time. This would stay the same, but in both the primary and general, approval voting would be used. The campaign chose this system-wide change as the easiest option.
Additionally, approval voting would allow for independents to be viable candidates in the general.
Can you be a little bit more specific about the exact implementation of approval voting that would be implemented here? Specifically I’m wondering:
Would party primaries be banned? (My personal view is that most of the harm of FPTP in the current US context is that it selects relatively extreme candidates in the primaries, as primary voters for each of the major parties tend towards one side of the political spectrum, and I’d worry that approval voting in our current context without banning party primaries would have much smaller impact than if party primaries are also banned.)
Would there be a runoff election of the top n candidates? (IIRC, some approval voting in the past has had top-2 runoff, while others haven’t.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_primary
The implementation keeps the primaries throughout the state as-is.
Right now, Missouri’s primaries are “open” in the sense that you must vote within a party, but you can choose which party at any time. This would stay the same, but in both the primary and general, approval voting would be used. The campaign chose this system-wide change as the easiest option.
Additionally, approval voting would allow for independents to be viable candidates in the general.