* Massachusetts: https://ballotpedia.org/Massachusetts_Question_2,_Ranked-Cho...
* Alaska (with open primaries): https://ballotpedia.org/Alaska_Ballot_Measure_2,_Top-Four_Ra...
It does sound like STAR is better than RCV, especially after reading about it here https://www.wired.com/story/dana-debeauvoir-texas-county-cle... (A Texas County Clerk’s Bold Crusade to Transform How We Vote).
I do wonder if those adopting RCV are still in a better place, than FPTP, simply because it decreases voter apathy and gives voters a chance to be "heard", thus increasing participation. At least in the short run, I feel like RCV is still a win, even though it may not be as optimal as STAR.
In STAR voting, the optimal strategy is almost always to vote how you actually feel. This isn't the case with pure RCV.
Democracy itself implies that we expect voters to be informed and rational. Since we know that isn't the case, perhaps the important business of ruling countries should be left up to those who are very well educated and who possess a certain... nobility.
What I like about Condorcet methods is the Condorcet criterion itself. I have yet to find a better definition of a candidate being most preferred by the voters than that the candidate would beat every other candidate in a two-person race. The later-no-harm criterion (that giving a positive rating to a less favored candidate cannot hurt a more favored candidate) is also valuable and STAR doesn't satisfy it.
STAR does seem easy to count though, and without doing much research, likely to elect the Condorcet winner most of the time.
While the Condorcet criterion itself is nice it is far from the most important (cardinal systems are going to do a good job here). VSE really is measuring the MSE distance between true voter preference and candidate policy. But there are other criteria that matters. Simplicity is one, as it allows for transparency and voters to understand the system. Ranked systems typically fail the favorite betrayer. This includes RP and Schulze (the most popular Condorcet methods, and what I assume you are specifically referring to). But also consider factors like: expressiveness, spoiling, monotonicity, scaling (do ballots look the same?), and momentum.
It is really easy to get caught up in a single metric, but the difficulty of voting is that there are a lot of metrics that matter and you really have to do a lot of tuning. But I'll tell you that the researchers themselves, including Arrow, typically prefer cardinal systems because of the combination of criteria.
I thought I remembered it was mostly about how to verify your vote, I'll have to read more into it again. Thanks!
The problem is that this agreement is expressly unconstitutional by way of article 1 section 10: No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, [...] enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State
While states are allowed to divvy up their EVs within their own borders however they choose, this kind of interstate agreement to do so in a certain way is illegal, and bipartisan congressional support to circumvent the electoral college seems unlikely.
As long as the defecting state had fewer (or the same number of) electoral votes as the aggregate of the non-compacting states that happened to assign their electors in support of the popular vote winner, then the defection would not actually change the outcome of the election.
This may reduce the incentive for states to defect from the compact, as might the possibility of electors from non-compacting states becoming faithless out of respect for the compact.
Strategically I think the NPVIC shouldn't have been presented as a compact between states but as a set of individual pledges to the people of America that each pledging state would act in the necessary way once enough other states had made equivalent pledges. That would mean the states wouldn't have standing to sue each other, unlike in a compact, but it seems that their ability to do that is constitutionally questionable anyway.
Yes, with:
> Toss out the states votes?
...as a fallback.
That's actually how the norm of "have a vote of the people in your state with the actual voting on, or completed by, the standard 'election day', and assign electors by a procedure that exists in law prior to that election" rule works. Its a federal law directing what states should do, and threatening that their electoral votes might be disregarded when the electoral vote count occurs in Congress if they don't comply.
I'm pretty sure that in the cases around the 2000 Presidential election (and possibly previously) one of the key federal rulings is that because selection of Presidential electors is a power of state legislatures (not states as a whole) specifically granted by the federal Constitution, State Constitutions cannot trump the federal Constitution in how that authority is allocated.
I would disagree with that phrasing, and your final paragraph contradicts that statement. There is nothing unconstitutional about states entering into compacts. They merely require congressional consent to do so as the language of Article 1 Section 10 makes clear.
Additionally, even without congressional consent the supreme court has ruled multiple times since the late 1800s that as long as an a compact is not:
> "directed to the formation of any combination tending to the increase of political power in the States, which may encroach upon. . . . the just supremacy of the United States"
Then congressional consent is not required. [1][2][3]
The argument then is whether the NPVIC violates that rule and encroaches on federal supremacy or grants additional power to the states. However, the power in question here relates to how states appoint electors. This is a power explicitly granted to the states under article 2 section 1 clause 2 [4]:
> Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors
Therefore, in my opinion, any compact regarding the power to select electors does not pass the tests laid out by previous case law, and the compact does not require congressional approval. Of course our opinions don't count, only the supreme courts opinion matters, but there is no indication from any case law that this compact is "explicitly unconstitutional" or "in a certain way illegal". If anything it is borderline, but supported by current caselaw. The supreme court will most likely take up any suit involving the compact for clarification, but they would need a novel justification for deciding that states exercising a power explicitly granted to the states somehow increases the power of states.
Additionally, all of this is entirely moot if congress grants approval.
For further reading I would look at the NPVIC's own FAQ which has detailed citations and caselaw supporting their argument as well as detailing counter arguments [5]. For an independent review of interstate compact caselaw see [1], [6], or [7].
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Interstate_compact
[2] https://ballotpedia.org/Virginia_v._Tennessee_(1893)
[3] https://ballotpedia.org/New_Hampshire_v._Maine_(1976)
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
[5] https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/section_9.16#myth_9.16.5
[6] https://www.csg.org/knowledgecenter/docs/ncic/caselaw.pdf
For comparison, note that a lot of what we think of as "treaties" (which require advice and consent of the Senate) aren't actually treaties per the constitutional interpretation, but done only with executive privilege.
States just need to pass a law which says: "If greater than [threshold] of states pass NPVIC-compliant laws, we will select electors based on popular vote of America, rather than on popular vote of [state]."
This type of collusion very obviously doesn't meet the threshold under Constitutional terms, and continues to be a republican form of government. I don't see any issues.
This sort of collusion is pretty common too. See local COVID19 response state consortia, codes like UCC, professional accreditations, etc. Without that, the US government would be impotent, since there are things which are outside of federal power, but which require coordination across states. If this were banned, the US would collapse.
Of course, if the whole country used RCV (or any other non-FPTP system) for federal legislative elections, then the presidential election would be far less important, since one party would be less likely to control the legislature and might actually deign to exercise some oversight, unlike our current Senate.
However, I ended up voting Yes on 2 because it will increase awareness that alternative voting systems exist. The more people who are aware that FPTP sucks moose juice, the more likely we can pass other, more impactful, reforms like STAR. So basically I'm wagering that there's more people like this, than people who will give up on voting reform due to RCV (really, IRV)'s shortcomings.