Washington uses what they call Top Two. Only the top two in the primaries will be on the ballot in the general election for the congressional, state legislative and state executive offices. They can be from the same party, e.g. the two candidates for state treasurer in 2016 were both republicans.

(California does this as well and it has had interesting effects. California's 31st district voter registration favors the democratic party, but they ended up with only the choice between two republicans in the general election because there were four democratic candidates dividing up the vote in the primary.[1])

1. https://ballotpedia.org/California's_31st_Congressional_Dist...

A starker thing happened in WA already. In the primary, there were five candidates for Treasurer. Three Democrats, two Republicans. No one knew much about any of them, and the vote was roughly split between all five. So the two Republicans advanced, even though almost 60% of the votes went to Democrats. (One of the Republicans won - the Democrats were prohibited from participating as write-ins due to a "Sore Loser" rule.)

Regardless of your political leanings, this is a case where the vote was distorted, and where the winner was decided more by the voting system than the preferences of the electorate.

Yes the vote was distorted, but that is the fault of the democratic party for not organizing their candidates better. How can you make a law that prevents one political party from being disorganized? Isn't that kinda like trying to "fix stupid"? (I'm not trying to call the democratic party stupid here, it's just an example of something impossible to legislate against.)

I think the more rules and regulations that get put into place that try to "fix" problems, which are really just symptoms of poor performance, not a root cause, the harder it makes it for upstart political parties to get involved!

This is part of the reason we only have two viable parties, there are so many rules and regulations that make it so difficult and very expensive to participate, that the democratic and republican parties can strangle any competition out of the race.

The problem with that critique is that it can be applied towards any system that has messed up incentives. Regulations to prevent over-fishing is kinda like trying to fix stupid, too, but it's still necessary.

Pierce County tried it. They quickly undid it.

IRV confused the voters. The election administrators were dead set against it, so were only too happy to allow it to fail.

Aside, on the election integrity front, IRV is difficult to tabulate and necessitates digital tabulation. I initially supported IRV, so many years ago, but its inherit complexity finally turned me off.

I now support Approval Voting. More fair than IRV, trivial to tabulate, easy to explain.

In my mind, the problem with Approval Voting is that it's harder to decide how one should vote. What's the cut-off? Do I vote for everyone I really believe in? Or everyone I don't loathe? And it's exactly that sort of question which leads to tactical voting. With IRV it's easy. Just order them until you're indifferent to the rest of the candidates.

Wrong.

http://scorevoting.net/RVstrat6.html

http://scorevoting.net/TarrIrv.html

It seems to me that AV should lead to basically the same results regardless of people's individual cutoffs. I think it's more important to avoid the nonmonotonicity of IRV.

IRV scrutiny has been successfully done by hand-counting for many decades before computer-assisted counting was available.

As another Washingtonian who donated to and followed the Maine initiative closely, let me know if you find an organization to work with (or if you start one).

I'd be happy to volunteer, donate, etc.

fairvote.org is a national organization dedicated to voting reforms such as this. They were a big supporter of Maine initiative, and often have satellite state offices.

I'd sign & vote for that initiative.