Congresswoman @AyannaPressley: please endorse… and endorse, and endorse.
This is an open letter to Ayanna Pressley, who represents me in Congress. Overall, I am proud to have such an outstanding representative as you. As you know, with a hostile Senate, the House of Representatives mostly can’t do your main job, passing laws. So for now, your important work is maintaining oversight and investigations, and laying the groundwork for 2021. I think you are doing a good job at both, and this request is in that spirit.
The most important question in 2021 will be who controls the Senate. I trust that you will do all that’s in your power to ensure that the Democrats will be in charge, including endorsing the incomparable Stacey Abrams as soon as she announces her candidacy.
But this letter is about the second-most-important 2020 election: the presidency. As you know, the field is already teeming with candidates, many of them supremely qualified. Early polling favors the candidates with the name recognition that comes from a history on the national stage: Biden and Sanders.
The fact is, our current primary system is not built to handle this many serious options. In every state, primary elections still use the antiquated, broken method of choose-one voting: each voter may only support one candidate. This means that similar candidates can end up splitting the vote, favoring those who stand out. Perversely, the more candidates take a position, the more it helps those candidates who refuse to take it.
Under this system, as individual voters, it becomes smart for us to make ourselves stupid. That is, instead of looking at the whole field of options, we must use the simplest possible heuristics — such as fame and fundraising—to limit our consideration to the few candidates that matter. This voluntary self-blinding is the only way to avoid “wasting” our primary votes, but it feeds into a media environment of inane horse-race coverage. It was just such an environment in the Republican primary in 2016 that may have allowed illegal Russian in-kind donations to become a factor; I don’t want to oversell this point, but the fact that I can even plausibly raise it is horrifying. Even without literal foreign influence, this enviroment makes it so our ideas about electability are based on self-referential innuendo, not simple straightforward vote-counting.
Though we’ve been conditioned to believe that vote splitting and the resulting strategic considerations are an inevitable feature of democracy, they’re actually very fixable. The simplest example of a voting method that avoids these problems is approval voting. In this method, instead of being arbitrarily limited to supporting one candidate, voters could approve as many as they wanted:
These approvals would be tallied, and the candidate with the most approvals would win. This makes vote splitting a solvable problem; if more candidates take the positions you like, you can just add approvals. Since each voter can only approve or disapprove of a given candidate once, it’s still fair, giving each equal voting power.
Congresswoman Pressley: I urge you to evaluate the presidential candidates on their platforms and qualifications, and tell us which ones you approve of most. As a party, we have an important decision to make, and as a leader in that party, you can help us make a good one. I believe that your judgement can be more free of petty strategic considerations and innuendo than ours can. I believe that by making multiple endorsements, a la approval voting, you can help keep the focus on productive policy discussions and not divisive personal attacks. And I believe that by doing so, you could help start a trend among your generation of upcoming leaders, other heroes of mine such as Stacey Abrams, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar.
Thank you.
Your constituent,
Jameson Quinn
ps. What’s your Hogwarts house? Asking for another constituent of yours who’s a fan artist…
