Affinity Voting

In our constrained one-vote to one candidate plurality system with its ballot access laws that favor only the two main establishment parties, we are virtually guaranteed to keep the Democrats and Republicans permanently in power -- the parties that got us in to such a mess. Third parties are relegated to permanent minority status and dismissed as wasted votes or spoilers which prevents outside solutions to come to fruition.

In an election a Democrat or Republican who obtains a majority or some high-enough threshold plurality can take office even though they may not be the voters' truly preferred choice nor an ideal favorite compared to more appealing independent or third-party candidates. The winner may even sometimes be regarded only as a lesser evil to the greater evil of the main party's fare. Such are the fruits of our cynical electoral system.

Now consider a generic race including candidates A and B of two main parties with third-party candidate C. Candidate A wins 49% to B's 46% with candidate C reaching a glass ceiling share of 5% via the media, debate facilitators and other constraints convincing the voters to split mostly between A and B. For illustrative purposes, let's say a third of A's voters support candidate A strongly for ideological reasons. On a percentage scale they are 83% in A's favor. The next third are less in favor for various reasons but come in fairly supportive at 72%. The last third were just more against the other main party candidate and average at just a more tepid 54% approval. For the B candidate a high 91% approval is attained from the faithful party cheerleaders as the candidate wholeheartedly meets their party's criteria. The next third are the more tempered partisans who are mostly satisfied about their consistent core issues, rating B at 83%. The remaining third for candidate B are more like swing voters that usually lean towards the party and give B 71%.

Looking at the main party candidates conventional appeal, those who cast their vote for candidate A on average rate A at about 70% level of affinity: (83% + 72% + 54%) / 3. Candidate B's voters average at a higher enthusiasm nearly 82% affinity: (91% + 83% + 71%) / 3. Now let's also consider how each of the candidates' three tiers of support feel about the opposing main-party candidate. We present the percentages associated with each candidate's tiers in the following tables (with a bit of rounding).

With candidate A here winning office 49% to B's 46% of the votes tallied, we can calculate for the 95% of all voters (49% + 46%) who cast votes for either A or B that:

So despite candidate B having a higher level of affinity amongst all the A and B voters, candidate A still got into office by satisfying this particular race's plurality threshold that is applicable when no candidate obtains a majority.

Now what if we also consider the affinity candidate C voters have for candidate C and for candidates A and B introduced under the same kind of illustrative tiers?

We also account for the affinities of A and B voters for C.

With all the voters' various affinities for each of the candidates now quantified, we can finally proceed to calculate the average affinity each candidate has obtained from across all the voters. Instead of presenting it in the form of equations as we did for the affinities toward candidates A and B via their 95% voting bloc, we enter all the factors we have arrived at in a table showing a candidate's share of the vote and their average affinity attained from each set of candidate voters.

Looking at the average affinity levels for each candidate from all the voters, we notice again that while A wins office with a high enough plurality for this race, candidate B achieves a higher level of affinity from all the voters compared now to both candidates A and C. Notable too is though candidates A and C obtain significantly different shares of the overall vote at 49% and 5% respectively, they are close in their average affinity level from all voters albeit inclusive round-off errors.

In this case where candidate C is similar in positions to candidate B, we thus obtain a clone candidate in C that can take some of B's traditional votes and therefore yield a victory for candidate A to take office. This means C acts here as a spoiler. However, if C had been the sort of candidate more between candidates A and B in platform positions with appeal more so to both their voters then depending on the margins, the race could have been more competitive between candidates A and B including possibility of a tie between them. It is possible too that if such a candidate C has likeable qualities appealing to A and B candidates' voters then candidate C could obtain the highest average affinity level of all three candidates with respect to the whole electorate despite still not garnering a significant share of the traditional vote due to perception as being a "throw-away" vote.

Now imagine if we had chosen the winner for these scenarios described by going with the candidate having the highest average affinity level obtained from all voters. We would be choosing victors that have greater broad appeal from the electorate as opposed just to who corrals the most votes from our massaged, duopoly-favoring election system. A system basing elections on affinity as herein described allows voters to give more information on how they feel about each candidate and in relative strengths to other candidates. Our constraining one-vote for one candidate can yield more disingenuous results as voters vote more cynically or strategically such as "holding their nose" to vote for an established party candidate in fear of the diametrically opposed main party taking power in a two-party oriented system. A truly favored outside independent or underdog is written off for the most part. This keeps many of our officeholders as more stale, unimaginative caricatures on repeat impeding the application of needed solutions.

