(04-14-2022, 12:50 PM)Lucky2Last Wrote:

(04-14-2022, 10:44 AM)The Real Marty Wrote: But does the government actually have a constitutional right to regulate how political parties choose their candidates?  Here is an interesting article on the subject, dealing with state regulation of political parties.  I'm not sure if the federal government has that right, though.  

https://www.cga.ct.gov/2013/rpt/2013-R-0...20imposed.

By the way, if the Republicans had had ranked choice voting, I don't think Trump would have gotten the nomination in 2016.

That would have been a good thing. I think Rand Paul would have been the choice, who is probably one of the better thinkers in DC. 

As to your question, no, it doesn't. This is why I said I would change a lot about the way we vote. It would be very difficult to make changes through the proper channels. Part of the problem exists because our founders saw our states as independent nations that were forming a union. They didn't see it as one, federalized country, which is what it became after the civil war. Because of this, I think it leaves the state voting mechanisms exploitable.

Ranked choice voting can be counted two ways. Condorcet and Instant Runoff.

In instant Runoff, the candidate with the lowest number of first choice votes is eliminated, and those votes get distributed to remaining candidates based on the second or third preference, etc.  Rand Paul would not have gotten enough first choice votes to be a factor in that counting system.  It would have gone to Cruz, Rubio, or Kasich, probably Cruz.  Paul would have been eliminated early.

Instant Runoff is similar to how the primaries work today, if you imagine that the early states are the early rounds of counting, then candidates drop out, and their supporters in later states go to second and thirds choice candidates instead  

With a Condorcet counting method, you use the rankings to create hypothetical 1 on 1 matchups.  The candidate that wins the most 1 on 1 matchups is the winner.  You don't need to have the most first choice votes, in fact you might have very few, as long as you have plenty of 2nd and 3rd choice votes you can win.
Paul might have pulled that off, but Cruz and Rubio seem more likely to be the Condorcet winner, to me.

Either way, I think we all need to get over our scruples and reverence for the founders a little bit.  Something as important as selecting the right candidate for a party should not be monopolized by unaccountable party officials

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