Final five will bring more people out to vote in primary elections. That hurts conservative candidates who rely on a low vote percentage. Look what happened in Kansas? The Republicans counted on a low voter turnout. The general idea is very useful. It's good for democracy even if it's not good for MAGA candidates.
I couldn't agree more with the approach you've put forward. However, it should go even farther and have rank-choice voting in the primary as well. Consider your example, in which you suggest that a Democrat would land in the top five. But that assumes there's only one Democratic candidate. What if there were 10 Democrats running? None of them might get enough votes to make it to the general. A ranked-choice voting scheme (perhaps rank your top five choices) would solve that. I believe, in fact, this has been a problem in the open primaries held in California, in which there have been so many more candidates from one party than another that the candidates from the minority party have a much greater chance of getting to the Final Two.
Nice to read your writings. I enjoyed your course readings when I was a Duke Library staffer (reserves/copyright)
Final five will bring more people out to vote in primary elections. That hurts conservative candidates who rely on a low vote percentage. Look what happened in Kansas? The Republicans counted on a low voter turnout. The general idea is very useful. It's good for democracy even if it's not good for MAGA candidates.
A key research project would be to find out exactly why the RCV ballot initiative we had here in Massachusetts failed in 2020. Maybe a student could do more in depth data analysis, and better understand what went wrong. https://www.wgbh.org/news/politics/2020/11/04/why-did-massachusetts-reject-ranked-choice-voting
I couldn't agree more with the approach you've put forward. However, it should go even farther and have rank-choice voting in the primary as well. Consider your example, in which you suggest that a Democrat would land in the top five. But that assumes there's only one Democratic candidate. What if there were 10 Democrats running? None of them might get enough votes to make it to the general. A ranked-choice voting scheme (perhaps rank your top five choices) would solve that. I believe, in fact, this has been a problem in the open primaries held in California, in which there have been so many more candidates from one party than another that the candidates from the minority party have a much greater chance of getting to the Final Two.
Don’t Mew York City have a recent election using ranked choice voting?