There is such an affinity voting method that has been proposed, it is the score or range vote where voters rate candidates in a race much like movie critics rate movies with their 5-star system. When the ballots are tallied the candidate with the highest "star" average wins. This is not to be confused with ranked-choice voting (RCV) or instant run-off voting (IRV) as that system only allows one to express ranked preferences without relative affinities, prohibits expressing equal preferences and relies on long (re)counts in order to eliminate lesser ranks. Would score/range voting be less prone to ballot shenanigans as the result relies on an average? Also score/range voting is more adaptable to current voting machines as opposed to RCV / IRV.

Electoral College Slates

How many of you in the take-for-granted states want your runner-up presidential voters to get nothing for their presidential vote and thus be ignored by both the winning campaign and the challengers? Do you feel the same about your ideological brethren or adversaries in take-for-granted states on the opposite side of the aisle? Wouldn't it be better for a state to have some influence towards whoever wins the presidency for more national balance? That intrastate dynamic is a pressure-hold to apply to an administration. What about the prospects of possibly boosting turnout or having more campaign money going into the coffers of your state in their quest to accumulate sufficient electors for each campaign? Will your state have any influence as compared to the more 50/50 swing states? Would current swing states be as effective influencers if other states began to award their elector slates proportionately? Proportional representation is a preferred method in other countries towards filling deliberative bodies. A mixed-member proportional system using the range/score vote for the incorporated single-member districts side would give the best of both worlds. Anyway, why not consider proportional improvement for the electoral college doable even when using a one-vote to one candidate election system? Actually the all-or-nothing electoral college slates for the states were not intended by constitutional underwriters.

Perhaps any transition to proportional elector slates can be made more appealing to the larger blocs in the established interests' spheres by having pacts between two opposing states of near or equal electors whose combined presidential proportions for their electors would in the end net about the same result together by their having either near 50/50 shares for those main candidates beforehand or inverse shares of the main candidates. This would allow such states to garner more attention and influence in the presidential election while prospering in their respective campaign coffers and still preserving a probable same outcome. Any fractional electors resulting from overlaid candidate proportions could be settled by trading between campaigns or rounding determined through state legislatures. Another thing to consider by the established blocs is that a campaign may end up wishing they had granted proportional representation of electors to various states as a sort of mulligan in order to save face in case of an opposing wave overcoming the walls of the unanimous states usually in such a campaign's favor.

Here is an interesting litmus test. In the various forums or debate stages when the "defenders of democracy" justify their actions such as removal of candidates due to allegations of insurrection without regard to full due process, you should ask them when they will also prohibit consecutive incumbency in the legislative bodies in order to eliminate the unfair advantages incumbents have towards re-election and thus subjecting those officeholders as mere citizens next term to their own laws they pass. Ask them when they will lower ballot access thresholds for independents and third-parties and remove other oppressive conditions so that America is not decreed to have only Democrat-Republican governance for the rest of eternity. Ask them to implement proportional electoral college slates by the states so that presidential elections are not skewed for swing states and thus making the executive branch preside more so over all the states. Ask them to adopt the score/range election method herein described that gives office to those who hold the greatest affinity of all voters as opposed to our current blunted and cynical one-vote to one candidate scheme that acts as a tool to divide us further and deny solution-driven candidates and compromises. Then watch those "defenders of democracy" ignore your requests for reform or outright deny them with flimsy status-quo arguments giving heed to the naysayers and excuses that they always perpetuate in order to avoid beneficial and substantive innovation feared by those in the establishment circles.

Now you see there is no reason we cannot have a functioning multi-party election system implemented. It doesn't guarantee perfect outcomes but it at least gives us a likely better chance at improvement. And where are the counter-insurrection democracy advocates on limiting or taking punitive action for the ballot shenanigans we have experienced from Maricopa county Arizona the last few cycles?

Before the usual divulging of sources, we leave with an example of proportional state electoral slates for the electoral college from a table that was included in the Electoral College Safe Mode. It shows how the relative shares of Biden and Trump electors would look in each state if only the Democrat and Republican votes were tallied against each other (simplicity). For comparison note that the elector tally for 2020 as the legacy media would have you believe was purportedly Biden: 306, Trump: 232.