A plea to decent Republicans

Let me put my cards on the table. I'm a bleeding heart liberal and I doubt that I would agree with Republicans on very many policy positions. But the essence of democracy is that no one gets everything they want, or perhaps not even much. But there has to be compromises among the two sides to reach acceptable decisions upon which both sides can agree. To this end, a strong Republican Party is essential to the continued functioning of the Republic.

But in this polarized, highly partisan political landscape, this seems unlikely. So I'd like to offer my thoughts on how we got to this point and what can be done about it.

In my view, the root cause of the current problem is caused by Primary elections. Primary elections sound like a good idea and surely their intention was to make selection of candidates more democratic, or more plainly, take power away from the "elites in smoke filled back rooms". Primaries are not mentioned in the Constitution. Note that this doesn't make them unconstitutional; it merely makes them extra constitutional.

The problem with primaries are two-fold:

1. They generally require that a person registering to vote declare their party affiliation. At the very least they require a governmental agency to keep track of who voted in which primary, thus making party affiliation available to a government entity. In a democracy, it is abhorrent that any part of government should know or have knowledge of a person's political views. We can easily see how this information is used and abused by lawmakers during redistricting leading to gerrymandering.
2. While giving the appearance of increased democracy it actually does the opposite. For many reasons, the set of people who participate in primaries is a subset of people who vote in general elections. This tends to result in the politically obsessed picking an extreme candidate who is not really popular with the electorate at large but who will win in a general election because many voters vote a strict party ticket.

The second problem has led to the destruction of the Republican Party. It used to be a reasonable, but conservative, opposition to Democrats.

At this time we need to introduce another variable. The two main parties, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party work very hard to maintain their duopoly status. To this end, they will go to great lengths to avoid the creation of a third party. In many ways, this is a valid fear. Let's take a hypothetical case of a largely Democratic district and let's suppose the Democratic Party split into two parties. The way elections are held currently, this would mean the Republican candidate would get elected with less than 50% of the vote because the Democratic Party vote would be split. You can argue that George H.W. Bush suffered in 1992 from the presence of Ross Perot, and that Al Gore suffered in 2000 because of Ralph Nader. So my point here is that both parties can, and do suffer and so they fight hard to destroy democracy by inhibiting the formation of third parties.

So how did this destroy the Republican Party? In 2010, the Tea Party ran a lot of candidates and because of the way primaries work, they won a lot of primaries. Then when the general election came around, straight ticket voters ensured the Tea Party won. But they were never interested in governing, only in obstructing, and so two Speakers in a row, Boehner and Ryan found it impossible to control their caucus. It was worse than that because even if a non Tea Party Republican tried to say anything sensible, they were instantly threatened by a primary challenge. This meant that over time, no Republican felt free to say anything intelligent. I am in Texas and after Tea Party darling Ted Cruz was elected, Senator John Cornyn, the other Republican senator, who had been a sensible Republican until that point, no longer was allowed to use his brain and be sensible, So the Tea Party destroyed the Republican Party. Had we had "Instant Runoff" (IRO) elections, the Tea Party would never have gained more than just a few seats, whereas Mark Meadows, the "Freedom Caucus" (more sensibly called the Tyranny Caucus) chairman has 40 members, at least he did until the recent mid-terms. IRO elections are described below.

Having defined the problem, we can now proceed to a solution. It's actually easier than you think. In Australia they use what is called "Instant Runoff" elections and Maine, in 2018 became, I believe the first state to introduce that scheme, but they called it "Ranked Choice Voting". This sounds complicated, but let me explain how it works.

Imagine that for every office on the ballot, that office title appears on the left followed by once column for each candidate. The name of the Candidate is followed by a space in which you can place a number. You then vote by placing the number 1 next to your preferred candidate, the number 2 next to your second choice and so on. You must specify at least a first choice, but you don't have to pick any others if you don't want to. But, for example, let's say there are 4 candidates, A Democratic Socialist (DS), a Democrat (D), A Republican (R) and a Tea Partier (T) your ballot might look like one of the following:

• DS 1, D 2, R 3, T 
• DS 4, D 3, R 2, T 1
• DS  , D 3, R 1, T 2

You get to choose.

The votes are then counted as follows.

Everyone's first vote is counted and if a candidate has more than 50% of the total, they win.

If not, the person with the LEAST number of votes is eliminated and this time the second choice of the voters who voted for the eliminated candidate is used. This is done repeatedly until someone has more than 50% of the votes cast.

A more precise way to say this is that on every iteration of the count, each voter's vote is counted for their most preferred candidates of those remaining in the fight.

Some states have similar but more cumbersome and expensive systems. For example, in Georgia if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote then the two top vote getters hold a run-off election a month later. That is why this system is called "Instant Runoff" because the runoff happens instantly saving the expense of a second election.

This might seem cumbersome, but with electronic voting systems, it's actually really simple. A voter would be presented, one at a time, with each office on the ballot together with the candidates for that office. The voter then ranks the voters by choice, possibly using drop down lists, etc. The voter is free at any time to decline to make a vote but they are always forced to make a valid vote (a no vote being considered valid).

A system like this would make it both useful and harmless for third party candidates to run. Even if they don't win, their share of first choices can be counted. Whereas now voting for a third party candidate is usually a wasted vote, it would not be so. But third parties might get a chance to rise or die based on their popularity.

It is, in my view, essential to the continued success of the Republic that such a voting method be introduced sooner rather than later.